Today in the CHE‘s Lingua Franca blog, a “Frankenwords” posting by Geoff Pullum combining Halloween topicality, references to the East Coast superstorm, and allusions to Zwicky & Pullum on “Plain morphology and expressive morphology” (1987). The combining form Franken- plays the major role in the piece, but the popular -gate comes up as well.
Then it turns out that these two have danced together, sort of.
(No linguistic interest. Just a Halloween hunk, for fun.)
From Tim Evanson on Google+, with the caption, “happily sexually objectifying Halloween”:
On the 28th, we had “The do(ugh)nut news for Halloween”, with suitably scary items from Psycho Donuts. And on the 29th, “Halloween Giants”, with orange and black sexy underwear (for Halloween from Undergear, for the San Francisco Giants from Papi, though either would serve either purpose).
Yesterday on ADS-L, Charlie Doyle reported a tv commercial for catheters beginning “End painful cathing” and noted some 343,000 raw ghits for cathing. I posted back in 2009 on a commercial with to cath in it, in which I treated cath as a clipping of catheterize ‘use a catheter’ (adding that both the full and the clipped version can be used transitively and intransitively). But there’s more to be said.
Following up on the Flying Spaghetti Monster and impastas (here), here’s another take on the same pun, done in rotini:
(From Bob Mugele’s Facebook site, passed on by Avery Andrews and Tony Aristar.)
(Not about language.)
A day away from Halloween, and already Christmas items arrive in the mail. Some of them are sticky-sweet and earnestly celebratory, and invite subversion. Here are six I tried to collage into submission some years ago in a protest against holiday sentimentality. They range from mildly critical (a composition about “women’s work”), through varying degrees of outrage and menace, to a Father Christmas as a child molester. (You’ve been warned; these are on the dark side.)
Yesterday, lunch at Gordon Biersch with visiting friends Max and Ned (down from San Francisco to cheer me up and keep me company). Ned ordered the half turkey sandwich with a cup of soup, and this is how the sandwich and lobster bisque looked when they arrived:
Yes, the Sign of the Z (a crossed Z, even). More specifically, as Ned said, Zwicky Bisque. Or possibly, as Rod Williams suggested on Facebook, the mark of … Zorro! Maybe not as impressive as the Baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary on a tortilla, but surely it means something, right?
As Halloween approaches, orange and black clothing becomes prominent — and purveyors of men’s underwear (as clothing and as porn) offer sale prices on season-appropriate gear. This morning, in e-mail from Undergear, after the teaser line “Are you a trick? Or are you a treat?” came:
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Giants have taken the World Series, in an exciting four-game shutout (I watched them all), which has led to more orange and black underwear, in particular the Papi Giant Man Thong
… [by] Miami-based underwear makers Papi. Normally the banana hammock of choice for muscly, gay latino men, Papi is embracing its surprising entrance into the sports world and sent the Giants an entire package of the rally thong. (link)
In decidedly bright orange:
