Four brief items in familiar categories: (1) a malapropism; (2) a mishearing; (3) a silly pun; and (4) a bit of folk categorization.
Archive for October, 2012
Odds and ends
October 28, 2012Ziegler on toast
October 28, 2012Two cartoons about toast from The Essential Jack Ziegler (ed. by Lee Lorenz, 2000): the Bureau of Missing Toast and The Scream in toast:
Toast is so ordinary, so everyday, so uncomplicated, that making anything of it is likely to be at least a bit funny.
The domestic relevance duels
October 28, 2012In today’s Zits, Jeremy and his mother spar over dirty dishes:
Another Zits in which Gricean relevance plays a central role.
The do(ugh)nut news for Halloween
October 28, 2012Yesterday morning, in the “Cool Secret Places” segment of KFJC’s Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show, we visited Psycho Donuts (in Campbell and San Jose), which has several offerings suitable for Halloween.
synovial
October 27, 2012This week’s installment of Arnold’s Hip Saga centered on Wednesday’s needle aspiration (term explained here), after weeks of hitches in getting the procedure set up. The point is to insert a needle into the hip joint, to extract — aspirate — fluid from the joint, and then to culture the synovial fluid to find out if there’s any infection in it (or whether it’s sterile, as it’s supposed to be). First, an etymological note on synovial (which apparently doesn’t have the etymology I thought it did), and then a brief encouraging report on Wednesday’s procedure.
Another round of repropriation
October 27, 2012In the last installment, we looked at an example of a verb repropriate intended to convey ‘reproduce, procreate’ — an error I suggested was an approximation to reproduce, probably blended with portions of other verbs. On ADS-L, Joel Berson proposed (not entirely seriously) a simple blend of reproduce and propagate — not a bad idea, but imperfect syntactically and phonologically. Garson O’Toole offered the image of a stew [amendment 10/28: Garson reminds me that Larry Horn used the image first, and that Garson picked it up from him], with ingredients from several different sources. And then, in a comment from Éamonn McManus:
“Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first.” It seems to me that squishing together reproduce and procreate would be enough, but We May Never Know.
So: just two contributors, but with their parts combined in complex ways, more complex than the bulk of blends. This turns out to be a very attractive idea.
The upcoming storm
October 27, 2012As Hurricane Sandy advances on the East Coast of the U.S., a storm of playful morphology has developed in its wake, unleashing gales of the portmanteaus snowicane and frankenstorm.
Please remove your cats
October 26, 2012I posted on Facebook yesterday during World Series game 2:
Seventh inning stretch, and the customary musical interlude. What I *heard* was that we were instructed to take off our cats for the singing of “God Bless America”. You would have thought that “caps” was so over-determined in this context that no one could mis-hear it, but I somehow managed.
If, however, you were wearing a cat, I suppose it would have been a patriotic gesture to take it off.
My original point was about mishearing something that should have been entirely clear in context; in contrast, so many mishearings involve infrequent or unexpected bits of text, especially in conditions of some noise (for instance, when the material is sung — hence the many mondegreens in lyrics). But Facebook being a social medium, things drifted fast — to music during the seventh inning stretch and to cats perching on people’s heads.
Rainbow fruit
October 26, 2012A delicious and healthful image for the weekend. It came to me from Betsy Herrington on Facebook, who got it from the site of endocrinologist and weight-loss specialist Scott Isaacs; I don’t know who created the original image:
Earlier rainbow food, for Stonewall Day, here.
repropriate
October 25, 2012Jon Lighter reported on ADS-L on the 22nd that:
A fellow opposed to gay marriage argued in All Things Considered a few minutes back that if you’re married to somebody of the same sex, “How can you repropriate?”
Well, it hadn’t been a good day for me, and as sometimes happens with these wrong-word examples, I couldn’t figure out what the speaker was aiming (unsuccessfully) at. I was thrown into a mild tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state, came up with two possibilities that I knew were wrong (because they didn’t fit the context) — the verbs (re)appropriate and reciprocate — and appealed to the ADS-Lers for help.