Two recent additions to the publications on my website, on classical malapropisms:
“Classical malapropisms” (Language Sciences, 1979). (link)
“Classical malapropisms and the creation of a mental lexicon” (Obler & Menn, Exceptional Language and Linguistics, 1982). (link)
Don’t know why these hadn’t been scanned in and added earlier, but now they have.
(Not about language, but linguistics figures in the story.)
During the past few days, I’ve spent a fair amount of time putting together a brief bio for my man Jacques, for Haverford College’s class of 1963 (whose 50th is coming up fast). A difficult task for me, bringing up memories both sweet and painful, though I had the help of J’s family and Haverford friends. Here’s the result; it gives no sense of his personality, but gets the bare facts.
From the 12/3/11 Economist, p. 43, in “Marijuana in California and Colorado: Highs and laws”:
In October, California’s four federal prosecutors threw the state (and drug-lovers everywhere in the country) into confusion when they announced their intention aggressively to go after landlords who rent their buildings to dispensaries of medical marijuana, and even after newspapers, radio and television stations who accept advertising from sellers of the weed.
The placement of the adverb aggressively (which modifies the VP in go after… that follows) before the infinitive marker to struck me as awkward, suggesting (momentarily) that the intention was aggressive, that is, that the prosecutors intended something aggressively. This brief potential ambiguity in the scope of aggressively isn’t problematic in itself, but if the writer had alternatives that are better stylistically, they’d have done better to go with one of them.
And there is a clearly better placement for aggressively: snuggled right up to the head V, go, of the VP it modifies (go after landlords …): the intention to aggressively go after landlords … Why not go for it?
Presumably because that involves the configuration misleadingly known as a “split infinitive”, against which some people bear an irrational prejudice. More on this in a moment. First, a note on why I’m resurrecting a quote from last year.
This over-the-top item has come to me from several sources recently:
Just packed with sexual suggestion, playing the phallicity of celery stalks for all it’s worth.
Joe Biden on the campaign trail in Wisconsin yesterday:
It was made very clear that they [Romney and Ryan] do not believe a woman has a right to control her own body. That’s between she and her doctor. [elsewhere transcribed as: … own body – that’s between …]
A NomConjObj (nominative conjoined object), with a 3sg pronoun as the first conjunct. This is a Democratic match to Republican Mitt Romney’s
I like he and Callista. (about Newt Gingrich)
reported on here, along with an instance from Romney of the more frequent 1sg as second conjunct.
Yesterday’s Scenes from a Multiverse:
Jon Rosenberg’s comment:
Me? I think the stars are gigantic glowing kittens. But I don’t have conclusive evidence yet.
Rosenberg returns here to one of his enduring themes: what counts as evidence for beliefs? The beliefs in question are often fantastical, and the reasoning his characters use to defend beliefs is often fallacious.
In this case, beliefs involve asserting a prophylactic function for some X: X is there to ward off some Y, to prevent Y from happening, so if that Y doesn’t happen, we have evidence for this function of X (stars as warding off space vampires) or even of the existence of X (those giant bulbs of garlic, those dead folks looking down on us) or of Y (space vampires). The basis of a family of jokes.
Some time ago, while I was having dinner at the bar of the Three Seasons restaurant in Palo Alto, a conversation involving customers and the staff somehow focused on the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant on S. Winchester Blvd. in San Jose. One diner and the bartender were locals and remembered the place with great affection. I was interested in it architecturally, as an example of demotic design for the world of California car culture.
It’s National Coming Out Day (which Jacques and I celebrated as our anniversary). This year: check out Alison Bechdel’s tribute to Life in Hell, a mock Akbar and Jeff number with an instance of what I think of as “celebratory” gay:
I meant gay as in exquisite, enlightened, droll, sublime and potent.
During this time when I’m pretty much housebound, I’ve taken to having more and more things delivered. Just ordered my second delivery from Safeway, which includes toilet paper. But it took me a little while to find the stuff on the on-line inventory. Under “paper products”, clearly, but then what?
The only subcategory I couldn’t immediately identify was bath tissue, so that pretty much had to be it.
Today’s Zippy:
Syncretism is the technical term for what we might think of as “mixing up on purpose” or “mashing up” — combining disparate elements. Like items from popular culture (Casper the Friendly Ghost, the Three Stooges) introduced into Shakespeare.