Today’s Bizarro:
(#1)
A visual as well as verbal gag, which depends on the comic convention of the mouse hole (inverted as a bat hole; compare the balloon dog door in the Sam Gross cartoon here), from which we can reconstruct the presupposition associated with the also in Cat #1’s statement: we have mice.
The topic of the go get (or go + V) construction in English (Let’s go see what’s happening) has now come up (in comments) in connection with V + V compounds (sleep walk, stir-fry). I’ve spent years probing this construction, mostly in collaboration with Geoff Pullum, so I thought this would be a good time to reproduce a summary I wrote in 2000 for the Usenet group sci.lang (with editorial amendments and additions over the years).
Note: This is going to be long and pretty technical. And you should first read (at least) my 2007 Language Log posting “Go, go, go!”, which will put things in context and set aside a collection of issues off the main topic.
Passed on by Jeff Wechter in e-mail, a link to Ted McCagg’s drawings on his site Questionable Skills, including a long series of Best Word Ever drawings, in which competitions in word attractiveness are presented as bracketed sports tournaments. Yesterday’s open competition:
And then a completed tournament, in a series that runs through the letters of the alphabet (of course, I’d choose Z):
McCagg draws more traditional cartoons as well as these diagrams, which lie off on the edges of the comics/cartoons world (along with Venn diagrams and some webcomics I’ve posted about).
Today’s Zits:
Here we have a deliberately uncooperative response from Jeremy, who treats his mother’s request entirely literally, rather than thinking “Why is she making this request?” and calculating the reasons for her request and the kind of response she’s looking for. So his answer flouts Grice’s Maxim of Relation (or Relevance), as in this discussion of an earlier Zits. Jeremy is given to evasive uncooperativeness.
Note Jeremy’s facial expression in the first panel, and both facial expressions in the third.
From yesterday’s “Metropolitan Diary” in the NYT, this contribution (“Which Way Is the River?” by Alan Rogowsky):
Dear Diary:
From the Useful Information Department.
Overheard in front of the subway station at West 72nd Street and Broadway.
Woman: “Which way is the river?”
Policeman: “That way. Or that way. We’re on an island.”
(This in Manhattan, which is bounded by three rivers: the Hudson River on the west, the East River on the east, unsurprisingly, and the much smaller, and locally much less salient, Harlem River on the north.)
From Paul Krugman’s NYT column yesterday (“The Comeback Skid”):
There will be two big stars at the Republican National Convention, and neither of them will be Mitt Romney. One will, of course, be Paul Ryan, Mr. Romney’s running mate. The other will be Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who will give the keynote address. And while the two men could hardly look or sound more different, they are brothers under the skin.
How so? Both have carefully cultivated public images as tough, fiscally responsible guys willing to make hard choices. And both public images are completely false.
How so? is perfectly ordinary — a truncated idiom (glossed by OED2 as ‘How is it so? How is that?’, by NOAD2 as ‘how can you show that that is so?’) — but I hadn’t realized just how old it is: the OED‘s first cite is 14th century, and the cites go through several centuries from there (including one from Shakespeare: “How so sir, did she change her determination?”). The cites run out in 1632, which just means that this entry hasn’t been updated.
In any case: how is it so that the two men are brothers under the skin? (and then the answer follows).
In the NYT yesterday, an obit (by Leslie Kaufman) for “Tubesteak Tracy”:
Terry Tracy, Model for the Big Kahuna, Dies at 77
Terry Tracy, who as an easygoing, fun-loving surfer inspired the “Gidget” movies and television series and helped make surfing an international sport — in the process becoming the embodiment of the cool alternative lifestyle of sunglass-wearing beach bums — died on Wednesday at his home in San Clemente, Calif.
… One day a 15-year-old girl just over five feet tall named Katherine Kohner wandered up to Mr. Tracy while he was living on the beach. Soon he gave her the nickname Gidget, a hybrid of girl and midget.
Portmanteaus in the news.
Today’s Zits — with Jeremy talking so fast his mother can’t understand what he’s saying — turns out to be a repeat performance; I posted about this strip on Language Log in 2009, under the title “Teen speech in overdrive”.
Jeremy’s mother: “Can’t you just talk slower?” Jeremy: “Can’t you just listen faster?”
On slow/slowly, see Language Log here and here and Motivated Grammar here.
From a NYT editorial yesterday, “No Crime, No Punishment”, p. 10:
Proving federal fraud requires evidence of intent, no small lift.
Or framed positively, a big lift ‘something which is a lot to lift (i.e. achieve)’. Not among the many senses of the deverbal noun lift in the OED, but similar to a big ask ‘something which is a lot to ask’ as discussed on Language Log back in 2008.
