Archive for 2013

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Subjectless predicative adjuncts

February 10, 2013

Ask AZBlog. From a Stanford student who’s worked with me, a query on behalf of her mother and her brother, who was confronted by this item on a PSAT exam:

31.  Viewing it (A) from Earth, the planet Mars seems to be rushing (B) eastward through the constellations, as if (C) in a futile (D) effort to escape from the Sun. No error (E)

In this sort of question, the student’s task is to identify one of the four underlined expressions (labeled A through D) as an error in grammar, or to answer E if there’s no error in the sentence. There are not many such questions, so that getting just one answer “wrong” affects the student’s score significantly.

In this case, my friend’s brother answered E (as I would have), and that was marked wrong. What’s going on here?

(more…)

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

The inevitable verbing

February 10, 2013

On ADS-L on the 8th, Garson O’Toole reported two instances of a new verb drone ‘attack with a drone, kill by a drone’. The verbing was inevitable, given the current controversy over drone attacks, especially on US citizens abroad.

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Posted in Conversion, Language and politics, Verbing | 1 Comment »

Shapiro on quotation dictionaries

February 9, 2013

Fellow ADS-Ler Fred Shapiro has taken the occasion of the appearance of the new (18th) edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (edited by Geoffrey O’Brien) to consider the nature of quotation dictionaries in internet age — in a thoughtful review (“Just glad to see me?”) in the Times Literary Supplement of 2/1/13. While commending the new Bartlett’s in several areas, Fred finds defects in its thoroughness and its accuracy, defects shared with some other reference works (the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, in particular), defects that are in principle remediable in the internet age.

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Posted in Books | Leave a Comment »

In a syntactic quandary

February 9, 2013

An abstract I have submitted for the 2013 Stanford Semantics Fest (on March 18th). The abstract is quite compressed; it had to fit in a single page of text.

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Posted in Inflection, Semantics, Syntax, Variation | 3 Comments »

Tivaship

February 8, 2013

The USA network is now advertising a Tiva marathon for Sunday 10 February: a day’s worth of episodes of the tv series NCIS featuring the relationship between the characters Anthony DiNozzo and Ziva David.  Tiva is a portmanteau of Tony (supplying the t) and Ziva (supplying the iva) — Zony, Tova, Ziny, Tozi, and Zito would have been other possibilities, less satisfactory to my mind — and is in fact an established label (in the world of NCIS fandom) for

the possibility of a romantic relationship between Agents Anthony DiNozzo [played by Michael Weatherly] and Ziva David [played by Cote de Pablo] on NCIS. (link)

This is from an NCIS wiki on Tiva, which describes the word as a “shipper term” and notes that “It is one of the most popular ships associated with the show in general.”

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Posted in Abbreviation, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

Emily Flake

February 7, 2013

Having posted one Emily Flake cartoon (on decimate, here), I thought to check out some of her other work. (That’s her real name, by the way.) Mostly focused on situations rather than language, but here are three varied examples of interest to me.

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Posted in Academic life, Gender and sexuality, Language and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Underwear | 3 Comments »

The colors of passion

February 7, 2013

(Sexually explicit in language, but it *is* about language.)

Just arrived: Gay Sex! Cards (from Kheper Games Inc.) for fantasy sex play among men, each with a crudely cartooned depiction of a sex act (hardly any are WordPressable — lots and lots of penises — and none are artistically notable, so I’ll forgo illustrations). The cards are color-coded:

The color indicates how HOT the card’s portrayed action is. Similar to heated metals, stars, etc., the first degree of hot is red, then orange, yellow, white, and finally light blue. When unleashing your fantasy, try following your fantasy cards in this order.

More or less the opposite of what you might have thought of as the progression of hotness, from neutral (white) or cool (blue) through red-hot. Different metaphors. (more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language play, Metaphor | 1 Comment »

Swiss American

February 7, 2013

In the NYT Book Review on Sunday, a review (by Rebecca Stott) of Christoph Irmscher’s Louis Agassiz. Agassiz, a difficult character, was a distinguished scientist — and the first notable Swiss American (in the narrow sense) that I was aware of as a child. (My Swiss grandfather enthusiastically praised the achievements of Swiss Americans, and Agassiz was for him the beginning of Swiss American history.)

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Posted in Books, Race and ethnicity | 3 Comments »

England and Wales

February 7, 2013

Teaser on the front page of the NYT yesterday:

British Victory for Gay Unions

The House of Commons voted to legalize same-sex marriage in England and Wales, a sign that the bill is assured of passage as it advances. Still, dissent was a setback for the prime minister.

Note: England and Wales, not the UK. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legislatures.

So if you’re counting countries with same-sex marriage, England-and-Wales will count as one. But a same-sex marriage bill is working its way through the Commons in Scotland; that would be a second country. No forward movement in Northern Ireland, however.

 

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and politics | 3 Comments »

not publicly acknowledged

February 7, 2013

Stories of secrets kept until death: Ed Koch’s homosexuality, Strom Thurmond’s fathering an interracial child. Neither publicly acknowledged during their lives.

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Posted in Death notices, Gender and sexuality, Language and politics | Leave a Comment »

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