On Thomas Thurman’s Facebook page, passed on by Bert Vaux this morning, a linguistics cartoon:
The cartoon alludes to the Wug Test in psycholinguistics.
Archive for January, 2013
Wuggiana
January 16, 2013On-line resources
January 15, 2013For some years, I have been getting scans made of articles of mine, starting with often-requested pieces that appeared in out-of-the-way places. Typically, I would have a set of things scanned in and put on my website, and then almost immediately I’d get inquiries (usually from people in places with little access to good libraries) about further items. Ultimately, I put over a hundred things on my website, but leaving out some that I felt to be inconsequential or only of historical interest. And then in the past few days I’ve gotten requests for *two* of these items, from long ago:
Phonological constraints in syntactic descriptions. Papers in Linguistics 1.3.411-63 (1969)
On reported speech. Studies in Linguistic Semantics, ed. by D. Terence Langendoen & C. J. Fillmore. Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1971) 73-77.
It’s hard for me to imagine why anyone could have a pressing need for either of these, but I’ll do what I can. Some parts of the academic life are odd indeed.
Colors
January 14, 2013A display of new crayon colors, from the Miss. Fits Facebook site, passed along by Ruth Lawrence:
Think of it as a complex exercise in sociocultural knowledge. My favorites are yellow and purple, for their grotesque specificity, but the more cerebral among you might favor gray or black.
Then there’s the Eagle Shirtmakers contest of 1961 for naming shirt colors.
A matter of size II: The sale
January 14, 2013On the heels of my posting on Ken Ryker and penis size comes a sale offer from Falcon / Raging Stallion Studios — apparently not tied to a holiday, as so many porn sales are, however inappropriately — on big dick videos:
Nice playful pile-up of synonyms for (very) big. Some of these items recur in the names of porn films featuring big dicks.
The news for libfixes
January 14, 2013In the news this morning, an NPR Morning Edition piece by Louisa Lim, “Beijing’s ‘Airpocalypse’ Spurs Pollution Controls, Public Pressure”. Again, the disastrous libfix –pocalypse, just a few weeks after the libfixes -(po)calypse and -(ma)geddon (“hyperbolic combining forms for various catastrophes”) together won in the Most Useful category in the American Dialect Society’s 2012 Word of the Year competition, where hashtag was the overall WOTY winner and the portmanteau phablet (phone + tablet, “mid-sized electronic device between a smart phone and a tablet”) garnered the Least Likely to Succeed award.
Putting the man in manicure
January 13, 2013Today’s Zits reanalyzes the word manicure:
Girls get their nails done at a salon, guys bite theirs.
A matter of size
January 12, 2013(Mostly about sexuality/sex, rather than language.)
[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much information, as the saying goes. As a general observation, I’m willing to go almost anywhere in my postings, including some places that some readers don’t want to go.]
From the NYT Magazine “The Lives They Lived” section of 12/30/12, on Paul Fussell (born 1924), by Dwight Garner:
The most profound tectonic shift in our literary culture in 2012 was one that, by and large, no one noticed. The last of our great curmudgeonly essayists — Gore Vidal, the art critic Robert Hughes and the historian and social critic Paul Fussell — died this year. Add to this list of punishing, witty and literate writers Christopher Hitchens, who died at the end of 2011, and it begins to seem as if the Mayan calendar, which predicted global ruin, took aim instead at our stinging public intellectuals, our necessary horseflies.
… In 1987, the inspired editors of GQ magazine sent Fussell to a far-flung nudist colony, and the resulting essay, “Taking It All Off in the Balkans,” is something to behold. It contains dozens of memorable observations. Among them: “Fat people look far less offensive naked than clothed. Clothes, you realize, have the effect of sausage casings.” About penis size, Fussell said: “You will learn that every man looks roughly the same — quite small, that is, and that heroic fixtures are not just extremely rare, they are deformities.”
All true. But there’s a a whole complex world in which this deformity, this abnormality, is celebrated and venerated: the world of gay male fantasy, especially as represented in gay porn imagery. A place where the gigantic and grotesque are worshiped. Case in point: the pornstar Ken Ryker.
Realism plus
January 11, 2013(Mostly about art.)
Today’s Zippy has Griffy and Zippy reflecting on comics and art — Griffy from the viewpoint of a cartoonist (Is my stuff art?), Zippy from the viewpoint of a cartoon character (concerned with the conventions of the genre: speech balloons, punchlines):
The artists Griffy is drawn to are all what you might think of “realism plus” artists: like Griffiths in his cartoons, they create realistic depictions, but infused with extra content (allegorical, magical, self-mocking, absurdist, etc.). Hence the title “Realistic expectations”.
occasional
January 11, 2013A recent One Big Happy has Ruthie coping with an ambiguity in the English adjective occasional:
Ruthie, quite reasonably, understands occasional in its primary sense, semantically related to the adverb occasionally, but her grandmother is using it in one of its context-restricted idiomatic senses, in which it evokes the noun occasion (a “pseudo-adjective” use of the word).
Two cartoons
January 10, 2013Two language-related cartoons came by on Facebook a little while ago. One I think I understand pretty clearly — it involves a demi-eggcorn — but the other baffles me, not because of what it says (involving the glottal stop), but because I don’t understand why the character who speaks is saying it.