Archive for March, 2013

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Chattiness again

March 5, 2013

A recurrent theme in the cartoon Zits is the replication of gender stereotypes saying that girls are chatty, boys are laconic. Postings on the subject (using Zits in particular) go back at least as far as Mark Liberman’s Language Log posting of 4/26/05 (“Language and gender: The cartoon version”); meanwhile, Mark has been attacking the stereotypes directly with data. But Zits rolls on; here’s today’s strip:

A dense block of wordage is a Zits convention for indicating overwhelming amounts of speech.

Posted in Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »

vasovagal syncope

March 5, 2013

Yesterday I suffered a fainting spell, which unfortunately sent me falling to the floor in my bathroom, doing some (superficial but dramatic) injury to my head and wiping out the toilet. (Men are currently at work fixing the property damage.) The fainting spell goes by the name vasovagal syncope in the technical terminology of medicine — an interesting term in all three of its parts.

(more…)

Posted in Language and medicine, Metaphor | 3 Comments »

Another winter storm

March 5, 2013

Widely reported recently is the portmanteau name Snowquester (snow + sequester) for the winter storm now threatening the D.C. area — a fortuitous coincidence of the storm and the sequestration process recently put into effect in Washington. From the NPR coverage, “As Midwest Slips And Shovels, Mid-Atlantic Prepares For ‘Snowquester’ ” (by Mark Memmott):

The National Weather Service sums up the story this way: The storm is moving out of the Upper Midwest and “heavy snow [is] possible from parts of the Ohio Valley to parts of the Mid-Atlantic.”

The Weather Channel has dubbed this storm Saturn. But The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang blog is among those using the more topical “Snowquester.” It writes this morning that for the capital region “this is easily the biggest snow threat we’ve seen over the past two winters. … Significant snow accumulations of 3-8 inches are likely (except 6-12 inches west of the beltway).

Previous blogging here on The Weather Channel’s winter storm names here, about February’s big Northeast storm, which TWC dubbed Nemo.

 

Posted in Portmanteaus | 1 Comment »

The Telephone game

March 5, 2013

Yesterday’s Zippy continues a series on the game of Telephone in Dingburg:

What makes this sequence so entertaining is the complexity and prepostereous nature of the seed message, which pretty much guarantees  that the message (passed in circumstances not conducive to full comprehension) will mutate entertainingly.

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Mishearings | Leave a Comment »

Peter and Paul

March 5, 2013

Bartender R at 3 Seasons in Palo Alto, on February 23rd:

That would be robbing Peter to Paul Mary.

A complex error, in which one fixed expression, the proper name Peter, Paul, and Mary, interferes with the production of another sort of fixed expression, the idiom to rob Peter to pay Paul. The two expressions share the parts Peter and Paul (in that order), so R’s error is an inadvertent blend of the two.

(more…)

Posted in Blends, Errors | 2 Comments »

Syllabic approximants

March 3, 2013

From a weekly report of the Bowman International School in Palo Alto, from the youngest class:

In science we are learning about the native plants of California. We are doing the Honeysucker, and Poppy.

(The writeups are taken down by older students acting as reporters.)

That would be honeysuckle, with a perceptual confusion of syllabic [r] and syllabic [l], the two segments being very close indeed phonetically (the difference between an unaccented rhotic and an unaccented lateral being very slight phonetically, especially since unaccented approximants are frequently “vocalized”, realized as vocalic offsets rather than actual approximants).

(more…)

Posted in Phonology | Leave a Comment »

Going against nature

March 3, 2013

A Styx underwear ad that apparently can be found in underground stations all over Prague. Showing a gay couple in Styx underwear, advertised as a present for Valentine’s Day.

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky found it on the Photoshop Disasters site, under the heading “Going against nature”, where the poster wrote:

Cuddle up with your same-sex lover all you want, but keep the grotesque bumps you call abs in the bedroom.

Pink Trunks sure looks concerned about his caramel counterpart. I suspect it has something to do with his china-doll expression and his perfectly manicured eyebrows/armhair.

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language in advertising, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Sunday funnies

March 3, 2013

This morning’s crop of cartoons includes a Bizarro pun assortment and a Zippy on the humor of humorlessness:

 

I’m especially taken by the absurdity of Darth Wader.

The sequence shriek, giggle, titter, snicker, chuckle, guffaw, smile — onomatopetic verbs followed by the simple smile — is nice.

 

Posted in Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »

Annals of back-formation

March 3, 2013

From Jon Lighter on ADS-L, this report:

CNN tells of a hockey player who “loves to hard-hit.”

That’s a back-formation from the expressions hard-hitting and/or hard-hitter — synthetic compounds of a type I don’t think I’ve written about here (with an adverb incorporated into the compound, rather than a noun, as is usually the case).

I haven’t found the CNN quotation on-line, and searches for other examples of a verb hard-hit run up against the use of hard-hit as a modifier (with PSP hit), as in

Wintry storm brings new woe to hard-hit Northeast (link)

Can Hard-Hit States Reinvent Themselves? (link)

 

 

Posted in Back formation, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »

The Two Ronnies

March 3, 2013

Following my posting on “the Bayloo puzzle”, Nick Fitch reminded me on Facebook of a sketch by The Two Ronnies that turns on misunderstandings of English expressions:

The sketch is known variously as “Four Candles” and “Fork Handles”.

(more…)

Posted in Language play, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »