(About phallicity rather than language.)
From Chris Ambidge, in Trawna, this entertaining movie poster:
Guns as phallic symbols come up again and again on this blog and AZBlogX.
Archive for April, 2013
Mounties with guns
April 30, 2013Cul de Sac
April 30, 2013From Lynne Murphy on Facebook, this Cul de Sac cartoon, which reminded her of her daughter Grover:
The child in the cartoon, Alice, is 4; she’s at the stage of bargaining about the exact choice of words.
A multiplicity of uses
April 30, 2013… for the verb look, especially in combination with the particle up, in yesterday’s Zippy:
Zippymorphs
April 30, 2013Today’s Zippy, with morphological play from Dingburgers:
One attested derived nominalization, contemplation from the verb contemplate; one over-extended derived nominalization, ingestation (rather that ingestion) from the verb ingest; one extremely over-extended derived nominalization, overindulgification (rather than overindulgence) from the verb overindulge; and one derived nominalization, donutitude. based on a noun (donut) rather than an adjective (as in similitude, based on similar) — each one more outrageous than the one before.
Spoonerism Day
April 30, 2013Today is what I have come to think of (thanks to my friend Robert Coren) as Spoonerism Day, in honor of the famous (and undoubtedly apocryphal) transposition from Rev. Spooner himself: my queer dean for my dear Queen. But what’s the connection to April 30th?, you ask.
The album cover
April 30, 2013Today is the third and last day of the IvanFest at Stanford (Structure and Evidence in Linguistics, a conference honoring Ivan Sag). A slideshow of Ivan photos goes by before the sessions begin and in breaks. My favorite:
This shows Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, and Sag, in alphabetical order from left to right, in (I think) 1984, while they were finishing the manuscript of:
Gerald Gazdar, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum & Ivan Sag, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Basil Blackwell, 1985.
— looking for all the world (except for that computer) like a reasonably well-behaved rock group on an album cover.
Nick Danger: an appreciation
April 29, 2013My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed full of playfulness, silliness, and absurdity, much of it linguistic.
Orange and apple
April 28, 2013From various sources on Facebook, but most directly from Engrish.com:
A pun on mandarin, and an allusion to the idiom comparing apples and oranges.
End of The Empire
April 28, 2013From the Palo Alto Daily News a little while ago: “End of an Empire: Downtown Palo Alto pub closing its doors after 21-year run” by Jason Green:
For two decades, the Empire Tap Room [aka the Empire Tap and Grill] has injected a bit of East Coast flavor into downtown Palo Alto.
It’s been a favorite of movers and shakers like Congresswoman Anna Eshoo [whose office is across the street], San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator Vic Fangio and Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen.
But on April 28, an empire will end, so to speak, when long-time proprietress Josie Jelks closes the doors forever.
Jelks said she made the decision with a heavy heart. Costs have increased prohibitively across the board, from rent to liability insurance to the supplies necessary to run the pub at 651 Emerson St.
April 28th is today, and the Empire is essentially out my back door — a very pleasant place, with a wonderful long bar and a fabulous patio / courtyard, and inventive simple food. It will be much missed.
chicano
April 28, 2013Over on ADS-L we’ve been discussing the etymology of chicano/Chicano, and Jon Lighter introduced the question of the social status of the ethnonym; it was his recollection that in the 1960s the word was used disparagingly, and that was my recollection and Larry Horn’s as well. But on the whole it’s been reclaimed, a process that was already underway by 1970, with the rise of chicano political consciousness.