Jon Lighter on ADS-L comments on my usage:
Arnold’s unremarkable syntax from the “Chicano” thread: “the first OED2 cite, from 1947 Arizona, is somewhat disparaging in tone.”
In case some young folks don’t realize it, this journalistic use of a year-date as an adjective [well, prenominal modifier] is pretty “new” …
The usage is so natural to me that I thought nothing of it, nor did I recognize it as a relatively recent innovation or associate it with journalists.
Another showy plant of the season: digitalis, or foxglove, blooming now in several locations close to my house in Palo Alto:
Cultivars of the common foxglove, Digitalis purpurea. The etymology of the Latin name is straightforward, but the common name foxglove presents a puzzle.
From the NYT on April 23rd0, “E. L. Konigsburg, Author, Is Dead at 83” (by Paul Vitello):
E. L. Konigsburg, a children’s author and illustrator who twice received the nation’s highest award in children’s literature [the Newbery Medal] — she won it in 1968 for her second book, edging out the runner-up, which was her own first book — died on Friday [April 19th] in Falls Church, Va.
Two things: a note on the pleasures of her most famous book, and a note on her pen name.
From Laura Staum Casasanto this morning:
Here is a sentence taken straight from an email about encouraging students to fill out course evaluations at Stony Brook:
[(1)] Did you know? Students can complete their evaluations on their mobile devices, and some instructors have found success with taking the first 10 minutes of class and ask their students to do the evaluations.
Wow, she said, and I concur. This is formally like classic GoToGo, but deviating from central examples in two respects. And it’s the second such example Laura has found.
A portmant is a clipped portmanteau. There aren’t all that many of them, but here’s one that came to my attention today. It starts with the portmanteau zoobiquity, a somewhat over-clever (and opaque, but certainly memorable) combination of zoo + ubiquity. And goes on to zoob.
Following on my posting about Shel Silverstein, on to another children’s book author, Dr. Seuss, this time through an article in NewScientist (print edition of April 20th): “Miracle mix looks like liquid but shatters like glass” by Lisa Grossman, beginning:
Walking on water is possible – just as long as it contains corn starch. Now it seems this miracle mixture, dubbed oobleck, can also shatter like glass. Knowing how and why could help guide its use in soft body armour and car suspensions.
Oobleck gets its name from the artificial gloop that falls from the sky in the Dr Seuss book Bartholomew and the Oobleck. It has a split personality because the corn starch exists as a solid suspended in liquid water. Gently poke real-life oobleck and your fingers easily slip through, but slap it and it suddenly stiffens.
Over on ADS-L, Gerald Cohen and Joel Berson have been enjoying recollections of Shel Silverstein’s Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook (2005). Delightful childish pleasure in the (intentional) transposition of syllable onsets (or, sometimes, just the syllable-initial consonants):
Recently on AZBlogX, five postings on items from gay porn — with little (but not entirely zero) linguistic interest. Note: all with descriptions and photos of flat-out gay sex, so not for the kiddies or the sexually modest.
4/25/13: On the facial hair watch: Lots of facial hair in the cast of TitanMen’s After Hours, ranging from the scruffalicious (see postings on this blog on facial scruffiness) to the clearly (but neatly) bearded. Facial hair is in, dudes!
4/25/13: More toys: Adam Killian and Rod Daily in the Lucas film Toy With Me, together enjoying a double-headed dildo. (Looking ahead to the next posting: Daily’s genitals are somewhat lighter in color than the skin on the rest of his body.)
4/25/13: Rafael Alencar: On the handsome Brazilian pornstar Alencar, whose genitals are notably darker in color than the skin on the rest of his body. Some discussion of this phenomenon, with one site offering this circular explanation:
Question: Why is the penis darker in color than the body? [This assumes, incorrectly, that the phenomenon is general.]
Answer: … The technical answer is that the skin of the penis has more of the pigment melanin than other skin.
4/26/13: Anthony, Saint, Stallone: On the TitanMen compilation flick Hung: The Best of David Anthony. Ten men in six scenes, including the wonderfully named Christopher Saint (oh, St. Christopher!) and, oh my, Fabio Stallone. (David Anthony, on the other hand, has one of those porn names that is so averagely masculine that you have trouble remembering it.)
4/26/13: Sex in suits: On the recent Lucas film Undress For Success, with five scenes of men in and out of business suits (in pairs) having their way with one another. Something for students of clothing as display and for students of b and t roles in sexual relationships. Plus a French pornstar with the stage name Will Helm.
Lane Greene, on the Economist blog:
Ben Yagoda at Lingua Franca doesn’t like the “historical present”: the tendency to use the present tense to describe past (and literary) events
… Mr Yagoda concludes that describing the past this way is a crutch: “it’s essentially a novelty item. It’s tacky. Give it a rest.” I don’t quite agree, but his description of the historical present prompted this digression on another use of the present tense that he points out: jokes. (More specifically, jokes in the form of a funny story.)
… But that’s not how all languages work. In looking around at joke websites, I found that conventions vary a bit.
Today’s Zippy:
Griffy and Mr. (the) Toad in a meta-comic, about comics. On the growing elevation of comics to the status of an art form — as has happened many times before with other pop cultural genres (like movies and jazz).