… in today’s Zits:
This is a topic that Scott and Borgman (somewhat wearisomely) just can’t leave alone. I do like the economical communication of Jeremy’s nonplussed state of mind, though.
Archive for April, 2013
More girlish chattiness
April 25, 2013Cambridge Rindge and Latin
April 25, 2013In the news recently (thanks to the Boston Marathon bombing), the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (thanks to Dzhokhar Tsernaev’s having gone to high school there), with a name that strikes many non-locals as rather odd: Rindge and Latin, coordinated in the name, are indeed both nouns, but they aren’t semantically parallel: Rindge is a family name, Latin the name of a language. Things used to be worse.
And then there’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.
The new word slash
April 25, 2013From Anne Curzan’s column on the Lingua Franca blog yesterday:
Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore
Lots of us use the slash (/) in writing to capture two or more descriptions of the same thing, with a meaning something like “or,” “and,” or “and/or” — e.g., “my sister/best friend” or “request/require.” The slash typically separates two things that are the same part of speech or parallel grammatically; and we can say that slash out loud if needed: “my sister slash best friend.”
Now I wouldn’t write that phrase down that way, with the slash spelled out, but students tell me they now often do.
Irregularized jack-knives, regularized jack-knifes
April 25, 2013Caught in passing in some tv commercial: “It never jack-knives”. With jack-knives as the 3sg PRS of the verb jack-knife — though the standard verb form is jack-knifes. The irregular verb form is obviously modeled on the irregular PL jack-knives of the *noun* jack-knife, inherited from its head noun knife (PL knives); the 3sg PRS of the verb knife is the regular knifes.
Dialect time in the comics
April 24, 2013A Frazz passed on by a number of people on Facebook:
Well, you scarcely need to go to the Bronx to find sprain and sprayin’ falling together in casual speech. Or walls with spray-painted graffiti.
But I long to see what the kid does with euphemism.
Palindrome time
April 24, 2013Today’s Bizarro:
The famous version is ABLE WAS I ERE I SAW ELBA — purported to be a report of Napoleon Bonaparte’s sentiments late in life. If Napoleon had written in English and had been given to word play. The Napoleon palindrome was reported by Mark Twain, along with some other classic palindromes, in the magazine The Galaxy, Vol. 1 (1866), p. 439. Who knows who the original palindromist was.
Blue pun
April 24, 2013On Facebook this morning, Wilson Gray posted this Rotten eCard with a double entendre:
A pun on the verb come. Not that a responsible mother would commit this pun to her child.
I’ve posted a fair number of eCards (from several sources). It’s a funny genre, somewhere between gag cartoons (if cartooning can take in captioning) and slogans / aphorisms.
[Update: of course, FB warns my FB friends about this one: “this may be spam”. Some readers are now suggesting that FB adds this warning to everything I post.]
Facebook bizarreness
April 24, 2013My posting this morning on three references to putative sex / gender differences caused Facebook to put me through a captcha test to get the thing posted — I presume because of the word sex in the text. Then people began reporting that FB had been labeling this posting (and two previous ones) as potential spam, in a bizarre use of the word spam, since the objection would have to be to the content of the postings (not to bulk mailing of unsolicited messages, especially advertising, which I certainly can’t be accused of doing: people get FB postings from me by virtue of having mutually friended me).
On the sex / gender watch
April 24, 2013On the heels of my little note on “Manly Deeds, Womanly Words” (a comment from John Baker notes that this is “the motto of the Calvert family “Fatti maschii parole femine” loosely translated [from Italian] as “Manly deeds, womanly words” ”) came two more items on male/female differences: a piece in the NYT Sunday Review on the 21st (“The Tangle of the Sexes” by Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis); and an Alex cartoon in the London Telegraph on men as rational, women as emotional.
Reduplicative compounds
April 23, 2013Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
Hippy-dippy, artsy-fartsy. Compound-like combinations with parts that aren’t semantically independent but are related phonologically, in this case by rhyme. In addition to rhyming reduplication (as in these cases), there’s also exact reduplication (yada yada, wee wee, chi chi; see this posting for the clever punning invention tako–taco) and ablaut reduplication (chitchat, dilly-dally, tittle-tattle), with the accented vowel varied but the remainder of the components remaining the same. Many reduplicative compounds are negative in tone, as hippy-dippy and artsy-fartsy are in ordinary usage. For hippy dippy in the cartoon, more is going on, since there’s a pun on dip involved.