… this time fitting into my gay sex postings, about the verb spit-roast. I didn’t see it for a while, because the OED seems to treat the verb as a direct compound, from N spit + V roast: ‘roast on a spit’. But N + V compounds are not particularly common — except as the end result of synthetic compounding followed by back-formation.
Archive for April, 2013
Yet another synthetic compound / back-formation
April 16, 2013Dream weirdness: the song
April 16, 2013As a follow-up to the Zippy on weird dreams, here’s the lyric masterpiece in the genre, Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Nightmare Song” from Iolanthe:
The lyrics, in quatrain verses with the rhyme pattern A B C B (with internal rhyme in most of the first and third lines, and then a burst into rhymed couplets as it rushes towards the end);
Love unrequited robs me of me rest;
Love, hopeless love, my ardent soul encumbers;
Love, nightmare-like, lies heavy on me chest,
And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers…When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache
And repose is taboo’d by anxiety,
I conceive you may use any language you choose
To indulge in, without impropriety;For your brain is on fire, the bed-clothes conspire
Of usual slumber to plunder you:
First your counter-pane goes, and uncovers your toes,
And your sheet slips demurely from under you;Then the blanketing tickles, you feel like mixed pickles,
So terribly sharp is the pricking,
And you’re hot and you’re cross, and you tumble and toss,
‘Til there’s nothing twixt you and the ticking.Then the bedclothes all creep to the ground in a heap,
And you pick ’em all up in a tangle;
Next your pillow resigns, and politely declines
To remain at its usual angle!When you get some repose in the form of a doze,
With hot eyeballs and head ever aching,
Your slumbering teems with such horrible dreams
That you’d very much better be waking;For you dream you are crossing the channel, and tossing
About in a steamer from Harwich,
Which is something between a large bathing machine
And a very small second class carriage,And you’re giving a treat (penny ice and cold meat)
To a party of friends and relations,
They’re a ravenous horde, and they all come aboard
At Sloane Square and South Kensington stations.And bound on that journey, you find your attorney
(who started this morning from Devon);
He’s a bit undersized and you don’t feel surprised
When he tells you he’s only eleven.Well, you’re driving like mad with this singular lad
(By the by, the ship’s now a four-wheeler),
And you’re playing round games, and he calls you bad names
When you tell him that ties pay the dealer;But this you can’t stand, so you throw up your hand,
And you find you’re as cold as an icicle,
In your shirt and your socks (the black silk with gold clocks)
Crossing Salisbury Plain on a bicycle.And he and the crew are on bicycles too,
Which they’ve somehow or other invested in,
And he’s telling the tars all the particulars
Of a company he’s interested in;It’s a scheme of devices, to get at low prices
All goods from cough mixtures to cables
(Which tickled the sailors) by treating retailers
As though they were all vegetables:You get a good spadesman to plant a small tradesman
(first take off his boots with a boot tree),
And his legs will take root, and his fingers will shoot,
And they’ll blossom and bud like a fruit tree;From the greengrocer tree you get grapes and green peas,
Cauliflower, pineapple and cranberries,
While the pastry-cook plant cherry brandy will grant,
Apple puffs, and three corners, and banburys;The shares are a penny and ever so many
Are taken by Rothschild and Bering,
And just as a few are allotted to you, you awake
With a shudder, despairing…You’re a regular wreck
With a crick in your neck,
And no wonder you snore
for your head’s on the floor
And you’ve needles and pins
From your soles to your shins,
And your flesh is acreep
For your left leg’s asleep,
And you’ve cramp in your toes
And a fly on your nose,
And some fluff in your lung
And a feverish tongue,
And a thirst that’s intense
And a general senseThat you haven’t been sleeping in clover;
But the darkness has passed, and it’s daylight at last!
The night has been long, ditto, ditto my song,
And thank goodness they’re both of them over
Dream weirdness
April 16, 2013Today’s Zippy, a bit of weirdness on dreams and their interpretation:
Unusually absurd names, even for Zippy. Well, there is an Old Saybrook station on Metro-North rail, and pinkie and gastric juice are both English expressions (though hard to put together meaningfully). Seth MacFarlane is certainly real —
Seth Woodbury MacFarlane (… born October 26, 1973) is an American actor, voice actor, animator, screenwriter, comedian, producer, director, and singer. He is the creator of the show Family Guy (1999–2002, 2005–present) and co-creator of American Dad! (2005–present) and The Cleveland Show (2009–present), for which he also voices many of the shows’ various characters. (link)
— but, like the other dream ingredients, he seems to just float in from outer space.
Photography in San Francisco II: Garry Winogrand
April 16, 2013At SFMOMA from March 9th through June 2nd, an exhibition on the photographer Garry Winogrand, a great American street photographer.
Initialistic ambiguity
April 16, 2013From the NYT op-ed page on the 14th, in T. M. Luhrmann’s column “When God Is Your Therapist”:
… the Rev. Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” one of the best-selling books of all time, teaches you to identify your self-critical, self-demeaning thoughts, to interrupt them and recognize them as mistaken, and to replace them with different thoughts. Cognitive-behavioral therapists often ask their patients to write down the critical, debilitating thoughts that make their lives so difficult, and to practice using different ones. That is more or less what Warren invites readers to do. He spells out thoughts he thinks his readers have but don’t want, and then asks them to consider themselves from God’s point of view: not as the inadequate people they feel themselves to be, but as loved, as relevant and as having purpose.
It was the reference to cognitive behavioral therapy (or as Luhrmann has it, Cognitive-behavioral therapy). After the first mention, most writers shift to using the initialism CBT to refer this approach to psychotherapy. And then I have a moment of entertaining the possibility that the writer is talking about the fetish/kink cock and ball torture, also abbreviated as CBT. Context sorts things out, of course, though it entertains me to think of psychotherapists treating their patients with cock and ball torture, or BDSM folk torturing people with cognitive behavioral therapy.
NPR team and the perils of transcription
April 16, 2013Yesterday on NPR’s Morning Edition, a piece announcing a new NPR feature:
NPR Team Covers Race, Ethnicity And Culture (by David Greene and Gene Demby)
NPR this week is introducing a new team that will cover race, ethnicity and culture. Code Switch is the name of the new blog. Code-switching is the practice of shifting between different languages or different ways of expressing yourself in conversations.
Greene and Demby chat for a while about code-switching, with examples, bringing in linguist Tyler Schnoebelen as a consultant at one point. But if you read the transcript rather than listening to the segment, you might be puzzled.
Synthetic compounds and back-formation: go-go truth-telling
April 15, 2013Once I start looking at synthetic compounds and back-formation, new examples pop up all over the place. Two today: the synthetic compounds truth-teller (and truth-telling) and go-go dancer (and go-go dancing) — from which, the verbs to truth-tell and to go-go dance. (more…)
Photography in San Francisco I: Gordon Parks
April 15, 2013Two significant San Francisco exhibitions of photography, on Gordon Parks and Garry Winogrand. Parks first.
Pun for April 15th
April 15, 2013Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a pun for April 15th (income tax day in the U.S.):
The Accounting Crows, instead of Counting Crows (a Berkeley rock band).
Synthetic compounds and back-formed verbs: rape
April 15, 2013From discussions of rape in recent news, the synthetic compounds slut-shaming and victim-blaming — and, no surprise, the back-formed verbs slut-shame and victim-blame.