(Mostly about penguins rather than language.)
From Chris Ambidge in Canada, a package cover for Brownies — brownie-like cookies in penguin shapes (shown at about half actual size).
I wonder how Brownies is pronounced in Canadian French.
Archive for April, 2013
The news for penguins
April 14, 2013Misspelling my name
April 14, 2013It’s been a while since I got mail with my name mispelled, but one came yesterday. I had used it to amend a Kristen Bjorn gay porn postcard when I realized it might be fun to post it. So that I could post it on this blog, I’ve blocked out the model’s naughty bits.
This is a keyboard-induced finger error: look at where N and J are located, and where W and Q are located.
Ned Deily notes that ZQICKY would be a great Scrabble word (if it were a word).
ship my pants
April 14, 2013Passed on by Karen Chung on Facebook, a HuffPo piece (with video) about a Kmart ad with ostentatious taboo avoidance:
‘Ship My Pants’ Kmart Ad: For The 12-Year-Old In All Of Us
Looks like Kmart has finally said, “F it, we’re not Target and we’re not Walmart… we’re @#$%*! Kmart.”
Touting the fact that if you can’t find what you’re looking for in store you can find it online and then have it sent to your home, Kmart has introduced its “Ship My Pants” ad… which you will make you laugh despite your higher aspirations.
Not since Benny Bell’s immortal “Shaving Cream”, has the word shit not been said [repeatedly] with such glee.
We shall endeavor to ship our pants very soon. Thanks, Kmart!
More sex/gender symbols
April 13, 2013A follow-up to my posting on sex/gender symbols, taking up some further cases in which the borders between male and female are erased, and how these situations have been represented graphically.
Four more obits
April 13, 2013Just in the past two days, four more deaths of people who have given me pleasure through their work: Ed Fisher and Peter Workman in the NYT yesterday, Jonathan Winters and Maria Tallchief today. There’s some linguistic interest in there.
Sex/gender symbols
April 13, 2013From Kim Darnell on Facebook, a story from a year ago (4/17/12) about the adoption of a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish, with this handsome accompanying graphic:
(#1)
The graphic has three interlinked components: The “female symbol” (or “mirror of Venus”), a circle (representing a body) with a cross below it (♀ in biological literature); the “male symbol” (or “spear of Mars”), a circle with an arrow at the upper right (♂ in biological literature); and a plain circle in the center, representing a body unspecified as to sex. Turning to grammatical gender rather than biological sex, the mirror of Venus represents feminine gender (as in the Swedish pronoun hon ‘she’), the spear of Mars the masculine gender (as in the Swedish pronoun han ‘he), and the plain circle the new gender-neutral 3sg Swedish pronoun hen).
A complexity here is that this symbol is sometimes taken to be a transgender symbol, the central circle represeting someone who in some sense is *both* female and male. And for this purpose there are a number of competing symbols.
Manliness and money
April 13, 2013
Ducati and Ares
April 12, 2013(Following up on an account of the gay porn flick Close Up on AZBlogX, a posting about the first scene of the film, involving Trenton Ducati and Jessy Ares — in part about the use of language in this encounter and in part about the the assignment of roles — what I’ve called b vs. t — in this encounter. This is a close call: usually my postings analyzing the action in porn flicks go on AZBlogX, but in this case I thought there might be enough language-related stuff to put it on this blog. You should understand that there’s a lot of plainly described gay sex in this posting, though no photos — they’re already on AZBlogX — so you might want to pass.)
Cubism
April 12, 2013(About art rather than language.)
From the NYT on 4/10/13 (and on pretty much every other news outlet), a report of a spectacular gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC: “A Billion-Dollar Gift Gives the Met a New Perspective (Cubist)” by Carol Vogel:
In one of the most significant gifts in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon Leonard A. Lauder has promised the institution his collection of 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures.
The trove of signature works, which includes 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14 Légers and 14 works by Gris, is valued at more than $1 billion. It puts Mr. Lauder, who for years has been one of the city’s most influential art patrons, in a class with cornerstone contributors to the museum like Michael C. Rockefeller, Walter Annenberg, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and Robert Lehman.
(Money figures prominently in these reports. The art market is extraordinarily strange.)