Archive for June, 2013

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Cattions and Kliban cats

June 10, 2013

On AZBlogX yesterday, a set of ten more cattions (male photography — in this case, from Michael Taubenheim, Benno Thoma, and Bel Ami — plus captions from me plus B. Kliban cat stickers); from my third cattion posting:

As in the two earlier collections [here and here], the cattions are variously poetic, funny, slyly queer, and vulgar, often several at once. [The fourth collection is here.]

In the current set, the fifth, this item:

  (#1)

The guitar-playing cat is a version of the central figure from my very favorite Kliban cartoon:

  (#2)

(more…)

Posted in Back formation, Captioning, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Truncation | 1 Comment »

Rosenberg’s Laws of Robotics

June 10, 2013

Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:

A tribute to Isaac Asimov.

(more…)

Posted in Fiction, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Cigarette phallicity

June 10, 2013

A link from Arne Adolfsen on Facebook to this 1976 ad for Winston cigarettes:

  (#1)

Length as a theme in cigarette ads was all over the place. Here, the ad has the guy saying that he doesn’t judge his cigarette by its length — but, still, he opts for a super king size cigarette, longer than king size, which in turn is longer than standard size, and he does that because he wants the extra length. The phallic content is unmistakable.

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language in advertising, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Crowdsourced lexicography

June 8, 2013

In the NYT on May 21st, a front-page story by Leslie Kaufman, “For the Word on the Street, Courts Call Up an Online Witness”, beginning:

The wheels of justice move slowly sometimes, but not, apparently, as slowly as Webster’s New World Dictionary.

Slang has always been a challenge for the courts in cases that involve vulgar or insulting language. Conventional dictionaries lag the spoken word by design. That has lawyers and judges turning to a more fluid source of definitions: Urban Dictionary, a crowdsourced collection of slang words on the Internet.

The online site, created by a college freshman in 1999, has found itself in the thick of cases involving everything from sexual harassment to armed robbery to requests for personalized license plates, as courts look to discern meaning and intent in the modern lexicon.

(more…)

Posted in Context, Language and the law, Lexicography, Slang | 1 Comment »

Define “collaborate”

June 8, 2013

Today’s Dilbert:

Alice gives a witheringly sarcastic response to the pointy-headed boss, supplying a definition of collaborate that unpacks some of the connotations of the word for her. The boss then puts her down by maintaining that she is uncooperative (she ought to “play well with others” by collaborating with Larry), and she counters by pulling out the gender assumptions in the boss’s observation (women are supposed to be cooperative and collaborative, men are supposed to be assertive and confident).

Posted in Connotation, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics | 1 Comment »

Religious double pun

June 8, 2013

An Andy Singer No Exit cartoon, accompanying Anthony Gottlieb’s review of Ruth R. Wisse, No More: Making Jewish Humor, NYT Book Review 6/2/13, pp. 38-9:

Two parallel puns, on practicing and on observant.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Puns | 3 Comments »

Breakfasts

June 7, 2013

In the June/July Details magazine, a feature (pp. 106-11) on breakfasts: some inventive breakfast dishes from around the U.S., a little glossary of international foods to know, several pages on reinventions of familiar breakfast fare, and a few unusual brunch dishes. Here some comments on the first two features.

(more…)

Posted in Language and food | 2 Comments »

tapping

June 7, 2013

(Not about some sexual practice you’ve never heard of before, and not about the sexual slang tap ‘fuck’, but about a kind of self-administered therapy involving tapping the body with the fingertips.)

In the June/July Details magazine, a feature (pp. 84-5) “Press for Success”, with the subhead:

Despite scientific skepticism, droves of young men are taking up tapping (known as EFT) to overcome anxiety and perform at the office. Is the secret to advancement really right at their fingertips — or is it all in their head?

EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. (I would have said these guys “are taking up EFT (known as tapping)”, rather than the reverse.) Tapping uses the traditional acupressure points to “tap away” pain, stress, destructive emotions, or self-defeating beliefs.

(more…)

Posted in Language and the body | Leave a Comment »

Non-hair quiffs

June 7, 2013

Commenter John yesterday on my “whoopee cushion” posting:

So the point of intersection of “making whoopie” and “razzberry” is quiff?

Well, it turns out that in addition to quiff referring to a hair style (first discussed in this blog here), it has plenty of other senses. What I said in that first quiff posting was:

(Quiff is a word that sounds like it ought to be at least naughty, if not actually coarse slang — “his quiff in her quim”, something like that — and indeed a huge variety of slang senses have been reported. Apparently, it’s just one of those dirty-sounding words that can get pressed into service for any old off-color meaning. Including as an onomatopoetic verb meaning ‘fart’.)

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Metaphor, Metonymy, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

investigational

June 7, 2013

Heard in television ads for cancer treatment centers, the phrase investigational drugs. From an FDA site on “Access to Investigational Drugs”:

Investigational or experimental drugs are new drugs that have not yet been approved by the FDA or approved drugs that have not yet been approved for a new use, and are in the process of being tested for safety and effectiveness.

This passage treats investigational and experimental as synonyms in the drug context — but then the site goes on to use investigational exclusively. This specialized use of investigational (as opposed to the transparent general use ‘of or relating to investigations’) seems to be fairly recent — recent enough that it’s not in the dictionaries I’ve consulted. It seems to have replaced experimental as the appropriate technical term for drugs undergoing testing, perhaps because some people in the relevant community had come to feel that experimental no longer sounded sufficiently technical, but had become part of ordinary language.

(more…)

Posted in Derivation, Language and medicine, Morphology, Semantics, Style and register, Synonyms, Technical and ordinary language | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »