Today’s Pearls Before Swine, in which Rat updates a nursery rhyme:
A number of people have labored to modernize traditional nursery rhymes or to create new rhymes in the style of the traditional ones. Most of these are sweet or humorous, but some are serious. Consider, for instance, Modern Mother Goose – On The Loose: The Oil Spill by Mary Elizabeth Rumsey (2010), a rhyme on the Gulf Coast oil spill as seen through the eyes of a goose.
From Chris Ambidge on Facebook, an ad for the Literary Gift Company offering grammar mugs:
The full set of all six Grammar Grumbles mugs. An original design by The Literary Gift Company, this series is inspired by the 2013 publication A Mug’s Guide to Grammar.
Well, four spelling mugs and two on word use. Garmmra.
Today is a big event in San Francisco: from Wikipedia:
The Folsom Street Fair (FSF) is an annual BDSM and leather subculture street fair held on the last Sunday in September and caps San Francisco’s “Leather Pride Week”. The Folsom Street Fair, sometimes simply referred to as “Folsom”, takes place on Folsom Street between 7th and 12th Streets, in San Francisco’s South of Market district.
The event started in 1984 and is California’s third largest single-day, outdoor spectator event and the world’s largest leather event and showcase for BDSM products and culture.
Another quotation from Jane (via Chris Ambidge), this time from Northanger Abbey (1817):
Carpe diem.
Back on the 19th, in a collecion of miscellany, I reported (in item 4) on the porn film title Pacific Rim Job: an overlap of Pacific Rim and rim job ‘anilingus / analingus’. Which made me reflect on sexual X job expressions, a small family of compounds referring to sexual acts, of which three are especially frequent: blow job and rim job (of the form V + job) and hand job (of the form N + job). So to other snowclonelet composites examined on this blog and Language Log (among them, X fag, X porn, X queen, X rage, X virgin, X whore, X drag, X magnet, X Nazi, X slut, X porn, X police), we can now add X job.
(Mostly about art rather than language.)
In the September 23rd New Yorker, a review by Andrea Scott, “Strange Days: MOMA refreshes the image of the Surrealist René Magritte”, beginning:
René Magritte was a pop-culture meme years before there was an Internet. In 1951, when CBS aired a new logo—a stylized eye hovering in a cloud-clotted sky—it bore an uncanny resemblance to his painting “The False Mirror” (1928). (The sky was later removed by the network.) Over the years, Magritte’s art has been hijacked for designs ranging from the Beatles’ record label to a Volkswagen ad to a bowler-hat light fixture. The Belgian Surrealist, who died in 1967, at age sixty-eight, is still going viral: in April, an anonymous artist started a Tumblr called Super Magritte, reimagining the artist’s works as 8-bit designs by Nintendo. In one case, the locomotive that floats indelibly in the fireplace of the painting “Time Transfixed” (1938) is replaced by Super Mario’s slow-moving bullet.
That’s the title of the “Lives” column (by Shahan Mufti) in the September 22nd New York Times Magazine, which begins with a mystery:
“Reply me its very imported,” the subject line demanded, bossy and impatient. Before I even opened the message, blinking over my morning coffee, I knew where this was going.
For a couple of years now, I have received e-mails from complete strangers soliciting my opinion on deeply private matters. The content of these queries varies widely, but there are always telltale signs: they are almost always written by nonnative English speakers; they all claim, as this one attempted, to be important; and they always describe a conundrum, soliciting my direction on what to do.
Eventually, he figures out what’s going on:
From a friend yesterday:
Recently the word “selfie” has been showing up, referring to images taken of oneself, usually with a cell phone.
I was wondering how long it takes for a word such as this to become accepted and recognized by you authorities on words.
Two matters here: the word selfie; and acceptance and recognition by authorities on words.
