From a number of Facebook friends, the food miniatures of Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida, from the 1/11/12 NPR piece “Go Where Raisins Swell Into Grapes, And Lemons Light The Sky” by Robert Krulwich. Parisian food photographers Javelle and Ida create miniatures involving food, like this droll depiction of raisins being blown up into grapes:
The libfix -gate seems to be irresistible, trotted out for all sorts of public fusses; discussion here. Recent example, reported by Victor Steinbok on ADS-L:
According to MediaBistro, there’s now yet another -gate. Newly crowned NYC Mayor [Bill de Blasio] was caught on camera eating pizza with a fork, which is sacrilege in NYC. Appropriately, the affair has been dubbed “forkgate”, lack of coverup notwithstanding…
Like most -gate formations, this will surely be short-lived. Then Joel Berson suggested on ADS-L that Gate-gate is likely to come upon us,
for the scandalous way in which the former Secretary of Defense [Gates] has dissed the present VPOTUS
Previously coined for a silly British scandal involving David Cameron, detailed in 2012 here (among other places).
And then Larry Horn chimed in with some overlap portmanteaus involving -gate:
A recent Dilbert, already posted on Language Log:
Mark Liberman posted this to comment on management styles, but there’s also the word bossification.
I’ve posted this on Elizabeth Zwicky’s Facebook timeline, where it’s been appreciated. Now to give it a somewhat more permanent home, on this blog.
From the website One Last Blog on Nothing of 12/18/13, “One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy” by Michelle Nijhuis, beginning:
My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.
The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)
(Not about language, but about food and phallicity.) It’s been a little while since the last food phallicity posting, with carrots.
From a hilarious Buzzfeed site on hilarious vintage recipes, #16, the Banana Candle:
The original source appears to be the book Be Bold With Bananas (I am not making this up).
(The apparent melting wax on the banana is mayonnaise.)
Fascinating piece on Slate on the 8th by Bennett Muraskin, “Jewish Surnames Explained”. The crucial fact is that for a long time Jews had no family names as we understand them now, but used references of the FN1 child-of FN2 sort (very common around the world); I am Arnold Arnoldson, and my father was Arnold Melchiorson, in this system. For reasons briedfly noted in this piece, Jews were required to adopt fixed (and inheritable) family names; the piece eumerates the various strategies they adopted.
Exoplanets are planets in solar systems outside our own. So I guess it was inevitable that when it was discovered that exoplanets had moons, they would be called exomoons. I discovered this delicious word in the January 2014 issue of Scientific American (p. 40), but no doubt it’s been around for some time.
Linguistics in the comics postings – 1/9/14
(postings on obscenicons are in a separate file)
*http://arnoldzwicky.org/2010/12/05/but-is-it-art/
what is a cartoon? Dinosaur Comics, xkcd
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2010/12/30/speech-balloons/
on speech balloons
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2011/11/16/x-is-the-real-y/
A Softer World: comic?
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/01/28/wordless-cartoons-words-only-cartoons/
wordless cartoons, words-only cartoons
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/02/05/sonneteer/
“comicteer” or “dialoguenaut” for “cartoonist” (Dinosaur Comics)
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/02/12/hot-comics/
division of labor in the comics: writer vs. artist, drawing vs. inking, story vs. realization, etc. (Zippy)
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/03/08/summer-in-the-comics/
summer in the comics? – proposal
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/04/15/cartoon-matters/
cartoon matters – gag cartoons
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/05/10/alison-bechdel/
Alison Bechdel – graphic novel
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/05/27/comics-books/
bibliography – graphic novel
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/05/29/raymond-briggs/
Raymond Briggs – graphic novel
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/06/03/balloons/
speech and thought balloons
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/06/17/cartoon-conventions/
Bizarro on visual conventions
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/06/18/more-cartoon-conventions/
more Bizarro on visual conventions
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/06/23/meta-zippy/
Zippy: cartoon characters ageing
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/07/01/the-cartoon-characters-assisted-living-facility/
Zippy: cartoon characters ageing
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/07/06/the-passage-of-time-in-the-comics-world/
Zippy: cartoon characters ageing
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/07/10/cartoon-fingers/
Bizarro on visual conventions: three fingers rather than four
*http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/07/13/in-the-comics/
comic-book genres, comics vs. cartoons
*http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/08/07/comic-machines/
art, cartoons, illustration, etc.
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/08/14/zippys-movie-career/
the comics world and the real world; Zippy’s lg.
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/08/28/best-word-ever/
McCagg diagrams: cartoons?
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/09/11/wally-wood/
“Panels That Always Work” by Wally Wood
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/09/28/course-preparation/
Carvell slides on preparing the freshman seminar; Dubinsky & Holcomb
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/10/15/ink-on-paper-vs-paint-on-canvas/
comics vs. graphic novels
*http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/10/29/on-cartoons/
comics vs. other forms; creation of comics; allusions to other comics
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/11/07/bubbles/
bubbles under water
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/12/22/triumph-of-the-nerds/
the rise of webcomics
BZ, 2/7/13: The cyberpragmatics of bounding asterisks:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4466
typographical conventions
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2013/04/07/garfield-minus-garfield/
subtractive cartooning
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2013/08/13/manga-matters/
manga instruction books; Haida manga
Today’s Bizarro:
I before E except after C.
From the linguistics humor site Speculative Grammarian on Epiphany (January 6th):
Happy Birthday!: Today is the birthday of Nikolai Marr! To celebrate, use only the four original words, sal, ber, yon, and rosh, to speak today.
From Wikipedia:
Nicholas Yakovlevich Marr (… 6 January 1865 – 20 December 1934) was a Georgia-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus during the 1910s before embarking on his controversial “Japhetic theory” on the origin of language (from 1924) and related speculative linguistic hypotheses.
Marr’s hypotheses was used as a rationale in the campaign during the 1920-30s in the Soviet Union of introduction of Latin alphabets for smaller ethnicities of the country.
Marr earned a reputation as a maverick genius with his Japhetic theory, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and Basque languages. In 1924, he went even further and proclaimed that all the languages of the world descended from a single proto-language which had consisted of four “diffused exclamations”: sal, ber, yon, rosh.
Marr eventually fell out of favor with Stalin.