This is an odd American holiday. This Washington Post piece from yesterday — “Why Presidents’ Day is slightly strange” by Valerie Strauss — explains why.
Archive for February, 2014
Today’s holiday
February 17, 2014Two Sunday cartoons
February 16, 2014Two cartoons for today: a Pearls Before Swine on some visual conventions in the comics, and a Dilbert on telling stories, through images and words.
Zakuski
February 16, 2014On the occasion of the Olympics in Russia, NPR has published a piece on Russian food, in particular zakuski: “Drink Vodka, Eat Pickles, Repeat: Mastering The Zakuski Spread” by Deena Prichep (on the 15th). The illustration and its caption:
Zakuski tables, like Slava and Luba Frumkin’s, are known for their largesse. This spread includes smoked salmon and halibut, pickled green tomatoes, salted mackerel, Herring Under a Fur Coat and Georgian eggplant rolls.
The fur coat is (Russian) mayonnaise.
bitchtits
February 15, 2014(The title provides a warning for the sensitive.)
On the 11th on Facebook, Greg Parkinson commented on steroid-induced gynecomastia, with this image:
Tom Kirkland followed up with:
What surprises me is … how large the fan base for bitchtits [is].
(introducing the slang bitchtits for gynecomastia; bitchtits would be doubly unsuitable for the New York Times, which treats both parts of the compound as taboo, unacceptable in print; also note the syntax).
Subtext
February 15, 2014A recent Zits:
Subtext has come up in the Stanford Language of Comics seminar I’m involved with, in discussions of indirection — primarily, Gricean implicature, in which expressions have a straightforward interpretations but are used to convey different ones. Subtext is subtler, since two messages are sent at the same time.
In the Zits case above, the subtext (Drag Me to Hell) is made explicit, as commentary on the surtext (The Sound of Music).
Yet another pun
February 15, 2014Today seems to be pun day. Passed on by Barbara Need on Facebook, this Bizarro from 2009:
Groan: phero- vs. pharaoh. These are homonyms for some speakers, near-homonyms for others (who have have [æ] in pharaoh and a higher vowel, [ɛ] or [e], in phero-).
Slang change
February 15, 2014Yesterday Mark Liberman posted on this Doonesbury cartoon:
Rich in material. The main thing I want to note (as Mark did) is a sense development in the slang verb rock, from an older sense, around at least since 1990 (‘impact strongly’), to a newer sense, the one in the cartoon, around since at least 2007 (‘wear or display conspicuously or proudly’); this is a change from a more objective sense to a more subjective one, such as Elizabeth Traugott has repeatedly discussed.
Allusive pun
February 15, 2014Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
For a change, I won’t leave this as an exercise for the reader. Two crucial pieces: a pun on fence — a barrier or someone who sells stolen goods — and an allusion to Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”, which ends with the quotation “Good fences make good neighbors”.
![“Mending Wall”](http://arnoldzwicky.s3.amazonaws.com/MGGFences.jpg">){kind=link}
More deaths
February 14, 2014Two recent deaths in the news. First, funny man Sid Caesar, who transformed the face of American comedy in the 1950s through Your Show of Shows. Tributes and recollections are everywhere, Second, and less well known, is filmmaker Gabriel Axel.
One more V-Day posting
February 14, 2014In the Washington Post yesterday, a piece “A whole lot of history behind ‘x’ and ‘o,’ kiss and hug” by Nadine Epstein, which asks the question:
Where do those symbols come from, these ur-emoticons that we sprinkle so liberally across our correspondence?
Lots of sources cited, some more authoritative than others. Included are ADS-Lers Stephen Goranson and Ben Zimmer, plus Deborah Tannen.