Another in a series of periodic reports on taboo avoidance in the New York Times: three examples of an expletive / obscenity (from Ben Zimmer), plus one case where the paper breaks down and prints [expletive deleted], despite its stated policy not to do so (in this case, it’s hard to see how to avoid it).
Archive for February, 2014
Taboo avoidance in the NYT (once again)
February 9, 2014Putin on the Ritz
February 9, 2014From this site (Sad and Useless), this still from an animation:
Ordinarily, I’d unpack this image, but in the Linguage of Comics course at Stanford this quarter, Elizabeth Traugott and I have been asking students what sociocultural knowledge is required to understand a cartoon (this isn’t technically a cartoon, but it’s a similar visual joke) — imagine you’re trying to explain it to a Martian or a child — and why it’s funny. So think of this as an at-home exercise.
callistemon
February 9, 2014The Burlingham sisters (Ann, Kathryn, and Gillian) and their extended family (spouses, children, mother, and aunt) have been on tour on the other side of the world, sending back (wonderful) Facebook reports on their travels. Along the way, a note on Callistemon flowers.
From Wikipedia:
Callistemon … is a genus of 34 species of shrubs in the family Myrtaceae, all of which are endemic to Australia.
… The obvious parts of the flower masses are stamens, with the pollen at the tip of the filament; the petals are inconspicuous … Flower heads vary in colour with species; most are red, but some are yellow, green, orange or white. [also purple and pink]
Beyond Australia, the plant is also also grown in other semi-tropical and tropical places: among them, India, Southeast Asia, and California (where it’s all over the place).
Bibliobimbo
February 8, 2014From bookseller Ann Burlingham, a link to this parody comic:
Pulp fiction with hot books.
doge
February 8, 2014First it was cats (especially lolcats), now it’s dogs, well doges.
From a February 6th posting on The Toast site by Gretchen McCulloch. ‘A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow.”
Mammoths and flowers
February 8, 2014Passed on to me by Sim Aberson, this NPR story of February 6th, “Woolly Mammoths’ Taste For Flowers May Have Been Their Undoing” by Geoff Brumfiel, beginning:
They were some of the largest, hairiest animals ever to walk the Earth, but new research shows a big part of the woolly mammoth’s diet was made up of tiny flowers.
The work is based on DNA analysis of frozen arctic soil and mammoth poop. It suggests that these early vegans depended on the flowers as a vital source of protein. And when the flowers disappeared after the last ice age, so too did the mammoths that ate them.
(#1)
Comma time
February 8, 2014Today’s Bizarro has yet another version of the Comma Joke, repeated in many places over the years:
The contrast is between expressions that are tightly connected syntactically to the rest of their syntax (as in Kiss the cook) vs. those that are loose adjuncts of one type or another — vocatives or, as in this case, appositives.
(Note: this was originally posted under the heading Apostrophe Time. My mental gears slipped between apostrophe and comma, as several readers have pointed out. Some days I’m not very sharp.)
Joke time
February 8, 2014A request went out on Facebook recently for favorite jokes. Lots of responses, most of them old acquaintances. But this one, from Michael Babinec, was new to me:
Queen Elizabeth is touring a new Scottish hospital and approaches the bedside of a patient. She asks him “What are you in hospital for?” and he says “Fair fa your honest sonsie face, great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race.”
Puzzled, she moves on to the next bed. “And what brings you to hospital?” Patient answers, “My love is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June.”
Finally the Queen goes to a third patient, who says “Wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie, oh what a panic’s in thy breastie.”
Completely lost, she turns to a doctor and asks “Is this the psychiatric ward?”
“No, it’s the Burns unit.”
Consider what it takes to “get” this joke.
God’s Grammar Cactus
February 7, 2014Found via the net, this cartoon:
Inflectional morphology and (somewhat absurdly) social context.
Zippy nonsense
February 7, 2014Today’s Zippy, which incorporates the comic-within-the-comic, Fletcher and Tanya:
F&T is a recurrent feature in Zippy. It’s a masterpiece of (Gricean) irrelevance, in which the conversational partners flagrantly talk past one another. What each of them says is grammatical English, though often peculiar in content. But the exchanges don’t cohere at all.