Four cartoons today: a Dilbert, a Bizarro, a Mother Goose and Grimm, and a Scenes from the Multiverse:
Archive for March, 2014
Monday quartet
March 31, 2014Jarry at the diner II
March 31, 2014Extracting this from John Baker’s comment on my previous posting, the image of the Tilt’n Diner in Tilton NH:
Now, this matches the image in the Zippy in my previous posting. Nice photo.
The diner and the definite article
March 31, 2014
Gapless relatives
March 30, 2014An old topic, which has cropped up on ADS-L in the past few days. I’ll try to sort out that discussion in a while, but first a quick look back at (some) postings on the topic, in chronological sequence.
Triple play
March 30, 2014Three varied cartoons fot the day: Rhymes With Orange, Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert.
Jarry at the diner
March 30, 2014
Hu on base
March 30, 2014Pointer from Dan Everett on Facebook to this image:
(#1) (more…)
Decline and rise of gay
March 29, 2014Geoff Nunberg writes with this Google Ngram:
This shows the usage of gay (at least in the books Google samples) gently declining until roughly 1980 and then zooming up. The interpretation I’d provide here is that “old gay ‘merry’ ‘” was declining very slowly (it became “old-fashioned”), until “new gay ‘homosexual’ ” eventually took over massively. But others might have other interpretations.
The moth worm
March 29, 2014From Arne Adolfsen on Facebook, an entertaining 1936 ad for Expello:
The crucial linguistic point is de-mothers (or demothers, you can’t tell because of the line break). This is a semantically transparent, but innovative, derived form from the noun moth, conveying ‘remove moths from’. Still, it presents some parsing challenges.
For John Gumperz
March 29, 2014Passed on by Damien Hall, forwarded from the Variationist mailing list on 3/25:
We just published an edited volume of the Journal of Ling Anthro on the work and legacy of John Gumperz. Wiley graciously agreed to provide full and free access to the issue. Check it out: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jola.2013.23.issue-3/issuetoc
On Gumperz and his work, on this blog, see here. Another colleague who is much missed.