April | 2014 | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for April, 2014

Annals of hybridity

April 7, 2014

Passed on by Jonathan Lighter, this story of the 4th from Herald Scotland:, “Meet Farmer Murphy’s geep (or shoat): now what will he call it?”

An Irish farmer who claims to have bred a cross between a sheep and a goat is seeking a name for the rare offspring.

… Similar crossings have been reported before in Chile, Jamaica, Malta and in Botswana, where scientists found a hybrid – known as the Toast of Botswana – had 57 chromosomes, a number in between that of sheep and goats.

In most cases the offspring is stillborn.

A photo:

(more…)

Posted in Compounds, Language and animals, Morphology, Portmanteaus | 6 Comments »

A little more on dog whistles etc.

April 7, 2014

In the previous installment (4/4/14, here), Geoff Nunberg was looking for a good term to use for a particular class of racially coded vocabularly, for a discussion on public radio: dog whistle, euphemism, whatever. He makes the point that the purpose of this vocabulary is crucial.

On the next day, on ADS-L, from Geoff:

the figure is designed to avoid unambiguously suggesting certain social attitudes to listeners who disapprove of them (as distinct from euphemisns, which enable the speaker to avoid uttering a coextensive term that some listeners find unsavory). “Obliquity” conveys one part of this, and “conivinutation” nicely conveys the other, though neither is a word they would let you use on public radio.

Obliquity, though rare, is not unattested. But conivinutation?

(more…)

Posted in Language and politics, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

Zippy on figures of speech

April 7, 2014

Today’s Zippy:

Zippy runs through an inventory of figures of speech. Then there’s the language play: oxymoron / moron, and (in the title) idiomatic pressing ‘urgent’ vs.one of the literal senses of pressing (Zippy is ironing clothes).

Posted in Figurative language, Idioms, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Bird life

April 6, 2014

Some time ago, Arne Adolfsen posted on Facebook about seagulls in Chicamauga GA, well inland. Commenters noted that, amomg other things, gulls were attracted to garbage dumps (and other places where edibles were to be found).

I then realized that though gulls were easily found a few miles away from my house — which is close to the San Francisco Bay and not far from the ocean — I didn’t see them in my neighborhood. (Gulls are large and noisy, so they’d be hard to miss.)

But we do have large and noticeable birds.

(more…)

Posted in Language and animals | 4 Comments »

Two porn ads

April 6, 2014

… on AZBlogX. Not about language, and definitely X-rated.

(I have a considerable backlog of XBlog stuff to post, also of cartoons. Material is coming in faster than I can handle.)

Posted in Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »

Cheap pun

April 6, 2014

Just in: a Mother Goose and Grimm with a cheap (but enjoyable) pun:

Justin Bieber / Beaver. The pun is straightforward, but this is another case where you need a lot of sociocultural knowledge, in particular about Justin Bieber.

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Another Pearls elaborate pun

April 6, 2014

Today’s Pearls Before Swine:

Pig sets up an elaborate pun (on “Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light?”) and Rat confronts the cartoonist.

Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 1 Comment »

Jane Austen with nothing to say

April 5, 2014

Another quotation from Jane Austen, in a letter of 1/21/1801:

(Thanks again to C hris Ambidge.)

The advantage of having nothing to say.

Posted in Quotations | Leave a Comment »

Aquapocalypse

April 5, 2014

In the news recently, stories about the chemical spill in West Virginia, now widely labeled the Aquapocalpse — with the libfix -pocalypse used in denoting a disaster, but not (as you might at first have thought) a flood, but instead a different type of watery disaster.

(more…)

Posted in Libfixes | Leave a Comment »