Today’s Zippy:
A rush of verbs, and then blaundry (bowling + laundry).
Archive for April, 2014
A Zippy portmanteau
April 2, 2014April 1
April 1, 2014(Not much language here.)
Once again, it’s April 1, April Fool’s Day. It’s hard enough to know what to believe on the net — there’s so much invention, satire, and the like — but it all gets booted up on this day (and its surrounding days). An old Peanuts, passed on by Billy Green:
Today brought a reminder (from Chris Ambidge) of one of the greatest April Fool’s jokes, the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest BBC broadcast of 1957. Panorama broadcast by Richard Dimbleby here, longer presentation (with complete text) here. It still makes me giggle.
Squiggles
April 1, 2014In the NYT of March 29th, this piece, “In an Era of Squiggles, You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Handwriting Analyst” by Tyler Kepner, about signatures from baseball players.
Profanity in the NYT
April 1, 2014Yesterday’s NYT had an op-ed piece by Jesse Sheidlower on “The Case for Profanity in Print”, taking up a topic that I’ve posted about frequently (often mockingly, often with input from Jesse): the paper’s insistence (almost without exception) on alluding to taboo vocabulary without quoting it, even when it’s the point of the story. (It’s a family paper, they say, and the children must be protected. If so, then they should simply avoid allusions to the language at all, rather than contort themselves to communicate what was said without actually using the words. And, by the way, children are not innocents about such things.)