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Archive for August, 2014

Briefly noted: an appositive adjective

August 15, 2014

From the (San Francisco Mid-Peninsula) Daily Post of 8/14/14, p. 1, “Massage parlor workers arrested”:

Redwood City police conducted an undercover operation at the Aurora Spa at 1865 Broadway on July 22 after receiving complaints of illegal prostitution.

Not just prostitution, but illegal prostitution. But prostitution is in fact illegal in California (and other places outside of Nevada), so what is the adjective illegal doing here?

This is an appositive, rather than restrictive, use of the adjective — a phenomenon I’ve posted about several times, at greatest length in a 2/8/07 Language Log posting “Droning on”, about the expression pilotless drones.

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Posted in Modification, Semantics, Syntax | 1 Comment »

Tumble Inn, Stan

August 14, 2014

Today’s Zippy:

(#1)

There’s the diner, and there’s the address term Stan.

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Posted in Address terms, Art/lit/music/film, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

A Bizarro replay

August 13, 2014

On Facebook recently, this Bizarro cartoon (from 1/29/07) passsed on by Grammarly:

Michael Siemon then asked if I was aware of this cartoon. As it turns out, I posted about it on Language Log on 1/30/07, under the heading “Pronouns: The early days” — but, unfortunately, because of changes in the LLog platforms, the cartoon itself has became unavailable in the LLog archives. So here’s a replay.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Syntactic categories | Leave a Comment »

infidel

August 11, 2014

Unfolding in Iraq, a fierce campaign by the Sunni Muslim organization ISIS against “infidels”, in particular, Shia Muslims, Christians, and Yazidis. (I’m skipping here what ISIS stands for, and whether some other label entirely should be used for the organization.) Jews would of course be on the list, but there aren’t many left in Iraq; ISIS proposes to get to the Jews by attacking Israel, but only after they eliminate Iraqi infidels first — by the classic tactic of requiring them to convert or be killed. (The Convert or Die tactic is familiar in the West from the long history of Roman Catholic impositions on other groups, especially the Ottoman Turks, but also Jews and (what the Church saw as) heretical Christian sects.)

Obviously, what counts as an infidel depends on your point of view, as will become clear from a run through the OED2 entry. But first, some notes on the etymology.

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Posted in Insults, Language and religion, Lexical semantics | Leave a Comment »

A further Nixonian note

August 11, 2014

In a posting yesterday I paired Richard M. Nixon with the poet Frank O’Hara, both of whom have significant anniversaries this year:

A startling juxtaposition of personalities: the awkward, often surly, and fiercely ambitious politician Nixon versus the charming and gregarious poet, with his great gift for friendship.

I went on the embroider some on O’Hara, but didn’t expand on my brief and cautious characterization of Nixon. Into the breach steps distinguished historian David M. Kennedy in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, in “On the Record: ‘The Nixon Tapes 1971-1972’ and ‘The Nixon Defense’ “, which hits RMN with both barrels.

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

The news for cats

August 10, 2014

From Jeanne Dusseault, a link to the eccentric webcomic Breaking Cat News by Georgia Dunn. The latest installment (headline: “The man is taking a shower”), of August 6th:

The conceit: The strip shows bulletins from Cat News, a program by and for cats — in particular, the three cats of Dunn’s household (Lupin, Puck, and Elvis). The cats view everything from their point of view, and the views of the humans in the household (known to the cats only as The Woman and The Man) are either irrelevant or inscrutable. Many cross-species failures of communication result, as in the fourth panel above, where Puck (the black cat) can’t understand why The Man stands in a closet to get clean when he has a perefectly good tongue.

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Posted in Animal communication, Linguistics in the comics, Sociocultural conventions | 1 Comment »

Yesterday’s anniversaries

August 10, 2014

Yesterday, August 9th, was the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resigning the Presidency of the United States. And the New York Times had an appreciation of Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems”, which was first published in 1964 and has now been reissued by City Lights. A startling juxtaposition of personalities: the awkward, often surly, and fiercely ambitious politician Nixon versus the charming and gregarious poet, with his great gift for friendship.

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Posted in Books, Events, My life, Poetry | 1 Comment »