Archive for September, 2014

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Sweet rainbow food

September 13, 2014

In a continuing series, more food with a rainbow theme, this time from the sizable Flickr site Rainbow Sugar, which says:

Anything that is rainbow color and sweet, belongs in this group

(The comma between subject and predicate, marking a breathing point in the sentence (especially with a complex subject), once very common, is now treated as non-standard punctuation, an error.)

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

Two examples: rainbow cookies and rainbow (jelly) fruit slices (with only part of the rainbow shown here; we need purple and blue at the left end):

(#1)

(#2)

Huge numbers of rainbow cakes, of course, ranging from the subtle to the garish.

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Punctuation, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

natural person

September 13, 2014

In the NYT on 9/11, an editorial “An Amendment to Cut Political Cash”, with the now-familiar retronym natural person:

There are 48 Democratic senators sponsoring a constitutional amendment to restore congressional control to campaign spending that is expected to come up for a vote later this week. They are not under the illusion that it will become the 28th Amendment soon, if ever. But their willingness to undertake a long and difficult effort shows the importance they attach to restoring fairness to American politics by reducing the influence of big money.

… Addressing the Citizens United decision, [the amendment] says that governments can “distinguish between natural persons and corporations” in setting those regulations, thus allowing restrictions on corporate or union spending that would not necessarily apply to individuals.

Ordinary people would simply make a distinction between persons and corporations, but once corporations are treated as persons for certain legal purposes, the ‘human being’ sense of person needs to be distinguished from these legal entities — and so we get the retronym natural person ‘human being’.

(more…)

Posted in Innovations, Language and politics, Lexical semantics, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »

Thursday’s misreading

September 13, 2014

On the front page of the NYT on 9/11, a headline that I read as

From Kurdistan
To Texas, Scots
Spurn Separatists

This was deeply puzzling: I didn’t think that either Kurdistan or Texas had sizable numbers of Scots, much less ones passionately engaged in the question of Scottish separatism. But then I looked more carefully at the head, and saw that it had Spur, not Spurn. The Scottish issue has inspired separatist advocates in Flanders, Catalonia, Kurdistan, Quebec, the Basque Country of northern Spain, the Veneto region in northern Italy, Brittany, Friesland, Corsica, the South Tirol, Bavaria, the Swedish-speaking sections of Finland, and yes, Texas.

Sometimes I think I understand where my misreadings come from, but in this case I have no idea.

Posted in Errors, Misreadings | Leave a Comment »

Not ending with a preposition

September 13, 2014

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:

Not ending a sentence with a preposition is one of those grammar myths debunked by virtually every usage authority. Here it surfaces in the supremely silly version that you should never end a sentence with “a preposition”. Note that the proscription violates itself.

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Usage advice | 3 Comments »

mix media

September 12, 2014

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Instant food: just mix. And mix-n-match. But the linguistic point is mix media (for the expected mixed media) — an instance of lexicalized t/d deletion.

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Phonology | Leave a Comment »

Zippy at the Alamo

September 12, 2014

No, not that Alamo, the Alamo Court Motel in Ocean City MD:

(#1)

Meanwhile, Griffy confronts the paranoid conspiracist Claude (who serves as the loony foil to Bill Griffith’s voice of reason).

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Visual formats

September 12, 2014

(Warning: some material about gay sex in plain language.)

On AZBlogX, a posting about a “cast album” for the gay porn flick Crave. Here, some reflections about this (conventionalized) visual format, an analogue to to conventionalized formats for linguistic material, variously referred to as “styles”, “registers”, “routines”, or “genres” (the terminological issues are vexed indeed) — choices of linguistic features that come together in packages, for use in specific contexts for specific purposes.

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Photography, Pragmatics, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

On the spam train

September 12, 2014

While I was sleeping, the tally of spam comments reported by Akismet for this blog passed two million; at the moment, it seems to be 2,000,736. Obvious trash is filtered out automatically, without my even seeing it. But every day there are requests from Akismet for me to moderate comments, most of which I’d characterize as non-obvious trash, some of them fairly clever attempts to get me (and my readers) to link to a url that usually turns out to be a commercial site of one sort or another. Recently, many of these come from sites in Germany, I don’t know why.

Some of them are content-free congratulations on the marvels of my site. I have to look at congratulatory comments fairly carefully when they come from people I don’t recognize: a few of them mention specific content from one of my postings and have no commercial link, so they get a pass.

Others masquerade as requests for technical help of some kind.

And then there are the “advice” comments, designed to get a rise out of me: they report that there are a lot of misspellings (not specified) in my postings; or complain about some posting that I provided only “visuals” (images), when I should have posted more text; or complain about some posting that I provided only text, when “visuals” were necessary. Sigh.

Posted in Spam, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

More sexual fap(p), plus shlick

September 11, 2014

Background: a posting on the verb fapp (with variant fap) ‘to masturbate furiously’ and one on the exclamation of annoyance Fap!. And now reader Paul comments on the former:

My understanding is that fap as onomatopoeia comes from [the webcomic Sexy Losers]

I do not know when the second p started to appear.

There seems to be some agreement that Sexy Losers at least popularized the sexual verb, whether or not it originated it — and that takes it back to 1999. Also in 1999 in Sexy Losers, the feminine counterpart, shlick (Urban Dictionary in 2004: “The onomatopoeic representation of female masturbation”).

Two examples, with the strips reduced to the final panel, and genitals cropped:

SL #158 “War Games” 10/13/02, in which guys find that long sessions of gaming can improve their ejaculation distance:

(#1)

SL #166 “Psychology Games” 12/24/02, with both terms:

(#2)

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Sound symbolism | 1 Comment »

Fap!

September 10, 2014

Following up on my posting on the verb fap(p) ‘to masturbate furiously’, Robert Coren thought he recalled Fap! as “an exclamation of annoyance commonly used by a character in some ancient comic strip — I think maybe Major Hoople”. Yes, indeed, Aric Olnes replied, Major Hoople, and supplied this strip:

(Chris Ambidge added that “FAP is one of my favourite words to use when annoyed or frustrated.”)

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Syntactic categories | 4 Comments »

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