Among the presents for my birthday (on the 6th): a penguin, a spelling Owl, an Archie comic, and a rainbow cake. (At least one more to come, in a future posting.)
Archive for September, 2014
Birthday presents
September 8, 2014Straight guys in porn
September 7, 2014(Some frank discussion of man-man sex here, but in elevated rather than plain language. And only one photo, suggestive but far from X-rated.)
On AZBlogX, a piece on another of male photograher Jonathan Black’s models: porn actor Chris Champion:
(X-rated Black photos of Champion, and shots of Champion in hardcore porn action, are on AZBlogX.)
Champion is a gorgeous man. But writeups of his porn work note that his performances were often lackluster, probably because he is straight — a gay-for-pay (G4P) actor — and not fully engaged in his work. So: back to the topic of G4P.
geosocial
September 7, 2014It starts with today’s Doonesbury —
(#1)
and ends with shirtless lycanthrophy. In between: Roland Hedley, III, the apps Tinder and Grindr (with some shirtlessness), geosocial networking (aka geosocial), and professional lycanthrope Tyler Posey (appearing shirtless). A long strange trip.
Cantus Arcticus
September 6, 2014(Nothing much about language here. Music and birds instead.)
Caught in the middle of the night from WQXR, the NYC classical music station (I sleep to music), this musical oddity:
Cantus Arcticus, Op. 61, is an orchestral composition written by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara in 1972. It is probably his best-known work.
Subtitled Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, it incorporates tape recordings of birdsong recorded near the Arctic Circle and on the bogs of Liminka in northern Finland.
The work is in three movements: The bog opens with a flute duet, after which the other woodwinds join in, followed by the birds. The second movement, Melancholy, features a slowed-down recording of the song of the shore lark. The final movement, Swans migrating, takes the form of a long crescendo for orchestra, with the sounds of whooper swans. At the end both birdsong and orchestra fade, as if into the distance.
Cantus Arcticus was commissioned by the University of Oulu for its first doctoral degree ceremony. (Wikipedia link)
I’m enchanted that a university (a university specializing in science and technology, in fact) would commission a musical composition to inaugurate its doctoral program. In this case, a substantial composition, and one especially crafted to fit the university’s location, way up in northern Finland.
Porn parody cartoons
September 6, 2014In collecting material for a Page on this blog on webcomics (more Traugott & Zwicky research), I came across Leisure Town, which is not particularly language-oriented, but has had a series of parodies of Dilbert in which X-rated language (with a gay twist) figures prominently. (Yes, a combination of the comics, parody, taboo language, and gay porn — an obvious winner for me. Parodies of comics are common — some are here — and gay male comics are abundant indeed, and here we see them together.)
I’ll review the story of Tristan Farnon’s Leisure Town and its Dilbert detour and then exhibit two of the parodies — visuals from Dilbert, but with X-rated captions.
Three Saturday cartoons
September 6, 2014… on language matters, and none of them is a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. A Zits, on disagreement; a Mother Goose and Grimm, with an uncomplicated ambiguity; and a One Big Happy with Ruthie searching for the right word:
(#1)
(#2)
(#3)
SuperSenior
September 6, 2014Today’s Bizarro:
Sad days.
Today is my 74th birthday, and I’m feeling old. But I’m getting wonderful birthday messages from all over the world, mostly on my Facebook account but also in e-mail. From a few very old friends, plus a lot of linguistics colleagues and a lot of lgbt friends (my two main communities). Including, in linguistics, Ethelbert Emmanuel Kari, of the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, who shares my birthday (but is considerably less geriatric than I am). I am, as Ethelbert said, blessed.
What a difference 30 years makes
September 6, 2014Just arrived: Dan Jurafsky’s delightful The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (Norton, 2014):
I’ll have more to say about the book later; here I’m focusing on chapter 1, “How to Read a Menu”, because it takes up a topic than Ann Zwicky and I wrote on in 1980 (“America’s National Dish: The Style of Restaurant Menus”, in American Speech 55.83-92; available on-line here). A lot has changed in 30+ years.
garden pathing
September 5, 2014From Chris Waigl on Facebook:
Garden path alert. After reading this for the first three times, I was left with an extraneous “appear to have been a loan”. Got it the fourth time.
Both McDonnells, who now face years in prison, were acquitted of lesser charges of making false statements on loan applications, while Ms. McDonnell was convicted on a charge she alone faced, of obstructing a grand jury investigation by trying to make a gift of $20,000 worth of designer dresses and shoes appear to have been a loan. (link to NYT)
At first (second and third), Chris understood that Ms. McDonnell was convicted of trying to make a $20,000 gift of dresses and shoes (to some person or organization). She thought the sentence was finished – but then it went on!
A classic garden path sentence, to use the term of art (in linguistics and the psychology of language) that has been around since 1970 and has often been used on Language Log and this blog.
Zubin Mehta violates the CSC
September 5, 2014From the one-column interview of Zubin Mehta in the NYT Sunday Review on the 31st:
We [Parsees] have a Sunday dish called dhansak. That’s three or four different kinds of lentils, heavily spiced, eaten with brown fried rice with chicken in it. It’s something you eat and go to sleep.
Note the relative clause modifying something: (that) you eat and go to sleep , with two VP conjuncts. The first conjunct is missing an object for eat; the standard generative-grammar story here is that the object of eat has been “extracted”, and surfaces as the head of the relative:
something-i you eat ____i
(where the index indicates reference and the underline after eat indicates the position of a “gap” representing the extracted material).
But the second conjunct has no gap — it’s just an ordinary intransitive VP — so the two conjuncts aren’t parallel in structure, and many people have found their coordination (though comprehensible) awkward at best, or even ungrammatical. The latter view was enshrined in the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) in Haj Ross’s Ph.D. dissertation.