Following up on yesterday’s “The abs/junk buddies” posting, which has a Daily Jocks ad together with a story that’s essentially a long caption for the image, some new Pages: under Captioning,
a Page on AZ captions, with my captions (and similar amendments) for ads, porn photos, male photography, and other images (most are slyly or flagrantly gay; many are X-rated);
and a Page On captioning, with my postings about captions, especially in relation to other genres and forms.
(Not really about language.)
For the holiday weekend, the Daily Jocks site offers a new Neon range from the Male Basics company.
Neon Yellow, the seriously butch, threatening guy on the right, says to Neon Magenta, his abs-cultivating, somewhat swishy buddy, “You can lean on me”. Yellow’s a top, Magenta a bottom, but they like to share their junk with each other. Or so I hear.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
(Note the title: “Linguistics 101”.)
For the people:
We call them pets because we pet them.
For the cats:
We call them feeds because they feed us.
The two cases of nouning aren’t parallel, but reversed — in a sense, chiastic.
May 26th. Note of etymological truth, which I playfully omitted in the original posting. This is a cute story for pet, but it’s etymologically backwards. The noun came first, for ‘indulged child’, then for ‘animal companion’, and then the verb was derived from the noun, meaning something on the order of ‘to treat like a pet’, specifically ‘to stroke’.
Today’s Zippy, with a delightful musical nightmare:
Note the title: “Shindigabaloo”, a portmanteau of the names of two American pop/rock music shows on television in the mid-60s, Shindig! and Hullabaloo.
Just arrived at my house, this excellent 2014 volume:
Bill Watterson, Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue (Andrews McNeel, Kansas City MO)
The exhibition took place at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum of the Ohio State University, where Watterson has placed his collection of Calvin and Hobbes materials.
The volume has a preface by Jenny E. Robb, the curator of the exhibition; an extensive interview of Watterson by her; and a nice assortment of essays by Watterson about things Calvin/Hobbesian. Here I’ll talk about the influences he cites on his work.
From his op-ed column “Unaffiliated and Underrepresented” in the NYT on the 18th:
(1) The issue in this country is less that Christians are persecuted as much as peevish.
Two things: the parallelism between persecuted and peevish; and the parallelism between less that X and as much as Y.
In the June 2015 Funny Times, a cartoon by UK cartoonist Clive Goddard, for which I supply here only the caption, which bears almost all the humor anyway (I haven’t been able to find an image on-line). A committee of four people are gathered thoughtfully around a conference table:
Central Sub-Committee Steering Group for the Facilitation of Brevity & Clarity of Language Usage in the User/Provider Communication Interface (Formerly the plain English group)
Oh, how they have fallen!
Follow-up on the 25th: Sim Aberson has unearthed a copy of the cartoon, in a Nuclear Regulatory Commission posting on “Plain Writing and Its Benefits”:
Today’s Doonesbury, in which Barack Obama toys with the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell
Much as McConnell would like to deny that the sky is blue, that’s too much for him to assert directly, so he says that he’s not qualified to answer the question, in effect issuing a sideways denial.
The strategy is familiar from the positions politicians take on climate denial.
This morning’s name was Pyewacket, which came to me as the name of the cat in Bell, Book and Candle. The cat, with Kim Novak:
