Two recent reports on ADS-L, both from baseball talk, about two-part back-formed verbs (2pbfVs) that have Adj (rather than N) as the first element: to official-score (back-formed from official scorer) and to situational-hit (back-formed from situational hitting). These will turn out to be less novel than they appear at first.
Archive for August, 2015
Adjs in 2pbfVs
August 17, 2015A story of patient endurance
August 16, 2015From yesterday’s NYT, on the front page, an obit by the estimable Margalit Fox, “Edward Thomas, Policing Pioneer Who Wore a Burden Stoically, Dies at 95”, which raised conflicting feelings in me. Here’s the beginning, with the bits that roused me boldfaced:
When Edward Thomas joined the Houston Police Department in 1948, he could not report for work through the front door.
He could not drive a squad car, eat in the department cafeteria or arrest a white suspect.
Walking his beat, he was once disciplined for talking to a white meter maid.
Officer Thomas, who died on Monday at 95, was the first African-American to build an eminent career with the Houston Police Department, one that endured for 63 years. By the time he retired four years ago, two months shy of his 92nd birthday, he had experienced the full compass of 20th-century race relations.
His days were suffused with the pressure to perform perfectly, lest he give his white supervisors the slightest excuse to fire him — and he could be fired, he knew, for a transgression as small as not wearing a hat.
They were also suffused with the danger he faced in the field, knowing that white colleagues would not come to his aid.
In 2011, when Officer Thomas retired with the rank of senior police officer, he was “the most revered and respected officer within the Houston Police Department,” the organization said in announcing his death, at his home in Houston.
On July 27, two weeks before he died, the department renamed its headquarters in Officer Thomas’s honor.
On the one hand, you can feel pleased at how far race relations have come (though you can be sure that fellow officers referred to him as a nigger in the old days, and that some still do). On the other hand, the history is simply appalling, a tale of constant unyielding indignities.
Mant!
August 16, 2015Caught yesterday on KFJC’s Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show: the audio of the trailer for the astounding movie Mant!, a tale of the horror caused when radiation from an atomic bomb affects both a man and an ant, yielding a — OMG! — half-man half-ant.
Watch the trailer here:
Morning: mandolin, mandoline
August 16, 2015This morning’s name was mandolin, the musical instrument (in the lute family). And that led almost immediately to mandoline, the kitchen utensil (a vegetable shredder). They turn out to be very closely related.
Dance and the male body
August 16, 2015An assemblage of photos sent to me by Mike McKinley (sometimes in collaboration with Chris Ambidge) or from sites Mike pointed me to, most of them featuring male ballet dancers, most of them dripping with gay sensibility in their view of the male body, and a fair number of them over the top.
Len Cariou
August 15, 2015(About the actor, with only a bit about language in it.)
A few days ago, Ion Television was re-playing a string of episodes from the drama series Blue Bloods, which I hadn’t experienced before. I missed the intro, and was plunged into an early scene from one of those episodes, with the Reagan family around the dinner table. And there was a very familiar face I couldn’t quite place. Second from the left in this cast photo:
(#1)
(Yes, that’s Tom Selleck in the #3 slot, and Donnie Wahlberg as #5. Plus Will Estes as #1, and Bridget Moynahan as #4.)
Stickwork
August 15, 2015Zippy leads us on an art tour:
(#1)
Stickwork is the title of Dougherty’s 2010 book about his outdoor stick sculpture. Fascinating stuff.
Crab feast
August 15, 2015Some time ago a tv commercial went past me in the middle of the night: a commercial for a fast-food or casual-dining restaurant advertising specials on crab, a feast of snow crab and king crab. So I wondered about the crab in these two names, suspecting that we might be in a world where the referent of one or both of these names is unclear — where there are several distinct creatures called snow crab, say — and maybe also in a world where biologists claim that some things called crabs (or X crabs, for some specific X) are not in fact crabs at all, or aren’t “true crabs”. My suspicious are justified.
Annals of phallicity: the hardness score
August 14, 2015In the September 2015 issue of Out magazine (p. 20), Aaron Hicklin’s Editor’s Letter, “The Audacity of Cucumbers”, a rave tv review:
If you are among the paltry 55,000 people that tuned in to Logo earlier this year to watch the premiere episode of the British import Cucumber, or the paltrier 24,000 that watched its sibling, Banana, both helmed by the Queer as Folk originator Russell T. Davies, I hope you stayed beyond those establishing episodes. Cucumber and Banana were slow to warm up, but by episodes three and four there was little doubt that Davies had created the most audacious and original queer series ever. Two of them, in fact. They were funny; they were sad; they were mischievous. Sometimes they were even profound.
With titles taken from designations for the Erection Hardness Score, developed by the European Association of Urology, Cucumber and Banana were so audacious that I sometimes felt almost embarrassed to be watching. Yet how utterly novel to see gay sex treated in such a frank and casual manner. The shows are complementary but separate, with characters flitting from one to the other… In fact, I’ve never seen the LGBT community treated with such equity, in which all the constituent parts of the acronym are present and fully fleshed out.
(#1)
You can watch some scenes from the shows here.
