Archive for August, 2015

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The spread of popular culture

August 6, 2015

An entertaining piece in the NYT on the 4th (in the print edition that I get): “Iran Capitalizing on a Taste for America’s Biggest Brands” by Thomas Erdbrink:

Tehran— Despite the smiling clown, a symbol of the Great Satan’s love for meat, buns and fries, there were no angry mobs punching fists in the air, shouting “Death to America”; nor did the smell of burned American flags permeate this Tehran neighborhood.

It smelled of juicy burgers, flipped by a cheerful Iranian teenager named Jahan. His kitchen was crowned with a flashing logo that looked remarkably similar to the golden arches of McDonald’s, perhaps the best-known symbol of American fast-food imperialism.

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Posted in Language and food, Pop culture, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Trump’s incoherence?

August 6, 2015

Over on Language Log, Geoff Pullum has posted, under the heading “Trump’s aphasia”,  about a Donald Trump speech:

The following word-stream (it cannot be called a sentence) was uttered by Republican presidential contender Donald Trump on July 21 in Sun City, South Carolina. As far as I can detect it has no structure at all: the numerous conditional adjuncts never arrive at consequents, we never encounter a main verb or even an approximation to a claim. The topic seems to be related to nuclear engineering, Trump’s uncle, the Wharton School, Trump’s intelligence, politics, prisoners, women’s intelligence, and Iran. But it’s hard to be sure

In a follow-up, “Trump’s eloquence”, Mark Liberman offered explanations for Trump’s apparent incoherence. By that point, I had realized what sounded so familiar in Trump’s speech: it sounded an awful lot like what psychiatrists refer to as “the flight of ideas”, sometimes associated (somewhat inaccurately) with schizophrenia, but more characteristic of bipolar disorder.

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Posted in Language disorders, Language in politics | 3 Comments »

Coordinate initialisms

August 6, 2015

It started with an ADS-L posting by Benjamin Barrett about the initialism T&A, which (he learned) abbreviates tits and ass but can also denote (from a Wiktionary entry) “scantily-clad women, or entertainment featuring scantily clad women” (that is, a display of tits and ass).

(#1)

[The T & A Team is a classic porn film from 1984, with the slogan “Using Their T & A to Make the World a Better Place!”. It’s a take-off on the tv series The A-Team (1983-87).]

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Posted in Abbreviation, Gender and sexuality, Initialisms, Truncation | 4 Comments »

Language cartoon Wednesday

August 5, 2015

That would be today, with three language-related cartoons in my inbox: a Rhymes With Orange, a Mother Goose and Grimm, and a Bizarro:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

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Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Initialisms, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Truncation | Leave a Comment »

Culinary Loc + V back-formed Vs

August 5, 2015

Previously on this blog: a posting on the two-part back-formed V (2pbfV) to spit-roast (used literally with reference to cooking — ‘to roast on a spit’ — and also figuratively; the verb is back-formed from the synthetic compounds spit-roasting (PRP) and spit-roasted (PSP). Then a posting that refers to the spit-roast posting, refers to the culinary 2pbfV to pan-fry, and adds another culinary 2pbfV, to chicken-fry ‘to fry like chicken’, based on the PSP synthetic compound chicken-fried in chicken-fried steak.

Two of these culinary 2pbfVs, spit-roast and pan-fry, are of the form Loc + V, where Loc names a cooking location (on a spit, in a pan) and V denotes a method  or technique of cooking (roast, fry). It turns out that the world of culinary Loc + V back-formed Vs is huge, embracing at least the following elements:

Loc: oven, pan, skillet, spit

V: roast, cook, fry, grill, toast, smoke, sear

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Posted in Back formation, Language and food | Leave a Comment »

Childhood memories

August 4, 2015

Yesterday’s Bizarro, with a poignant reflection on the memories of childhood:

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Posted in Age, Categorization and Labeling, Linguistics in the comics, Memory | Leave a Comment »

Briefly: an excellent portmanteau

August 4, 2015

The NYT Book Review‘s interview on Sunday (the 2nd) was with the author Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Early on, we get:

Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

Yes, who indeed? The post of Favorite Novelist has been filled in my world by Flaubert, Joyce, Faulkner, Conrad…. Right now it’s probably a creature of my invention called Tolstoyevsky: a great Russian who is able to write battle scenes as well as conflicts of the soul, whose astonishing eye for detail is matched by his great gift for making people talk, and who is second to none in describing the crossroads between the public life (history, politics) and the private existence of individuals.

The perfect cross between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

I don’t usually post about portmanteaus that have come past me. There are so many of them. But this one struck me as an especially apt creation.

Posted in Portmanteaus, Writers | Leave a Comment »

cheesy pickup line

August 4, 2015

From George Takei on Facebook, this elaborate visual pun, presented like a captioned cartoon, with an entertaining disjuncture between the image and the caption:

The cheesiest pickup line ever

(Takei is scandously bad about crediting the sources of the things he posts — he just passes on things he comes across — so I have no idea who created this image or where it was originally posted.)

Three content words, each exhibiting crucial lexical ambiguity: the Adj cheesy, the N pickup, the N line.The whole thing is a N + N compound pickup line modified by the superlative of the Adj.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 1 Comment »

green … egg … (ham)

August 4, 2015

It starts with a paper by Elizabeth Closs Traugott (with my assistance) at the recent International Pragmatics Conference in Antwerp, on metatext in the cartoon xkcd (full set of slides linked to here). After Elizabeth gave the paper, she got a comment from someone asking if she knew of a comic strip with mouse-over texts and further texts that emerge from inside those mouse-overs (another layer of cartoon complexity beyond those I have written about) — a daily or weekly strip with a name that Elizabeth thinks had green and egg in it, but of course wasn’t Green Eggs and Ham.

I’ve now been trying to track down this mystery strip, but without success, mostly because Dr. Seuss keeps getting in the way. But I’ve come up with seven interesting new cartoons for your entertainment.

Note: yes, Elizabeth should have written the name down, or gotten the name of the commenter (who was not someone familiar to her), but things tend to be rushed and chaotic at these giant conferences, so it’s easy to slip. Now I’m hoping that someone will recognize the strip from her description (which I’ve paraphrased above).

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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Quotations | 1 Comment »

Self-identification

August 3, 2015

An Emily Flake cartoon in the August 3rd New Yorker:

There reference here is to people with transgender self-identification, though in fact pluots are biological hybrids, parallel to intersex people. There might also be an allusion to white people who self-identify as black (posting on this blog here).

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | 1 Comment »

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