Archive for September, 2015

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Boop 2

September 20, 2015

Commenting on yesterday’s posting about Betty Boop, Bonnie Bendon Campbell reminded me that before she married Dagwood Bumstead, Blondie (of the comic books) was Blondie Boopadoop. Investigating that history takes us back to the 1920s and 1930s and the rise of the sexy “little girl” persona in pop culture, distilled in the Betty Boop animated movies and newspaper comic strips. The girlish women in this material were all dark-haired — until the persona collided with the “blonde bombshell” stereotype, giving us the early Blondie.

The song “I Wanna Be Loved by You” figures in both the brunette and the blonde strains of this history — in a 1928 performance by the dark-haired Helen Kane (one possible model for Betty Boop) and in the 1959 Some Like It Hot performance by blonde icon Marilyn Monroe.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »

Betty Boop

September 19, 2015

The Comics Kingdom site tells us that this book was released this week:

The Definitive Guide to Betty Boop: The Classic Comic Strip Collection, with an introduction by Brian Walker

Note: Max Fleischer’s animated character is here represented as she appeared in the funny pages of daily newspapers in the 1930s. So, somewhat tamed down from the adult-directed animated features.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Muffins

September 19, 2015

It seems to be Breadstuffs Weekend. Yesterday, breadsticks. Today, muffins.

Today started with a photo from London, posted on Facebook by Steven Levine:

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Steven’s comment:

Excuse me, I’m looking for a guy who lives here who calls himself “the muffin man”. Do you know him?

Yes: Do you know the muffin man?

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Posted in Art, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Music, Names | 2 Comments »

Breadsticks

September 18, 2015

Big advertising campaign underway for Olive Garden’s “breadstick sandwiches”. Now the idea of a breadstick sandwich might strike you as absurd, if you think of breadsticks as pencil-thin and crisp, like the grissini here:

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But OG’s breadsticks are wide grissini, and they are chewy rather than crisp, so they can serve as the bun in a sandwich.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and food, Language in advertising | Leave a Comment »

Briefly: two borderline AZ attributions

September 17, 2015

Continuing on terminology that’s been associated with me, two odd cases, both already posted on here: Zwicky’s Law and scanting out.

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Posted in AZ terminology | 5 Comments »

The steely cruise of the Voltron Blaster

September 17, 2015

(Mostly about men’s bodies and sexuality. But there’s some language stuff too.)

From Daily Jocks yesterday, a penetrating gaze:

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The accompanying copy (reproduced here without editing):

Go interstellar with the new Astro range from Teamm8!
The form enhancing briefs and trunks are made from cotton and elastane and feature a thick metalic waistband to give you support where you need it.
Featuring striking stars and geometrics, they are bound to be your next underwear draw favorite!

My caption, using this material:

Astronaut on earth, or the
Steely cruise of the Voltron Blaster

Anthony treasures his Astro time
In space, but now he
Revels in his career as the
Blaster, at $200 an hour,
Out or in.

Now there will be notes.

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Posted in Captions, Clothing, Dissimilation, Gender and sexuality, Names, Portmanteaus, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Zombie X

September 16, 2015

For some time, Mike Pope has been (gently) after me on Facebook to assemble a list of linguistic terms that are my innovations. This turns out to be a devilishly difficult enterprise, for several reasons, a prime one being something that afflicts any attempt to discover the “inventor” of an expression: as I’ve noted several times on this blog, most innovations exploit potentials in the language that are in principle available to everyone (various figures of speech, semantic extensions and specializations, patterns of word formation, and so on), so that it’s quite likely that an innovation has been made by many people on many different occasions, without anyone taking special notice or recording these events.

But sometimes one of these events is noticed, at least within a particular sociocultural community, and that’s taken to be a founding event (with an identifiable source), from which the innovation can spread within the community; the innovator is then given credit within the community.

And so to the story of metaphorical zombie.

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Posted in Figurative language, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Pop culture, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

Substance massification on the golf course

September 15, 2015

In another watching of the GEICO “Kraken” commercial (posting here), I caught a nice everyday example of the sort of conventionalized metonymy that I called in a 2008 LLog posting substance massification, a particular type of conversion of a C (count) noun to a M (mass) use.

In their in-play commentary on a golf game in progress, one reporter says to another, about a golfer attempting to cope with a sea-monster:

(X) Looks like he’s going to go with the 9 iron. That may not be enough club.

(Golf) club is C, but here is used with M syntax, according to this generalization (from the LLog posting):

C>M: substance massification. A C noun denoting an individual has a M use to denote a generic substance or totality, usually in construction with a quantity determiner (“That’s a lot of horse”, “That’s more elephant than we can handle”). [So: horse / elephant (roughly) ‘amount of horse / elephant material or substance’ (considered as a whole)]

Or in the case of (X), enough club, with club (roughly) ‘amount of club substance or material’.

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Posted in Conversion, Count & Mass, Metonymy | Leave a Comment »

Dennis Greene

September 15, 2015

In the NYT on the 10th, an obit (by Daniel E. Slotnik), “Dennis Greene, a Singer With Sha Na Na, Dies at 66”. As it happens, I’ve posted before about Sha Na Na (“More na na na” on 4/3/15) and the song (“Get a Job”) that gave them their name, but without singling Greene out. Here’s the group in their heyday:

Greene is in the back row, fourth from the left. Yes, the black guy.

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Posted in Death notices, Music | Leave a Comment »

The speech of signs

September 14, 2015

Today’s Zippy has him somewhere in the neighborhood of Albuquerque NM, being lectured to by the sign at a Blake’s Lotaburger:

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Signs that speak are nothing new in Zippyworld; they go along with the speaking fiberglass roadside sculptures / statues that dot the Griffyscape — Muffler Man and his relatives,

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Posted in Diners, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

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