Archive for September, 2015

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Superpatriot hot dogs

September 14, 2015

Now on tv around here, an advertising campaign for hot dogs that goes way over the top in making claims for the patriotic virtues of one particular brand, Ball Park Franks from Hillshire Brands:

The flag, and one of Our astronauts, and an advertising slogan that appears to say that there’s a characteristic American taste you can detect in Ball Park Franks because it’s so intense there. But I should say that there’s not a lot of point in trying to make sense of such slogans, because they’re not meant to communicate coherent ideas, but only to convey strong positive feelings about the product. Buy this! Because it will make you feel good!

(more…)

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

Alex Minsky and his underwear

September 14, 2015

From Daily Jocks yesterday, this underwear ad, featuring intriguing tattoos and an equally intriguing facial expression (concern? puzzlement? or what?):

(#1)

While I was contemplating a sexy caption for this photo, I dug around a bit and discovered the full-length photo that’s shown cropped in #1:

(#2)

Now focusing on his package and his prosthetic right leg.

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Photography, Shirtlessness, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Stage names for dogs

September 13, 2015

Today’s Rhymes:

Stage names, authorial pseudonyms, drag queen names, stripper names, etc., usually carefully chosen one by one. But as I noted in this 4/18/09 posting about such names, there are also formulas for creating them systematically from existing parts: for instance, mother’s maiden name plus the name of the street you grew up on — a scheme that yields the excellent Rice Highland for me but some very dubious or unwieldy names for others.

Now a formula for dogs!

Incidentally, there are certainly people with the last name Bacon (the actor Kevin, for instance), and there could be Bacons with “Squeaky” as a jocular middle name (consider Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme), so Jeff “Squeaky” Bacon would be imaginable. But are there people with the last/family name Hedgehog? (Sonic the Hedgehog doesn’t count.)

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

Ten language-y comics

September 13, 2015

On the Comics Kingdom blog on Tuesday the 8th: “Tuesdays Top Ten Comics on Grammar and Wordplay” (with grammar, as usual, understood broadly). CK distributes strips from King Features; it’s one of my regular sources of cartoons for this blog. The strips here are all from 2014-15.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Coordination, Dialects, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Punctuation, Slang, Spelling | Leave a Comment »

Caring

September 13, 2015

On the 11th, Mark Liberman returned to the expression could care less on Language Log, thanks to an xkcd cartoon that day, which I reproduce here:

He uses the expression as an implicitly negative idiom, conveying something like couldn’t care less, but a bit more compactly. She peeves at him, he analyzes what she might be doing with her peeve, and eventually he uses the idiom to her.

(more…)

Posted in Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Negation | Leave a Comment »

Chaste trees and jumping spiders

September 12, 2015

Yesterday at the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, a plant note and an animal note: chaste trees and jumping spiders.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and animals, Language and plants, Names | Leave a Comment »

A sad editing moment at the New York Times

September 12, 2015

In last Sunday’s NYT Magazine, I was saddened, and not a little outraged, to read, in Dan Kois’s piece “The Misanthropic Genius of Joy Williams”, the following bit of garbled English:

In the end the essay is a call to arms for a new kind of literature, one Williams sounds doubtful that anyone, including she, can write.

(After nearly a week, the sentence is still on the paper’s site. Apparently nobody thought there was anything wrong with it.)

Now, I’m familiar with examples like this, and have posted about them, but not from professional writers or editors who are presumably native speakers of English; instead, they come from amateurs who are so unwilling to trust their instincts about how their language works that they cast about for guidance from (poorly remembered) advice on how to write their language that they’ve been taught. They have some excuse. But Kois and whatever editors worked on this piece do not.

(more…)

Posted in Pronoun case, Usage advice | Leave a Comment »

Cartoon adventures in lexical semantics

September 12, 2015

Two cartoons from yesterday — a Mother Goose and Grimm and a Scenes from a Multiverse — that turn on the senses of lexical items. The preposition on and the verb jam, respectively.

(#1)

(#2)

Ambiguity in #1, an extended sense in #2.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Briefly: circular word-formation

September 11, 2015

Caught in an episode of CSI: NY a little while ago: a parole officer talking about a parolee who missed his most recent meeting:

I didn’t violate him. I decided to cut him some slack.

That’s the transitive verb violate ‘cite for a violation’. Intended as cop-talk, I assume.

That looks like a (simple) back-formation from the noun violation. But of course violation is itself a derived noun based on, yes, violate ‘break or fail to comply with (a rule or formal agreement)’ (NOAD2)

But the back-formation gives us a new sense of violate — actually, a new verb violate. So:

violate > violation > violate

Posted in Back formation, Conversion | Leave a Comment »

Briefly: sources?

September 11, 2015

In looking up material for my recent goldenrod posting, I came across the site for the Herbal Extract Company, which claims to provide a goldenrod supplement for medicinal purposes. The site is a mess, with pages that look like templates, with no real content — like the goldenrod-sources page, which asks the question:

What foods are good sources of goldenrod?

but, so far as I can tell, provides no answers. My problem actually goes deeper than that, since I don’t understand the question. My guess was that it’s asking about sources of goldenrod ‘goldenrod extract’, in which case the sources are either goldenrod plants or companies like their own, but not foods. (In a slightly different context, it could be asking about sources of goldenrod ‘goldenrod honey’, in which case the answer is either the plants, or bees, or companies that sell foodstuffs like honey.)

My impression is that the wording of the question involves some sort of semantic reversal involving the noun sources, but I don’t see how to reformulate the question so that it asks something reasonable and could have a useful answer.

Posted in Lexical semantics, Mistakes | 1 Comment »

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