I advance very slowly on the project of looking at terminology that I might lay some personal claim to. Now: snowclonelet, which I note on the occasion of my having assembled a “Snowclonelets” Page (under the “Linguistics notes” heading), listing postings on the topic from Language Log and this blog.
More to come.
The chirpy and supremely annoying commercials for Dump Cakes are back on my cable tv. Here’s a sample:
The box of stuff you just dump on top of the other ingredients and bake in the oven:
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The name dump cake looks like a N + N compound, and not one of the possibly relevant senses of the noun dump is at all savory, and one (the sense that came first to my mind) is decidedly unsavory, on the edge of scatological taboo. Think of the idiom take a dump. How could the Dump Cakes people not have noticed this?
My morning name two days ago was silverfish (yesterday’s was toe jam, and I’ve posted on that). A perfect example of a morning name, since I had no idea why the little insect should have popped into my mind. This morning there were two, but they were entirely explicable: howler monkey (I read about them in the NYT yesterday, fascinating story) and dermestid beetle (prominently mentioned in a CSI: NY episode I watched yesterday). Brief words about them, and then on to the silverfish.
This morning’s name was toe jam (aka toe-jam and toejam), a slang term for something that has no medical label that I can find. Some definitions:
‘material that collects between the toes’ (Wikipedia)
‘dirt which accumulates between the toes’ (OED2, with a first cite in only 1934)
‘the ‘gunk’ that accumulates between the toes’ (Huffington post article by a podiatrist)
My mind then took me immediately to the line
He wear no shoeshine, he got toe jam football
from the Beatles’ “Come Together” on their Abbey Lane album (1969).
News from the Linguistic Society of America:
Arika Okrent announced as winner of LSA Linguistics Journalism Award: Arika Okrent, the language columnist for Mental Floss and a frequent linguistic contributor to many publications, has been named this year’s recipient of the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistics Journalism Award. The Linguistics Journalism Award, chosen annually by LSA officers and staff, honors the journalist whose work best represents linguistics over the previous 12 months.
From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, working her way back home from meetings in Atlanta, a photograph of an art installation in the airport there:
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This is a rear view, and you have to look for the beak. A front view, from the airport’s website:
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From Paul Armstrong, this link to Lars Eidnes’s blog on the 13th, with a scheme for “Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks”.
Background: postings on this blog:
7/17/14: “Clickbait schemes”, here
6/27/15: “Clickbait”, here
And now Eidnes’s come-on:
Yesterday’s invitation-to-explore from Daily Jocks:
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Kev, they said, short hair and facial
Scruff mean ‘butch’ to our faggot
Customers, that’s good; and a
Smooth, hairless body invites them to
Stroke it, so ditch the fur, dude, and
Bring them down to your
Treasure crotch.
So Kev suffered the pain of depilation, oiled himself lightly, and wore his skivvies down low, all to please the customers.
And now on “Depilation Row”, which will take us back to Palo Alto in the 60s.
Left over from my “Shirtless Mondays” posting, one of the three actors I showed shirtless there: Seann William Scott, grinning and showing off his really really ripped body, while doing a shirt-lifting number. (David Paetkau and Matt Passmore were the other two).
I picked these three to write about because I’d seen them all at work on a single day, enjoyed their performances, thought they deserved some notice as solid and reliable actors who were not, however, star names, and, yes, appreciated their inclinations towards showing off their bodies.
On to Scott, who I saw in the sweet comedy movie Role Models, where he shared top billing with Paul Rudd. But almost everybody who sees a photo of Scott recognizes him immediately from a comedy role he played 25 years ago: “Stifler!”
From Ann Burlingham, this Scott Hilburn cartoon from 2012, with a pun avalanche, or punvalanche for short, of bread-related vocabulary: breadwinner, the verb loaf, (slice of) toast, Melba (toast), sourdough.
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Some highlights follow.