Archive for November, 2015

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The art of interjection

November 13, 2015

In yesterday’s national edition of the NYT, a Jason Bromwich story with the arresting head:

Oy or Yo? Sculpture With Something to Say Lands at Brooklyn Bridge

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The rude interjection is a staple of New York life. Now, the landscape of the city will itself heckle residents and tourists, with a brash new sculpture in Brooklyn Bridge Park that yells “YO” if you are looking at it from Manhattan or “OY” if you are gazing out from Brooklyn.

The sculpture, “OY/YO,” is the first of this size from the artist Deborah Kass, who describes herself as a “total, absolute, 100 percent provincial New Yorker.” It was commissioned by a Brooklyn developer, Two Trees Management Company, and was placed in the park on Monday.

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Posted in Art, Interjections | Leave a Comment »

A Ben Carson note

November 12, 2015

As the presidential primary season rolls on, we discover that Ben Carson’s accounts of his life history seem to have a certain amount of embroidery in them. Meanwhile, Carson continues to espouse some very odd beliefs. Here’s one that NYT columnist Gail Collins greeted with amazement back on September 10th, in “A Presidential Primary Cheat Sheet”:

Ben Carson has been surging! It’s easy to understand his popularity. He has a compelling life story about raising himself up from poverty to become a brain surgeon, and he was the least needy-looking candidate in the first Republican debate. On the other side, it is kind of unnerving that he doesn’t believe in evolution. Most Republican candidates try to fudge that one, by changing the subject or saying something like “I am not a scientist.” But Carson really doesn’t believe in evolution. And he is, you know, a scientist.

Well no, there are medical scientists, but Carson isn’t one; he’s a clinician, who provides practical treatments for people’s conditions — using what is known by (medical) science, granted, but not advancing our basic knowledge about how the body works. Skilled clinicians perform wonderful things, but they’re not scientists.

Still, it’s bizarre, in fact distressing, for a clinician to deny basic findings of science, like evolution.

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Posted in Language in politics | Leave a Comment »

cold cuts

November 12, 2015

Recently I wondered about the story of cold cuts ‘lunch meat’, an Adj + N composite that is not particularly transparent semantically (in fact, lunch meat isn’t fully transparent either). There’s some interesting linguistic history here. But there’s clearly also some substantial cultural history to be uncovered, and for this I don’t have the resources.

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Posted in Compounds, Etymology, Language and culture, Language and food, Lexical semantics | 1 Comment »

Movies and tv: Grimm

November 12, 2015

(Mostly about the tv show, but with some linguistic digressions.)

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left to right: the characters Monroe, Nick, Hank

From Wikipedia:

Grimm is an American police procedural fantasy television drama series. It debuted in the U.S. on NBC on October 28, 2011. The show has been described as “a cop drama—with a twist… a dark and fantastical project about a world in which characters inspired by Grimms’ Fairy Tales exist”, although the stories and characters inspiring the show are also drawn from other sources.

David Giuntoli as Nicholas “Nick” Burkhardt, the eponymous Grimm. Nick is a Homicide detective [in Portland OR], whose Aunt Marie (Kate Burton) tells him that he is descended from a line of hunters, called Grimms, who fight supernatural forces. Even before his abilities manifested, Nick had an exceptional ability to make quick and accurate deductions about the motivations and pasts of individuals, which has now expressed itself as his ability to perceive aspects of the supernatural that nobody else can see.

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Posted in Actors, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »

Annals of miniaturization: Fantastic Voyage

November 12, 2015

(About a movie, rather than language.)

A follow-up to my posting on the miniature world of bonsai, about the preposterous (but entertaining) world of extreme miniaturization in the film Fantastic Voyage.

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From Wikipedia:

Fantastic Voyage is a 1966 science fiction film written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby. The film is about a submarine crew who shrink to microscopic size and venture into the body of an injured scientist to repair the damage to his brain. The original story took place in the 19th century and was meant to be a Jules Verne–style adventure with a sense of wonder. Kleiner abandoned all but the concept of miniaturization and added a Cold War element. It was directed by Richard Fleischer, and starred Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmond O’Brien and Donald Pleasence. It was 20th Century-Fox’s final film to use the CinemaScope process.

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Posted in Actors, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Dance: Friedemann Vogel

November 12, 2015

Another installment on male ballet dancers and their remarkable bodies. Passed on by Mike McKinley, Chris Ambidge, and Arne Adolfsen from the Male Ballet Dancers Facebook page, Friedemann Vogel as photographed by Youn Sik Kim:

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Vogel in mid-air: slender and lean, lean, lean, but with massive thigh muscles.

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Posted in Dance, Language and the body, Photography | 2 Comments »

In the miniature world

November 11, 2015

Today’s Bizarro:

The conceit here is that there is a miniature world mirroring the normal-sized world, with bonsai lumberjacks chopping down bonsai trees and, presumably much else besides: bonsai police to confront bonsai vandals, for instance.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

The story of Noodles Crumplewaste, Any-Size Woodtank, and Index Icecup

November 11, 2015

Today’s Zippy, with our Pinhead surreally awash in preposterous names (though I can’t help suspecting that there might be actual models for these), cartooning, and Art:

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Posted in Art, Graphic novels, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

The water frog, the ground squirrel, and the little thrush

November 11, 2015

From Xopher Walker, back in the spring, a Colonial Williamsburg Foundation greeting card with a reproduction of a charming 1754 etching by Mark Catesby showing a “water frog” (billed as Rana aquatica) together with a purple pitcher plant:

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(more…)

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

Run it up the flagpole

November 11, 2015

On AZBlogX, a Veterans Day offer from the gay porn company Channel 1 Releasing, featuring a serviceman admiring his penis “Wrapped in the red, white, and blue”. Spun as patriotism, but it’s all about sex.

C1R’s slogan: This Veterans Day we SALUTE you!

Meanwhile, Flag Boy’s penis is at attention, and he’s saluting it.

From Wikipedia:

“Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it” [variant: “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes (it)”] is a catchphrase which became popular in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It means “to present an idea tentatively and see whether it receives a favorable reaction.” It is now considered a cliché. Sometimes it is used seriously, but more often it is used humorously, with the intention that it be recognized as both hackneyed and outdated. A non-joking equivalent would be “to send up a trial balloon.”

Posted in Formulaic language, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

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