Archive for January, 2016
January 22, 2016
Larry Horn, posting to ADS-L yesterday:
Haven’t encountered “to rabble-rouse” before, although I’m sure it’s widely attested. Here’s an interesting one in the wild, though, from George Wallace’s daughter, arguing that Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who — after gaining fame some time ago by commissioning a monument of the Ten Commandments and posting it in the state judicial building, is now engaged in a crusade force Alabama probate judges to ignore the federal mandate on marriage equality (or, as he probably terms it, sin):
… George Wallace was able, by virtue of his office, to take political advantage by publicly promoting a theology of discrimination, but Roy Moore cannot. George Wallace was not confined by a code of ethics that restricted his right to rabble rouse, but Roy Moore is. (link)
Plenty of occurrences of to rabble-rouse and a few of rabble-rouses and rabble-roused, and rabble-rouse seems to be in WNI3. Not in my list of 2pbfVs (two-part back-formed verbs), but now it will be in entry #140.
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Posted in Back formation, Lexical semantics, Movies and tv | 1 Comment »
January 22, 2016
The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal from January 1st:
Either you find the story in the first four panels fascinating (in which case you might enjoy a beginning linguistics course) or you find it unspeakably boring (in which case you should probably stay away).
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Posted in Language, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
January 21, 2016
Today’s Zippy takes us to New Haven CT in times past:
(#1)
The Elm City has changed over the years, but here’s a photo of it roughly as it is in the comic strip:
(#2)
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Posted in Diners, Linguistics in the comics | 4 Comments »
January 21, 2016
In the February Funny Times, an Ods Bodkins cartoon by Tim Lockley showing Batman at a booth with a sign offering
GUANO FOR SALE
with a rather disconcerted guy eying the sign. (I haven’t been able to find a copy of the cartoon, although I’ve found tons of other one-panel gag cartoons by Lockley, many of them playing with language (Ods Bodkins homepage here, very useful Ods Bodkins Facebook page here). I’ll post six of these below, but for the Batman cartoon — Batman definitely is a cartoon meme these days, by the way — I’ll have to rely on describing it.
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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
January 20, 2016
(Frank discussion of man-on-man sex, short of X-rated images but otherwise about sexual acts in plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The most recent offer of gay porn under one of the names, Yoasobi News, used by a gay porn aggregation service that fills my mailbox with offers of this stuff. This particular piece of porn came from the Maximum Pleasure site, offering NextDoorWorld gay porn, and this particular video manages to cross allusions to the confessional (where priest and penitent engage with one another in such a way that both are, in principle, anonymous) with allusions to the t-room (a men’s room used for male-male sexual hookups, especially in glory-hole and under-partition sex between men in adjacent stalls, acts that are typically performed under the cloak of anonymity).
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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and religion, Language of sex | 1 Comment »
January 20, 2016
It started with a cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti (from 1/18/10) in my doctor’s examining room yesterday:
(#1)
Angry doctor upbraids a smugly smiling patient (hugely obese, cocktail in hand, cigar in mouth).
Barsotti is a great favorite of mine, and he has his own Page on this blog.
So: four more Barsottis that tickle me and haven’t been blogged on here before.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Quotations, Snowclones | 1 Comment »
January 20, 2016
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:
The nouns butt and booty overlap in their uses, and so do the verbs dial and call, and so do the related nouns dial and call. However… the compound nouns butt dial and booty call (also the related verbs butt dial and booty call) are both slang idioms, and they aren’t at all interchageable.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Idioms, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Nouning, Slang, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
January 18, 2016
Briefly: a gift from my friends Sim and Mike recently: a signed copy of The Dingburg Diaries, a collection of all the Zippy strips from June 2010 through January 2013 (#11 in the collection of “annual” collections, the earlier ones having actually been annuals, while this one covers about three years in a much thicker book).
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Posted in Books, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
