Archive for June, 2016

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Name play in Basingstoke

June 12, 2016

From my English correspondent RJP, this tradeperson’s van, photographed on the street:

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Flat Boy Skim is a bit of complex name play on Fatboy Slim. Well, you have to know who Fatboy Slim is, something many people do not. And then: what might Flat Boy Skim have to do with plastering? For that, you have to know something about the technical jargon of plastering (which I did not, until I looked it up; well, I correctly noted that a good plastering job should be flat — smooth — and I assumed that boy was just there for the name play, but skim was a mystery).

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Posted in Jargon, Language in advertising, Language play, Music, Names | Leave a Comment »

The entrepreneur gets an honorary degree

June 12, 2016

For Graduation Day (which is, in fact, today at Stanford), a wry Doonesbury in which Chris Simm, a dropout from Walden College and a business success, comes back to get an honorary degree (along with the rest of his original class):

“A surge-pricing app for mobile sex workers”, thereby remedying “an inefficient industry”: wonderful.

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

Girl Genius

June 11, 2016

… a comic book, webcomic, and book series centered on the character Agatha Heterodyne:

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Posted in Books, Categorization and Labeling, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Schmitts Gay Beer

June 11, 2016

Caught on a best-of-SNL feature on VH-1 today, the truly fine parody skit “Schmitts Gay” from season 17, 1991, of Saturday Night Live, with Chris Farley and Adam Sandler as two gay housesitters who discover that the house is a Schmitts Gay Beer site, complete with a pool containing a crew of hunky gay men for their pleasure. The housesitters, astonished when the hunks appear:

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and the inevitable beer commercial:

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A send-up of beer commercials that exploit sexy chicks to sell beer to men.

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

More male dancers flying in mid-air

June 11, 2016

(Mostly about dance and male bodies.)

Passed through several Facebook sites, most immediately Michael Palmer’s, this fabulous photo of four dancers from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, captured flying in mid-air:

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Other male dancers flying in mid-air were featured in my 1/10/16 posting “Dance Time”. All of these photos are tributes to the skill of the dancers, the choreographer, and the photographer, who undoubtedly had to have the dancers run through their performances many times to get these remarkable shots.

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Posted in Dance, Dancers, Language and the body | 1 Comment »

Referent finding in Zits

June 11, 2016

Today’s Zits features Jeremy, his buddy Hector, and his dad:

In panel 1, Jeremy introduces two entities into the discourse: (E1) the dead squirrel and (E2) the engine of the van that Jeremy and Hector share.

The in panel 2 come two anaphoric elements: (A1) the definite pronoun it from Jeremy’s dad and (A2) the indefinite pronoun one from Jeremy. In principle, (A1) could pick out either (E1) or (E2) as its referent, but on the grounds of real-world plausibility, (E1) is incredibly unlikely (dead squirrel running?), so (E2) it is.

(A2) could also in principle pick out either (E1) or (E2), but here things get complicated; remember that this is a cartoon.

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Posted in Anaphora, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

Ho Ho trees, Ho Ho logs

June 10, 2016

Today’s Zippy takes us to the Hostess Snack Forest, where we can stand in awe of the giant chocolate cylinders filled with white creamy delight:

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Let’s just register the impressive phallicity of the Hostess Ho Ho and move on to other things.

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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Phallicity | Leave a Comment »

You should really look at the text

June 10, 2016

… or maybe you think that any publicity is good publicity — if you are the author of this e-mail that came to me yesterday:

Dear Arnold Zwicky, We would humbly request that you consider adding [site X] as a dating site link on your page [1/20/12, “Christians”]:

We are the largest free Christian dating site in the world and have been around since 2007. We are currently working hard on our memberships and have marketed the latest versions of our Google Play Android app and iOS app to the Christian community. Thank you for your consideration. God Bless, David

Snarl.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and religion, Lexical semantics, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Another dubious name

June 10, 2016

Passed on from Facebook posters by way of Chris Waigl, this storefront, with comments from readers about the store name Kum & Go:

(Note the use of rhyme and alliteration in the follow-ups.)

Another chapter in the annals of dubious and unfortunate names on this blog. In this case, you might have thought that a double entendre was intentional, a bit of playful naming to catch your eye and stick in your memory. But the company’s official story maintains otherwise, so (apparently)  it’s only accidentally risible.

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Posted in Alliteration, Double entendres, Language of advertising, Names, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »

The literalist on Fathers Day

June 9, 2016

Fathers Day comes on the 19th. For the occasion, a Tom Toro cartoon that didn’t get into my earlier posting about him:

Well, there can be literally only one greatest dad in the world, but then not all language is literal — as in this case, where the sentiment on the mug is a piece of hyperbole, exaggeration for effect.

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Posted in Comparison, Figurative language, Holidays, Hyperbole, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

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