Archive for July, 2016

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Morning name: Colquhoun

July 16, 2016

Today’s morning name was not one that came to me apparently from outer space, but had a clear basis in my recent experience — namely, watching the British detective drama Midsomer Murders episode “Blood Wedding” (S11 E1), in which a character with this name plays a significant role. As it turns out, the name (in one of its North American variants) has appeared on this blog before (on 4/21/15, “Verbatim letter”).

To come: the name, my previous posting, and the upper-class twit Randall Colquhoun in “Blood Wedding”.

(more…)

Posted in Language play, Morning names, Movies and tv, Silliness, Social class | 2 Comments »

Zippy on a cross-comic run

July 16, 2016

In the “Ask the Archivist” column on the Comics Kingdom Blog (from King Features) on the 14th:

It’s been thirty years since Bill Griffith’s underground comix star Zippy The Pinhead went above ground and joined King Features Syndicate. Zippy had been around since 1971, so he’s in the midst of a forty-fifth anniversary, too.

Zippy, as you might know, was inspired by Griffith’s real-life interaction with a Pinhead, as well as Pinheads in popular culture, like the co-stars of the infamous film, “FREAKS” (MGM 1932).

But Griffith has always been more interested in the way culture has impressed him, especially that which addressed kids many years ago. At any time, incomprehensibly, long-dead actors or forgotten corporate mascots might appear, and interact with Zippy or Griffith’s cartoon alter ego. It’s like a surreal dream, often punctuated with misty bits of philosophy and out-of-date advertising catchphrases.

Today I’ve picked some of the Zipster’s various encounters with comic characters

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

oiks, yobs, and prats

July 16, 2016

Three British slurs, widely used on the ITV detective mystery show Midsomer Murders (broadcast since 1997 and still going on), which I’ve been watching on Netflix. As far as I can tell, all three are primarily insults directed at males.

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Posted in Movies and tv, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

Time to refuel

July 15, 2016

Low? Need some? Hook up with Zwicky and let us fill you up.

A neatly designed ad from 1936:

(#1)

And then a cruder number from the next year:

(#2)

Feast your eyes on that giant high-performance tank! That only a Zwicky can supply.

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Posted in Language of advertising, Phallicity, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

A medal for pronoun case

July 15, 2016

In today’s Stanford News, a report by Dayo Mitchell, “The projects conducted by the winners of the 2016 Firestone and Golden medals and the Kennedy Prize represent the breadth of the undergraduate experience at Stanford. They included research on germ cell, federal farm animal policy, the tailoring industry in Naples, ethics and autonomous vehicles, and the writings of author Zadie Smith.”

Thirty-five graduating seniors were recognized recently for their outstanding thesis projects. They are recipients of the 2016 Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in Humanities and Creative Arts; and the David M. Kennedy Honors Thesis Prize.

The prizewinners represent 24 academic departments and all three schools with undergraduate programs

Among the eight Goldens was

Tyler Lemon, “An Examination of the Distribution and Variation of Non-Coordinated Pronoun Case Forms in English,” linguistics, advised by Tom Wasow (linguistics).

(I helped out).

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Posted in Pronoun case, Stanford, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Garden moments

July 15, 2016

Today’s Calvin and Hobbes in my comics feed:

(#1)

In the land of sentient plants.

Meanwhile, I’ve been laboring on getting my little container garden in hand, after a decade of devastation, neglect, and drought. Into the land of vegetative reproduction (cymbidiums,geraniums / pelargoniums, coleus / plecranthus) and nurturing some gift plants (two succulent gardens, kalanchoe, penstemon, and hydrangea).

(more…)

Posted in Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, My life | Leave a Comment »

goose bumps

July 14, 2016

The One Big Happy in my cartoon feed today has Ruthie once again coping with an expression that doesn’t make much sense to her: goose bumps:

At some point, she’d heard the expression (a N + N compound), understood that it came in two parts, and that as a whole it referred o a physical manifestation of fright (and perhaps other states of mind) — but failed to grasp the identities of the two parts and so remembered them incorrectly. In the simplest of terms, there are two ways to misidentify a lexical item: on the basis of phonology or on the basis of semantics; such perception + storage errors are the counterparts to two familiar types of production errors (phonological, aiming at presentation but producing preposition; semantic, aiming at research (assistant) but producing teaching).

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Posted in Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Wolverine eats a weenie

July 14, 2016

From the queerty site on the 11th, “37 Unintentionally Gay Moments in Comic Book History”, this Fleer trading card from 1995 (in a series of X-Men trading cards from the period):

Wolverine is here using his three retractable claws as skewers for grilling a frankfurter for eating as food, but (if you’re inclined to seeing such things) the drawing is also open to the interpretation that rather than literally eating a weenie ‘hot dog’, Wolverine is metaphorically eating (that is, fellating) a weenie ‘penis’.

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Posted in Double entendres, Linguistics in the comics, Phallicity | Leave a Comment »

Bodily alignment

July 13, 2016

(The X-rated images are on AZBlogX, but, still, there’s some plain talk about male-male sex here, so probably not for kids or the sexually modest.)

It starts on AZBlogX, with a posting “The T-formation blowjob”, taking off from a Bound Gods image (#1 there) illustrating the pleasures of bondage, submission, and humiliation, but viewed on my blog primarily for the carefully aligned bodies of the two men engaged in a complex sexual act: the submissive, bound and gagged, man entirely vertical, including his hard cock, the dominant man (edging him) leaning over at right angles to him, making a visual T. A similar T-formation blowjob appears in #2 there, in a carefully posed scene (from gay porn) of group sex, with its central feature a fellated man (again making a strong vertical) aligned at right angles to his fellator (bent over at his task), with two flanking men (nearly vertical) serving as bookends, so to speak.

The larger topic is the alignment of bodies in photography, painting, and drawing: alignment to one another and to features of the physical context, and the direction of gazes in these scenes.

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Posted in Art, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Male art | Leave a Comment »

Farewells

July 13, 2016

On Sunday I went to shapenote singing (2-4, at the Unitarian Universalist Church in south Palo Alto), for the first time in two or so years. Much trepidation, but I manasged reasonably well, especially in the early (“warm-up”) songs, which were so familiar I could sing the shapes and the verses without looking at the book. Tremendous expense of energy, as I was singing full-out, so I was done in after two hours, but happy.

Of the several possibilities for a closing song, we did one of the “new songs” (new to the 1991 edition of the (B.F. White) Sacred Harp): 347, “Christians, Farewell”, reproduced here (with permission) from the book:

  (#1)

(Click to enlarge the image.)

Hamrick adapted the text of #621 in Benjamin Lloyd’s 1841 Primitive Hymns, and more recently Caroline Bonnet supplied a one-verse secular text.

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Posted in Music, My life | 1 Comment »

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