Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
Hilary Price is enormously fond of POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus). Here we get:
gingerbread house + house of correction = gingerbread house of correction
Archive for November, 2016
Two POPs
November 20, 2016The mazel tov cocktail
November 20, 2016From the Washington Post on the 7th, “Actually, the Mazel Tov cocktail is real. And it’s delicious” by Maura Judkis, beginning:
In what will be perhaps the last great moment of comedy this presidential campaign season has given us, Donald Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes of RightAlerts.com criticized Jay Z after the rapper performed in Cleveland on Friday in support of Hillary Clinton.
“One of his main videos starts out with a crowd throwing mazel tov cocktails at the police,” said Hughes, referencing the “Run This Town” video.
Except: The explosive is called a molotov cocktail. “Mazel tov” [more or less literally, ‘good luck’] is a celebratory phrase in Hebrew — something you say when a baby is born, or a happy couple gets married. It’s not the first time a Republican has confused the two terms — when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was a county executive, he wrote “molotov” as a greeting to a Jewish constituent. So while Jewish people were laughing at Hughes’s malapropism, everyone else began to wonder: What is a mazel tov cocktail … ?
Judkis’s piece goes on to explain the mazel tov cocktail, and I’ll get to that. But some readers were made uneasy by these mazel tov / Molotov eggcorns, with their mixture of Judaism, Russian communism, and bomb-throwing protestors (like cartoon anarchists).
A near-Zwicky: Zwickey broadheads
November 20, 2016Continuing the series on Zwickys (most recently here), a similarly spelled name, for a company that will help you bring down a water buffalo with bow and arrow:
Two negatives make a positive
November 19, 2016The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed:
“Two negatives make a positive” is one way to state a principle of logic, that the negation of the negation of X is equivalent to X. The principle is irrelevant to an account of the syntactic phenomenon that’s popularly called “double negation” (or more generally, “multiple negation”) — often labeled negative concord by linguists — according to which all susceptible elements in a negated clause themselves appear in a negative variant (I didn’t see nobody nowhere, corresponding to standard English I didn’t see anybody anywhere); in languages or varieties or styles with negative concord, two negative elements are just the expression of one negation.
But Joe takes us into new territory, with his novel interpretation — actually, willful misinterpretation — of the principle of logic (or of algebra, as her father puts it): according to Joe’s interpretation, saying two negative (that is, deprecatory or insulting) things counts conversationally as saying something positive (that is, favorable or complimentary). All to take the opportunity to double down on nastiness.
Gluten log at the Bluebird Diner in Brooklyn
November 19, 2016Today’s Zippy takes us to the Bluebird (or Blue Bird) Diner in Brooklyn, where you can get a gluten log (or Lotto tickets, candy, cigars, newspapers and magazines, and who knows what else):
(#1)
Il gioco di parole è mobile
November 19, 2016Somewhat out-of-kilter word play: the purely orthographic pun. On this blog on 1/27/14, a Bizarro with King George IV and playing on IV ‘the 4th’ vs. IV ‘intravenous’. And on 7/26/15, a Dave Blazek cartoon turning on the ambiguity of the orthographic noun mobile: mobile ‘mobile phone’ vs. mobile ‘scupture that is suspended so as to turn freely in the air’. Cartoon in #2 there, an image of a mobile phone in #3, and an Alexander Calder mobile in #4. From that posting:
These two nouns are identical in spelling, but not pronunciation: the phone is a /móbǝl/ or /móbàjl/, the sculpture is a /móbìl/ (and Mobile AL is /mòbíl/).
Somewhat strained, but here it is again in yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine:
Well, it works on the page.
(Oh yes, Italian mobile ‘changeable, fickle’ is trisyllabic.)
(Hat tip to Andy Sleeper.)
Montalvo morning
November 19, 2016Stuck in my mind on waking, a notable placename in California — there are Montalvo Streets in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Palm Springs, and the Villa Montalvo and Arts Center in Saratoga is not far from Palo Alto — and for good historical reasons, going back to the inventor of California, the 15th-century Castilian author of fantasy romances Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (Montalvo ‘white mountain’).
Apostrophic moments
November 18, 2016Punctuating possessives and plurals in writing English is something of a minefield; possessive plural forms like ladies’ and women’s are especially tricky, and quite a few writers of English would prefer to see the system both rationalized and simplified — in particular to use the apostrophe to signal “grammatical morpheme s” and to place it regularly before the s. That gives us the “greengrocer’s apostrophe”, as in two eggplant’s.
It also gives us possessive plurals like kid’s, as in this ad photo for CheapesTees:
(#1)
But wait, there’s more.
The Isis files
November 18, 2016Not the Egyptian goddess, certainly not the Islamic terrorist organization, but instead a phenomenon of English syntax involving an unexpected, extra, form of the lexeme BE, most often resulting in the sequence is is, hence the label Isis. There is now an “Isis: is is, double is” Page on this blog, listing postings on the subject on Language Log and this blog, plus bibliographic resources of several types. The Page is freely available publicly, and (like my other Pages) will be updated and added to as new material comes in.
From a 2007 handout:
{For at least 45 years now (2016)] (Dwight Bolinger’s first example is from 1971), English speakers have been producing sentences with an occurrence of a form of BE that is not licensed in standard English (SE) and is not a disfluency – what I’ll call Extris (“extra is”). There are many subtypes… The Isis (“is is”, “double is’, etc.) subtype has gotten much attention – from Bolinger (1987) [on]…
[Two varieties of Isis:]
[N-type, with a “thingy”-N subject] The thing that’s most interesting about the film is is that it’s…
[PC-type, in a pseudocleft sentence] Basically, what they were trying to tell me was, is that whatever Federal Prison Industries was doing was more important…
Isis is one of those things that people keep rediscovering, and then grope their way through questions that have been pretty well settled for some time. For them, I’d recommend a look at this 2007 handout of mine and at the summary in the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America page on “Double IS”. Of course, they’d have to know that such resources exist — and that I don’t know how to fix.
The news for cigars
November 18, 2016Following up on yesterday’s posting “No cigar”, on a Tom Chitty cartoon with phallic foodstuffs striving to become cigars, two items: You’re no Cigar (Lloyd Bentsen: You’re no Jack Kennedy) and Sometimes a cigar is a lot more than a cigar (apocryphal Sigmund Freud: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar).