Archive for February, 2017

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Morning: spanakopita

February 23, 2017

Spanakopita was the morning name some weeks ago, and then this morning the bon appétit site offered instructions on how to “make spanakopita pie”, with a yummy photo:

  (#1)

The full instructions, which are pretty complex, amount to:

make the spinach filling (using frozen spinach), prepare the phyllo pastry (using frozen phyllo), assemble, bake

The result, seen above, is spanakopita:

(in Greek cooking) a phyllo pastry stuffed with spinach and feta cheese. ORIGIN modern Greek, literally ‘spinach pie.’ (NOAD2)

(more…)

Posted in Compounds, Etymology, Language and culture, Language and food, Morning names | Leave a Comment »

Roll, Brittania

February 23, 2017

A piece in the NYT on the 20th, by Steven Erlanger, under the head

British Snobbery Still Found In Paychecks, a Report Says [in print]

Hear This: Class Pay Gap in Britain Shows Snobbery Persists [on-line]

To a (very) rough approximation: in the UK, the most significant social fact about a person, the thing you register first about them, is their class; in the US, it’s their race. What follows from this is that the most powerful forms of social discrimination in the UK are based on class, in the US on race. And while some advances have been made in reducing the baleful effects of these types of discrimination in both places, the fact is that great and shameful social disparities, seriously disadvantaging the disfavored groups, persist (and fuel angry backlash towards the favored groups). In particular, Britannia rolls on in her disdain for the working class, and the first and easiest signal of class identity (though not the only such signal) is language.

(more…)

Posted in Language and class, Language and race, Language in social life | 1 Comment »

Coded!

February 23, 2017

(Men’s underwear alert! Premium grade, but still…)

(more…)

Posted in Captions, Language in advertising, Underwear | 2 Comments »

Two from the 2/27 NYer

February 22, 2017

Not only both about language, but both about portmanteaus. A Drew Dernavich with the verb podlisten formed on analogy with the portmanteau verb podcast; and an Alice Cheng with the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Brownstonehenge (brownstone + Stongehenge):

 (#1)

“I feel like everybody’s podcasting and nobody’s podlistening.”

(#2)

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

Playing for laughs

February 22, 2017

… or, playing over the top, and in fact doing this knowingly while winking at the audience, so that you might want to say: camping it up. I refer to the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which Neil Patrick Harris (NPH) plays the villain for laughs, while Patrick Warburton plays the author-narrator, Lemony Snicket, ditto, and a bunch of others — notably Joan Cusack, K. Todd Freeman, and Alfre Woodard — join them.

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Idioms, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness, Slang | Leave a Comment »

Meathead

February 22, 2017

First brought to my attention by Ken Rudolph on Facebook, this reproduction of a political meathead collage, which has recently been widely disseminated on-line (without attribution):

(#1)

Baloney face, banana hair

I put out a request for attribution on Facebook, and after some churning there, archarchivist Michael Palmer nailed it as the work of the very playful Spanish artist Asier Sanz (who uses the name Asier for his artwork):

(more…)

Posted in Art, Language and politics, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Understanding the comics

February 22, 2017

Once again, I return to the question of what you have to know to understand a comic strip or a cartoon, with two recent cartoons in my comics feed, a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro; in both, understanding requires that you supply a word that isn’t in the text of the cartoon:

(#1)

(#2)

(more…)

Posted in Idioms, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Synthetic compounds, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Objects in compounds

February 22, 2017

A recent One Big Happy:

Ruthie has heard her father use the N + N compound student loan but doesn’t know the conventional meaning of the compound (in which the first N functions as Indirect Object: ‘a loan (of money) to a student’), so she (erroneously) gets another possible reading for student loan (in which the first N functions as Direct Object: ‘a loan of a student (to someone)’.

(more…)

Posted in Compounds, Errors, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Briefly: today’s metrical pleasure

February 21, 2017

In today’s Stanford Report (a daily report to the university community, three stories a day), the lead story has the teaser head:

Minuscule nanostraws

Ah: a double dactylic line: SWW SWW! Now to work it in as the first line of a full 8-line double dactyl.

Suggestions welcome.

(Oh yes, the nanostraw story is here.)

Posted in Poetry | 2 Comments »

IN in the news

February 21, 2017

The lesson for the day begins with a news story. From yesterday in the Guardian:

British Muslim teacher denied entry to US on school trip: Juhel Miah from south Wales was removed from plane in Reykjavik despite suspension of president’s travel ban … A council spokesman said Miah was left feeling belittled at what it described as “an unjustified act of discrimination”. The council said the teacher is a British citizen and does not have dual nationality.

Then from Nadim Zaidi on Facebook, commenting on this:

These stories are becoming so commonplace that I don’t even bat an eye at them anymore. And that is how it starts, through normalization. More specifically, banality, the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt wrote.

That’s normalization, the nominalization of innovative normalize (IN) — ‘render normal [‘acceptable’] that which was previously deemed beyond acceptable bounds’  used in a political context. From Emily Dreyfus in Wired 11/23/16:

Long before [[REDACTED]] became the president-elect, his detractors warned against “normalizing” his myriad violations of campaign decorum: the bigotry and misogyny, the Putin-philia and cavalier talk about nuclear weapons. Since [his] election …, “don’t normalize this” has become a liberal mantra, a reminder to stay vigilant in the face of aberrant presidential behavior that Americans may feel tempted — or emotionally bludgeoned — into excusing as just the way the country works now.

(more…)

Posted in Innovations, Language and poitics, Lexical semantics | Leave a Comment »

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