Archive for April, 2017
April 13, 2017
Tomorrow’s colloquium in the Stanford Linguistics Department (3:30 in Margaret Jacks Hall, if you’re local and interested):
A set-theoretic typology of phonological map interaction, by Eric Baković, UC San Diego (with Lev Blumenfeld, Carleton University). Beginning of the abstract:
Theories of generative phonology assume that, in general, morphemes have unitary underlying representations and that systematic variations in the surface pronunciation of morphemes in different morphological contexts result from the application of a complex, context-sensitive transformation – a phonological grammar – to those underlying representations. A phonological grammar is thus a complex map from underlying representations to surface representations. Theories differ on the details of what the phonological grammar is comprised of, but it is commonly assumed that it can be broken down into a set of simpler maps – intuitively, individual phonological processes – that make particular changes in particular contexts.
The question we ask in this work is: what is the set of possible interactions among the individual maps that constitute a phonological grammar?
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Posted in Linguistic theory, Phonology | Leave a Comment »
April 13, 2017
The latest bulletin from Pinterest featured a Reaper Jokes board maintained by Kathy-Lynn Cross. More Grim Reaper cartoons, including one that especially caught my eye because of the two idioms in the text. A Mark Parisi showing one (angry) Reaper confronting another (disconsolate) Reaper: “I’ve had it with you! From now on, you’re alive to me!”. Nice reversal of the idiomatic you’re dead to me ‘I disown you, cut you off, will never see or speak to you again’. Spoken by Death to Death, you’re alive to me conveys the same.
More on this cartoon, then two more Grim Reapers, to add to the 14 already posted on this blog; it’s a very popular cartoon meme.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Idioms, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Tongue twisters | Leave a Comment »
April 12, 2017
Yesterday’s Dilbert takes us into a dark world of language, the Jargon Matrix:
(#1)
The Matrix, but with jargon from the world of technology businesses.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Jargon, Movies and tv, Pidgins and creoles, Slang, Social life, Technical and ordinary language, Usage, Usage advice | 1 Comment »
April 11, 2017
From the Bloomberg site on 4/6/17, a death notice: “Don Rickles, Comedian Who Turned Insults Into Art, Dies at 90”, by Laurence Arnold, which notes:
“The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang credits Rickles, circa 1963, with repurposing ‘hockey puck’ to mean ‘a stupid or useless person.’”
There’s some question about when Rickles first used the insult to address someone, but no one seems to have asked
🏒Why hockey puck?🏒
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Posted in Death notices, Insults, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
April 11, 2017
A morning name contributed by John Wells:
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Says John,
Venn St in Clapham [district of London], commemorating two bearers of the surname: the campaigner against the slave trade, and the inventor of Venn diagrams. Who knew they were related?
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Posted in Mathematics, Morning names, People | Leave a Comment »
April 11, 2017
A Scott Hilburn cartoon on Pinterest this morning:
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A pun on irritable bowel syndrome. The vowel letters I, A, and O are angry, throwing the letter L out of their club because he’s not a vowel. (The play on Get the hell out of here is a bonus.) Note that this is all about vowel letters, not vowels. (Depending on the dialect, speakers of English have a dozen or so distinct vowels, that is, vowel phonemes.)
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Posted in Language of medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »
April 10, 2017
Another set of photos of my family, this time a page of 6 shots of me as a little kid (age 4-7). Some notes on memory, clothing, and names for things.
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Posted in Clothing, Memory, My life, Names | 1 Comment »
April 10, 2017
In the latest (April 10th) issue of the New Yorker, Slight Headache Dept.: “I Say Koch” by Nick Paumgarten, on pronouncing the family name Koch. The lead-in has Apple Maps directing someone to the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge (which is really the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge — do honor to Simon & Garfunkel — or just the Queensboro Bridge),
pronounced Koch “coke,” as in the Koch brothers, Charles and David, the industrialists and underwriters of right-wing causes — rather than “kotch,” as in the Mayor. What a maroon.
Ed Koch contemplating the 59th St. Bridge (caricature by Tom Bachtell)
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Posted in Language and politics, Language and the body, Names, Pronunciation | Leave a Comment »
April 10, 2017
Yesterday’s Bizarro is yet another Ascent of Man evolution cartoon, but this time a guy intervenes at the ape stage to offer a stupid outfit to wear and a pipe to pretend to smoke:
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This is an allusion to the (venerable) meme of monkeys or apes (usually chimpanzees) dressed as people — akin to popular art showing dogs playing cards, or folk museums with stuffed frogs engaged in folksy activities. But with the extra kick that monkeys and apes are uncannily similar to people — in a very common view, especially similar to black Africans and those of black African descent in other parts of the world. The pipe isn’t a necessary component of the dressed-ip primate figure, but it’s a very common one.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Evolution, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Race and ethnicity | 1 Comment »
April 10, 2017
You know about Jimmy Buffet Parrotheads, Wisconsin Cheeseheads, annoying dickheads, and musical Radiohead, and now New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin brings us PenguinHead:
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(Henry IV, Part 2: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Often quoted as the crown, as in the adaptation in #1.)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins, Quotations | Leave a Comment »
