Four recent cartoons in my feed that have to do with language: Mother Goose and Grimm (attachment ambiguity), Zits (greetings), Bizarro (labeling a bat(h)room), xkcd (knowledge about the referents of names).
Archive for May, 2017
Memorial Saturday 4
May 27, 2017Associative thinking
May 27, 2017Today’s (5/27-28/17) Daily Post (SF mid-peninsula) front-page headline:
Caltrain to cut 1,000 trees*
And what my mind took me to immediately was
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
Associative thinking strikes!
Dreams and nightmares
May 27, 2017(Not much about language.)
Yesterday’s Zippy:
(#1)
Amusement parks are framed as places where dreams can be fulfilled (I can fly! I can go to the moon!), but with their crowds, their noise, their bright lights, their looming structures (into the gaping mouth of the grinning monster!), their frenetic activity, they’re also nightmarish, and (as Zippy notes) they’re places where fun is totally commercialized, soullessly industrialized as a commodity.
Rodeos and sword dances
May 27, 2017(Warning: there will be talk of penises and mansex.)
On The Hill site on 5/21, “Tillerson: ‘Not my first sword dance’ in Saudi Arabia”, by Jill Manchester:
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Sunday that his sword dance the previous night in Saudi Arabia was not his first.
“I hadn’t been practicing, Chris, but it was not my first sword dance,” Tillerson told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace.
Tillerson and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross linked arms during the dance with Saudi performers on Saturday night. [REDACTED] also took part, swaying to the music, and appeared to enjoy the ceremonial dance. The event took place on [REDACTED]’s first day visiting Saudi Arabia, his first stop on his first foreign trip as president.
(#1)
Ross and Tillerson sword-dancing among Saudis
Food art: still lifes
May 26, 2017From Pinterest boards on food art, a small sampling of still lifes: two with artful assemblages of foodstuffs, and two with artful presentations of the ingredients for a specific recipe.
Non-standard sex talk
May 26, 2017I’ll start with the steamy gay sex talk from an on-line messaging site — sensitive readers are hereby warned about this content — and then go on to focus on a non-standard syntactic construction in this exchange, what the YGDP (the Yale University Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America) calls the Needs Washed construction (using as a label an instance of the instruction), involving a PSP complement of a head V.
Let slip the dogs of Japan
May 26, 2017Though hot dogs combine Memorial Day interest (picnics and cookouts!) with the gay attractions of phallicity (as Pride Month comes into view), after a recent flurry of phallic hot dogs on this blog, I intended to take a brief holiday from the topic, but then a Pinterest board on bento boxes came along. Bento boxes with artful food carefully, sometimes playfully, arranged — including a set of oh-so-cute creatures fashioned from hotdogs: snails, caterpillars, and bears, in particular:
1 Bizarro, 2 Bizarro
May 25, 2017
Arthur Laurents
May 25, 2017Collecting material for Tuesday’s gay-interest posting on Farley Granger led me to Arthur Laurents (who I wrote a bit about on the occasion of his death in 2011). Yesterday’s posting in this run-up to Pride Month switched to rainbow clothing. Today I’m back to accomplished LGBT people, with a brief posting on Laurents.
(#1)
Laurents in 1984
Dog dogs
May 25, 2017From a Pinterest board on hot dogs (looking forward to Memorial Day in the US), this way too cute presentation of hot dogs in buns:
Hot dogs by themselves are phallic symbols, but here they are, first, symbols of bones (in dogs’ mouths), and then the bones are phallic symbols.
The Pinterest posting led to no recipe or instructions that I could find, so if you want to reproduce these puppies, you’ll have to figure it out on your own.
If you do, then you’ll be able to eat a dog eating a dog.