Archive for May, 2017
May 21, 2017
(All about my life.)
Two occasions for this posting. First, another set of my man Jacques’s photographs, including this one of our house (722Ramona St.) as seen from the street in 1986, not long after we moved into it:
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— with a note about why J thought it was important to take this picture (and one of the back of the condo, which is much more boring even than the picture above).
Second, the news that the work on my front patio (which began early in November) was finished this Thursday, so I’m finally reconstituting my little container garden there.
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Posted in My life | Leave a Comment »
May 21, 2017
Working to clear out four more file drawers of accumulated papers (more recycling fodder, to follow on many dozens of file drawers of stuff that have already been sacrificed to the Great Recycler), I came across a print-out of a 1991 posting “Injurious language” to the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss. Still, I think, entirely relevant — and it takes us to a fascinating set of people connected to Chuck Lawrence (Charles R. Lawrence III).
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Posted in Language and race, Language and sexuality, My life | 1 Comment »
May 20, 2017
Recently unearthed: another huge trove of photographs, including a set of photos my man Jacques took back in the 80s and 90s. Places J loved (at Stanford: the Burghers of Calais, the fountain in White Plaza, scenes near the Dish on the foothills; Sather Tower at Berkeley; the house and garden on Beaunmont Rd. in Columbus, the house on Ramona St. in Palo Alto). Today it’s peonies in Columbus.
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Posted in Language and plants, My life | Leave a Comment »
May 20, 2017
#4 in my “Squid Pro Quo” posting is from Marcus Connor’s Brainless Tales, a new webcomic for me, but one largely devoted to language play. And immediately I came across this cartoon, with a portmanteau noun denoting a hybrid, doubly phallic, foodstuff:
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baniener = banana + wiener, denoting a decidedly louche anthromorphized banana-wiener. Hey, baby, wanna dance?
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Posted in Derivation, French, Language and gesture, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Phallicity, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
May 19, 2017
(Men’s underwear, but nothing hard-core.)
The Daily Jocks ad from the 9th, featuring the Marco Marco brand, with my caption:
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Maximum Marco in boxer briefs.
Middle Marco in briefs.
Minimal Marco in almost nothing,
Beyond the pecs, the abs, and the thighs,
Nothing like one another, but they’re
Totally tight —
All three for Subcomandante Marcos, the
Subcomandante for all of them.
Four things here: the Marco Marco firm, which is trés gai; the play on All for one and one for all (most famously alluding to the motto of the Three Musketeers)); the play on Marcos the plural of the personal name Marco vs. the surname Marcos; and the reference to the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. Plus a whiff of an allusion to Goldilocks and the Three Bears (Marco Midi is just right). And of course the differences in the three men’s body types.
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Posted in Captions, Chiasmus, Figurative language, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language play, Underwear | 1 Comment »
May 19, 2017
The One Big Happy in my comics feed today:
Rockefellers / rocky fellows. How was Ruthie to know her grandmother was using a proper name? And fellers is a familiar dialect variant for fellows – and an old one (Americans have been labeling feller an “impropriety” or “provincialism”, with an “excrescent” r, since at least 1795, according to DARE).
Ruthie undoubtedly also didn’t know that the Rockefeller family has long been seen as the richest family in the world, hence as the, um, gold standard of wealth. Which gives We’re no / not Rockefellers as an idiom meaning, roughly, ‘We’re not rich’.
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Posted in Dialects, Errors, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names | Leave a Comment »
May 19, 2017
Informed opinion has been very positive about the appointment of Mueller as special counsel to investigate allegations in the semolina affair. Commenters are generally agreed that Mueller is a respected authority in such matters, with a long public career in the field and experience in both semolina matters and the byzantine world of elbow-cheese casseroles.
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Posted in Count & mass, Language and food, Language in politics, Language play, Names, Pronunciation | 1 Comment »
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