Today’s Bizarro, on the opposite of easy chair:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
Archive for November, 2017
Taking it easy
November 17, 2017Follow-ups: t/d-deletion
November 16, 2017Following up on my posting on the 14th, “toss salad, fry shrimp, and other t/d ~ ∅”, two complex cases: dark fire tobacco, from Clai Rice’s recent fieldwork, as he reported on ADS-L yesterday; and t/d-deletion as a contributor to eggcorning.
Revisiting 12: chop salad
November 16, 2017In the previous installment, on the 14th, there was “toss salad, fry shrimp, and other t/d ~ ∅”; on Facebook, John Lawler noted that toss salad (< tossed salad) sounds like chop salad (< chopped salad). So it does, both in meaning and in form.
The Mankoff rat cartoon
November 15, 2017On Language Log on October 5th, Mark Seidenberg, “Cartoonist walks into a language lab”:
[Bob] Mankoff’s involvement in humor research isn’t a joke. He almost completed a Ph.D. in experimental psychology back in the behaviorist era, which is pretty hard core. Before he left the field he co-authored a chapter called “Contingency in behavior theory”, as in contingencies of reinforcement in animal learning. The chapter included this cartoon:
(#1)
Wet words
November 15, 2017In a Law & Order episode (S8 E15), a character explains that he’s going inside his house because he has to tap a kid — short for the idiom tap a/my kidney ‘urinate’, with kidney clipped to kid.
3 for 15
November 15, 2017Three recent cartoons, on different themes: a One Big Happy in which Ruthie misparses an expression; a Rhymes With Orange that requires considerable cultural knowledge for understanding; and a Prickly City that takes us once more into the territory of pumpkin spice ‘high quality’, now in a political context:
toss salad, fry shrimp, and other t/d ~ ∅
November 14, 2017Mike Pope on Facebook 9/29/17 (yes, I am many hundreds of postings behind), with this menu photo:
toss salad, like grill cheese, old-fashion, whip cream, ice tea, etc. Final t/d ~ ∅, aka t/d-deletion. In honor of Mike’s example, I have created a t/d-deletion Page on this blog, inventorying Language Log and AZBlog postings on the topic, with extensive quotations from the postings.
Then a bonus: though the menu listings above have fried shrimp, the shorter fry shrimp is also attested, as on this site of stock drawings, including doodles of fried shrimp, some labeled fried shrimp, but a number labeled fry shrimp.
Igor®, the Siberian shape-shifter
November 14, 2017(Men in underwear, sexual fetishes, plus a caption of mine. Not to everyone’s taste.)
Via Daily Jocks yesterday, this fetishwear vision:
(#1) Igor®, the Siberian shape-shifter
lifelike manikin for
Maskulo fetishwear,
fashioned in warm-
touch silicone —
model sexbuddy,
broad-chested
codpiece lover,
tough dream in
glowing neon green
Environmentally responsible derivation
November 13, 2017It starts with an ordinary noun source and an ordinary verb sustain and eventually works its way to the adverb sustainably as a modifier of a verb source, strikingly in the split infinitive construction to sustainably source, which Wilson Gray reported in an ADS-L posting on the 11th, citing a General Mills ad in which to sustainably source oats figures prominently.
Orchids on the march
November 13, 2017Starting in May, we had a series of extraordinary heat waves, with record-breaking high temperatures again and again (sometimes 10 degrees F. above the record for the day). Then the heat waves broke and temperatures dropped by about 40 degrees, to something like normal. This seems to have convinced winter-blooming plants, like my cymbidium orchids, that winter had come, so they started sending up flower shoots. By Halloween, about six weeks early, we had this:
(#1) Yellow cymbidium in bloom