Not just any Billy Collins, but Billy Collins Billy Collins — prototypical Billy Collins, the Billy Collins. Who I’m posting about here because one of his poems prominently features the morphological construction Contrastive Focus Reduplication, or CFR (which I’m going to cite in a forthcoming posting about two New Yorker cartoons on dating).
Archive for July, 2018
BILLY COLLINS Billy Collins
July 31, 2018Briefly noted: a syntagmatic blending
July 29, 2018Beth Huizenga, reading the weather report on KQED-FM (in San Francisco) this morning:
morning drog … uh … fog and drizzle
The textbook inadvertent syntagmatic error here would have been the telescoping frizzle (since fog apparently preceded drizzle in the printed report). The suppression of the and is not so surprising, since similar suppressions occur in some of the telescopings Vicki Fromkin collected in the appendix to her Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence (1973): shrig souffle < shrimp and egg souffle, prodeption of speech < production and perception of speech.
But the ordering is odd. In fact, drog looks like a textbook inadvertent paradigmatic error, a blend of two items competing for the same slot in production. So, an interesting mixed case.
Motherhood and stupid PAP
July 29, 2018Starting around the 9th, making the rounds on Facebook, a Daily Mail (U.K.) story from 2016, with a disturbing video under the heading (H):
This mother took her children’s phones and shot them to teach them a lesson!
(#1) You can watch the video here
(H) presents a series of complexities in interpretation, having to do with the reference of the two anaphoric pronouns them, with respect to two potential antecedent NPs: the determiner NP her children (marked as possessive) and the argument NP her children’s phones (here serving as the direct object argument of the verb took).
Rainbow pasta
July 28, 2018From Kim Darnell, links to the work of Seattle pasta artist Linda Miller Nicholson (@saltyseattle on Instagram), in particular her rainbow pasta:
(#1) Screen shot from the video “How to Make Rainbow Pasta” by Salty Seattle, which you can watch here
Beautiful, and colored with only natural ingredients.
Local news: weather and food
July 28, 2018The local weather has been mostly very pleasant recently, normal temperatures for this time of the year (highs in the 70s), of course no rain (it’s the dry season), and good air (no haze or actual smoke from wildfires). So on Wednesday I undertook to cook something, using ingredients in the house: peppery barley and vegetable soup. (With my wonky hands, I don’t cook much, and certainly don’t try any culinary procedure that takes manual dexterity; just opening cans is a slow and arduous process for me.)
Then… the intersection of the weather and food preparation.
Hockney paints Daley
July 28, 2018Ah, synchronicity! Yesterday, in my posting “Are You My Bottom?”, I included a section on Tom Daley and his husband Dustin Lance Black — partly for the sake of a shot of Daley cradling Black’s bottom as they walk on the street, and partly for the sake of a shot of Daley’s bottom in very brief Speedos. Then today from Randy McDonald on Facebook, a Hornet website story from the 24th, “But Is it Art? Tom Daley Poses Nude for Painter David Hockney” by Dan Avery, the centerpiece of which is this photo by Black, of Daley guying for the camera in front of Hockney’s painting of him:
(#1)
The ants are my friends?
July 28, 2018Through friends on Facebook, a 7/30/12 Captain Scratchy cartoon (by Chuck Ingwersen) “The Wiener Dog Is Annoyed”, in which a dachshund and a pug are transfixed in panel 1 by small black dots on the ground between them, from which these sounds are emanating:
🎶Just like me, they long to be … close to you. 🎶
🎶Rainy days and Mondays always get me down. 🎶
🎶We’ve only just begun. 🎶
— upon which, in panel 2, the dachshund growls:
CRAP, WE’VE GOT CARPENTER ANTS.
(To get this, you need to know that carpenter ants are a real thing — not a stretch — and you really need to know about Karen and Richard Carpenter and their songs from 1970-71.)
Are You My Bottom?
July 27, 2018(Anatomical and sexual double entendres thick on the ground, but mostly in a high-kawaii context. Eventually, talk of relationships and of sexual acts, though not at all vividly. There will, however, be explicit linguistics.)
An answer, offered by the Helsinki Athletica muscle-hunk model known here as SpoJo, in my previous posting today: “I Am Your Bottom” (referring to the bodypart, but if your mind bends in that direction, also to the role in anal intercourse).
The question, in the (recently published) pandalicious children’s book (for reading to kids 3-6) Are You My Bottom?:
(#1)
I Am Your Bottom
July 27, 2018(Taste alert: hunky guy in underwear, sexual double entendres. No explicit linguistics.)
(News flash: accompanying “Are You My Bottom?” posting to come soon.)
From Daily Jocks on the 23rd, with my caption:
(#1)
I Am Your Bottom
SpoJo exudes
Urgent desire
Coupled with
Anxiety verging on
Dread, while hisFleshy buttocks
Press their own
Cheeky agenda