The news stories are appalling, but this is about an expression in one of the stories:
(1) More needs to be done to protect children from molesting priests. (Gregory Ward in e-mail on 8/29, reporting on a WBEZ-FM (Chicago) news story)
Which led to the contemplation of the N + N compounds:
(2) child molester
(3) child abuse
All of them ambiguous, though all with a (dire) conventionalized sense.
Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Semantics | 3 Comments »
The 8/5 One Big Happy has Ruthie doing her best to make sense of the idiom the spitting image (of) as, roughly, ‘the person someone looks like when they spit’.
Behind this lies a whole chain of reanalyses, none of them due to Ruthie. Ultimately, sex is probably involved. (Oh, isn’t that always the way?)
Posted in Etymythology, Idioms, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »
Bonnie Taylor-Blake to ADS-L on 8/10 under the heading “Another zoological crash blossom”:
The headline for a blog post hosted by the Smithsonian:
“Scientists track a mysterious songbird using tiny backpack locators“
This reminded me of a favorite from a few years ago, “Public urged to keep track of squirrels with mobiles.” (See Ben Zimmer’s column about this and other crash blossoms [here].)
Two ambiguous headlines that might be understood in an unintended way because of how modifying phrases (underlined above) are attached to preceding material:
Posted in Ambiguity, Headline trouble, Modification, Parsing | 1 Comment »
Today’s morning name: stick insect (creatures from my insect-collecting childhood):
(#1) The strong stick insect, Anchiale briareus
Fascinating creatures, with long bodies and camouflage coloration — brown like sticks, green like leaves.
Probably in my mind from a Facebook query by Georgia Morgan on the 30th about a long-bodied brownish insect that had turned up on a screen in her Brattleboro VT house. Which, as it turned out, was a tree cricket, not a stick insect.
A celebrated kid riddle:
Q: What’s long, brown, and sticky?
Posted in Jokes, Language and animals, Morning names | 1 Comment »
Today’s Calvin and Hobbes re-run is yet another episode of breakfast cereal as mind-altering drug:
(#1)
Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
Back on August 8th, as reported in “Succulents on a rampage”, things looked like this:
(#1)
The blooming plant with the silver rosette is an Echeveria, and if you look closely, you can see that, behind it, the Echeveria hybrid ‘Blue Curls’ has a modest flower shoot. In the three weeks since then, matters have gotten out of hand.
Posted in Language and plants, My life | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Rubin, which works or not depending on whether you get the cultural reference:
(#1)
The title for the cartoon isn’t crucial to understanding. Nor is the exact year 1972. But chart topper and the ID badge without a name on it are essential ingredients.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
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