… that is, a notice of a book on taboo language: The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language, ed. by Keith Allan, publisher’s site here.
Cover art: Namarrgon the Lightning Man (aboriginal rock art from Western Arnhemland); he comes to earth as a lightning strike and brings the fierce tropical storms in Western Arnhemland during the monsoon season (notable testicles are a common feature of representations of him)
(Significant sexual content, not for children or the sexually modest.)
Making the rounds on Facebook, this photo from a store sportswear department, with a sign that appears to be exhorting Christmas shoppers to give head ‘perform oral sex’:
(#1)
Not that some prime seasonal head wouldn’t be a fine holiday gift — but the exhortation is, alas, only to give products of the Head company, which sells (among other things) sportswear.
A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Three artists” (Franz Marc, Odilon Redon, Dale Chihuly): more art posted by Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook. Works by Spanish sculptor Fernando Suárez Reguera, in particular some of his corten steel animal figures, simultaneously impressive and charming.
(About art rather than linguistics. Well, Joelle Stepien Bailard is a lawyer specializing in international law and mediation, but she’s also a PhD in linguistics from UCLA (1982), though that doesn’t seem to be relevant to this posting.)
In recent weeks on Facebook, Joelle has been providing a pleasurable counterforce to a stream of news liable to provoke dread, despair, or rage: a counterstream of reproductions of art works in various media and genres, some of them familiar (Manet’s Olympia came past a little while ago), many by artist X before X became X (before X developed the recognizable style X is famous for), many that are simply little-known works by well-known artists, and many from artists you’ve probably never even heard of. Delightful.
Two of the artists — Franz Marc and Odilon Redon — are old favorites of mine. And a third, the currently very visible glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, appears here through a sliver of connection to Redon.
I posted yesterday on anaphoric islands — “Smoke from a island”, here — and then of course immediately came across a wonderful example, in a 12/1 Economist article on prosthetic limbs, where the anaphor is a bit of conspicuous language play. (The Economist is strongly inclined to language play in its heads and lead paragraphs.)
It’s time for that moving, rousing carol that makes this time of the year so special. I refer of course to the great seasonal song of Okefenokee County, the Pogolicious, Kellytastic “Deck us all with Boston Charlie”:
In today’s Zits, Jeremy enjoys the Swiss Army knife, the Dagwood sandwich, of breakfast cereals:
No need to choose; it’s got everything you might want, all in one package.
The king of breakfast-cereal comic strips is, of course, Calvin and Hobbes. See my 9/1/18: posting “Subscendence by sugar bomb”, with 4 strips on Calvin and sugary cereals.
My friend Aric was astonished yesterday to come across this food product:
Pork me: a classic presentation of faggots, in a brown gravy, accompanied by peas and mashed potatoes
No doubt he would find the following news bulletin (from Wikipedia) remarkable:
The “nose-to-tail eating” trend has resulted in greater demand for faggots in the 21st century.
Aric is American and gay, so of course pork faggots — being British and devoid of sexual associations (beyond those attending on any sort of meatball) — are neither familiar nor salient to him.
An anaphoric island. The smoke signalling another Page on this blog for anaphoric islands. Created back on 5/27/15, an Anaphoric islands Page, with links to postings about anaphoric islands (like this one). Now, today, a new Page with examples of them.
Today’s example was distributed to an informal group of anaphoric islanders (we collect the things — hey, it’s an innocent hobby) by one of our number, Larry Horn, who noted it back in the 1970s. Out of context, it’s a real challenge to interpret:
(1) I don’t think that non-smokers should have to put up with people who do
Follow-ups to my posting “A vernacular construction?” yesterday, about expressions like had went and had ran, non-standard counterparts to standard had gone and had run, respectively — which Ben Yagoda has characterized, misleadingly, as exemplifying vernacular constructions involving the inflectional category PST rather than the standard category PSP. Instead, I maintained, the constructions in question call for the PSP, period, but in some vernacular varieties, the PSP forms of some verbs are pronounced the same as the corresponding PST forms (while in the standard language these forms are phonologically distinct).
My posting noted that the vernaculars here extended an already very strong generalization, PSP = PST — that the PSP form is pronounced the same as the PST — so that it applies to almost all verbs, and a Facebook commenter emphasized the greater regularity of the resulting system vis-a-vis the standard array of forms. All true, but critics of non-standard varieties still manage to use these facts to disparage speakers of these varieties.
And then it occurred to me that Ben was viewing expressions like had went and had ran as if he had produced them himself, in which case they’d be inadvertent errors, substitutions of one inflectional category (PST) for another (PSP). But the expressions need to be seen from the viewpoint of the varieties they occur in — and there, they simply involve phonological realizations of the inflectional category PSP.