My paper from Berkeley Linguistics Society 15.303-20 (1989), which somehow escaped scanning for my Stanford website. So here it is…
Archive for February, 2019
What’s become of derivations? Defaults and invocations
February 16, 2019Be more Michael B. Jordan
February 15, 2019So a Coach ad today exhorts us:
(#1) “Be more Michael B. Jordan. Start with the look.”
Oh, honey, I wish I could, but there’s just no chance. Put aside the race thing, I’m never going to be an icon of masculinity, with that face, that body, and that manner.
And I couldn’t pull off the
Colorblock Shearling Jacket in Burnt Sienna
that Coach is selling (for a cool, or possibly very hot, $2200). MBJ can easily rise above its magnificent fagginess — the purple block is a nice finishing touch — and there are gay men who could flaunt that fagginess defiantly, but I’m not up to either of these presentations.
From the files of facial expressions in gay porn
February 15, 2019A regular topic on this blog and AZBlogX, combining a semi-professional interest in facial expression with one in the creation and presentation of personas (using gay porn as an arena of study). And there’s holiday — Valentine’s Day — interest as well. Despite the topic, this posting is nowhere near as raunchy as you might have imagined — no street language — but there’s no denying that there’s a whole lot here about men’s bodies and mansex, so it’s probably not for kids or the sexually modest.
This posting is a version of a posting today on AZBlog X (“Sweetly Blissful VDay Muscle Daddy”), with naughty bits cropped from the images; they’re central to the gay porn, but not particularly relevant to my interests here.
Revisiting 26: LGBT etc. etc.
February 14, 2019A mailing today about the March-April 2019 issue of G&LR (The Gay & Lesbian Review):
The proposal is LGBT+. Just LGBT+.
Revisiting 25: Alligator Goodbyes, now in song
February 14, 2019Back on 6/4/11, in “Alligator Goodbyes”, a t-shirt with 14 instances
of a verse form that I’ll call the Alligator Goodbye, on the model of “see you later, alligator” (at the top of the shirt):
(#1)
Now, a much bigger assemblage of AGs — 27 of them — on the Language Nerds Facebook page, in b&w:
Mesh Man: Always Open for Business®
February 13, 2019(The Daily Jocks e-mail of 2/11/19 with a homowear offer from the Varsity company came with the header “NSFW: Boys in mesh”, so this posting will clearly not be for everyone. Seductively exposed buttocks, offered sexually, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
With a brief caption of mine:
(#1) Mesh Man: Always Open for Business®
Ever at the ready, a
Marvel of receptivity
Mesh Man, always there for you,Mind reader and lightning
Provider of sexual
Emergency service
Allusions to titles past
February 13, 2019The Economist, wildly given to jokey headlines for its stories (and sometimes also their lead paragraphs or final paragraphs), performed a Proustian double play in its 2/2/19 issue: in two successive stories, headlines that are both plays on Proust’s title À la recherche du temps perdu, in two different English translations (both of them widely quoted in English).
on p. 21, about Facebook turning 15: “Remembrance of posts past” (Remembrance of Things Past)
on p. 22, about the consequences of the US government shutdown: “In search of lost time (and money)” (In Search of Lost Time)
Captain of our fairy band
February 13, 2019(Hot guys in very skimpy underwear, suggestive verse, but generally playful and not actually X-rated. Use your judgment.)
Today’s Daily Jocks sale ad, for Marco Marco Valentine’s Day homowear, with a caption in two parts, one raunchy doggerel, one Puckish:
(#1)
Lincoln Darwin Valentine
Is a cutup friend of mine
Loves the boys with all his heart
Loves them hard in every partAnd the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
individuals, people, persons
February 13, 2019From a mail pointer to a 1/30/19 article in the journal Psychological Science, “Similarity Grouping as Feature-Based Selection” by Dian Yu, Xiao Xiao, Douglas K. Bemis, & Steven L. Franconeri:
Individuals perceive objects with similar features (i.e., color, orientation, shape) as a group even when those objects are not grouped in space.
Point at issue: individuals rather than people, a mark of a consciously formal, “scientific” way of writing, appropriate (some believe) for reporting on research in psychology.
In the diaspora
February 12, 2019An announcement yesterday on the Linguistic Typology mailing list:
After three conferences in Bamberg [Germany] (2013), Mardin [southeastern Turkey, in Turkish Kurdistan] (2014) and Amsterdam [Netherlands] (2016), we are delighted to announce that the 4th International Conference on Kurdish Linguistics (ICKL-4) will take place at the University of Rouen (Université de Rouen) [France] on September 2-3, 2019.
Three meetings in the Kurdish diaspora, in the countries in Europe with the largest populations of displaced Kurds, plus one within Kurdistan itself.