(A version of things I posted on Facebook earlier today about my life, with glancing allusions to various phenomena of social life. Posted here to have a more permanent and accessible record, on WordPress. There will be a little bit of linguistics.)
(#1) (Not an accurate portrayal of Xfinity/Comcast staff)
News for penises. And fingers. And, possibly to come, buttocks.
The larger topic is the line between what counts as normal and what counts as abnormal, diseased, or morbid. Today, the discussion starts with some television commercials for the drug Xiaflex® (from Endo Pharmaceuticals), marketed as a treatment for Peyronie’s Disease.
… just came up on this blog. Since I last reported on the crowds of spam comments here, in my 10/20/18 posting “Numbers and names” (“The number of pieces of comments spam on this blog … passed 5.5 million a little while ago”).
Well, on the 3rd, when I first checked, some 5,600,601 had accumulated since this blog started in December 2008. At the moment, there’s an attack underway from a site with a clever strategy for evading spam recognition programs, so I’m getting more than a thousand new spam comments a day..
Meanwhile, there’s a certain amount of entertainment in the ebbs and flows in the views of postings on this blog — which will lead me eventually to some remarks on location expressions in the world’s language.
Adventures in cross-dialect understanding in the One Big Happy strips of 2/1 and 2/2, both featuring Ruthie and Joe’s playmate James:
(#1)
(#2)
It began five months ago, on ADS-L, the American Dialect Society mailing list, with a note from the compiler of the Yale Book of Quotations about a piece he’d recently published:
Fred R. Shapiro, Confessions of the Antedater. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 39.1.23-42 (2018).
An engaging and informative essay about finding earlier and earlier citations for English words and phrases. At the time, ADS-Ler Mark Mandel exclaimed:
At first I saw it as “Confessions of an Anteater”!
and Larry Horn chimed in:
Me too … Indeed, my mailer tells me that when I type “antedater” I really meant “anteater”. Maybe someone should work on a logo
I seconded the suggestion, but then no one did anything until Fred’s piece came up again yesterday, and everybody made the same misreading again — and I came up not with a logo, but with a mascot, an Anteater With a D, the adorable little Silky Anteater didactylus.
(Yes, a totally cheesy play on the name “My Darling Clementine”. Though it does clarify that the name clematis is accented on the first syllable. Note: this posting is mostly clematis appreciation.)
Passed on by Joelle Stepien Bailard, another wonderful flower painting by Emil Nolde, this time of clematis in the purple range:
(#1) Japanese-Impressionist Clematis (1934)
A great many varieties of the plant grew wild throughout most of the world; then from the 16th century on, plant collectors began to spread a number of them to Europe and elsewhere; and programs of selective breeding and hybridization eventually produced an extraordinary range of gorgeous flowers.
From various friends on Facebook who know that I’m interested in meta-comics, this 4/21/17 Imbattable strip by Pascal Jousselin, in an English translation:
(#1) Imbattable (‘Unbeatable’) is a bandit superhero in a yellow and black costume
Among Imbattable’s superpowers is his ability to break the walls of the cartoon’s panels and freely move between them. With the result that temporarily, in the fourth panel, the cat is in two places at once — a phenomenon that unsettles both the cat and the old lady.
Passed on by Joelle Stepian Bailard, this Cyanide and Happiness strip by Rob DenBleyker from 9/30/10:
A tour of the interrogative words of English.
Today’s mailing from bon appétit magazine leads with a hybrid food:
(#1)
(#2) Normally, you’d expect the hybrid food to come with a corresponding cute portmanteau name, but not this time
