Archive for April, 2019
April 30, 2019
The steamroller of language change chugs on, even through the famously factchecked and copyedited precincts of the New Yorker. From the keyboard of the magazine’s ideas editor, Joshua Rothman, in the 1/21/19 issue, in the article “The art of decision-making: Your life choices aren’t just about what you want to do; they’re about who you want to be”, in a section where Rothman and his wife face decisions about becoming parents (p. 31 in the print edition; relevant passage boldfaced, crucial phrase underlined):
Before we had our son, I began exploring the “near face” of being a parent. I noticed how cute babies and children could be and pictured our spare room as a nursery; I envisaged my wife and I taking our child to the beach near our house (my version of “entering the warm light of a concert hall on a snowy evening”). I knew that these imaginings weren’t the real facts about having children — clearly, there was more to having kids than cuteness. All the same, I had no way of grasping the “distant face” of fatherhood. It was something I aspired to know.
This is the first NomConjObj — nominative personal pronoun form in a conjoined object — that I’ve noticed in plain (not quoted) text in the New Yorker; there are in fact no New Yorker examples in my database of NomConjObj examples. Meanwhile, I believe the editors of the magazine have deprecated the construction as a vulgar error, so it’s notable. It’s not at all surprising to me that Rothman wrote that sentence, but it’s telling that it wasn’t changed in editing. I will explain.
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Posted in Language change, Pronoun case, Usage, Variation | 3 Comments »
April 30, 2019
The One Big Happy from 4/3, recently in my comics feed: the tough neighborhood kid James and his sledgehammer:
(#1)
What I hear in the first panel is an echo of a quotation with an ax, not a sledgehammer:
‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
One of the great first lines in English literature, just grips you right off, does E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web.
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Posted in Books, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Metaphor, Movies and tv, My life, Phallicity, Quotation, Signs and symbols, Verbing | 4 Comments »
April 28, 2019
(This message is brought to you by Frolic, Romp, Frisk, Gambol, Cavort, Caper, & Prance, Ltd., purveyors of iambs and orgies.)
Today’s playful Zippy:
(#1) Drying clothes engaged in an orgy of cavorting and gamboling, playfully, sensually sliding against one another: inhale the freshness!
With one satisfying line of enigmatic iambic pentameter:
All ˈlaundry ˈis a ˈblur of ˈstatic ˈcling
Words to live by. If you can only divine their deeper lesson.
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Posted in Homosexuality, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Poetic form | 5 Comments »
April 27, 2019
(Mesh Man in his underwear, leading us in many directions, but with plenty of sexual content — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
From the 12th: Mesh Man returns to the Daily Jocks underverse, flogging their fabulous Varsity Mesh Shorts, flaunting his famous receptive organ — he’s all man and a foot deep — kneeling with feeling in #1 and flashing a finger gun to his fans in #2:
(#1) Party shorts! (see the ad below) — I go down on one knee to go down on my guy
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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Clichés, Compounds, Gesture, Idioms, Language and religion, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Music, Parody, Phallicity, Photography, Signs and symbols, Underwear | 10 Comments »
April 25, 2019
In the recently published The Ultimate Cartoon Book of Book Cartoons —
(#1)
edited by New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein (a regular visitor on this blog), this Ed Koren (who’s also on this blog):
(#2)
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Posted in Argument structure, Books, Combining forms, Language change, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Morphology, Puns, Spoonerisms | Leave a Comment »
April 24, 2019
From Jeff Bowles on Facebook on the 12th, this Magritte-based composition:
(#1)
Apparently a Magrittean disavowal (there’s a Page on such disavowals here), playing on Magritte’s wry late 1920s painting La Trahison des images (The Betrayal / Treachery of Images) — which shows a pipe, with the painting labeling itself Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’. Here we get Louis Flint Ceci, on the left, objecting in astonishment that what’s on the right is not (a) Ceci; instead, it’s (a) Davisson.
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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Music, Paradoxes, Poetic form, Poetry, Semantics, Writers | 5 Comments »
April 22, 2019
From the 3/30/19 issue of The Economist, in “Reflecting on past sins” about “the clamour to return cultural treasures taken by colonialists” (from Africa), this photo on p. 62 (as captioned here), presumably included to illustrate the cultural, political, and legal issues involved:
(#1) Getting back to where it once belonged.
First, there’s the photo in #1. What does it show? Why this picture — are we supposed to recognize the elements in the picture, or is it just intended as a generic representative of a certain type of situation or event? And what is it doing in a story on the restitution of African art objects removed by colonial powers (mostly in the 19th century)?
Then there’s the Easter egg quotation in the caption, from the Beatles’ song “Get Back”. That’s what caught my eye first (unsurprisingly, given my interests in ludic language in general, and Easter egg quotations in particular), but then I cast a puzzled eye on the photo itself.
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Posted in Art, Language play, Music, Quotation | 3 Comments »
April 21, 2019
(Men’s bodies, clicks, mansex, dactyls, homowear, eggcorns, street talk, and more. Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Daily Jocks mailing of the 15th, with a studiedly homo-smouldering ad for crop tops from the fetish-wear company Barcode Berlin. Plus a foul derangement of (heavily enjambed) dactyls as a caption.
(#1)
Kiko the crop-top kid,
Impudent pussy boy,
Butch faggy target for
Amorous arrows — a
mazing for festivals,
Parties with gangbangers,
Mid-drifting kikis with
Quatrains of dactyls
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Posted in Address terms, Captions, Eggcorns, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Phallicity, Poetic form, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | 2 Comments »
April 21, 2019
Two sharp cartoons on human evolution, one from the viewpoint of gender (by Eduardo Saiz Alonso, apparently from several years ago), one from the viewpoint of climate change (by Kevin Kallaugher (KAL) in yesterday’s Economist):
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Posted in Evolution, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
