Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to the Boston waterfront and a piece of remarkable antic public art:
(#1)
A chimera — a composite of parts of a Boston lobster (those claws!) and parts of Mickey Mouse (all the rest, but especially the ears), let’s portmanteau him Lobstickey Mouse — who stood for a couple of years by Faneuil Hall on the Boston waterfront.
Tell it to Kim. Tell it to me. Tell it to Kim and I.
The new paradigm for case-marking of pronouns, including the nominative conjoined object (NomConjObj) in to Kim and I — now judged to be the correct form by a large population of young, educated American speakers, as against the judgments of older speakers, who use instead accusative conjoined objects (AccConjObj), as in to Kim and me.
Entertainingly, the new paradigm is evidenced in tv comedies in which grammatically fastidious characters freely use NomConjObj and even admonish those who use AccConjObj.
The earlier go-round: my 9/7/19 posting “Big sexy prime birthday gay ice cream”, with a section on the Marquis de Lafayette (among other things, a French hero of the American Revolution), because I share a birthday with him.
And now (note from Joelle Stepien Bailard) the Lafayette Trail organization. Its logo:
(#1)
With, as linguistic added value, the quite rare, but relatively learnèd-transparent N/Adj co-natalist ‘(someone) sharing a birthday with’. God is not my co-pilot, but Lafayette is my co-natalist.
From Ela Thurgood on Facebook today, this photograph of a recent visitor to Ela and Graham’s house in Chico CA:
(#1) An alligator lizard, presumably a southern alligator lizard, Elgaria multicarinata; alligator lizards are a western US thing
That’s in Chico, in NorCal. But at least since 1972, alligator lizards have been famous as a SoCal phenomenon, celebrated in song as apparitions in the air above “Ventura Highway”:
(#2) DeviantArt by nightly03 illustrating America’s “Ventura Highway”
From Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook on 11/3, this cookbook find — the butch cook book, by Lee Lynch, Nel Ward, & Sue Hardesty (Perfect Paperback, 2008) — at his favorite local thrift store, which moved him to wonder whether anyone still uses butch as a noun:
(#1) Adventures in cooking and in the language of sexuality: the title is intended to be read as ‘cook book for butches’ (rather than ‘cook book which is butch’) (JS’s phoro)
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo goes (sort of) bilingual:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
The Cyrillic label hints at сардинкы (transliteration in Latin letters: sardinky/i) ‘little sardines’, with a hard sign Ъ added to allow an allusion to one of those odd symbols. Meanwhile, the title tsardines is a portmanteau, of tsar and sardines, referring to the five tsars of Russia packed like sardines into the tin.
(Yes, full appreciation of the cartoon requires assembling a fair amount of knowledge of several kinds, starting with sardines and their customary packaging.)
In Mexican tradition, November 1st is the central point in the Days of the Dead (October 31st through November 2nd), while in older Christian tradition it’s All Saints’ (or, as many would have it, Saints) Day. For some of us, there is specific music for the day: the magnificent processional hymn “For All the Saints”, sung to the Ralph Vaughan Williams tune Sine Nomine.
(#1) Fra Angelico, The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs (from the 1420s, tempera on poplar wood) (from Wikipedia)
A recent — 10/7 — One Big Happy has Ruthie willfully misunderstanding a usage, something she does every so often, sometimes as a joke, usually to annoy her brother Joe:
(#1) Joe asks about /plen/ plane vs. plain, and Ruthie mischievously shifts to a pun on /pléɪn/ playin’.
Today’s Bizarro, with yet another unpacking of the initialism BYOB:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 12 in this strip! — see this Page.)
In the conventional initialism, BYOB stands for ‘bring your own bottle / booze / beer / beverage’, but here it’s ‘bring your OB’, where OB /o bi/ is short for — a clipping of — OB-GYN /o bi ǰi waj ɛn/. From NOAD:
noun ob-gyn: abbreviation [pronounced as an initialism] obstetrics and gynecology.
