From reader BJP on 10/22, from The Cut website “There’s Drama in the Queer Penguin Community” by Amanda Arnold on 10/22/20:
Drama is afoot in the Dutch queer penguin community after two gay lovers with a reputation for trouble stole an entire nest of eggs from a neighboring lesbian couple at the same zoo.
Within the queer penguin community at large, fostering eggs is relatively common: On multiple occasions, zoos and aquariums have gifted unhatched eggs to gay and lesbian couples exhibiting behavior that suggests they’re desperate for a chick, like building mock nests out of pebbles. But rather than demanding the same of their caretakers, one pair of African penguins at the DierenPark zoo in Amersfoort instead took the matter into their own claws by snatching eggs from two mothers-to-be, according to DutchNews.nl. The conniving boys have since been sharing caregiving duties, taking turns keeping the eggs warm and foraging for fish.
I know, I know, guys just take whatever they want.
The accompanying photo, which isn’t billed as being of the penguins in the story:
(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Linguistic note: the Dutch expression: het pinguïn-homokoppel ‘the gay penguin couple’. (Of course, I doubt that penguins experience anything truly analogous to same-sex desire in human beings. Pairing, yes.)
October 24, 2020 at 7:46 am |
Is “homo” the Dutch word that translates “gay”? The German adjective is “gay”, pronounced more or less as in English, but with the full set of adjective suffixes (a few years ago I was able to find attestations of all but one of them, using Google).
Remembering of course Mark Twain’s remark that he’d rather decline three drinks than one German adjective.
October 24, 2020 at 8:46 am |
Google hits:
gaykoppel About 618,000 results (0.52 seconds)
Did you mean: gay koppel
homokoppel About 193,000 results (0.52 seconds)
Each first page of results is mostly .nl sites or links that mention Amsterdam.
Translations of couples, along with Ted Koppel, and “Love Boat” actor Bernie Kopell spelled wrong discussing gay Hollywood, increase the hits to 3.79M for homo-koppel and 3.82M for gay-koppel when hyphenated.
So, somewhere around 33% to 49.9% homo.
October 24, 2020 at 8:19 am |
How does a “mock nest” differ from a real nest? Are penguins not real birds, and their pebble nests are not real nests made of sticks and moss and spiderweb floss? Or are same-sex penguins not real couples, with their nests not real nests? Is it not a true nest until birds lay eggs in it, or at least try to, or potentially could? These same sorts of questions were asked about gay marriage, but childless or sterile straight couples have real marriages, too.
In a riddle, “The cabin found on the hillside” can be an airplane cabin without the wings, and the phrase could easily appear in a news story about a crash. On the other hand, statements like “There’s a cabin on the hillside” or “While hiking in the hills, you find a cabin” couldn’t appear naturally except in a context of hills littered with crash debris. Even “You find an airplane cabin” seems contrived, since “airplane wreckage” sounds more natural for anyone but a crash investigator. “A cabin” implies something that counts as a real cabin — otherwise, it’s so misleading that it counts as a lie.
Boundary conditions are controversial, and we judge and assume all the time: Penguin nests, gay penguin couples, or the XKCD hot dogs as long sandwiches.
October 24, 2020 at 8:47 am |
You wrote:
«On the other hand, statements like “There’s a cabin on the hillside” or “While hiking in the hills, you find a cabin” couldn’t appear naturally except in a context of hills littered with crash debris.»
Of course they could! They could not appear naturally IN a context of hills littered with crash debris.
In support of this, if any were needed:
«“A cabin” implies something that counts as a real cabin — otherwise, it’s so misleading that it counts as a lie.»
October 24, 2020 at 4:03 pm
My complaint is that a riddle which depends on the ambiguity of “a cabin” to mean “an airplane cabin” is too much of a stretch without the context of multiple crashes.
If I’m bringing supplies to the anti-aircraft guns, and debris of downed planes is everywhere, I might need to move a loose wheel out of the path, or detour around a crumpled cabin. That wording seems natural to me. Without such a context, however, cruise ship cabins and airplane cabins seem like metaphoric cabins as part of a larger object, while the unmodified noun “cabin” as a separate item refers to a category of small shelters (a hut, a lodge, a chalet). I’ve even stayed in a cabin that had been expanded over many years, with two wings, one of which had a second-story loft area with a bed, but it was still called “the cabin” by the owners, and was in the woods surrounded by other small houses and cabins along a lake shore.
In general, however, I think the airplane “cabin” in the riddles is semantically implausible. Another criticism is that the fuselage of a plane is recognizable, but the cabin is strictly the interior compartment — many versions of the riddle say there was a fire that didn’t kill the occupants, so little would remain of the cabin.
I was just drawing the analogy to “mock nest” for people already familiar with the “cabin” riddle.