October | 2020 | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for October, 2020

One Big Happy mnemonics

October 17, 2020

The One Big Happy of 9/13, in which Ruthie and Joe exhibit their prowess in spelling though mnemonics:

Spectacular examples of expression mnemonics, in which

The first letter of each word is combined to form a phrase or sentence — e.g. “Richard of York gave battle in vain” for the colours of the rainbow. (Wikipedia link)

… versus name, or acronymic, mnemonics, in which

The first letter of each word is combined into a new word. For example: VIBGYOR (or ROY G BIV) for the colours of the rainbow or HOMES (Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, Lake Superior) the Great Lakes. (also from Wikipedia)

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Posted in Memory, Spelling | 2 Comments »

On Facebook on 10/4, from the George Rullier Groupe Surréaliste!, British artist Phil Lockwood paying tribute to Edward Hopper with a compilation of Hopper’s work in a single painting, The Office at Night:

(#1)

It’s characteristic of Hopper that in his paintings we seem to be catching views of his subjects from the outside, spying on them, often through a window. So it’s natural to assemble these views in office buildings (with his Nighthawks in a diner on the street, in the center of the composition).

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Posted in Art | 2 Comments »

Two woolly mammoths

October 17, 2020

On Facebook early in this month, two woolly mammoths for my pleasure — one stuffed, one of ivory.

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Posted in Mammoths, Toys | Leave a Comment »

Another Shih still life

October 17, 2020

On Facebook on the 12th, another of Stephanie Shih’s still lifes:

(#1)

Artichoke flowers at the top, lots of oval imagery at the bottom.

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Posted in Art, Language and food | Leave a Comment »

One more Magritte homage

October 16, 2020

From Vadim Temkin on Facebook on the 14th:

One more homage to Magritte: Lovers II [now with naked men]. I think for now I have enough Magritte for a while

(#1)

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Parody | Leave a Comment »

The risonym

October 16, 2020

E-mail today from Gadi Niram:

I seem to recall you coining the term “risonym”. What I can’t remember was whether a risonym made a person laugh because of its meaning or because of the speaker’s perception of the sound as funny. Can you refresh my memory?

I had no recollection of such a coining (though Gadi eventually resurrected a single use by me on Usenet 20 years ago — see below), but I tried to respond to the idea of words that are funny because of their sound.

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Posted in Humor, Names, Word attraction | 1 Comment »

cubeb

October 15, 2020

Today’s morning name, surely triggered in my mind by a line from the song “Ya Got Trouble” from the musical The Music Man (about kids in pool halls): “They’re … tryin’ out cubebs” (referring to cubeb cigarettes).

Brief background, from NOAD:

noun cubeb: [a] a tropical shrub of the pepper family, which bears pungent berries. Genus Piper, family Piperaceae: several species, including the Asian P. cubeba [b] the dried unripe berries of the cubeb, used medicinally and to flavor cigarettes. [also, not given by NOAD: [c] a cubeb cigarette] ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French cubebe, from Spanish Arabic kubēba, from Arabic kubāba.

Note: most uses of the noun cubeb are M[ass] nouns, but the use for ‘cubeb cigarette’ is C[count], and so pluralizable, as in the quote from The Music Man.

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Posted in Count & mass, Language and food, Language and plants, Morning names, Movies and tv, Music | 2 Comments »

No offense (intended)

October 15, 2020

From the American tv series Emergency! S7 E11 “The Convention” (from 7/3/79), a tv movie following the regular series. Two women end up serving as a paramedic team together — female paramedics were a new thing at the time, only grudgingly accepted, and they were normally paired with a male partner — so a male paramedic tells them the watch commander wouldn’t approve of the women teaming up. One of the women good-naturedly but pointedly snaps back at him:

(1a) How would you like a thick lip, to go with your thick head? No offense.

With the idiomatic tag No offense — a shorter version of No offense intended — literally meaning something like ‘I intend/mean you no offense by saying this’, but almost always conveying something more complex than that.

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Posted in Idioms, Language and gender, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Politeness, Pragmatics, Speech acts | 1 Comment »

Homage to Magritte

October 14, 2020

On Facebook today, a Vadim Temkin gay male homage to the Belgian artist René Magritte and his 1937 painting La Reproduction Interdite (Not to be Reproduced):