Today’s Zippy takes us to the 29 Diner in Fairfax VA, where a Twilight Zone wrinkle has apparently established itself:
(#1)
It seems that Ned lives in that liminal world, where there are no coffee breaks (and presumably no bathroom breaks either). The place is open 24 hours, so maybe no sleep either.
From sites that post artworks on the net (often turning up unexpected delights), two paintings, both new to me, from a single well-known artist at the beginning of the 20th century. Can you name that artist? (Answer later in this posting.)
In the most recent (1/4&11/21) New Yorker, this E.S. Glenn cartoon with still another variant of the Desert Island meme:
(#1)
Somehow they started out paddling a lovers’ swan boat — note the heart — in the pond of a park but ended up beached on a desert island in the Pacific (or whatever tropical spot cartoon desert islands are located in). Yes, he should have let her ask for directions.
(Another follow-up to today’s “Manual labor” posting, and like it, thoroughy unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)
These are extracts from previous masturbation postings, focusing especially on my sexual and affectional life with my guy Jacques.
(A spin-off from today’s posting “Manual labor”. Obviously inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest: it’s all about sex, and a lot of it is raunchy.)
This is a compact summary of usages, confined here to male masturbation (all participants are men), in particular such acts involving men who have sex with other men.
This is the first part of three telling a story about Jacques’s and my sexual lives together. All parts of the story are entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.
This part — “Manual labor” — is about a project of J’s, to become (in effect) the world’s authority on how to please me by masturbating me.
Liz Climo’s cartoon for today, 12/30, the 6th day of Christmas (“Six geese a-laying” — that is, laying eggs):
(#1)
Prescriptively incorrect, but extraordinarily widespread, lay down (in an imperative to the geese to lie down).
Recently defended:
Control in Free Adjuncts: The “Dangling Modifier” in English by James Donaldson. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Edinburgh, 2020 (supervisors: Geoffrey K. Pullum and Nikolas Gisborn).
Donaldson presents a fresh approach to the topic, uniting a huge body of commentary on observed examples by reference to sentence processing in real time.
Below, the dissertation abstract and a “lay summary”. These are not (yet) for quotation: this is not yet the final form of the dissertation — as is common in academia, there will be some editorial revisions before final submission, though it’s to be expected that there will be no substantive changes. I provide the abstract and lay summary here because I think the leading ideas deserve to be heard and appreciated.
Ambiguity days: Ruthie (playing a restaurant server) to the neighbor kid James (playing a customer) in the 12/6 One Big Happy strip:
Ruthie has one understanding of (EX) How do you find our menu?, James another, and this difference is reflected in (at least) three (tightly linked) places in the question: in the meaning of the verb find; in the meaning of the present tense; and in the meaning of the interrogative adverb how.
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon has the cat Attila appealing to the Pied Piper for his help in the mice-delivery business:
mice-delivery business is a N+N compound with first element mice delivery — itself a N+N compound, with first element mice. And mice is quite clearly a plural form.
It then turns out that compounds of the form mice + N (with a clearly plural first element) have a certain degree of fame in linguistics.
