Yesterday, in “One Big Happy mnemonics”, the distinction between expression mnenomics and name, or acronymic , mnemonics, providing three spectacular examples of the former for spelling English words: among them, for ARITHMETIC:
A rat in Tom’s house might eat Tom’s ice cream.
Now, a revisit to my 9/8/10 posting “NICE ‘n’ RICE”, with examples of the latter type.
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)
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:
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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).
On Facebook early in this month, two woolly mammoths for my pleasure — one stuffed, one of ivory.
On Facebook on the 12th, another of Stephanie Shih’s still lifes:
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Artichoke flowers at the top, lots of oval imagery at the bottom.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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):
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