Archive for October, 2023

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THE shirts

October 7, 2023

… for THE Ohio State University. A posting inspired by this Facebook posting by Scott Schwenter (who is, among other things, Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio), on 9/16:


(#1) SS — with Tammy Anderson, to whom he is married — before an Ohio State football game they were going to

SS is wearing a scarlet THE shirt for the occasion, TA a scarlet and gray shirt of her own, scarlet and gray being the school colors. For what is about to come, you also need to know that the school mascot is the buckeye, the nut of the Ohio buckeye tree Aesculus glabra, and that school teams are known as the Buckeyes; Ohio State fans like TA and SS are also known as Buckeyes, as indeed are natives of the state of Ohio. (I am not making any of this up.)

Note: this is massively a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting, indeed something of a celebration of my being able to post anything at all, not to mention through enormous pain in my swollen fingers. But no details about any of that here; at the moment, I truly am pleased to be still alive and want to show that I can manage a posting.

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Posted in Articles, Clothing, German | 12 Comments »

Promissory note: a cascade of fishy puns

October 6, 2023

(I am wretchedly sick again and in great pain, for complicated reasons I won’t explain here. Had nevertheless hoped to show that I could do a posting using only my damaged right hand. This is as much as I’ve been able to get together, but I have to admit temporary defeat on the larger project, so this is another promissory note about pun cartoons.)

Through friends on Facebook yesterday, a Chuck Ingwersen cartoon with a cascade of four flagrantly imperfect puns — with a fish theme:


The pun census: halibut punning on hell of it; cod punning on god; haddock punning on headache; herring punning on hearing

A couple of these puns are phonologically very distant, but they can be understood easily because the context provides rich clues: halibut, in particular, is in the context of the idiom ‘(do something) just for the hell of it‘.

Though the word play is intricate, it’s merely phonological: despite the piscine theme of the puns, the cartoon is firmly located in just one world, that of diners in a restaurant; the characters are not also various species of fish, interacting in a metaphorical world. This isn’t a defect; almost all pun cartoons are merely phonological. But a few are also what I’ve come to call semiotically satisfying, evoking a parallel metaphorical world that complicatedly maps onto the base world. More on this below (I’m always on the lookout for semiotically satisfying cartoons).

 

 

Posted in Comic conventions, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 2 Comments »

The breast-clutching gesture

October 5, 2023

(There will be a barely clad male model showing off his hot hairy body in Daily Jocks homowear ads; you have been warned. But otherwise this is, remarkably, a posting about art, in particular extraordinary public art)

The backdrop is yesterday’s posting “A remarkable table lamp” — about a “sculpture in bronze by George Sellers — one of his insect sculptures, in particular a magnificent staghorn beetle cast in solid bronze, on a walnut base, which Sellers has made into a lamp base”. Which I used as a proof of concept / principle, showing that it was now possible for me to post something, even with my swollen (but somewhat ameliorated) left hand, if I used my fingers on that hand gingerly. That posting was pretty bare-bones — no further illustrations of some of Sellers’s remarkable works — but it served its purpose, which was to demonstrate that I can once again post stuff, at least relatively short, uncomplicated stuff.

The current posting was intended as another relatively brief, easy affair, about a gesture, or pose, in a men’s underwear ad that happened by accident to surface on my desktop. But it led to that public art, in Fort Lauderdale FL. The two are unlikely to be connected, so there’s still a bit of a puzzle.

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Posted in Art, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Underwear | 1 Comment »

A remarkable table lamp

October 4, 2023

The generalization is that almost anything of the appropriate size can be used as the base of a table lamp, especially if it’s vertically oriented. If you happen to have a sculpture of the right size, or a piece of ceramic art, you could just display it as an art object, sitting around somewhere for admiration. Or you could put it to a good use as a lamp base, in which case it will be displayed right in the middle of things. And all sorts of art work has been exploited this way.

Suppose, more specifically, that you have scored a high-end sculpture in bronze by George Sellers — one of his insect sculptures, in particular a magnificent staghorn beetle cast in solid bronze, on a walnut base, which Sellers has made into a lamp base:


As reported on the 1stDibs site, where the lamp sold for $14,000

From the site:

Dallas based sculptor George Sellers studied in Italy, where he was trained in the traditional methods by a master carver. He creates seductively Gothic home furnishings and objets using plaster and bronze as his primary mediums. … large staghorn beetle sculpture table lamp cast in solid bronze on a walnut base, designed in a fine arts foundry using the lost-wax method of casting

The whole thing is 3 ft tall.

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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Language and animals | Leave a Comment »

coming soon, two pun cartoons

October 3, 2023

from my most recent — 10/1 — posting, “typologizing interjections”,

a mary, queen of scots, cry that i am not dead yet (things have been very bad, though inclined to great pain and disability rather than intimations of mortality)

great pain, which has crystallized as excruciating pain when i use the pointing finger of my left hand to capitalize things. so i’m avoiding caps — and parens, etc. — as much as possible.

but eventually i will have two nice recent pun cartoons — by tom chitty and kaamran hafeez — to entertain you. the posting is mostly put together, but assembling it for publication requires more pressing with that finger than i think i can bear. so this is a promissory note. and an announcement that i’m not dead yet,  but deeply aggrieved.

Posted in My life | Leave a Comment »

Typologizing interjections

October 1, 2023

For Rabbit Day, the first of the month — 🐇 🐇 🐇 — and as a Mary, Queen of Scots, cry that I am Not Dead Yet (things have been very bad, though inclined to great pain and disability rather than intimations of mortality), this announcement — of a workshop and then a cool-sounding research project — from Maia Ponsonnet on the Variationist list in e-mail on 9/26:

On 21 Nov, Maia Ponsonnet, Aimée Lahaussois, and Yvonne Treis are convening a one-day workshop entitled “Typologizing Interjections”.

The workshop will take place from 9am to 5pm CET, in Lyon (Dynamique du Langage), and via Zoom

Context: This workshop is the first step of a [CNRS: Centre national de la recherche scientifique] research project on the typology of interjections. The broader project aims to publish an open-access edited volume, featuring a larger number of descriptive contributions on the semantics and functions of interjections in individual languages across the world. To start this scientific conversation and launch joint research efforts, we propose a one-day workshop, accessible in hybrid mode

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Posted in Conferences, Interjections | 1 Comment »

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