Archive for September, 2024
September 6, 2024
One of a collection of brief postings that have nothing to do with my birthday (which is otherwise consuming much of my day).
The background: a long time ago, I had a hummingbird feeder hanging in my little patio garden, but the squirrels wrecked it and I never replaced it. Then the other bird feeders had to be gotten rid of, because (the condo management maintained) they were attracting rats. So my life has been essentially without birds for a very long time.
Then last week, I started getting daily visits from a hummingbird, which came and hovered for a while where, long ago, the hummingbird feeder hung. And came back a couple more times to check if it had magically reappeared, then flew off in disappointment.
Every morning the same routine.
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Posted in Language and animals, Language and plants, My life | 3 Comments »
September 5, 2024
You imagine the scene: a dark and sleazy establishment serving drinks, but in the back room, hard-core habitués share bites of banned biscuits of every sort, while reveling in vices of the flesh.
Oh, not bar ‘an establishment where alcohol and sometimes other refreshments are served’, but bar ‘an amount of food formed into a regular narrow block’. On which turns a confession by Tim Brookes (of the Endangered Alphabets Project, based in Vermont; website here) on Facebook today:
Back in England, and straight away the old vices return …
In particular, the vice of McVitie’s Penguin biscuit bars.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, My life, Penguins | 1 Comment »
September 4, 2024
In this morning’s comics feed, two linguistic jokes from the Roman Empire (in a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro); maybe it’s just something in the air, but on the other hand, September 4th, 476, marks the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity and consequently (in some people’s view) the beginning of the Middle Ages. So let’s say goodbye to the boy emperor Romulus, aka Augustulus, and antiquity; and hello to the barbarians and, oh yes, medieval times!
Bye-bye, Imperial times
Took Romulus to the border, to see the Empire die
I’ll get to Augustulus in a while. But first the cartoons.
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Posted in Gesture, History, Holidays, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Opposition, Plays, Puns, Semantics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
September 3, 2024
Back on 8/23, Benjamin Dreyer (long-time copy chief at Random House, now retired to the life of a pointedly opinionated public intellectual, and connecting with me on Facebook) celebrated the birthday of Gene Kelly, posting this portrait photo of the man:
(#1) AZ > BD: An especially fine photo. Do you know who the photographer was?
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Posted in Actors, Art, Dance, Dancers, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Photography | 1 Comment »
September 2, 2024
Today’s Zippy asks the question: would it be better if Zippy acted in a normal fashion? Would that make Zerbina happier?
(#1) Faced with a normal-brain alternative to Zippy’s surreal non sequiturs about logic, word salad, and accountants, Zerbina decides to sing along with Rogers and Hart: don’t change a hair for me
A few words about Rogers and Hart’s song, and a few words about me and my postings, which, like my linguistics articles, are regularly labeled as eccentric and idiosyncratic, usually not in a nice way.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, This blogging life | 1 Comment »
September 2, 2024
In today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange, the clams are tenting tonight on the old campground, but find today’s experience to be unaccountably joyless; for some reason, the formulas just aren’t working:
To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize two similarity-based formulaic expressions of English: the metaphor happy camper and the simile happy as a clam; yet neither is overt in the cartoon, though both are alluded to indirectly (we’re campers and we’re clams)
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Posted in Figures of speech, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Simile, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
September 2, 2024
From Tim Evanson on Facebook this morning:
It’s Labor Day in the United States.
Here is a Labor Day image by J.C. Leyendecker, the gay illustrator who was probably the greatest magazine cover artist of the early and mid 20th century. (Norman Rockwell blatantly copied him.)
(#1) [AZ:] JCL’s tribute to both masculinity and labor; labor is conventionally represented as a big muscular man in grimy work clothes, engaged in hard physical work, typically with a sledgehammer (as here) — as the cultural ideal of masculinity
“The American Weekly” was a Sunday insert carried in nearly all American newspapers at the time.
To come: more on JCL; and more on US Labor Day images.
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Fashion, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language in advertising, Male art, Masculinity | 1 Comment »
September 1, 2024
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate September and a new season (autumn in the northern hemisphere, where I am); we bid a fond farewell to August and summer as we sail on to new times and new climes (time to think about mittens and down jackets!)
And time to turn the pages on the calendar — in my case, a Tom of Finland calendar that takes us from August’s sailor and leatherman paired in the bright sun on the water to September’s lumberjack and leatherman paired in a shady evergreen forest.
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Posted in Art, Calendars, Gayland, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art | 1 Comment »
