Archive for November, 2024
November 22, 2024
☹️ 🎶 Once again 11/22 brings us both an immensely sad anniversary (of JFK’s assassination, in 1963) and a day of joyous celebration (St. Cecilia’s Day, honoring the patron saint of music and musicians; see my 11/21/11 posting “Saint Cecilia”) — a maximally discordant moment that comes around every year. Meanwhile, I’m four days into a fresh, and crippling, bodily affliction, in the midst of an array of medical indicators of splendid good health, and plenty of gauges of happiness and emotional stability — another oddly discordant moment
(Oh yes, tomorrow, 11/23. is Fibonacci Day: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. 13, 21, 35, …)
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Posted in Holidays, Language and medicine, My life | 3 Comments »
November 22, 2024
(Well, consider the title if this posting, which tells you that it’s going to get into some vivid descriptions of sexual parts and sexual acts — plus a photo that’s just barely WordPressable — and you’ll see that it’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; and from here on, you’re going to get the C-word raw and unconcealed, but your enthusiasm for this dirty talk will probably be diminished when it turns out that this posting is mostly about lexical semantics)
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Posted in Address terms, Context, Dialects, Gay porn, Insults, Language and the body, Language change, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Personification, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs, Variation | 6 Comments »
November 20, 2024
(Warning: some full-frontal male nudity in fine art, not at all raunchy, but nevertheless not to everyone’s taste.)
In my e-mail yesterday, from Rod Williams, about:
an album of male nudes in art, posted by Christa Zaat, a remarkable Dutch woman who has assembled an enormous online archive of art across the centuries, and posts images daily on FB. She posted this link [to her trove of male nudes; there’s another of female nudes] on FB a couple of days ago.
Along with this note from CZ:
It’s all about: Male Nudes!
Conversationally, naked and nude are pretty much interchangeable. However, many people, especially in the artistic community, do say there are differences. The differences can be seen as follows: Nude: To be without clothes, or bare, in a setting that the subject feels safe and comfortable, and they are not being represented in a sexually accessible manner. They are unclothed bodies that are intended to represent natural beauty, not to create impulses. Naked: To be without clothing, or bare, in a setting that the subject would be embarrassed, left feeling exposed and defenseless, or to be presented in a sexual manner.
Several of CZ’s examples have already appeared on this blog (and several more are in the pipeline). Here I’ll supply three early 19th-century examples of oil paintings on canvas from CZ’s trove: two character studies, one meditation on the male body.
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Posted in Art, Language and the body | Leave a Comment »
November 19, 2024
Breaking news: from Susie “Brokeleg Mountain” Bright on Facebook, a re-play of this delicious Will McPhail New Yorker cartoon of 1/19/17 (the date is important):
On its first go-round, McPhail intended this cartoon as an allegory for the 2016 election of Grabpussy as POTUS 44; now in 2024, it works for him once more, with feeling, as POTUS 46
(There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on McPhail)
Posted in Language and politics, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »
November 19, 2024
Encountered on Pinterest on 10/28, in a collection of mostly homoerotic images — Pinterest strives to cater to your interests, and mine aren’t hard to suss out — this painting, identified as being an early 19th-century work by Russian painter Alexander Ivanov (an artist completely unknown to me):
(#1) My first response was that the painting was truly creepy, looking to modern eyes like high-class kiddie porn: a beautiful young man (wearing a laurel wreath, therefore noble or divine), naked but with drapery over his lower body (his gaze fixed dreamily on something in the middle distance), embracing a totally naked young teenage boy (whose eyes are closed, apparently in enjoyment), while another fully naked boy, considerably younger, plays a wind instrument (apparently an aulos, an ancient Greek double-reed) for his companions’ pleasure; a lyre hangs from a tree in the background
A gauzily Romantic painting, set in a rough scenic wilderness, apparently of some classical or mythological subject in which music plays a significant role. Ok, so the beautiful young man is probably the god Apollo, famously skilled at the lyre (bonus: by far my favorite of the pantheon of ancient Greece and Rome). In this painting as the god of music and also the protector of the young. The boys are naked because they are true pre-pubertal innocents. Or just because the scene is set in the Arcadian wilderness, suffused with divine presence, a territory in which the gods and those within their aura have no need for the garb of ordinary mortals. Well, certainly not in artworks; consider the famous Apollo of the Belvedere statue (my 9/23/24 posting “Godlike beauty” has a section on the Belvedere Apollo and his full-frontal divinity).
So I tracked down #1: it’s Alexander Ivanov’s Apollo, Hyacinthus and Cyparissus making music and singing (painted during 1831-34), which I’ll call AH&C for short. At this point, things just got puzzling. The Russian painter Ivanov (1806-58) was new to me; he turns out to have a remarkable life history (summarized below). And then there’s the scene in #1.
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Posted in Art, Language and plants, Language and religion, Language and sexuality, Language and the body, Myths | 2 Comments »
November 18, 2024
The Bizarro of 11/11, about birthday presents in Batworld: Selina Kaye (in her alter ego as Catwoman, where she is both woman and cat) and Dick Grayson (in his alter ego as Robin, where he’s a boy named Robin, and not a bird) grouse about the presents they receive — probably from Bruce Wayne (in his alter ego as Batman) — by virtue of their creature-name aliases:
(#1) Selina gets cat presents, but at least her alter ego is a hybrid of cat and woman; but Dick gets worms (because the bird the robin is famously fond of eating them) even though there’s nothing avian about his alter ego (not even his name, which is a diminutive of the name Robert), so he is no doubt doubly pissed off — Wayno’s title for the strip is the ironic “Thanks a lot, Bruce” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
As it happens, the proper name Robin is historically not unconnected to the common noun robin, but the connection runs the wrong way: the noun robin comes from the name Robin. As far as modern English is concerned, robin and Robin are just unrelated homophones, so giving Robin birthday worms because of his name is like giving Peter and Dick birthday condoms because of their names; it embodies a (crude) pun.
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Posted in Common vs. proper, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Puns | 2 Comments »
November 18, 2024
The 11/12 Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange strip takes us to the Merriam-Webster company gym, where the lexicographers get defined:
(#1) It’s pun day at the definition factory, with bodybuilders’ definition punning on lexicographers’ definition
Confronted with a pun strip, I’ll usually go on to cite definitions from NOAD (or similar sources) for the punning expression and its model, and I’ll do a version of that here, getting at the expression well-defined by starting from the verb define, going on to the adjective defined (modified by the degree adverbial well ‘thoroughly’ in well-defined), and then steaming on to the noun definition and the conceptually related verbs cut and shred.
But what I find on this little trip has nothing at all from the vocabulary of bodybuilding. Not in NOAD, where I start (because I can access this dictionary on my computer with a few keystrokes); not in the OED (no surprise; its on-line version for this vocabulary is still antique); not — oh wonderful irony — in the on-line Merriam-Webster; not in AHD5; and not (to my astonishment) in GDoS. So for the bodybuilding vocabulary, I’ve cobbled together definitions from various bodybuilding sources. But apparently bodybuilding is so esoteric a world that its vocabulary has not yet reached mainstream lexicography. (A surprise to me. I’m not part of the bodybuilding world, but I have, yes, bodybuilder friends, also friends who are into bodybuilding competitions, and friends who have a taste for bodybuilders; and meanwhile, the gay male world and the world of physique magazines have long been intertwined, so I’m familiar with the bodybuilding world.)
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Posted in Homosexuality, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Puns, Sociolinguistics | Leave a Comment »
November 16, 2024
Wayno’s Bizarro for 11/8 — yes, I am hopelessly overwhelmed with posting material, wondering whether I’ll ever catch up; on the other hand, my health has taken a turn back to normal awful, which I’m entirely able to cope with — is a Psychiatrist strip in which the patient is said to be suffering from (in fact, cowering behind the therapeutic couch in the grips of) the fear of contractions:
Of the types of traditionally-labeled “contractions” in English, the patient here — call him NoA — seems to exhibit sensitivity specifically to just one, now known in the linguistic literature as Auxiliary Reduction, AuxRed for short (in I am > I’m, I had > I’d, and you are > you’re), though in fact Wayno sees NoA’s sensitivity as triggered by all occurrences of the punctuation mark the apostrophe, of which there are a great many types — hence Wayno’s title for this cartoon, “Punctuation Trepidation” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
Now if this is NoA’s affliction, he’s in for a world of trouble, because in modern English spelling the apostrophe is used as an abstract mark for possessive forms of nominals — singular in someone’s cat and the queen of England’s hat, plural in the boys’ bat — a visual mark accompanying the possessive S; but while the the letter S in such forms corresponds to phonological content, the apostrophe neither represents phonological content nor indicates a place where some phonological content is omitted. So, how does NoA know that /sʌm.wǝnz.kæt/ in some sense has an apostrophe in it and he should cringe in fear at it?
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Posted in Comic conventions, Language processing, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Possession, Psycholinguistics, Psychology, Singular & plural, Spelling, Style and register, Variation, Writing conventions | 1 Comment »
November 15, 2024
Very briefly noted.
Passed on back on 11/9 by Michael Palmer on Facebook, this fine reworking of the map of Austria as an ostrich:
MP came across it on the Language Nerds Facebook site, but I don’t know who created the image in the first place
In English, Austria (a Latinization of the German name Österreich ‘eastern realm’) and ostrich (from a compound of the Latin avi- stem meaning ‘bird’ and the Greek struth– stem meaning ‘ostrich, big sparrow’) have only medial /str/ as clearly shared material, so are very distant puns, if they count as puns at all. Much the same is true of Spanish Austria and avestruz. Things are even more distant in Italian (Austria and struzzo) and of course German (Österreich and Strauß).
But in French, as I pointed out on Facebook, by the accidents of phonological change, Latinized Austria > Autriche and the avi– + struth– compound > autruche, yielding a truly fine pun: Autriche is an autruche!
So Austria not only looks like an ostrich, in French it sounds like one too. This makes me happy.
Posted in Art, Compounds, French, German, Greek, Language and animals, Language change, Latin, Placenames, Puns, Spanish | 3 Comments »
