Archive for July, 2025

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Day of the bed scorpions

July 11, 2025

On Facebook yesterday, George V. Reilly passed on an assortment of Joe Dator cartoons that the artist is selling the originals of. From these, one instantly made me laugh out loud at its preposterousness:


(#1) Plagued by pests? Bring in a predator to kill them off! | Got bugs? Scorpions zap bugs! | Bed bug infestation? Bed scorpions will do the trick!| It’s just common sense, right? (cartoon from The American Bystander)

No, wait, wait! That’s not what we had in mind! Dator just took simple reasoning and followed it wherever it led, even to an absurd situation, like scorpions in a bed.

Two more. I expect bed scorpions to give me the willies for some time to come. Meanwhile, two more of Dator’s offerings, now from the world of dining out.

Who gets which order? The framing event is the everyday one of a server in a diner connecting each customer to the dish they ordered. The absurdity lies in neither customer being from our everyday world and each being most unlikely to be eating in a diner, and then in there being no establishment, anywhere, in which these two would be eating together:


(#2) The nominal odd couple, the Tower of London yeoman and the formicavore edentate — the beefeater and the anteater — united by the form of their names (indicating their presumable preferences in comestibles), but nothing else (unpublished cartoon)

Not my order! The framing event is again an everyday one, a server who’s gotten an order wrong. But, well, nobody expects the Great Wall of China:


(#3) Of course he should send it back — but you can’t help wondering what the service platter was like (published in the New Yorker on 12/23/24)

There are more, equally preposterous. But I vowed to stop at three.

(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings on Joe Dator cartoons.)

Posted in Cartoonists, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Names | Leave a Comment »

The printing plate

July 9, 2025

A message to SF-peninsula Sacred Harp singers today, in the midst of a morning of complex life arrangements:

Some years ago I was given the printer’s plate for SH99 Gospel Trumpet in the 1991 Denson Revision (and have it on a display stand). A very touching gift from my singing community. I am now obliged to dispose of almost all my belongings, to reduce them to a small collection that will fit into a small assisted living facility apartment, saving just those things I need to continue the essays I post on my blog. This task is taking months, involving many thousands of objects; it is emotionally devastating; and it goes slowly because I am so disabled, and have become more so each day as the work damages my hands further. But, bit by bit, I am eroding the mountain of things. The plate for SH99 must go; I hope that some singer would love it as much as I have. Would come and take it.

A very few items shimmer with personal meaning for me; for them I’ve tried to find a truly suitable donor just for this one thing, and I’ve had some great successes. Now this, going to a married couple of long-time singers.

Now, for you, some of the back story, starting with a photo.

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Posted in Language and religion, Music, My life | 1 Comment »

RESIST

July 7, 2025

The message from my fellow QUESTer — another Queer University Employee At Stanford — Ryan Tamares, on a postcard mailed to me on 6/19, in the middle of Pride Month:

Happy Pride !
Pride always ! !
— RESIST —

The holiday moment has passed, but now we’re in a world where we have to actively resist, on a daily basis, against the brownshirts and blackshirts serving our overlords. And join with the drag queens and thrown-away club kids who, in one of our foundation tales, fought back against the cops who came to ruin their lives, and ours.

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Posted in Art, Biology, Categorization and Labeling, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, My life, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Stanford, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

Stoop labor

July 6, 2025

Earlier on this blog I’ve had occasion to celebrate the humane gravity of MSNBC commentator Jonathan Capehart, who happens to be both Black and gay. Now in JC talking about his 2025 book Yet Here I Am: Lessons From a Black Man’s Search for Home, an observation about the stoop labor historically done by Black folk in the American deep south (harvesting cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane):

“My cousin Rita and I are the first generation in our family to not have to pick cotton, and for people of a certain age, they will understand what that means,” Capehart said. “… It wasn’t until I was writing this book that I understood, when our parents were our age, they were working. They were working in the fields, picking cotton, picking tobacco. We did not have to do that.

So JC and his cousin Rita represent a shift in the fortunes of Black folk. Here’s JC informing us, explaining things, interviewing political and cultural figures, a figure of importance on national television — and a moving reporter on his own life history in that book. In what I see as the release of great abilities, drive, and insights that follow on opening up opportunity to everyone: excellent qualities that are in fact distributed widely across the population will flourish in new places (and since those who succeed first will have had to run through a lot of tough hoops, they will be seen to be especially talented).

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Posted in Books, Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Lives, Movies and tv, My life, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

The out@in shirt

July 5, 2025

From yesterday (for me, a long 4th of July work day, 6 am to 6 pm) on my Facebook page (somewhat edited):

In going through stuff in my closets, I came across a t-shirt (one that fits me, so I put it on) that has a logo on the front: a (portrait) rectangle with horizontal stripes of the rainbow flag in it and the word IN in white letters superimposed on the rainbow stripes. The back of the shirt identifies it as from out@in, which is presumably some sort of gay organization, but I don’t recognize the name or remember how I came to have the shirt.

My attempts to search for the organization and the logo came to nought, as did my attempts to scan the t-shirt logo into my scanning printer, so I appealed to readers to supply me with information about the organization and with a copy of the logo. (Given the precarity of my current life, I did not take well to people who, instead of giving me the information I sought, explained to me how I should have done the searches.)

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Posted in Academic life, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Logos, My life, Names, Rainbow, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Visual negations

July 3, 2025

This morning on Facebook, Otto Santa Ana added a temporary profile picture:


The X NO KINGS signage, taking us into the territory of  “double negation”, since both the X and the NO of NO KINGS convey a variety of negation, namely prohibition

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Posted in Negation, Signage, Signs and symbols, Symbols, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Prediction can override evidence

July 2, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate July, ok a day late, life has been difficult, here in the Dispossession Zone (I worked from 4 to 8 am today sorting stuff in this house to get rid of, this after coming back to life, solid food, and unsoiled clothing after three days of nasty intestinal affliction, so I am one weary bear — but clean, and looking forward to sushi for lunch), oh have I mentioned the construction workers tossing pieces of junk down from the sky (well, the roof), accidentally cutting off the electricity, and generally lobbing bombs into my daily life?

But enough of street entertainment. Time for a brief note from my correspondence, a query to AMZ the psycho/sociolinguist from someone — call them X — reporting on an odd experience that they had and hoping I could illuminate it, and give the phenomenon it illustrated a name.

The event: a speaker — call them Y — reached a point in their presentation where their audience would expect them to utter an expression E, but instead uttered an entirely different expression E′, which was, however, prosodically similar to E — E′ had, so to speak, the same melody, but not the same words, as E — but, with the exception of my correspondent X, apparently no one in the audience noticed what Y did; they seem to have understood Y to have said E, rather than E′, and so showed no sign of confusion or surprise (while X was astonished).

What happened there, and what was that called?

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Posted in Errors, Processing, Psycholinguistics | 2 Comments »

Playful offers: two bags of phallic figures

July 1, 2025

Things I can’t give away to local agencies as toys, because they’re adult toys, in particular figures whose reason for being is that they’re ostentatiously phallic. The figures are supposed to be funny rather than arousing, but there’s no denying that they’re displaying phalluses.

There are two bags, one of doubly phallic things in plastic, a whole lot of them; and one of gay male action figures (three of them, each paired with a superhero action figure — passion among the mighty). In detail:

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Posted in Language and the body, Language of sex, Offers | Leave a Comment »

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