Author Archive
May 14, 2020
So I’ve got a rock musician, a drummer, and his name is Urs. What else can you say about him? Well, he’s almost surely Swiss German, or of Swiss German descent; almost every guy named Urs is. If I tell you that his full name is Urs Zwicky, well, it’s pretty much a sure thing. And here he is, drumstick in hand, in a photo of the Swiss band he’s been in for years, Daytona (now, that’s a surprise):
(#1) A Zwicky who can rock you
Now in the music news because of a new mix of their old standard “We Stand Together” (apparently from 1993), reviewed a few days ago in World Front News.
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Posted in Art, Music, Names, Switzerland and Swiss things, Zwickys | 1 Comment »
May 13, 2020
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, about gobs and goblets:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Liquid Economics” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Start with the straightforward stuff: goblet vs. gob, with goblet playfully treated here as if it were gob + diminutive –let.
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Posted in Books, Derivation, Diminutive, Etymology, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Movies and tv, Slang | Leave a Comment »
May 10, 2020
(Consider the title: not for kids or the sexually modest.)
In today’s AZBlogX posting “VT’s Banksy’s Magritte”, two Vadim Temkin take-offs on a Banksy take-off on a Magritte — one, in the negative, like the Magritte original; the other, in the positive, as in the Banksy take-off — but both with artistic representations of penises that make them off-limits for this blog (and that itself becomes a topic for discussion).
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Posted in Art, Language and the body, Parody, Phallicity | Leave a Comment »
May 8, 2020
Wayno’s title for today/s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, in which the world of summer scout camp for kids intersects with the complex fictional world of the animate marionette Pinocchio. To understand the cartoon, you need to recognize both of these worlds (a matter of considerable cutural knowledge); and to understand why it’s funny, you need specific detailed information about each of these worlds.
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page
The key words are kindling and fibs.
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Posted in Books, Fiction, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Narrative, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
May 7, 2020
Today, Alex [Alessandro Michelangelo] Jaker (posting from Toronto) on Facebook:
So unfortunately I can’t go home and visit my family in Minnesota 🚗🚗🚗🛣🏡 because of the virus, so I decided to just go ahead and make my own hotdish 🍄🥕🍅.
… Although actually, it’s sort of a hybrid between hotdish and lasagna 🍅🧀🇮🇹.
(#1) Jaker Hotdish (photo from the author)
… [about hotdish] Apparently it is what people from other places call a “casserole”. In the present case, I used ground mutton 🐑, onions, celery, carrots 🥕, a leek, tomatoes 🍅, mushrooms, a can of cream of mushroom soup 🥫, parmesan cheese 🧀, and noodles. And beans. First stir fry all the ingredients except the noodles, and boil the noodles separately, then combine into a baking dish and bake for ~40 minutes.
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Posted in Count & mass, Language and food, Movies and tv, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »
May 6, 2020
… Helvetia stands guard over the Matterhorn, and by extension, all of her Swiss domain, in this excellent poster (source still untraced):
(#1) Not only the Matterhorn in the background, but also the shields of the 22 cantons of the time when the poster was published (I point to the Zwicky-Canton, Glarus, with its figure of Fridolin, the patron saint of the canton)
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Posted in Art, History, Signs and symbols, Switzerland and Swiss things | 2 Comments »
May 5, 2020
(About gay male presentations of self, but with a fair amount on men’s bodies and mansex in plain language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday’s mailing from Daily Jocks, with an ad for Sparta’s colorful fetishwear: harnesses and underwear (in this case, a jockstrap), plus my (parodic) caption (apologies to Rick Blaine):
(#1)
Of all the dungeons
in all the queer clubs
in all the world,
he walks into mine.
Play me, Sam.
Play My Ass Gets Hot.
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Posted in Captions, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
May 4, 2020
On the dangler watch, a report by Ben Zimmer on 4/29 about this Reddit posting, which seems to have appeared without any preceding context:
TIL [Today I Learned] Due to their reclusive nature, scientists are unsure how long a pangolin lives in the wild.
(now entry Z4.87, coded SUB(due to)-I-EMB-3P, in my collection of examples)
The writer of Z4.87 was no doubt intending to write about the endangered animal the scaly anteater, or pangolin, and the creatures were paramount in their consciousness; and they also wanted to introduce an observation on scientists’ knowledge about pangolins. All of that is fine. But we can’t be mind-readers, and what they wrote fell afoul of a general strategy in sentence comprehension that leads even well-intentioned readers to understand, at least for a perceptible moment, the claim to be that scientists, not pangolins, are reclusive.
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Posted in Context, Danglers, Language and animals, Modification, Syntax | 1 Comment »
