… or edible roots (with root covering any underground plant organ), or whatever you call the stuff. In the 7/30 One Big Happy, Ruthie, confronted with /hol fudz/, takes it to be just such a label, hole foods, when her mother is referring instead to a grocery store, Whole Foods:
(#1)
The conventional (semi-technical) label for the category in question is root vegetables.
The phenomenon, from my 8/25 posting “Exception-triggered alternation”, involves:
Two contrarily opposed states — good vs. bad [in a joke routine], forestressed vs. afterstressed [in the accentuation of N + N compounds] — for some phenomenon, with the choice between them determined by context, the choice flipping between the two as the context narrows more and more (with each flip, the contextually more specific choice overrides the contextually more general one).
“More specific overrides more general” is a familiar principle, known by many names; what the statement above emphasizes is that this overriding can cascade, through a number of iterations.
Now, as an addition to these two examples Larry Horn (Laurence Horn of Yale Univ.) offers another, from formal semantics: Sobel sequences. Here I’ll turn the floor over to Larry, for a guest posting on them. As background, the cover of David Lewis’s Counterfactuals book (in the paperback edition, much more visually exciting than the severe cover of the edition I once had):
In Larry’s words, from here on out:
He does like them; he will not eat them.
Scott Hilburn’s latest (8/26) foray into language play:
(#1) An Olympic parody
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo:
(#1) A parade of unidiomatic prepositional alternatives (with the P of) to the synthetic compounds cheese grater, nutcracker, meat cleaver, egg timer
(Wayno’s title: “Rhyme & Punishment”; see comments below)
To understand the relevance of these nominals, you need to know not only who Jimmy Buffett is and that his most famous song is the notoriously ohrwurmisch “Margaritaville”, you actually need to know a crucial couplet from the song:
My 7/22 posting “Oh that’s good” looked at Archie Campbell’s That’s Good / That’s Bad joke routine from the tv show Hee Haw. Now Tim Evanson points out a somewhat later appearance of the routine, in an episode of The Simpsons.
(#1) From “Treehouse of Horror III”, The Simpsons S4 E5 (first aired 10/29/92)
Exhibit A: the joke routine That’s Good / That’s Bad from an Archie Campbell comedy sketch — discussed in my 7/22/19 posting “Oh that’s good”.
Exhibit B: the principles that predict when a N + N compound in English has primary accent on the first (modifier) N (front stress, or forestress) and when that accent falls on the second (head) N (back stress, or afterstress) — discussed in my old paper “Forestress and afterstress”, (OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, 1986, viewable on-line here).
From a sufficiently abstract point of view, these two phenomena can be seen to be manifestations of a single scheme, which I’ll refer to as exception-triggered alternation.
Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden last Saturday morning (the 17th), during motss.con XXXII. Eight of us prowled over the northern part of the garden, appreciating all sorts of botanical delights and surprises, densely compressed into a very small space. (On a separate visit, motss.conners Robert Coren and John Gintell managed not to notice a huge topiary rabbit; well, there was just so much else to look at.)
And now, a report on random selected moments from our visit.
From correspondent RJP, a link to a story on the My Modern Met site, “Adorable Egg Holder Transforms Your Produce into a Pack of Penguins” by Sara Barnes on 8/23/19:
(#1) Egguins: portmanteau in name, portmanteau in function
(Penguins and art, no linguistic content to speak of.)
On the Plain of Teak at Ramona St., the presiding penguin, La Púrpura, greets the newest resident, Pingüino Gaudí:
(#1)
(Warning: consider the subject; penises will be under discussion, so some will want to skip this posting.)
I’ll start with the logo of Herb’s Plumbing & Heating, 2562 Noble Rd., Cleveland OH:
(#1) Brawny man, a plumber, with a big wrench — the symbol of his trade, also (like wrenches in general) a phallic symbol, intensifying the masculinity of the image
This is garden-variety phallicity. But on Herb’s trucks, we get something more substantial: a phallic simulacrum, a representation of a penis (which is, however, also symbolically a wrench):
