Another quotation postcard from Jane Austen (from Chris Ambidge), this time with some genuine linguistic interest:
Chris disagreed with the quotation (he and I are dependable correspondents, at least for one another) — but then this is not an expression of Jane’s own opinion, but a statement by one of her characters, which is quite a different thing. From Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon, which is about (among other things) the creation of a new English seaside town in the early 19th century.
Today’s Zippy, with Zippy and Griffy on cartoon styles and men’s fashions:
(#1)
And, in the third panel, a diner — which turns out to be identifiable, and leads us to some surprising places (Mercury Comets and English pubs):
(Only a bit about language.)
Xopher Walker wrote on Facebook a couple of days ago about the plague of rabbits in his yard and garden (which his dog Dolly was doing her best to address), and cited the absurd monster flick Night of the Lepus:
Night of the Lepus, also known as Rabbits, is a 1972 American science fiction horror film based on the 1964 science fiction novel The Year of the Angry Rabbit.
Released theatrically on October 4, 1972, it focuses on members of a small Arizona town who battle thousands of mutated, carnivorous killer rabbits. (Wikipedia link)
The movie belongs to the large genre of horror/suspense movies (and fiction etc.) — think of Hitchcock’s Psycho — about human evil of one kind or another, and embracing ghost stories, as well as the subgenre of monster movies (and fiction etc.), where the creepiness comes from humanity gone awry in some crucial way, and indeed to the subsubgenre of “natural horror” movies (where natural means ‘having to do with nature’):
Natural horror is a sub-genre of horror films “featuring nature running amok in the form of mutated beasts, carnivorous insects, and normally harmless animals or plants turned into cold-blooded killers.” (Wikipedia link)
Two recent One Big Happys:
(#1)
(#2)
Ruthie misunderstands a number of things here: in #1, the full cultural context of what she’s seeing on television, plus the interpretation of self-esteem issues (which she parses as selfish steam issues); and in #2, the interpretation of Oil of Olay (which she hears as Oil of Old Lady).
Here in the U.S., it’s July 4th: Independence Day. So yesterday was, I suppose, Independence Eve. The 2nd was a notable anniversary, of the signing of the (U.S.) Civil Rights Act (of 1964, so that’s a 50th anniversary). And the 1st was Canada Day, to the north of us.
Passed on by Karen Chung on Facebook, yesterday’s Daddy’s Home:
Pass mustard for pass muster is in the Eggcorn Database; it substitutes a familiar lexical item for a less familiar one (in this case, in an idiom). Semantically, pass mustard has the advantage over pass muster by consisting of familiar items, but the contribution of mustard to the meaning of the whole is not at all clear, so this looks like a demi-eggcorn.
The cartoon has another extension of mustard to the territory of muster, this time for metaphorical muster ‘summon up’ (with direct objects denoting feelings, attitudes, or responses), originally based on the military verb muster (as in muster troops). Again, it’s hard to see how mustard is a semantic improvement here.
Google Alerts has, well, alerted me to a story about a skateboarding cop, as has Horton Copperpot in e-mail. From a site provided by Copperpot, this story of June 25th, “Holy Kickflip Batman! Is that a Skateboarding Activist Cop?!”:
Meet Officer Joel Zwicky, “Skateboard cop,” of the Green Bay Police Department.
Zwicky is not your typical cop, for starters, instead of harassing skaters, he’s shredding right next to them.
Instead of lobbying for more strict laws on skateboarding, he’s fighting to get restrictions lifted; and he’s successful at it.
Earlier this year, Zwicky convinced the city of Green Bay to lift the skating ban on the 25 mile urban path known as Fox River Trail.
Zwicky is trying to change the stereotypes about skaters.
“Wanted to break that down and show people that skateboarders aren’t just punk kids causing trouble, they are all kinds of people in the community, and they’re even your police force,” Officer Zwicky told KHON 2 News.
I interrupt the flow of postings on cartoons to report on my adventures in sporting enthusiasm, in particular for teams in the World Cup. In the current round, I had three favorite teams: Mexico (how can you live where I do without supporting Mexico?), Switzerland (the land of my father’s family), and of course the U.S. Everybody lost, though the games had stirring moments.
I’m not up at all on the fine points of soccer, but I enjoy the spectacle.
And now, back to language.
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
Mistaken anemone for mistaken identity. Phonologically distant, but interpretable because mistaken identity is an idiom, a formulaic expression, which is, moreover, appropriate to the context of the cartoon.
A recent One Big Happy:
Ruthie is verbing names of locations: shed, porch. Granting that she’s a cartoon character, we can nevertheless speculate that she’d heard the verb shed and connected it to the familiar noun shed. Then porch by analogy.