Author Archive
July 24, 2024
Posted on Facebook on 7/19 by James Fell: a riff of 12 risonyms on the name Benedict Cumberbatch (on the occasion of his 48th birthday) — 12 risible names scattered over a factual, plainly told, account of BC’s life, which begins at the beginning:
Today in history, July 19, 1976, Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch was born in London, England.
and then immediately refers to BC with a preposterous risonym:
Both of Benzedrine Cloacalsplotch’s parents were actors, and his grandfather served as a submarine officer in both world wars.
I’ll reproduce the whole thing below. But first some context.
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Posted in Actors, Jokes, Language play, Names, Phonology, Poetic form, Spelling | 1 Comment »
July 23, 2024
From Sunday’s’s (7/21) New York Times Magazine, in the section “The Ethicist: Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman”:
Angel writes: My co-worker Nick suggested we have a baked-goods potluck at work. I got excited because I have a great baked-mac-and-cheese recipe. But Nick said it wouldn’t count. He says it must be something made with a batter or dough. I disagree!
—–
Many things are baked (potatoes, Brie, Alaska), and like macaroni and cheese, they are good. But they are not “baked goods” in common usage. … In your case, most of the cooking happens outside the oven, and the baking is just a finishing touch. That said, who cares? [and on from there]
Angel has run aground on the shoals of idiomaticity; they suppose that the meaning of baked goods is straightforwardly compositional, ‘goods that have been baked’ — the meaning of the plural noun goods as modified by the meaning of the adjective baked, using the primary senses of the two words. But that won’t fly here, because the nominal baked goods has developed a specialized use, in which it refers to not just any stuff, even not just any foodstuff, that’s been cooked in an oven, but only to breads (and similar foods) and cakes (and similar foods) from an oven. The category of baked goods is expansive, but not so broad as to embrace lasagna, roasted vegetables, baked chicken, baked beans, baked ham, etc. … or mac and cheese.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Compositional semantics, Idioms, Language and culture, Language and food | 1 Comment »
July 22, 2024
For Pied-Piping Day — see my 7/23/13 posting “Pied-Piping Day”, on 7/22 as Ratcatcher’s Day (cue the Pied Piper of Hamelin), with a discussion of pied-piping in syntax — the wonderful French-English pun Philippe Philoppe:
(#1) Punnng on flip-flop ‘a light sandal, typically of plastic or rubber, with a thong between the big and second toe’ (of imitative origin) (NOAD) — currently being passed around on Facebook (I got it first from Susan Fischer yesterday)
As a jokey bonus, the image is a portrait of an actual Philippe — Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans [known as le Petit Monsieur or simply Monsieur] (from Wikipedia: (21 September 1640 – 9 June 1701) the younger son of King Louis XIII of France and Anne of Austria, and the younger brother of King Louis XIV) — as painted by Pierre Mignard (from Wikipedia: (17 November 1612 – 30 May 1695) … a French painter known for his religious and mythological scenes and portraits).
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Posted in Art, Compounds, French, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
July 21, 2024
— For Vicki Fromkin, may her memory never grow less
ATMIDDEDLY for ADMITTEDLY, in my typing up a posting a couple of days ago. Which is, first of all, an (inadvertent) exchange of the consonant letters D and T. And then involves maintaining the positions for single vs. doubled consonant letters, in the frame
Aℒ1MIℒ2ℒ2EDLY (where ℒi is a variable over letters)
A complex error that highlights the kind of mental planning that goes on in writing or typing text: I had to choose the two letters ℒ1 and ℒ2 (and get them in the right order); and at the same time choose which one of them is single and which doubled. (For a refreshing change from some of the other spelling errors I’ve looked at recently, this one has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the positions of the keys on the QWERTY keyboard.)
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Posted in Errors, Language production, Psycholinguistics, Spelling, Typos | 4 Comments »
July 21, 2024
Caption on a photo on the front page of today’s New York Times:
A Somber Procession
First responders at the funeral of a father of two killed in the attack on NN
(where NN stands for the name of 45, TFG, the Orange Menace, Helmet Grabpussy; the attack was an attempted assassination). In principle, the PSP (past participial) phrase at the end of the caption — killed in the attack on NN — could be parsed with the preceding material in (at least) four different ways, as a predicative or in one of three ways as a modifier (which I’ll label VHA (very high attachment), HA (high attachment), and LA (low attachment). I doubt that either of the first two parsings would occur to any normal reader (though a mechanical parser would entertain them), but the last two are more imaginable.
To look ahead: ceteris paribus, LA is the favored parsing, but plausibility in context is a powerful effect and often favors HA. I was lured into understanding the caption with LA and had a lot of trouble shaking that parsing, despite its incongruity with the facts of the situation as I knew them and the real-world unlikelihood of this understanding.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Context, Modifier attachment, Parsing, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax | 2 Comments »
July 20, 2024
In e-mail from Larry Horn on 7/18, this Good News / Bad News (GN/BN) joke cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner from 6/18/24 (in The New Yorker issue of July 1):
“First the good news, Mr. Edmonds: you’re going to get closure.”
(#1) Doctor to patient in hospital, offering the truncated variant of GN/BN, with (the dire) BN omitted (to be supplied by the reader from the context)
This is closure as in sense 3b from NOAD:
noun closure: … 3 [a] a sense of resolution or conclusion at the end of an artistic work: he brings modernistic closure to his narrative. [b] a feeling that an emotional or traumatic experience has been resolved: I am desperately trying to reach closure but I don’t know how to do it without answers from him.
In a GN/BN joke, the GN carries a sting in its tail, made overt in the BN. In #1, the GN is that the patient’s ordeal of illness is coming to an end — by his imminent death (the BN), which nobody says aloud.
Things to talk about. First, GN/BN, as treated in earlier postings on this blog (prominently featuring Larry Horn). Then, another joke form with a sting in its tail, kin to GN/BN: Genie’s Wish.
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Posted in Context, Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics | 3 Comments »
July 19, 2024
From Ruth Lawrence on Facebook yesterday, a version of these meat-shoe photos, which had come to her on the net (the way things are customarily passed around, without sourcing):
(#1) The meat shoes
But since what #1 depicts is clearly the (most entertaining) referent of the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau)
beef Wellington boots = beef Wellington (the food preparation) + Wellington boots (the footwear), referring to (simulacra of) Wellington boots fashioned from beef Wellington
I could quickly track them down to a source —
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Posted in Art, Language and food, Language and the body, Names, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Shoes | 2 Comments »
July 19, 2024
Two Datoro cartoons from the July 22nd New Yorker (the one with Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” — six 45s and three women — on the cover): Joe Dator offering goldfish snacks in a cat bar, Tom Toro offering a summer food pun with a dubious union between plant and animal (interkingdom breeding! quelle scandale!).
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Posted in Ambiguity, Idioms, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Puns, Trade names, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
July 18, 2024
Zippy is known for his enthusiasm for specific words, is given to playing with them in public. Today’s Zippy strip shows our Pinhead drifting happily through six encounters with ball, in the title (In the ballpark) and five times in the text:
(#1) In four idiomatic expressions and then, in panel 3, when we’re set up to expect idiomatic drop the ball ‘make a mistake’, Zippy goes all literal on us by, just, dropping the ball
The four idioms: have a ball, keep one’s eye on the ball, the ball is in someone’s court, take one’s ball and go home. One use of ball ‘formal social gathering for dancing’, followed by three uses of ball ‘spherical object’ in the context of playing games or sports. The effect in the text is to switch from one way of thinking to another: the social gathering image gives way immediately to three game-playing images, and then Zippy gets literal.
Now to look at the lexical resources Bill Griffith is tapping in this strip. But first, a diversion to six actual (game-playing) balls.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
July 18, 2024
Released on the 9th, a cartoon feast of a volume from Sunday Press (in Palo Alto), distributed by Fantagraphics: The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie Bushmiller by Peter Maresca and Brian Walker:
(#1) The cover: all about Nancy — but Sluggo’s not far away, and Ernie’s hovering over them both
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Posted in Art, Books, Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
