Author Archive

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The same great classic rock

April 8, 2024

☀️ 🌑 for Solar Eclipse Day, Sisyphus and drive-time DJs intersect in a Venn diagram, where they generate a wonderful even-handed pun:


(#1) The hinge is the ambiguous NP great classic rock; what Sisyphus and drive-time DJs share — what’s in the area in the diagram that represents the intersection of the categories in the two circles — is that they’re people who bring you the same great classic rock every night (but in two different senses of the great classic rock)

We understand what the categories are in a Venn diagram from the labels on the intersecting circles and on the areas of their intersection, which are meant to be informative (and clear in their reference). But of course the labels are expressions in some language, which means that ambiguous expressions can be exploited for a joke. As in #1.

(#1 came to me on Facebook from from pun enthusiast Susan Fischer, the syntactician and psycholinguist specializing in sign languages; the ultimate source is the vox + stix website, on which see below)

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Philosophy, Puns, Riddles, Signs and symbols, Slang, Words and things | 4 Comments »

Urgently singing the hidden homoeroticism of cowboys

April 7, 2024

Poignantly noted on Facebook on Friday by Earl Jackson, a just-released video of Orville Peck and Willie Nelson joined in a moving performance of “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other”, which you can view here.

Actually, you should view it before reading on with this posting, even if — maybe especially if — you’ve never heard of Ned Sublette’s wry 1981 song, which has been something of a Willie Nelson project for two decades now (he recorded a version of it in 2006) and even if you’ve never heard of the young gay country singer who performs, masked, under the name Orville Peck. Enjoy the song — which is more complex than might at first appear — and the performance, with Peck’s warm, strong country voice paired with Nelson’s raspy but equally strong country voice (a real marvel for a 90-year-old), and Orville’s deep seriousness paired with Willie’s sweet but earnest smiles. So you should listen to their performance, but you should also watch it.


(#1) From the YouTube video: Orville and Willie under a tree, out in the middle of a fenced field, singing and strumming in celebration of gay desire and coupling — urgently conveying a social and political message

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Music | 2 Comments »

I am a camera

April 6, 2024

No, I’m not roaming inter-war Berlin like Christopher Isherwood, passive, recording; I am not a figurative camera. But I now wield a camera, an alarmingly small digital camera that does so many things it’s hard to figure out how to just, as they say, point and shoot, and then download the pictures to my computer so I can show them to you. It’s taken me several days, but I have managed two photos on subjects of interest. A bright red amaryllis blooming on my worktable (one of five waxed amaryllis bulbs I got in a post-Valentine’s Day sale at Holland Bulbs of Holland MI). And five tiny (just over an inch long) brass castings of motos-couples getting it on in an assortment of positions (tiny, but with fingers and simple facial expressions) — entertaining artwork, shown here watched over by a fabulous portrait sketch by John Singer Sargent (which has its own sexy story). (But definitely sexy, so I suppose that #2 is off limits for kids and the sexually modest.)

Here are the shots, and then very brief commentary.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language of sex, Technology | 4 Comments »

La machine à comprendre les femmes

April 5, 2024

From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook yesterday, this Tintin panel (whose specific source I do not know), in which Tintin and Capt. Haddock finally reach the famous machine for understanding women:


bon sang!, Capt. Haddock exclaims (literally ‘good blood’, used as an exclamation covering a range of high affect: roughly ‘Damn it!’); and Tintin prefaces his announcement of their amazing find with alors voila enfin ‘here it is finally’

La célềbre machine is a monster of science-fantasy invention, the sort of unimaginably intricate device that might revivify corpses, transport people through time, or launch a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth. But this one is devoted to understanding women, as if this project were on a par with revivifying corpses, transporting people through time, and launching a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth.

Men! I cry out, peevishly, at the ways of normative masculinity. As women and gay men are given to doing (often together, since many of our annoyances are shared).

(more…)

Posted in AI, French, Gender and sexuality, Language and the sexes, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | 2 Comments »

The pictures of Dorian Todd Yeager

April 3, 2024

[Sexy guy. scarcely clothed, so not to everyone’s taste.]

Visual artists — at least those who think of themselves as Artists, creating fine art (for its own sake), in the art world — tend to be elusive folk: hiding behind pseudonyms, performing elaborate presentations of themselves, concealing biographical information in the belief that they should be judged on their art alone, producing accounts of what their art is about that are either bafflingly abstraction-laden or sophomorically jokey, giving their works unhelpful titles, making information about their works hard to come by, and so on. (In my experience, illustrators, cartoonists, and craft artists are considerably more approachable.)

Which brings me to the subject of my 3/27 posting “With hooves and horns” (assembled after considerable wrangling with sources), which looked at

the male art of the young NYC artist Todd Yeager … Especially devoted to faun / satyr / goat-god Pan images …, male buttocks and penises, and loving male couples …. Also to self-portraits of many kinds; well, he’s a good-looking hunky young man who can do pensive or flagrantly sexy, as it suits him. Here’s a sexy one: boots, buttocks, and profile. ..:


(#1) Self-portrait in jockstrap and boots (not dated)

The painting shows a young man I judge to be in his 30s. Meanwhile, the young man categorization comes from Yeager writing about himself in the Advocate magazine website on 2/16/21  — only three years ago — in “Spring Brings Hooves and Horns From Todd Yeager”:

Todd is a working artist in New York City who has been exhibiting in galleries for a surprising number of years considering what a young man he is.

But then the age thing started to unravel.

(more…)

Posted in Argument structure, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Lives | 2 Comments »

A monument of mail vacuity

April 3, 2024

In today’s solicitation e-mail — I get an enormous amount of this crap — a monumentally vacuous offer from a source that, despite a superficial appearance of legitimacy, turns out to be equally suspect.

The mail as it came to me, with only the dummy name of the sender suppressed:


These days, the solicitation e-mail I get mostly takes advantage of AI resources to refer to specific content on my blog, making it appear that some actual person has read this material, but NN’s message steadfastly avoids all specificity, in favor of empty fawning

A truly stunning performance.

(more…)

Posted in Style and register, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

The Ruthie versions

April 2, 2024

An old One Big Happy strip, recently up in my comics feed, has Ruthie once again coping with vocabulary unfamiliar to her:

Cirque du Soleil (presumably pronounced in English, as if it were Sirk do sew-lay), obstetrician, and false alarm (which Ruthie takes to be circus ole, lobstertrician, and fossil arm, respectively). These are three different cases, as I’ll explain below.

But then — knowing that in the world around her, different people have different pronunciations for expressions — she takes her mother’s intended corrections of her creative misinterpretations to be just repetitions of them (“Mom always repeats the stuff I say”), but with a pronunciation alternative to hers. Attempted corrections of kids often run aground in similar ways.

(more…)

Posted in Dialects, Linguistics in the comics, Phonetics, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Stock expression goes country

April 1, 2024

A real-life example of the LWYDW stock expression I looked at in my earlier posting today (“I love what Scrivan did with the rabbit pun”, here), in a poignant love song by the country / country pop group Rascal Flatts: “Love What You’ve Done With The Place”, on their Back To Us album (2017):


Refrain from the song, in which a guy details the touches of his lover’s presence in his place

(more…)

Posted in Music, Stock expressions | Leave a Comment »

Love what Scrivan did with the rabbit pun!

April 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, 🃏 🃏 🃏 three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and 🌼 🌼 🌼 three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:


(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”

Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Color, Constructions, Dancers, Formulaic language, French, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Puns, Signs and symbols, Speech acts, Stock expressions, Style and register, Syntax | 1 Comment »

Stand Up To Hate

April 1, 2024

That’s what the fuzzy sign said that was being passed around on Facebook, in appreciation of its unintended ambiguity: it’s supposed to be exhorting us to oppose hate (with noun hate), but it could be telling us to do our hating on our feet (with verb hate); consider some parallels in which the N and V readings are pulled apart:

Stand Up To Hatred [N reading]  OR  Stand Up To Execrate [V reading, with understood object]

Stand Up To Yelling [N]  OR  Stand Up To Yell [(intransitive) V]

Stand Up To Urination [N]  OR  Stand Up To Urinate [ (intransitive) V]

I’ll look at the ambiguity in detail in a little while. But first some words about slogans, like the one on that fuzzy sign.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Constructions, Emoji, Lexical semantics, Semantics, Signage, Slogans, Slogans, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »