Archive for the ‘Abbreviation’ Category
August 5, 2020
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with songs you just can’t get out of your head:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
A wonderful collision of worlds, set off by the idiomatic (and colorfully metaphorical) N + N compound earworm: the world of DJs — the ear world (disc jockeys providing sonic pleasures for the ear) — and the world of caterpillars — the worm world (caterpillars being one type of worm in colloquial English).
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Categorization and Labeling, Idioms, Initialisms, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Music, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »
June 24, 2020
Playing with ambiguity:
— a One Big Happy cartoon with: I feel like a tuna fish sandwich
— a domestic exchange about: I will make a dessert of my youth
— a Pearls Before Swine cartoon with: Tell me roughly
— a photograph, labeled Schrödinger’s Dumpster, of a dumpster with the signage: EMPTY WHEN FULL
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Adverbs, Allusion, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Comic conventions, Conlangs, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Signage | 4 Comments »
June 23, 2020
On the occasion of Alan Turing’s birthday today, this release from NPL:
1912 – 1954: Alan Turing’s work was instrumental in placing NPL at the forefront of computer technology.
Turing had already achieved a great deal before he started work at NPL. While at King’s College, Cambridge, he earned a scholarship, Maths Tripos Part II Distinction, fellowship and Smith’s Prize, as well as writing his paper on Computable Numbers. He then moved on to Princeton University and earned his PhD in 1938, before moving back to Cambridge and starting work at the Government Code and Cryptography School in 1939, where he was an essential part of the work to break the German Enigma code.
After the war he moved to NPL in 1945, and produced his plans for the ACE computer in 1946. He worked at NPL on the ACE until he left (after being on leave to Cambridge) in 1948, not long after writing his Intelligent Machinery paper.
Two things here: the identity of NPL; and more on celebrations of Alan Turing.
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Homosexuality, Initialisms, Mathematics, My life | 5 Comments »
April 17, 2020
Background: MSNBC now has a regular feature with a report from Dr. Calvin Sun, a native New Yorker who works as an ER doc in NYC, going to a different hospital each day, filling in wherever he’s needed; on MSNBC, he describes the situation at the ER of the day.
Dr. Sun on tv: earnest, passionate, compassionate, and terribly, terribly weary
Above, I used the familiar, everyday English job title for Dr. Sun: he’s an ER / E.R. doctor, ER doc for short. The formal job title is emergency physician (who practices emergency medicine, in an emergency department).
Meanwhile, I didn’t know any AmE name for a physician who filled in for other doctors as needed.
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Derivation, Language and medicine, Morphology, Names, Titles | 5 Comments »
February 9, 2020
… with figurative roses. Recent gifts to me of many kinds: symbolic roses for me, in accord with a 1/29/20 posting of mine on a line from the Sacred Harp: “Give me the roses while I live” (SH340 Odem (Second)). I’m an old man, currently writing things under the Python Queen of Scots cry “Not Dead Yet”. Meanwhile, I have been given some excellent roses.
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Argument structure, Books, Linguists, My life, Semantics, Social interactions, Syntax | 3 Comments »
January 26, 2020
(In the illustrations section below, there are some racy images; just a warning for the sexually modest.)
From the annals of ambiguity: the Mother Goose and Grimm from the 20th:
(#1)
Both terms of the ambiguity are of interest on their own: short-form location names (as in Men’s Fragrances in Meet us in Men’s Fragrances, with the PP in Men’s Fragrances functioning as a VP adverbial, referring to the place of the meeting) vs. (subject-oriented) predicative adjuncts (as in Meet us without a shirt, with the PP without a shirt functioning to denote some characteristic — here, shirtlessness — of the referent of the subject).
Mother Goose intended the VP location adverbial reading of in Women’s Dresses, where Women’s Dresses is the name of a department in a department store (readers are expected to know, even these days, what department stores are and how they are organized and labeled). The dogs Grimm and Ralph understood instead the predicative adjunct reading of in women’s dresses, and so they appeared wearing women’s dresses, outré though that might be.
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Phallicity, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
January 8, 2020
The Epiphany Rhymes With Orange is an exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1)
Without the title and the comment balloon (on the left), the cartoon is still compensible, and funny — this material adds some extra humorous depth — but none of it works at all unless you know the song.
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Initialisms, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Relativization, Semantics, Syntax, Understanding comics, Variation | 2 Comments »
November 3, 2019
Today’s Bizarro, with yet another unpacking of the initialism BYOB:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 12 in this strip! — see this Page.)
In the conventional initialism, BYOB stands for ‘bring your own bottle / booze / beer / beverage’, but here it’s ‘bring your OB’, where OB /o bi/ is short for — a clipping of — OB-GYN /o bi ǰi waj ɛn/. From NOAD:
noun ob-gyn: abbreviation [pronounced as an initialism] obstetrics and gynecology.
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Clipping, Initialisms, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »
October 25, 2019
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
I’m going in disregard everything in this strip except the B.Z.P.D., presumably an initialistic abbreviation for BiZarro Police Department — the police department in Bizarro’s world. Compare N.Y.P.D., L.A.P.D., and S.F.P.D., just to pick three similar initialisms prominently displayed in tv police dramas. However, this is the first time I’ve noticed the B.Z.P.D. in the Bizarro strip.
The police department in Bizarro’s world then led me to Bizarro World, the dark part of DC Comics’ world that is the mirror-image of Superman’s world.
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Playful morphology | Leave a Comment »
September 12, 2019
E-mail from the Stanford linguistics department on the 10th, under the header:
Save the Date: BOY Party 9/27
Whoa! I thought, conjuring up images of a department party featuring attractive young men — as entertainers (maybe some lesser-known boy bands), as guests of honor (very young up-and-coming NLP entrepreneurs, perhaps), as party staff (a phalanx of Ganymedes, in costume), purely as eye candy (twinks on parade), whatever — things are really loosening up in Margaret Jacks Hall!
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Acronyms, Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Semantics of compounds, Social life, Underwear | 2 Comments »
