Thursday’s memorable morning name was Mitzi Kapture (the actress), Friday’s was Piggly Wiggly (the supermarket).
Archive for the ‘Acting’ Category
Two more morning names
February 6, 2015Bobby Cannavale
January 11, 2015(Not about language, but about acting.)
Caught twice in re-runs of Law & Order episodes recently, the engaging and versatile actor Bobby Cannavale, seen below looking steamy:
(#1)
Jeff Goldblum
December 6, 2014(Not a death notice, but an appreciation.)
An old Law & Order: Criminal Intent went by me this morning, with the tall (6′ 4″) and versatile actor Jeff Goldblum in the role of Detective Zach Nichols. And that brought me to a wonderful GE commercial starring Goldblum that I had somehow missed. Goldblum, shirtless, and with big hair.
Mel Blanc
October 25, 2014Today’s Zippy, a tribute to actor Mel Blanc:
Lots of linguistic interest (not to mention humor) in Blanc.
Bromantics: Pine and Quinto, Kirk and Spock
October 4, 2014(The second item on male homosexuality, gay-straight relations, acting, and the male body — following “Homage to Marky / Mark”. Very little of linguistic interest. Steamy, but not X-rated, images.)
I start with this intense (but fully clothed) photo of actors Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto (sent to me by Chris Ambidge), one of a considerable number of images of this bromantic couple:
(#1)
Whew! Who knew that belt loops could be so hot?
That’s Pine (the straight bro) on the left, Quinto (the gay bro) on the right.
Homage to Marky / Mark
October 4, 2014(The first of two postings with vanishingly little linguistic comment, but plenty of appreciation of male bodies, plus material on the projection of sexuality in photographs. Not technically X-rated, but certainly steamy, so you might want to use your judgment in viewing these postings.)
First, Nick Jonas paying homage (in Flaunt magazine) to the boy-band star and original Underwear God Marky Mark / Mark Wahlberg (hereafter, MM), in this photographic homage to MM’s famous Calvin Klein photos — crotch-grabbing, abs-displaying, flagrantly challenging, and homoerotic all at once.
(#1)
He’s pulled his jeans down just for us!
Elaine Stritch
July 18, 2014In today’s NYT, “Elaine Stritch, Broadway’s Enduring Dame, Dies at 89” by Bruce Weber and Robert Berkvist, beginning:
Elaine Stritch, the brassy, tart-tongued Broadway actress and singer who became a living emblem of show business durability and perhaps the leading interpreter of Stephen Sondheim’s wryly acrid musings on aging, died on Thursday [7/17] at her home in Birmingham, Mich.
queens
June 27, 2014Yesterday I reported on Fortnum & Mason’s use of queen in an advert in support of Gay Pride: “Proud to be the queens’ grocer”, with the plural possessive of the common noun queen, rather than the singular possessive of the proper noun Queen. Not everyone is entirely comfortable with this use of queen, seeing it as an offensive and demeaning slur. But the import of words, even slurs and other problematic vocabulary, depends crucially on context — on who’s using them, in what circumstances, for what purposes. Given that, you can read F&M’s queens’ as affectionate, in fact celebratory.
Original pronunciation
March 21, 2014Many people have written to me recommending a video by David and Ben Crystal on the “Original Pronunciation” (OP) of Shakespeare vs. the Received Standard pronunciation we’re become accustomed to in performances of the Bard of Avon. Fascinating stuff, treated in a Language Log posting by David Beaver of 9/7/13: “Rot and Rot (a really, really rude sex joke)”.
Note that “Original Pronunciation” doesn’t mean the first there was, because that would take us back to Old English and Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European and beyond (insofar as we can imagine beyond). And the terminology is misleading because it suggests that there was only one pronunciation for the characters in the Shakespearean canon; there was unquestionably variation in the pronunciation of characters according to their place in society. But the OP label does highlight differences between current performance practices and the ones of Shakespeare’s time.
However, my point here is not to revive this discussion, but to note that one of my correspondents refers to the variety in question as ancient English, a label students of mine have often used for what is technically Early Modern English (not oven Old English). Well, it’s old, really old, so it must be ancient.
House men
October 27, 2013(Not really about language, but just about popular culture on a Sunday morning.)
Re-runs of House have been going past me this morning. On the show, from Wikipedia:
House (also known as House, M.D.) is an American television medical drama that originally ran on the Fox network for eight seasons, from November 16, 2004 to May 21, 2012. The show’s main character is Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), a drug-addicted, unconventional, misanthropic medical genius who leads a team of diagnosticians at the fictional Princeton–Plainsboro Teaching Hospital … in New Jersey.
The show is formulaic, tying medical drama (with the team running through a series of diagnoses in the face of baffling symptoms) into the seriocomic soap-operatic drama of the characters’ lives.