Archive for the ‘Ambiguity’ Category

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Los Futbolitos

August 18, 2026

Encountered a while back via Facebook, this YouTube video:


[text:] Los Futbolitos, es un dúo de youtubers dominicanos, compuesto por Ángelo Valdés, alias “Will” y Vincent Peréz, en el que se dedican a hacer videos sobre fútbol y debatiendo sobre esto ultimo. [Valdés and Peréz make videos about soccer / football and debate about it]

So: we’ve got the noun (el) futbolito ‘football / soccer guy’, a derivative of (el) fútbol ‘football, soccer’, with the diminutive suffix –it-; immediately, there’s the question of how this noun gets this sense.

And I note that Spanish has another noun (el) futbolito ‘foosball’ — which, startlingly, is also alluded to in the photo: that’s a foosball game just under the title. How does this noun get its sense?

And then that Spanish has another derived noun denoting foosball: (el) futbolín, with another diminutive suffix, -ín (for the musically inclined reader, it’s the Spanish counterpart of Italian –ín-: from Don Giovanni, Se vuol ballare, signor Contino ‘if you want to dance, my little count, …’)

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Posted in Ambiguity, Italian, Language and sports, Lexical semantics, Metonymy, Spanish, Variation | Leave a Comment »

The usual slogan

July 25, 2026

(Extensive reference to men’s private parts, occasionally in street speech, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

From my 7/23 posting “Small worlds”, in an anecdote (from 1990) about my man Jacques and me:

to reverse the usual slogan, [Jacques] treats me as not only a great piece of meat but also as an especially wonderful human being. This is ridiculously sweet. Unrealistic but sweet.

The usual slogan is about men as meat. Some details.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans | Leave a Comment »

The seeds of rye bread lie deep in 19th-century England

June 2, 2026

(not the cartoonist’s fault, but my discussion veers occasionally onto fellatio, in vulgar street language, and that’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)

The Pearls Before Swine strip of 5/31, Stephan Pastis’s farewell to the month of May, devoted to one of his outrageously complex jokes (it’s so off-the-wall intricate that Rat, one of his characters, takes to protesting against it):


Three contributions: (1) the joke genre (the setup / payoff formula pun); (2) the English verb succeed, homophonous with suck seed; and (3) the familiar proverb, popularized by William Edward Hickson in 19th-century England: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again — all the while skirting (4) the sexual collocation suck seed (with seed ‘semen, cum’), a variant of suck cum

On to the four contributions.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Rhyme, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Not knowing

May 8, 2026

Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin in the Point / Counterpoint segment on Saturday Night Live: Jane would make some serious point, only to be dismissed by Dan with a response beginning “Jane, you ignorant slut”

This posting is about not knowing, about ignorance — but not about the ignorance of “Jane, you ignorant slut” (call this ignorant, sense a), instead the ignorance of my helper Isaac, who turned out to be ignorant of the Great Depression (call this ignorant, sense b); well, he’s Fijian and more than a generation younger than me. On the two senses, see NOAD:

adj. ignorant: [a] lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated: he was told constantly that he was ignorant and stupid. [b] [predicative] lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about a particular thing: they were ignorant of astronomy. …

Unfortunately, the odium of sense a tends to overwhelm the simple not knowing of sense b (negative associations tend to crowd out positive ones). Meanwhile, I am famously ignorant of almost everything having to do with sports, while also being famously knowledgable about a few things having to do with language.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Lexical semantics, My life | Leave a Comment »

Funeral flowers for Mr. Shimmer

May 2, 2026

In this cartoon from the latest (5/4/26) New Yorker, Ms. Duck and Ms. Rabbit mourn their versatile paramour, Mr. Shimmer the duck-rabbit (or rabbit-duck); see my 8/24/25 posting “Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping”, and reflect on versatile gay men, who are bottoms or tops, depending on how you approach them:


(#1) The widows weep for their bi-stable beloved; meanwhile, the famous illusion that lies at the very center of their world turns out to be a lifelong preoccupation of the cartoonist

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Posted in Ambiguity, Cartoonists, Death and dying, Illusions, Language and animals, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Parody, Perception, Work | Leave a Comment »

The sno cone

April 18, 2026

Yesterday’s (4./17) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon shows two snowmen conferring:


Left Snowman reassures Right Snowman that the frozen confection that they are eating in a cone (“fruit-flavored crushed ice” (NOAD)) is not in fact snow — that would smack of, ick, cannibalism — but instead sno, a substance that merely resembles snow (Wayno’s title for the cartoon is Faux Cone); it’s just a sno cone / sno-cone (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »

Over-sensitive ambiguity alarms

April 17, 2026

As I regularly point out on this blog: if you look for it, ambiguity is everywhere; almost any expression can be understood in multiple ways, especially if you’re willing to entertain preposterous or unlikely ideas. So if you had a device that detects every possible ambiguity, it would be ringing forever and driving everyone crazy.

People typically fail to notice most of the possibilities, and then disregard the unlikely ones they do entertain (there’s evidence that most people hearing the word straw entertain, for a fleeting moment, both the interpretations ‘dried stalk of grain’ and ‘hollow tube for sucking a drink’ — even in The straw was mixed with hay and The straw was fabricated from plastic). So most ambiguity lies beneath the level of consciousness.

But some people have become accustomed to listening to and looking for details of language use — it’s one of the things they do — and so are inclined to have over-sensitive ambiguity alarms. Their ambiguity alarms are as a kind of occupational hazard. I am such a person, by profession. I have had to learn to suppress commentary on much of what I notice, because the details aren’t important for most people, though occasionally I’ll cite something that entertains me.

My friend Tim Evanson is also such a person, and since he’s a prodigious writer on Facebook, we get to see his ambiguity alarm in action. On 4/13, he citex a headline from Crain’s Cleveland Business:

CFO [is] named for Akron’s Trailhead Foundation (call this CCB)

And then quipped:

So, I have an etiquette question: Do we refer to her as “Ms. Trailhead”? Or as “Ms. Akron Trailhead”?

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Posted in Ambiguity, Extraction, Lexical semantics, Modification, Pragmatics, Syntax | 3 Comments »

human urinal

April 8, 2026

(a brief note about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

The hybrid. From “The Human Urinal” episode of MEN.com’s The Men’s Room DVD (the first scene (of 5) on my recently arrived copy of the 2/26 DVD:

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Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Form and function, Gay porn, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

Adventures in reading

March 24, 2026

Two reports on abilities and disabilities in reading. One from my own experience in reading Finnish (a language I don’t speak, though I have a fair amount of linguist’s knowledge about the language, its structure, and its writing system). The other from our overlord Grabpussy’s approach to reading English (his native language, indeed the only language he can speak). I’ll suggest that the two of us are more alike in our abilities and disabilities than you might have thought.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and politics, Language and thought, Morality, Reading | Leave a Comment »

The travails of etymology

March 7, 2026

Thoughts inspired by a comment by Robert Coren on my 3/6 posting “Checking out”, in which I responded darkly to the information from a grocery-delivery service that you can:

Add items until your shopper checks out

by understanding the intransitive phrasal verb check out in it not as the intended sense

To complete the procedure required in order to register one’s departure from a location or venue, esp. a hotel, at the end of a stay or visit. Also more generally: to leave, to depart. [OED‘s 1b for check out]

but as OED‘s 4a ‘to die’. RC offered a speculation on the etymology of the mortal sense of a different intransitive phrasal verb with out, peg out:

4a reminds me of a phrase that I encountered in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, where “peg out” is used as a colloquialism for “die”; I assume that (1) it comes from the process of being victorious in a cribbage game (which makes it a rather odd metaphor, actually), and (2) it was standard usage among some portion of the British population in the early 20th century.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Etymology, Etymythology, Humor, Movies and tv, Toys and games | 7 Comments »

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