Archive for the ‘Categorization and Labeling’ Category

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Sticks and cubes

July 4, 2018

It’s all about measuring butter. I said to Kim (who was preparing for a grocery run tomorrow) that I could use a stick of butter for cooking, and she was surprised: “I thought you’d say cube, not stick.” Me: “I don’t think I’ve ever said cube of butter in my life. It sounds weird to me.” So of course we went searching, and found considerable confusion.

Quite a few people asked what cubes of butter were; that means they’d somehow come in contact with the usage. They got two very confident, but very different, answers:

cube-1: a synonym of stick, where stick is as in this NOAD definition (essentialy the same as OED3’s):

noun stick: US a quarter-pound [4-oz.] rectangular block of butter or margarine.

cube-2: a quarter-stick of butter, hence (at least roughtly) a 1-oz. cube of butter

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Prototype semantics, Semantics | 10 Comments »

The musician, the mayor, his instrument, and their vermin

June 24, 2018

The Bizarro/Wayno collaboration on the 21st is another exercise in cartoon understanding (but a relatively easy one):


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

You need to know the basic outline of a European legend (the major clues to which are the reference to ridding a town of rats and the unusual word pied in the title), and you need to know something about musical instruments (to recognize that the sousaphone — named in the title — plays the role of the (musical) pipe in the legend).

Then there’s more to be said about the parallels between the cartoon world and the legend world, with special reference to wind instruments (of which the sousaphone is the largest). Which leads me to the rich world of the legend and its connection to the real world. And the fictivity of stories; there’s a fair amount of factuality, or at least real-world context, in the legend. And from there — surprise! —  to St. John and Paul’s Day next week (June 26th). And from there — another surprise! —  to eunuchs and the social world of the Roman Empire.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Holidays, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Narrative, Pop culture, Technical and ordinary language, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

The Calvin Klein pentachromatic neon rainbow

June 13, 2018

CK special for Pride Month:

(#1)


(#2) Pride Trunks

In five neon colors: pink, yellow, lime green, aquamarine, dark blue.

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Color, Flags, Homosexuality, Signs and symbols, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

There oughta be a word

May 16, 2018

Darya Kavitskaya on Facebook yesteday:

This is sour cherry clafoutis. No more food for today.

I commented:

I think French needs a verb clafouter ‘to cook a clafoutis; to devour a clafoutis’.

Come to think of it, I could use an English verb clafoute /kla’fut/ with these senses:

I think I’ll clafoute for tonight’s dessert. Maybe plum.

Terry piggishly clafouted. Seven at a sitting!

To come: a reminder about what clafoutis is; about the forms of the invented French verb clafouter; on “having no word for” some concept; about needing — or at least wanting — a word for it; about the ambiguity of these invented verbs (both ‘to cook’ and ‘to eat’); about the source of such ambiguities in marker-poor combinations of elements (lacking explicit indicators of the semantic relationship between the elements — there’s nothing in French clafouter or English clafoute to indicate the semantic role of the referent of their subjects, as creator or consumer); and about the motivation for marker-poor combinations, in a drive for brevity (vs. clarity). French and English could be clearer, less ambiguous — I’ll illustrate with still more invented French verbs — but only at the cost of greater length and effort.

All this from (delicious) French sour cherry flan.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Brevity vs. Clarity, Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Conversion, Derivation, French, Language and food, Metonymy, Morphology | Leave a Comment »

Differentiae

May 11, 2018

Today’s Bizarro/Wayno collaboration:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

It all depends on your knowing the classic text, from the introduction to the tv show Adventures of Superman (1952-1958):

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »

What have you done with your life?

May 10, 2018

An innocent-sounding request a few days back, from a Daily Beast reporter on its lgbt beat: [I’m] “working on a series of interviews with unsung (or, at least undersung) LGBT heroes. … I’m wondering if you’d be interested in being interviewed about your contributions to linguistics?”

Two claims here: I’m a person of significance in a professional field, linguistics; I’m a person of significance in the lgbt world. I am now asked to defend these claims, to demonstrate that I have done important things in both these areas of my life.

Difficult fieldwork moments in the linguistics-lgbt interface

This is where I curl into a ball of misery, in two ways at once. What have I done with my life, that people should read about me? I’m very proud of what I’ve done, in the academic world and the lgbt world, but I’m not even remotely a magisterial figure, a Great Person, in either. Sigh.

Reflections on my academic work to come. There will be lists. Long lists. I can’t promise quality, but quantity I can deliver.

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Linguistic theory, My life, Terminology, Words and things | Leave a Comment »

Four things are two binary oppositions

May 8, 2018

From Bitty Ramirez on Facebook:

It is really unusual to have a K-12 lesson that allows discussion of dice and playing cards. This may be the first time I’ve encountered it. And I am finding it really disconcerting that the writer keeps dividing suits by color instead of by major/minor.

This was at first completely baffling to me: major/minor?

It turned out to be significant that Bitty is a bridge player, and I am not. Major/minor is a thing in bridge.

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Fiction, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

CAKE-PIE II

May 3, 2018

I turn now from deserts (the plants at Stanford’s cactus garden, in a series of recent postings) to desserts.

This is the first in a series of follow-ups to my 4/29 posting “All the dessert world is not either cake or pie”, about the categorization and name of a strawberry dish made by Stephanie Shih’s friend Darya Kavitskaya. Darya called it a pie, but Steph insisted it was better labeled as cake. On looking at a picture of the dish (#2 in that posting), I identified it as a strawberry clafoutis, a crustless dessert of strawberries baked in a thick custardy flan-like batter (#3 in that posting) — something distant from both canonical cake and canonical pie. Hence the title of that posting.

But now Darya has sent me the recipe, and I see that it’s not a clafoutis at all, but in fact a fruit pizza, with a sweet base crust and a strawberry topping.

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and food, Ordinary vs. technical lg, Variation | Leave a Comment »

All the dessert world is not either cake or pie

April 29, 2018

Steph Shih on Facebook today:

There is this dessert that Darya [Kavitskaya, who is natively Russian, which will eventually become important, but not in this posting] sometimes makes and she calls it a “pie” when really I insist it falls better into the category of a “cake”. So finally today, I drew this.

(#1) Steph’s objection framed as a Magrittean disavowal (it’s obviously a pie, but… — except that for Steph, it just isn’t a pie)

But, as it turns out, it’s not much of a cake either, as most people use that label these days. It looks a lot like a clafoutis, but most of you won’t even know that name — for anything, much less a fruit flan (a term also unknown to most of you).  Unlike pie and cake, clafoutis and flan are specialized cooking terms

(more…)

Posted in Art, Categorization and Labeling, Names, Paradoxes, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »

chicken fried chicken

April 12, 2018

The subject of a somewhat confused exchange on Facebook a few days ago. Jeff Shaumeyer on the 9th:

(#1)

We were at the Safeway this weekend, when I saw this. I’m still perplexed by the idea of “chicken fried chicken”.

Chris Waigl on the source of the perplexity:

“Chicken fried steak” (I was taken aback by this one, too, at first) means “steak fried in the manner of fried chicken”. So “chicken fried chicken” would be “chicken fried in the manner of fried chicken”. That is, fried chicken.

Well, no. Chicken fried steak doesn’t mean ‘steak fried in the manner of fried chicken’; it’s the name of a dish, a fried steak preparation that resembles in some ways Southern fried chicken. As I hammer home again and again, Labels Are Not Definitions.

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and food | 1 Comment »

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