Archive for the ‘Categorization and Labeling’ Category
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.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and food, Ordinary vs. technical lg, Variation | Leave a Comment »
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
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Posted in Art, Categorization and Labeling, Names, Paradoxes, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »
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.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and food | 1 Comment »
March 11, 2018
Back on December 17th, my posting “Xmas follies 2017: the shirtless men of the season” featured (in #1 and #2 there) pole dancer Domenico Vaccaro, engaging in an activity that is both sport — there are competitions — and art form — performances are scored on aesthetic criteria as well as on the achievement of specific moves. Think of it as ballet with a prop, a prop that allows a dancer to fly suspended in mid-air. Male pole dancers frequently perform shirtless, so they also show off their full bodies, which are aesthetic objects in their own right.
And now, thanks to Kim Darnell, another male pole dancer, the Hungarian Peter Holoda, a great pleasure to watch in action. In a still shot:
(#1) You can watch here a piece of a stunning performance by Holoda to music from the film Schindler’s List, played by Holoda’s frequent collaborator, cellist Tina Guo
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Posted in Art, Categorization and Labeling, Dance, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Music, Shirtlessness | 1 Comment »
March 1, 2018
The Mother Goose and Grimm, from February 21st:
(#1)
A joke playing on use and mention: Grimmy mentions the name of the Oscar-nominated movie Call Me by Your Name, but Ralph understands him to be using the expression call me your your name, so he calls Grimmy Ralph.
That leads us to the movie and so to a thicket of issues about language, sexuality, gender, and the law.
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Posted in Art, Books, Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, Language and sexuality, Language and the law, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, My life, Technical and ordinary language, Use and mention | 5 Comments »
December 1, 2017
It starts with a Zippy strip from July 1st, featuring the Maple Donuts shop on Historic Lincoln Highway in York PA (and, incredibly, it will end with singings of the Negro National Anthem; in between, there will be firearms):
(#1) Maple Donuts, featured a number of times in Zippy strips
It might not be an accident that the strip appeared a few days before America’s great patriotic holiday, Independence Day / the Fourth of July. To see why, we need to look at the actual Maple Donuts store.
That will take us, on the one hand, to the adjoining coffee shop; and, on the other hand, to proud, unapologetic assertions of identities.
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Posted in Apologies, Categorization and Labeling, Diners, Flags, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and food, Music, Names, Race and ethnicity, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
November 8, 2017
Q: Did they ever have anatomic war?
A: Have you never heard of the great Anatomic War and one of its signal encounters, the 1346 Battle of Extremities, in which the Phalanges, with their long bones, overwhelmed the armored Carpals and Metacarpals?
(#1) Phalanges shooting down the Carpal and Metacarpal forces
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Derivation, Language and the body, Metaphor, Mishearings, Morphology, Movies and tv, Ordinary vs. technical lg | Leave a Comment »
November 5, 2017
Today’s Bizarro:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip — see this Page.)
Hairstyles; baked goods, including buns, rolls, and loaves; buttocks; and of course Monty Python’s lupin(e) bandit Dennis Moore
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Language and food, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Metaphor, Movies and tv | 1 Comment »
October 27, 2017
It started a while back with a pair of morning names: Ixia and Sparaxis. Two showy bulbs, united by the letter X. They led to (in alphabetical order) Chionodoxa, Cyanixia, Hesperoxiphon, Ixiolirion, Oxalis, Xenoscapa. And from Hesperoxiphon, through its sword-bearing component (Gk. xiphos ‘sword’), to Xiphion, which we know now in its Latin version Gladiolus.
Along the way, some reflections on categorization and labeling in the plant world.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Inflection, Language and plants, Morning names, My life, Ordinary vs. technical lg | 1 Comment »
October 20, 2017
Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine:
(#1) 10/19/17
My comment on Facebook: “A double doleful “Awww”. One for panel 3, one for panel 4.” Pig cries out for help in the third panel, Rat sympathetically stands with his friend in the fourth.
Then discussion took us to Lucy and Charlie Brown in Peanuts (and incidentally to Calvin and Hobbes in their eponymous strip), and so to Peanuts artist Charles Schulz, and so to Santa Rosa CA, where Schulz lived and worked from 1969 until his death in 2000, and so to the geographical and cultural regions of northern California (the North Coast / Redwood Empire, the Wine Country, and the North (San Francisco) Bay), in all of which Santa Rosa is by far the biggest town.
Santa Rosa is in the news because of the devastation there in the current spate of wildfires in northern California. The Charles Schulz Museum there was spared, but the family house (with all of its memorabilia) was completely incinerated. The cartoon in #1 is pretty clearly Pearls artist Stephan Pastis’s homage to Schulz in these terrible times.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Context, Geography, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Pragmatics, Sociocultural conventions | Leave a Comment »
