Today’s One Big Happy has James reciting a piece of American childlore, the taunt “X is a friend of mine” (where X is a name, preferably a trochaic one, like Ruthie, to fit the trochaic tetrameter pattern of the verse):
(#1)
A cornucopia of pop culture references.
Posted in Childhood, Insults, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Poetic form, Poetry, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
Or: Happy Trails to You.
It starts with a Richard Oliva photo in Steathy Cam Men on the 28th, with the caption “Hello, sexy daddy man!”:
(#1)
In leather singlet, displaying his furry pecs and treasure trail.
Posted in Childhood, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language play, Movies and tv, Music, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »
Delivered in the mail yesterday, two big books of stickers from the Melissa and Doug company (I use a lot of stickers on the postcards I send out and on the collages I make): the Pink Collection and the Blue Collection, intended for girls and boys (ages 3+), respectively. Each has ten themed pages, with themes mirroring gender stereotypes for kids.
Posted in Childhood, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »
From Lynne Murphy on Facebook, this Cul de Sac cartoon, which reminded her of her daughter Grover:
The child in the cartoon, Alice, is 4; she’s at the stage of bargaining about the exact choice of words.
Posted in Childhood, Language acquisition, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics | 1 Comment »
(Not about language.)
Assembling a Christmas present for my grand-daughter, I’ve been unearthing and scanning in photos of her Zwicky grandmother. Like my Rice grandfather before me, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky died about 20 years before Opal was born, and Opal’s become curious about this person who was so important in her mother’s life and mine (small voice: “Tell me about my grandmother”). But in this case, there’s photographic evidence — and a great many stories, some of which I’ve been telling here. (There are no photographs of my grandfather Rice, and a very few stories, only via my grandmother, whose husband died when she was in her early 20s; she herself died 50 years ago.)
Posted in Childhood, Not about language, Photography | 4 Comments »
From The Jack Wrangler Story (by Jack Wrangler and Carl Johnes, 1984), p. 30:
… I hadn’t figured all that [that his father was a perfectionist, an achiever, and a pessimist, and had judged his son to be doomed to failure] out by my seventh birthday. I just knew I felt a new sense of uneasiness. The Big Seven. Seven is that point in life where precocious children start writing sonatas, creative children do murals in the bathroom, tough children hit the hard stuff, and healthy, normal children receive birthday cards showing a brown teddy bear holding up a big orange 7. But if you’re growing up in Tinsel Country [L.A.] and your father is a motion picture producer and your mother is glamorous and you have two gorgeous older sisters and you’re skinny and your ears are too big and your hair is so blond and short that you look bald–well, then seven is the time when the heavy insecurities set in permanently.
Posted in Childhood, Social life | Leave a Comment »
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