Archive for the ‘Count & Mass’ Category

The Zits Halloween substance massification comic

October 29, 2023

For the pre-Halloween weekend, today’s Zits comic strip shows Jeremy (driving his car) and his buddy Pierce on a holiday errand for Jeremy’s mother; there is some dispute as to exactly how Connie Duncan (J’s mother) framed her instructions:


Did she ask for lots of pumpkins — using the PL[ural] C[ount] noun pumpkins — or for lots of pumpkin — using the (SG) M[ass] noun pumpkin ‘expanse of pumpkin substance’ (a special-use M counterpart of the C noun pumpkin)?

I have to say that I was not expecting to find an arcane C>M conversion — of the sort I’ve labeled substance massification — as the hinge in a Zits joke, but there it is, a wonderful holiday present for the ordinary working linguist. It certainly warmed my morning (which is now autumnally cold; as of yesterday I’m back in flannel shirts).

(more…)

Posted in Count & Mass, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »

The fruitcake and the meze

April 24, 2022

The fruitcake is a metaphor, applied first of all here to  my 4/20 posting “Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!” — a huge, complex mixture of writing about joy, playfulness, sex, story-telling, intertwined narrative, human nature, memory, artistic performance, Purcell, Jeremiah Clarke, Mendelssohn, Shakespeare, Schubert, Mozart, my life as a child, Lenore Barth and her family, my life with Ann Daingerfield, my life with Jacques Transue, my despair at the evil in the world, and, oh Christ, much more. All compounded together in such a way that no individual topic can easily be pulled out of the mixture. Like a fruitcake.

(You then get the allusion to (offensive) fruit ‘male homosexual’ for free.)

And then this metaphor applied to personal identities, most pointedly mine. Also enormously complex mixtures, a fact merely hinted at my assertions in the 4/20 posting:

I am a prole, proud of it, a union guy from the age of 17 on; I am also a distinguished university professor and all that other good shit.

And then, and then, and then … I am in fact a giant fruitcake of identities, and so are you (just not the same ones).

What about a metaphor counterposed to the fruitcake metaphor? In particular, how do we characterize postings that present pretty much one thing at a time, with the understanding that the postings are parts of some larger assemblage?

(more…)

Posted in Count & Mass, Language and food, Metaphor | Leave a Comment »

Mornings and mangelwurzels

October 18, 2015

Saturday’s morning name: mangelwurzel, the root vegetable. A beet by another name, a really big beet.

(#1)

Fodder beet: Beta vulgaris subsp. vulgaris var. crassa

(more…)

Posted in Count & Mass, Language and food, Language and plants, Names | Leave a Comment »