In a private corner of Facebook today, this family exchange:
Child A was very busy.
Parent about A: He has an agenda
Child A: I’m not a gender
Parent: An agenda is when you have something you want to do
Child B: A gender is someone who serves food at baseball games
Parent: That’s a vendor
Child C *dies laughing*
And then from another parent:
My kid was so proud she tried cantaloupe at school. “The fruit, not the animal”
Posted in Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones, Word confusions | Leave a Comment »
A recent instance, from Baltimore Sun copyeditor John McIntyre on Facebook today:
At the desk. Converting defective prose into the merely mediocre since 1980.
An earlier parallel, from Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) (co-written with Josef Breuer), as translated by Nicola Luckhurst (2004):
But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
A snowclonic figure of speech, Amelioration of Awful to Ordinary (Amelioration, for short), of the form:
Transformation-Verb Awful (in)to Ordinary
(with transformation verb transform, turn, change, convert, make, rework, etc.)
Posted in Figurative language, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »
Noted on a sign in Dan Gordon’s in Palo Alto yesterday — a place that specializes in barbequed meat, especially brisket and pulled pork. Meanwhile, I like pig butts and I cannot lie, with its double entendre play on butt, has apparently achieved meme status; it’s now available in many forms, including t-shirts from several suppliers:
(#1)
Posted in Double entendres, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Memes, Slang, Snowclonelet composites | 4 Comments »
Passed on by Benita Bendon Campbell, the One Big Happy for yesterday, as it appeared in the Denver Post:
The snowclone Play One, in which the central figure denies that she is an old lady — that’s not how she perceives herself — while conceding that she plays one in real life.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »
Marsupials are from Mars, according to Ruthie in One Big Happy:
Faced with marsupial, which looks like it has Mars as its first element (and sounds pretty close to that), Ruthie chops out the Mars and comes up with a second element upial. So she’s treating the whole word as a N + N compound, which means that upial is the head N, and if the compound is as simple as possible, it’s subsective: a marsupial is then a kind of upial — a variety from Mars.
Ruthie has then given marsupial the demi-eggcorn treatment, analyzing Mars in it and flying with the possibility that upial is an English noun (with a meaning she doesn’t happen to know).
Posted in Compounds, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones | 1 Comment »
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