Two recent One Big Happy strips, in which Ruthie wades into interpreting unfamiliar expressions (bulrush, Israelite) and interpreting one familiar expression (doggie bag) in a non-standard way.
Archive for the ‘Etymology’ Category
Ruthie copes: Moses and the doggie bag
July 9, 2017Light, and sometimes mixed
May 25, 2017It started with Chris Hansen posting this London bus ad on Facebook:
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On the bus:
IT’S SMOOTHIFIED.
WE’RE AMERICAN.
WE CAN MAKE UP WORDS.NOW IN THE UK
So: about the morphology; about the advertising tactic; and about the beer.
Emily Rizzo then threw this into the mix:
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with chelada (a variant of michelada), a type of beer cocktail — that is, a mixed drink with beer as one of its ingredients.
Chenillar moments, including frass and lepidopterism
May 14, 2017Two caterpillar notes, an old one and a very recent one.
First, from a Language Log posting of mine from 6/2/06:
As for the oak moths, we’ve been exceptionally afflicted by them this spring at Stanford — a rain of caterpillars [California Oakworms, Phryganidia californica], then masses of cocoons, and now clouds of moths. Ick. Susie Fork [posting on the Elkhorn Slough site], however, sounds pretty pro-moth. Well, the Elkhorn Slough staff seem to value all the organisms they study. But then they don’t have to live with clumps of cocoons disfiguring the pieces in the New Guinea Sculpture Garden, the way we do.
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Then from a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden last week:
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On the boulevard of broken dreams with Kip Noll
March 26, 2017(There will be plain-talking discussion of men’s bodies and sexual practices of several kinds, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The boulevard in question is Sepulveda Boulevard (my morning name for Friday), part of which is a piece of the Pacific Coast Highway, the locus of William Higgins’s 1981 gay porn flick of that name (PCH), starring Kip Noll. Meanwhile, what we know of Noll’s life involves a substantial career in all kinds of sex work, including a lot of work as a dance hall boy, that is, a male stripper for men, and almost surely work as an escort for men, that is, as a male prostitute or stud hustler — two occupations that fit senses of the label gigolo (originally the masculine version of a French term for ‘dance hall girl’, and then ‘prostitute’). Which brings us to “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, a song that refers to “gigolos and gigolettes” — male and female prostitutes — strolling on a Parisian boulevard. (This is in France, and in a pop culture fantasy, two places where hustlers and hookers are regularly construed as picturesque rather than socially dysfunctional; a similar example, the movie Gigolette, is to come below.)
These investigations wil eventually take us to picturesque locations in Spain (where the Sepulvedas come from) and also to “the dark, underground world of a New York City gigolo”, as presented in Michael Lucas’s penis-heavy gay porn flick Gigolos (2007). A long distance from the sunny surfer beaches of southern California, but Noll eventually danced his dick off (and probably sold it as well) on the mean streets of New York.
Morning: spanakopita
February 23, 2017Spanakopita was the morning name some weeks ago, and then this morning the bon appétit site offered instructions on how to “make spanakopita pie”, with a yummy photo:
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The full instructions, which are pretty complex, amount to:
make the spinach filling (using frozen spinach), prepare the phyllo pastry (using frozen phyllo), assemble, bake
The result, seen above, is spanakopita:
(in Greek cooking) a phyllo pastry stuffed with spinach and feta cheese. ORIGIN modern Greek, literally ‘spinach pie.’ (NOAD2)
Bring out your lukewarm etymythologies
October 26, 2016The instructions said to use lukewarm water, and Kim, being a linguist, wondered about the luke of lukewarm; we don’t, after all, have luke + anything else, even lukecool, lukecold, or lukehot. I said that she wasn’t going to be satisfied with the standard story, and she wasn’t. A brief version, from NOAD2:
(of liquid or food that should be hot) only moderately warm; tepid. ORIGIN late Middle English: from dialect luke (probably from dialect lew ‘lukewarm’ and related to lee [‘shelter from wind or weather’]) + warm
This account is suppositious, and unclear on many points (what dialects, how, and why? and is lukewarm really etymologically ‘lukewarm’ + warm?). So it occurred to us to just invent more satisfying etymologies — or, better, to invite others to invent them, to devise etymythologies. This is that invitation: to suggest better stories than the truth (as far as we know the truth), IN A COMMENT ON THIS BLOG (I will disregard e-mail to me or Kim and comments on Facebook or Google+ or ADS-L or wherever else; I cannot possibly spend time amalgamating suggestions from half a dozen sources). But before you jump in, read the rest of what I have to say about lukewarm and about etymythology. And, eventually, some suggestions as to what you might use to play with for ideas about lukewarm etymythologies.
A ewer in the morning
August 22, 2016Today’s morning name: ewer. An eminently useful object that has received the attentions of designers for millennia, craftsmen who lavished their skills on these objects to create items of great beauty. for instance;
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Morning spunk: same word, different word
May 27, 2016In a sense, a re-play of an earlier posting, “spunk” of 3/16/11, which was about spunk ‘spirit, mettle, courage, pluck’ vs. spunk ‘semen, seminal fluid’. Now spunk appeared as a morning name for me a few days ago, along with the ‘pluck’ context of the interview between Mary Richards (played by Mary Tyler Moore) and Lou Grant (played by Ed Asner) in the first episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show: Grant: “You’ve got spunk … I hate spunk.”
That led me to NOAD2, where I found a single noun entry with three subentries:
1 informal courage and determination.
2 tinder; touchwood.
3 Brit. vulgar slang semen.
(Note: seminal spunk might be more common in BrE than AmE, but it is scarcely unknown in AmE, as a search will readily confirm.)
Speaking informally, this dictionary presents these three as a single word with three different uses (all of which ae available in my speech), while I would have thought these were three different words which just happened to be identical in spelling and pronunciation. What could possibly unite them?
The gang double
May 14, 2016Today’s Rhymes With Orange (guest cartoon by Rina Piccolo) plays on double and gang, incidentally threading into a bit of etymology:
Wine tartar and Asian tartar
May 4, 2016The One Big Happy in my comics feed today (from April 5th originally), with Ruthie putting together the tartar of dental hygiene (as held in check by toothpaste) and the tartar of tartar sauce, going on the resemblance between toothpaste and the sauce commonly accompanying fish:
Here, Ruthie adopts the widespread attitude that Sound/Spelling Rules: an element with the phonology /tártǝr/ or the spelling TARTAR is “the same word” as any other such element (or, at least, is very closely related to it). The opposed attitude — Sense Rules — is also well-known, as evidenced (for example) in some speakers’ hot denials that gay ‘foolish, stupid, unimpressive’ (NOAD2) has anything to do with gay ‘homosexual’.
In the case of tartar, there are two clearly different etymological sources, one having to do with the production of wine (the ultimate source, believe it or not, of the tartar of dental hygiene), the other with inhabitants of Central Asia (the ultimate source, believe it or not, of the tartar of tartar sauce). This is a case where, spectacularly, etymology is not destiny, the two sources of tartar having each split semantically a number of times, each developing into a collection of elements that have nothing much to do with one another beyond sound/spelling, indeed not much more than the descendants of wine tartar have to do with the descendants of Asian tartar; from the point of view of modern speakers, what we’ve got is either a big assortment of distinct lexical items (if you follow Sense Rules resolutely) or a single lexical item with a big heterogeneous assortment of uses (if you follow Sound/Spelling Rules resolutely) — or something in between.
