Archive for the ‘Etymology’ Category
January 30, 2019
(This posting ends up knee-deep in gay porn, so there will be references to men’s bodies and to mansex, though the X-rated visuals are off in my AZBlogX posting today “Manly Beach”. This material might not suit all readers.)
A Facebook exchange this morning:
Michael Newman [posting a photo on an antipodal vacation]: Notorious [venomous] funnel web spiders? — in Manly, New South Wales, Australia.
Arnold Zwicky: I long ago got used to the place-name Manly, but every so often I see it afresh and giggle.
Michael Newman: I couldn’t help thinking about it the whole time.
The history of the placename Manly is both straightforward and surprising. Manly and nearby Manly Beach then led me to the 1991 Kristen Bjorn gay porn flick Manly Beach (manly mansex among the manly lifesavers of Manly Beach) and to brief notes on facial expressions in gay porn.
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Posted in Etymology, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Placenames | Leave a Comment »
December 19, 2018
The One Big Happy of 11/20, in which, as usual, Ruthie copes with an unfamiliar (semi-)technical term (here, cross section) by extracting a familiar word (here, the cross of irritability) from it:
Ruthie crosses the cross ‘representative’ of cross section with the cross ‘snappish, angry’ of cross words. These are grossly different lexical items in modern English, but in fact they share an etymology that goes back to the noun cross of the hymns “The Old Rugged Cross” and “In the Cross of Christ I Glory”.
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Posted in Etymology, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »
December 8, 2018
On the 5th here, postings on the patron saint of bears and on Swiss saintly dogs (with a bow to the city of Bern(e)). Now: more on Bern; on the movie BearCity; and on two California cities of bears, Big Bear City in San Bernardino County and Los Osos in San Luis Obispo County.
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Posted in Art, Etymology, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Movies and tv, Names, Placenames, Snowclonelet composites, Switzerland and Swiss things | Leave a Comment »
November 29, 2018
Tuesday’s Zippy:
(#1)
Another chapter in word attraction: Zippy’s (and Griffy’s) enjoyment of “funny words”. Here, gargoyle, which Zippy, absurdly, analyzes as a compound of the nouns gar (referring to a kind of sharp-toothed fish) and goyle (a rare, mostly dialectal, term for a deep trench) — so, roughly ‘fish ravine’. Turns out the actual etymology of gargoyle is entertaining enough on its own.
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Posted in Art, Beheading, Books, Clipping, Etymology, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Onomatopoeia, Pop culture, Word attraction | 2 Comments »
November 26, 2018
Tennis, anyone? Croquet, monsieur? Croquette, madame?
I begin in medias res, with croquet monsieur, as used in this announcement on the specials board recently at the King’s College Cambridge servery:
(#1) (photo by Bert Vaux, of King’s, posted on Facebook today)
The staffer who made up the board was presumably unfamiliar with the croque part of the food name croque-monsieur, so they went with the closest thing they knew: croquet. (Well, it was all French to them.) Go With What You Know is the eggcorning strategy of Ruthie in the cartoon One Big Happy, reported on regularly in this blog.Here it is in an adult variant.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Etymology, Language and food, Names, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
November 4, 2018
(Warning: embedded in this posting is a bit of — just barely euphemized — taboo vocabulary and the image of a hunky guy in his underwear.)
From Sim Aberson on 10/29, from WSVN, channel 7 in Miami FL:
BSO deputies arrest Dania Beach man in child porn case
Dania Beach, Fla. (WSVN) – Deputies have arrested a Dania Beach man on numerous child pornography charges.
The Broward Sheriff’s Office arrested 66-year-old Roger Aiudi on Thursday following a months-long investigation by the agency’s Internet Crimes Against Children task force. Investigators said Aiudi had 13 pornographic images of children and dozens of other images showing children in promiscuous positions.
Well yes, not promiscuous ‘having or characterized by many transient sexual relationships’, but provocative ‘arousing sexual desire or interest, especially deliberately’ (NOAD definitions). This is a very likely sort of word retrieval error, since the words are similar phonologically (sharing the accent pattern WSWW and sharing the initial syllable /prǝ/) and morphologically (both ending in Adj-forming suffixes, –ous vs. –ive) as well as semantically.
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Posted in Clitics, Errors, Etymology, Gender and sexuality, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Metaphor, Psycholinguistics, Terminology, Underwear, Word confusions | Leave a Comment »
October 23, 2018
The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed, from 9/26:
(#1)
Ruthie is faced with the task of demonstrating what a word means by using it in a sentence — a task often assigned to children as a test of their understanding of word meanings. But choosing effective example sentences is a challenging art for professional lexicographers, and children are not particularly good at it.
In this case, “the word skate” could be a verb (‘move on ice skates or roller skates in a gliding fashion’ (NOAD)) or any one of several nouns, but, on hearing about her tightwad great-aunt, Ruthie fixes instead on the otherwise opaque /sket/ portion of the compound cheapskate ‘tightwad, miser’ (which she analyzes as a composite nominal cheap skate).
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Posted in Ambiguity, Etymology, Idioms, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Slang | Leave a Comment »
October 6, 2018
Today’s Wayno/Bizarro collab:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
A play on the
NO SHOES / NO SHIRT / NO SERVICE
sign in some restaurants. Here enforced by a maître d’ who’s a (serifed) uppercase B. Suitably serifed uppercase diners fill the seats, while a shirted and shod but sans-serif uppercase T realizes he won’t be served.
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Posted in Etymology, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Typography | Leave a Comment »
July 13, 2018
First, it’s American.
Second, it’s simple, homey food, designed to use tougher and cheaper cuts of beef.
Third, it’s unclear where the modifier Swiss comes from.
Fourth, its preparation involves two cooking techniques that are used in other dishes. One of these is tenderizing and flattening by pounding, a technique also used in the preparation of elegant dishes of veal, beef, pork, or chicken in the Schnitzel / Milanesa family.
Fifth, the other technique is braising: searing meat and then cooking it very slowly with liquid (and, usually, vegetables) in a closed container. Sharing this technique makes Swiss steak and pot roast of beef culinary cousins.
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Posted in Conversion, Etymology, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Onomatopoeia, Subsectivity, Verbing | 3 Comments »
