Voiceless /hw/ (phonetically [ʍ]) in a surprising place (the name of the artificial whipped cream Cool Whip), a place where even W-WH contrasters like me never have it. Made into a standing joke on The Family Guy. Which will cause me to tell you more about voiceless /hw/ in English than you might have wanted to know.
Archive for the ‘Expressive language’ Category
Cool [ʍɪp]
May 9, 2022The sequel to my allergic ass
May 1, 2022🐇 🐇 🐇 pour le premier mai. A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “My allergic ass”, which was (mostly) about pronominal ass — possessive pronoun + ass, used of a person, to refer not to their buttocks but to that person: his ass ‘he, him’, your ass ‘you’, my ass ‘I, me’.
[Ambiguity may ensue: my ass is warm can mean either ‘my buttocks are warm’ or ‘I am warm’ (you have to figure out from context which was intended); while my ass is heart-shaped is probably about my buttocks (well, I might be Candy Man, shaped like a candy heart), and my ass is allergic is probably about me (though I might conceivably have buttocks afflicted by contact dermatitis).]
Now: through Facebook discussions, two different threads have emerged from that posting: one about material in a long citation in the 2006 Beavers and Koontz-Garboden paper on pronominal ass; the other about the source of the example — my allergic ass — that provoked my posting.
Tramp stamps
March 30, 2021and odalisques (with their erotic lumbar regions, aka lower backs) and rhyming disparagements (like tramp stamp and slag tag). It starts with the Zits comic strip of 3/26:
(#1) The rhyming (and disparaging) idiom tramp stamp had passed by in the fringes of my consciousness, but this strip foregrounds it
Another family food holiday, and alternatives to it
February 3, 2019The Hi and Lois cartoon from 2/7/16:
(#1)
Super Bowl Sunday — today, this year — joins Thanksgiving and Christmas as a holiday that serves as an occasion for gatherings of family and friends plus a spread of characteristic food. A family food holiday, for short.
The SBS holiday crucially involves the Super Bowl football game, for the NFL championship: this year, SB LIII (El Ay Ay Ay!), New England Patriots vs. Los Angeles Rams at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta GA (6:30 ET).
While much of the US population gathers around tv sets for the game, its half-time show, and its ads — virtually emptying out many public spaces — others seek out alternatives. (I myself have an unbroken record of studied inattention to the game, from SB I in 1967 on.) Alternatives that are cultural, recreational, commercial, and even sexual. (This posting will devolve into tales of SBS mansex, but I’m putting that material at the end, so kids and the sexually modest can enjoy the rest of this material and then bail out when the gay guys strip and go at it with one another like weasels in heat.)
oo-(w)ee!
April 29, 2016/ˌuˈ(w)i/, used as an exclamation. OED3 (Sept. 2013):
N.Amer. colloq. Expressing astonishment, admiration, dismay, etc. [first cite 1910]
(No one seems to have looked at actual usage in any detail — a tough task for colloquial expressions in general, but especially tough for exclamations.)
Why do I mention it? Because of my posting “sg /u/, pl /i/” a couple days ago — with sg / pl pairs involving these vowels, but also nonoccurring pairs like noose / neese. And then, in the April 2016 Funny Times, this Mark Stivers cartoon starting with the sg / pl pairs tooth / teeth and foot / feet, and then immediately branching off into silly play with pairs like toon / teen:
Tasty names 2
August 30, 2013Follow-up to the Häagen-Dazs gelato campaign here, with its tasty names: a story in Stanford Magazine of July/August about research by my colleague Dan Jurafsky: “Why Ice Cream Sounds Fat and Crackers Sound Skinny: Words carry weight. A linguist explains”. The brief version:
… front vowels are used in words for small, thin, light things, and back vowels in words for big, fat, heavy things
… Since ice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be rich, creamy and heavy, it is not surprising that people seem to prefer ice creams that are named with back vowels.
… In a study for an upcoming book based on my freshman seminar The Language of Food, I checked to see whether commercial ice creams (like Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s) make use of this association by using more back vowels in their names, and conversely whether thin, light foods like crackers would have more front vowels. I found more back vowels in ice cream names — Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge, Chocolate, Caramel, Cookie Dough, Coconut — and more front vowels in cracker names: Cheese Nips, Cheez-It, Wheat Thins, Pretzel thins, Ritz, Krispy, Triscuit, Chicken in a Biskit, Ritz bits.
Language evolution, cartoon summary
June 21, 2013
smartass
May 12, 2013An eCard:
Well, smartass isn’t directly a compound of the adjective smart ‘impertinent’ and the noun ass; instead, -ass serves here as an expressive extension of smart (as in sweet-ass ‘really sweet, big-ass ‘really big’, dumb-ass ‘really dumb’, etc.) — note He’s always asking smart-ass / dumb-ass questions — and the extended adjective was then nouned, giving an alternative to smart aleck, smartypants, and in fact the noun smarty.
Exclamatory -S?
May 26, 2011Possible addition to the cases of “extra -S” listed in this earlier posting: the -S on exclamations like yipes, yikes, gee whillikers, and possibly some others.
The /z/ in zounds represents a historical plural (in wounds), though only students of language appreciate that these days.
The /s/ in cripes probably reflects that segment in Christ, but again that might not be appreciated by people who use the expression.
Then there’s the final element of the testicular exclamations balls, bollocks, and nuts: a plural marker, historically, but why did these forms get chosen for this purpose?
Further nominations are welcomed.