Tom Gauld cartoons from New Scientist magazine, in a 2020 collection:
(#1)
— with three cartoons that especially caught my interest. One on science vs. journalism over de-extinction (already posted on this blog); one on the agony of Science Hell, the scene of eternal scientific mansplaining; and one on the adverbial literally understood literally (which then provides the title for the 2020 book).
Posted in Hyperbole, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Science, Usage attitudes | Leave a Comment »
(References to gay male life, men’s bodies, and mansex, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday was my birthday, my 79th, 79 being, as I noted in a 8/29 posting for the day, a sexy prime. 8/29 is also, every year, National Coffee Ice Cream Day, and coffee is my favorite ice cream flavor. Put all this together and you get this birthday present, delivered by Kim Darnell yesterday:
(#1) Coffee ice cream, plus a selection of Big Gay Ice Cream flavors for Big Gay Arnold
This will take us to the pornstars of the end of summer, to Greenwich Village, and to South Park, with a final side trip to visit with the Marquis de Lafayette.
Posted in Figurative language, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, History, Holidays, Homosexuality, Hyperbole, Language and art, Language of sex, Movies and tv, My life, Names, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
The morning name for the 6th: Attraverso i Secoli, the title of an elementary Italian textbook from about 60 years ago. Not mine, but Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s. No longer in my possession, after several years of the Great Library Divestment, but still I remember it, and it somehow surfaced in my dreamtime.
The title attraverso i secoli ‘(down) over / through(out) / across the centuries / ages’ is a PP with the very interesting P attraverso, which (historically) is itself a P + a N derived from a verb of motion (cf. the English V traverse).
And the expression as a whole is formulaic, a conventional way of referring to (all of) historic time.
As a bonus, there’s the book Il Quidditch Attraverso i Secoli by Kenilworthy Whisp.
Posted in Books, Figurative language, Formulaic expressions, Hyperbole, Italian | Leave a Comment »
Fathers Day comes on the 19th. For the occasion, a Tom Toro cartoon that didn’t get into my earlier posting about him:
Well, there can be literally only one greatest dad in the world, but then not all language is literal — as in this case, where the sentiment on the mug is a piece of hyperbole, exaggeration for effect.
Posted in Comparison, Figurative language, Holidays, Hyperbole, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics | Leave a Comment »
Frank Bruni in an op-ed column in the NYT yesterday, “Nazis, Lynching and Obamacare”, beginning:
You might think that the methodical extermination of millions of Jews by a brutal regime intent on world domination would resist appropriation as an all-purpose metaphor. You might think that genocide, of all things, would be safe from conversion into sloppy simile.
You’d be wrong.
Bruni catalogues an assortment of ravingly hyperbolic similes in recent times, mostly (but not entirely) associated with the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Comparisons to: Nazis and the Holocaust, lynch mobs, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, slavery, and hostage taking.
Posted in Hyperbole, Language and politics, Metaphor, Simile | 1 Comment »
I wrote, a propos of a postcard of a young man with an extraordinarily developed musculature, that he had “abs [abdominal muscles] of death”, and then thought of the template X of death, with the postmodifier of death conveying ‘overwhelming, magnificent’, much like the premodifier killer in expressions like killer abs — both of them hyperbolically metaphorical allusions to the effects of X on people.
Posted in Figurative language, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Hyperbole, Metaphor, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »
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