Archive for the ‘Metonymy’ Category
August 15, 2019
In anticipation of a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden with motss.conners on Saturday, two items from my last visit to the garden (on 7/31): blue flax-lilies, which are neither flax nor lily plants, but do have bright blue berries; and dark purple, almost black, hollyhocks.
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Posted in Art, Color, Language and gender, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language play, Metaphor, Metonymy, Music, Names, Poetry | 1 Comment »
July 24, 2019
(As you might guess from the title, this posting treats several English expressions of varying degrees of offensiveness, so some readers might want to avoid it.)
A message from Gadi Niram a month ago:
I can’t get past the name of this school: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/law
The Dickson Poon School of Law in the University of London
— and wondering if poon doesn’t have the meaning in BrE that it does in AmE. (And then there’s the dick in Dickson.)
Briefly, the answer is: no, the lexical item poon ‘vagina, pussy’ is largely unknown in BrE. But it is an estimable Chinese name, especially in Hong Kong. If they had known about the crude offensiveness of poon in AmE, Dickson Poon’s family might have chosen another variant of their name in English, say Pan. Or maybe not; they might have decided that it’s their family’s English name and they’re proud of it. (I will compare it to the Hindi surname often spelling Dikshit in English.)
Then there’s the question of why the University of London has anything named after Dickson Poon. That’s where I’ll start.
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Posted in Chinese, Metaphor, Metonymy, Names, Sanskrit, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
July 22, 2019
(An politico-sexual riff, with steamy underwear photos, on BoJo, the MP for Bone Juice and South Blowjob and the Man Who Would Be PM; you should be able to tell from this description that this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Passed on to me on Facebook by Dean Calbreath on 7/20, a link to a Business Insider article, “Boris Johnson called gay men ‘tank-topped bumboys’ and black people ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles'”, by Adam Bienkov on 7/12/19.
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Posted in Captions, Metonymy, Music, Parody, Race and ethnicity, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
May 28, 2019
Today’s morning name was the Italian phrase il mio tesoro, and there’s no mystery where it came from: on my overnight iTunes, the 1959 Carlo Maria Guilini recording of Don Giovanni had reached Luigi Alva singing “Il Mio Tesoro” just as I woke. What was odd was that my still sleep-addled brain was puzzling over why Don Ottavio was calling Donna Anna his thesaurus.
Attribute it to an overactive mental-association apparatus connecting It. il tesoro ‘treasure’ (but also ‘darling, honey, dear’) to Engl. thesaurus referring to a specialized type of dictionary (derived ultimately from Greek). In this case, one reproducing a historical connection between It. tesoro ‘darling’ and It. tesoreria ‘thesaurus’, which are, etymologically, second cousins, more or less.
After this, on to the aria, with performances by Alva, Araiza, and Domingo.
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Posted in Gender, Grammatical categories, Italian, Metaphor, Metonymy, Morning names, Music | 4 Comments »
May 25, 2019
(After the cartoons and the lexicography, John Rechy will take this posting into the world of mansex, in some detail and in very plain talk; that section is not for kids or the sexually modest, but I’ll warn you when it’s looming on the horizon.)
Two bison greet each other in a John Baynham cartoon with a wonderful pun:
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That’s numbers (roughly ‘amount’, but as a PL C noun) — and indeed large numbers of buffalo did once roam the plains of North America — vs. numbers referring to physical models, or simulacra, of symbols for certain abstract mathematical entities — in this case, the natural numbers. Such physical models are also familiar: think of the letters in the HOLLYWOOD sign, or the numbers on the building at 666 Fifth Ave. in NYC (with its own kind of fame as a Jared Kushner property). But people don’t walk around with, much less inside, giant versions of such models. That’s deliciously absurd.
Looking at the lexical items involved will take us deep into the lexicographic weeds and then to the secret places of mansex, starting with the dim recesses of Griffith Park in Los Angeles.
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Posted in Books, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Porn actors, Puns, Slang | Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2019
(OPAs, for short.) The contrast is to inconspicuously playful allusions, what I’ve called Easter egg quotations on this blog. With three OPAs from the 4/20/19 Economist, illustrating three levels of closeness between the content of the OPA and the topic of the article: no substantive relationship between the two (the Nock, Nock case), tangential relationship (the Sunset brouhaha case), and tight relationship (the defecate in the woods case).
The three cases also illustrate three degrees of paronomasia: the Nock, Nock case involves a (phonologically) perfect pun; the Sunset brouhaha case an imperfect pun; and the defecate in the woods case no pun at all, but whole-word substitutions.
I’ll start in the middle, with Sunset brouhaha. But first, some background. Which will incorporate flaming saganaki; be prepared.
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Posted in Acronyms, Ambiguity, Idioms, Implicature, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Language play, Metaphor, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Names, Pragmatics, Puns, Quotation, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »
May 16, 2019
(Talk of men’s bodies and mansex, not appropriate for kids or the sexually modest.)
From several posters on Facebook, a raunchy fabric composition involving TopPooh, TPooh for short, and BottomPooh, BPooh for short (both of them from Ernest Shepard illustrations for the original Winnie-the-Pooh books), doing a standing doggy:
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy | 2 Comments »
April 25, 2019
In the recently published The Ultimate Cartoon Book of Book Cartoons —
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edited by New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein (a regular visitor on this blog), this Ed Koren (who’s also on this blog):
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Posted in Argument structure, Books, Combining forms, Language change, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Morphology, Puns, Spoonerisms | Leave a Comment »
November 19, 2018
From Charlie Doyle on ADS-L on November 10th:
According to two different ESPN commentators, a University of Georgia football player has had surgery on “both groins.” Doesn’t that sound odd?
Others agreed that it did — the problem being that, in their reckoning, each person has only one groin.
Then still others quoted anatomists, and dictionaries, supplying evidence of a usage in which everyone has two groins, one on each side. This is apparently the older usage, though for a great many, metonymy has shifted the everyday meaning to cover the entire crotch region, with (for them) the older usage surviving only as a technical term in anatomy.
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Posted in Architecture, Language and the body, Metaphor, Metonymy | Leave a Comment »
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