Archive for the ‘Metonymy’ Category
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 »
July 10, 2018
(And Swiss steak isn’t either, but that’s a topic for another posting.)
(#1) A wedge of American Swiss
But then the expression Swiss cheese is ambiguous. NOAD recognizes this, but not in the way you were probably expecting:
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Posted in Figurative language, Language and food, Metaphor, Metonymy, Semantics, Subsectivity, Technical and ordinary language, Trade names | Leave a Comment »
May 17, 2018
(This starts innocently enough, but quickly descends into male body parts and mansex, in very plain language. All this in text, no X-images, but, still, not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Last week, as usual around the beginning of each month, I had my moments of body care: a haircut, to get deshagged (as I think of it); and the services of a neighborhood nail salon, to get pedicured.
Then I thought: I get deshagged regularly, but I don’t get shagged, haven’t been since sometime in the last century, don’t even remember when. Also, I get pedicured, but I don’t get pedicated. I like the sweetly raunchy verb shag and the owlishly learnèd verb pedicate. So different in tone, but they both roll off the tongue. Two ways of dancing.
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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy | Leave a Comment »
May 16, 2018
Darya Kavitskaya on Facebook yesteday:
This is sour cherry clafoutis. No more food for today.
I commented:
I think French needs a verb clafouter ‘to cook a clafoutis; to devour a clafoutis’.
Come to think of it, I could use an English verb clafoute /kla’fut/ with these senses:
I think I’ll clafoute for tonight’s dessert. Maybe plum.
Terry piggishly clafouted. Seven at a sitting!
To come: a reminder about what clafoutis is; about the forms of the invented French verb clafouter; on “having no word for” some concept; about needing — or at least wanting — a word for it; about the ambiguity of these invented verbs (both ‘to cook’ and ‘to eat’); about the source of such ambiguities in marker-poor combinations of elements (lacking explicit indicators of the semantic relationship between the elements — there’s nothing in French clafouter or English clafoute to indicate the semantic role of the referent of their subjects, as creator or consumer); and about the motivation for marker-poor combinations, in a drive for brevity (vs. clarity). French and English could be clearer, less ambiguous — I’ll illustrate with still more invented French verbs — but only at the cost of greater length and effort.
All this from (delicious) French sour cherry flan.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Brevity vs. Clarity, Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Conversion, Derivation, French, Language and food, Metonymy, Morphology | Leave a Comment »
October 26, 2017
On the 23rd, “The pumpkin spice cartoon meme”, with a variety of developments of pumpkin spice ‘spice for pumpkin (pie)’ to concrete uses for the flavor of such spice and the scent of such spice and then to figurative uses ‘special, extraordinary’ and from there ‘top-grade’. Now, some further developments:
The possibility that Pumpkin Spice might be a Spice Girl (Michael Palmer asks on Facebook, “Which of the Spice Girls is Pumpkin Spice?”).
More generally, the rule of thumb: if spice, then pumpkin spice, as in this playful e-card:
(#1) The verb spice up > pumpkin spice up
And, as also illustrated in #1, the metonymical extension of pumpkin spice to ‘autumnal’ (thanks to the association of the spice with the fall).
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Posted in Language and food, Language play, Metonymy, Music, Names, Slogans | 2 Comments »
July 5, 2017
Start with this little poem, “Spurring him on”, which seems to be heavily sexual:
Hotspur Cockspur:
Thorny, horny, over-
Heated prick.
Spiky, showy dandy,
Sharply tipped.
Actually, this is a continuation of my 2/4/16 posting “Some news not for penises”, which was about senses of cock that aren’t about penises, and it’s mostly about plants, a whole hell of a lot of plants, some of them with sharp thorns (like spurs) that will prick you, some of them with showy spikes (like a rooster’s comb), all of them with cock in one of their common names. So, what with the noun cock, the phallic spurs, and the phallic combs, the topic fairly drips with male sexuality — but this posting is not about men’s bodies or mansex. It’s mostly about birds and plants, plus some vintage dandies and Sir Henry Percy.
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Posted in Language and animals, Language and plants, Metaphor, Metonymy, Names, Nicknames, Phallicity, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
