Archive for the ‘Formulaic language’ Category
March 16, 2019
A dire nautical theme in today’s morning names: le naufrage ‘shipwreck, sinking’ and le naufragé ‘shipwreck victim, castaway’, powerful elements of popular culture and frequent subjects of news stories, books, and films.
I was first taken to le naufrage de l’Andrea Doria, an event that vividly evoked the summer before my junior year in high school; then (among the innumerable fictional representations of shipwrecks and castaways, going back to the Odyssey and before) to Tom Hanks in the appalling Cast Away; and, then, through the whimsicalities of googling, to Le naufragé (English title Stranded), a 2009 short comedy-drama film — about which I can find virtually nothing of substance.
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Posted in French, Morning names, Movies, Pop culture, Snowclones | 3 Comments »
March 13, 2019
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro cartoon:
(#1)(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)
You need to recognize that the cartoon takes place in a garage and you need to know that detailing is a kind of car care. And you need to recognize that Nick is the Devil (note horns and tail). That’s all pretty easy.
Then you need to know what detailing a car has to do with the Devil — and for that, if you don’t know the saying The devil (or Devil) is in the detail(s), you’re just stuck. You’ve missed a devil of a pun (on detail).
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Names, Proverbs, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
March 12, 2019
A long long day getting this handout together; my paper is on Friday afternoon. Ides of March. But first, the doctor is in:
Matt LeBlanc, playing Joey Tribbiani on Friends, playing Dr. Drake Ramoray on Days of Our Lives
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Posted in Conferences, Context, Language play, Movies and tv, Pragmatics, Puns, Semantics, Snowclonelet composites, Snowclones | 1 Comment »
March 3, 2019
From various friends on Facebook who know that I’m interested in meta-comics, this 4/21/17 Imbattable strip by Pascal Jousselin, in an English translation:
(#1) Imbattable (‘Unbeatable’) is a bandit superhero in a yellow and black costume
Among Imbattable’s superpowers is his ability to break the walls of the cartoon’s panels and freely move between them. With the result that temporarily, in the fourth panel, the cat is in two places at once — a phenomenon that unsettles both the cat and the old lady.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Formulaic language, French, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Truncation | 1 Comment »
February 25, 2019
The title of this cartoon, which turned up yesterday in FB’s Our Bastard Language group:
(#1)
The captain is both a pirate and (as it turns out, once you figure out what the man intends to say) a grammar nazi, bent on correcting his crew’s inferior (as he sees it) English — hence the portmanteau grammar pirate. So the cartoon is, primarily, about (stereotypical) pirate talk (which will take us to the West Country of England), but also about peeving.
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Posted in Books, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Peeving, Pop culture, Portmanteaus, Snowclonelet composites | Leave a Comment »
February 19, 2019
That, at least, is where it started, with this bit of playfulness on Facebook:
(#1)
One among a great many available versions of Wading for Godot (like this one, hardly any have an identifiable origin, but just get passed around on the web, along with jokes, funny pictures, and the like: the folk culture of the net). I’m particularly taken with #1, as a well-made image and as a close reworking of lines from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:
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Posted in Formulaic language, Language and medicine, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Parodies, Phonetics, Phonology, Puns, Snowclones | 1 Comment »
February 14, 2019
Back on 6/4/11, in “Alligator Goodbyes”, a t-shirt with 14 instances
of a verse form that I’ll call the Alligator Goodbye, on the model of “see you later, alligator” (at the top of the shirt):
(#1)
Now, a much bigger assemblage of AGs — 27 of them — on the Language Nerds Facebook page, in b&w:
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Posted in Catchphrases, Formulaic language, Language play, Music, Poetic form, Rhyme | 2 Comments »
February 13, 2019
The Economist, wildly given to jokey headlines for its stories (and sometimes also their lead paragraphs or final paragraphs), performed a Proustian double play in its 2/2/19 issue: in two successive stories, headlines that are both plays on Proust’s title À la recherche du temps perdu, in two different English translations (both of them widely quoted in English).
on p. 21, about Facebook turning 15: “Remembrance of posts past” (Remembrance of Things Past)
on p. 22, about the consequences of the US government shutdown: “In search of lost time (and money)” (In Search of Lost Time)
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Posted in Formulaic language, Idioms, Language play, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »
February 5, 2019
Conversations typically drift in topic, as one thing suggests another. (Occasionally, the conversation is reset when one of the participants introduces a new topic or external events intrude with fresh things to talk about.) On-line threads similarly drift, sometimes in unexpected directions.
Case in point. I posted enthusiastically on this blog (with links elsewhere) about John McIntyre’s book The Old Editor Says: Maxims for Writing and Editing (2/2/19, “The crusty old editor speaks”), and John then noted my review on Facebook. I expected the Facebook discussion to continue with more observations about John’s little book, but since my name had entered the thread, several commentators shifted the topic to me. Whoa!
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Posted in Conversation, Linguists, Proverbs, Quotations, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »
