Archive for the ‘Formulaic language’ Category
June 9, 2025
We filter stuff flowing past us, consider this material, and evaluate its worth. As here:
(#1) Neocrinus, a stalked living crinoid species similar to those found in the Paleozoic (from Brian N. Tissot’s website, “Curious Creatures of the California Coast: Crinoids”, from 12/31/13); from Wikipedia:
Crinoids are marine invertebrates that make up the class Crinoidea. Crinoids that remain attached to the sea floor by a stalk in their adult form are commonly called sea lilies, while the unstalked forms, called feather stars or comatulids, are members of the largest crinoid order, Comatulida. Crinoids are echinoderms in the phylum Echinodermata, which also includes the starfish, brittle stars, sea urchins and sea cucumbers.
… Crinoids are passive suspension feeders, filtering plankton and small particles of detritus from the sea water flowing past them with their feather-like arms.
Oh, not crinoid, silly man; on Facebook, commenting on my posting from yesterday, “Today’s bilingual jest”, Gadi Niram seemed to think it was clitic, but that was just a joke; really, the saying is that everyone’s a critic nowadays (or some similar piece of wisdom about the prevalence of unfavorable opinions coming from all quarters).
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Posted in Books, Clitics, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Stock expressions | Leave a Comment »
May 23, 2025
Yesterday on this blog, in “Not in a bad mood, just smart”, I looked at this cartoon panel that had appeared on Facebook:
(#1) Image plus text; the image was pretty clearly from Calvin and Hobbes (isn’t that Susie?), but the text (expressing a sentiment that resonated with me in current times, packaged in a slogan, or tag line) was unfamiliar to me
Then the searches.
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Posted in AI, Art, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
May 22, 2025
The abbreviated form of a slogan, or tag line, that I came across on Facebook this morning, in what appeared to be a panel from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon (see the Watterson signature), or could be an extract from such a panel with the tag line added (we live in a world that has both old Photoshop and new AI, so such things are trivially easy to arrange):
(#1) I had a thought of using this as a visual distillation of my attitude towards the current US government, but I wanted to get the credit right; that became a problem I haven’t yet solved
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Posted in AI, Art, Basque, Clothing, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans, This blogging life | 6 Comments »
May 18, 2025
Today’s Pearls Before Swine (by Stephan Pastis), with one of the cartoonist’s formula pun jokes (in a set-up / pay-off format):
(#1) The 5/18/25 strip “Four Scored”: Rat engages in a wandering conversation with his neighbor Nancy, then summarizes their talk for Pig, in a gigantic complex pun on the beginning of Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”; in the last (meta) panel, Lincoln appears, to shame the cartoonist for his outrage
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Posted in Comic conventions, Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 4 Comments »
March 24, 2025
[Sexual acts discussed in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest]
No, not like my excellent TeePublic DEI t-shirt —
(#1) A shout-out for diversity, equity, and inclusion
but a different sort of DEI t-shirt, one with a double entendre invoked on it, like this one in my 3/22 posting “Put a red apple in that mouth”:
(#2) A Double Entendre Invoking t-shirt: the slogan I like it spit roasted with the outline of a pig: innocently claiming that the wearer likes — that is, likes to eat — spit-roasted pork (with it referring to pig / pork); but raunchily suggesting the sexual act of spitroasting, conveying that the wearer likes — that is, likes to experience — that sexual act (with it referring to the activity), much like saying I like it bareback
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Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Double entendres, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Metaphor, Slogans | 2 Comments »
February 23, 2025
Or: who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
A report from Monday 2/17, when in the morning, while getting breakfast, I must have knocked my right hand against something with a sharp edge to it and nicked it (without any pain, so I didn’t realize it had happened) — because, when I looked down at the first knuckle, a bright bead of blood had welled up and was about to run down my hand. I grabbed some kleenex, wrapped it around the wound, and went to the bathroom to get a bandaid to cover the wound until the blood had clotted. (Clotting takes a while because I take a blood thinner — for atrial fibrillation, which seems to have vanished — which also means I have tons of bruises where I knock up against things with one bodypart or another. Medical treatments, side effects, it’s a balancing act.)
The day ticked on. Late in the afternoon, checking my Facebook page before getting up to assemble some dinner, I looked down, and my right hand was entirely covered with blood, which was streaming onto the pad under my keyboard. Onto my mousepad. And onto the tabletop. Blood everywhere, Jesus fuck. I must have knocked the scab loose against something, again without any warning pain, it was so minor. (No, I had not lost sensation in my fingers, that would have been truly scary.)
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Posted in Formulaic language, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Language play, My life, Narrative, Quotations | 2 Comments »
January 28, 2025
Returning to a very old topic on this blog, making small advances on some outstanding puzzles. It starts with my 6/8/11 posting (yes, 14 years ago) “Parasites and the body politic”, about
my dismayed reaction to recent political assaults on teachers (and, more generally, public employees) as drains on the economy, selfishly demanding decent wages and benefits while being “unproductive”, producing nothing of significance. Lots of things are going on at once here — contempt for the working classes and for service workers like maids, cooks, gardeners, and janitors (and, yes, teachers); classic American anti-intellectualism (cue Richard Hofstadter); marketplace valuation of people’s worth; and more — but parallel attitudes surface in the way many people view academics, so it hits close to home for me.
Then the anecdote. Some years ago I was at some large public function involving people of money and substance and, wine glass in hand, struck up a conversation with another attendee. This guy plunged right in by asking me what I do [for a living]. (In many cultures, the leading question would be some version of “Where are you from?”, meaning “Who are your people?”, but in ours it has to do with occupation. All such questions are designed to position a stranger socially.)
I said I was a university professor, and, without waiting to identify himself occupationally, he said
Artists and scholars are parasites on the body politic. [call this State Suckers, SS for short]
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Posted in Academic life, Formulaic language, Idioms, Insults, Language and politics, My life, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »
January 22, 2025
A Mark Thompson cartoon in the 1/20/25 issue of the New Yorker offers a foxy goulash of cultural forms: cartoon memes, joke forms, story formats, and conversational routines:
(#1) The Dog in Bar cartoon meme (with a fox instead of a dog), the Walk Into Bar joke form (a fox walks into a bar,…), the Fox Eludes Hound(s) story format, and the Tell Them I’m Not Here conversational routine
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Conversational formulas, Jokes, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Movies and tv, Narrative, Routines and rituals, Stories | 2 Comments »
December 23, 2024
🎄- 2: 12/23, so it’s Festivus; the last day of Saturnalia; and now, according to a front page story in today’s New York Times (“In Some Parts, It’s Christmas Adam Before Eve: Churches Are Adding Day to the Holiday, With a Side of Ribs”), it’s Christmas Adam, the day before Christmas Eve (it’s a joke, son)
Meanwhile, today’s found mantra is Zesty Pickle — repeat as needed until you reach the desired state of tangy pungency. It came to me in a commercial for Chick-Fil-A’s classic chicken sandwich:
Crispy chicken, zesty pickle, it’s tough to top the original
But then the piquant phallicity of zesty pickles pushed me onto another path, into the tale of a fickle fly:
zesty pickle
frisky pepper
pesky stuck zipper!
… no plucky pickles past this point
(#1) The pickle-pepper tale
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Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Language and plants, Language in advertising, Mantras, Music, Phallicity | 3 Comments »
