Archive for the ‘Formulaic language’ Category

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pit beef snow ball girl

March 28, 2022

The Zippy strip from yesterday, 3/27:


(#1) Help wanted at the pit beef restaurant: a female server for their pit beef (the house entrée) and snow balls (the dessert), with the ensuing mantra that afflicts Zippy: PIT BEEF SNOW BALL GIRL (prosodically SW SW S; add a strong fourth beat — a shout YEAH!,  a drum beat, cymbals, whatever — and you can conga to it)

So, the obvious stuff: Zippy’s onomatomania, his attraction to certain words and phrases; pit beef (especially associated with Baltimore); snow balls / snowballs, shaved ice confections especially associated with the Italian communities of Philadelphia and New York. Plus the gender stuff, a girl needed to serve guy-food: grilled meat, especially beef, being at the peak of masculinity in the American food world (with the gender association reinforced by serving it in a bun); not to mention that beef with balls is covertly phallic.

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Posted in Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Headlines, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras, Masculinity, Word aversion and attraction | 1 Comment »

Zippyphrases 2

March 11, 2022

Some riffing on yesterday’s posting “Catchphrases for sale”, about this Zippy strip:


(#1) Offering fresh phrases — not already in circulation as catchphrases, sayings, proverbs, slogans, famous quotations, well-known names and titles, and the like — chosen at random

Zippy’s fresh phrases sound like catchphrases — roughly, free-standing expressions that you recognize as coming from a stock of quotations widely known in your culture, which then (if you wish) can be conventionally used to make some point — but are in fact novel. The things called catchphrases are then exquisitely embedded in particular cultures (note: “widely known in your culture” and also “can be conventionally used”).

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Posted in Catchphrases, Clichés, Formulaic language, Holidays, Humor, Language and medicine, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Nonsense, Poetry, Proverbs, Psychology, Slogans | 1 Comment »

Catchphrases for sale

March 10, 2022

(I’m struggling with medical issues and sleeping away much of the day, so this posting will serve as a kind of intro to a host of related topics having to do with formulaic expressions. Bear with me.)

Yesterday’s Zippy strip has our Pinhead (accompanied by Claude) selling fresh catchphrases from a van:


(#1) Zippy’s Guaranteed Random Phrases — meaning, in this case, fresh phrases (not already in circulation as catchphrases, sayings, proverbs, slogans, famous quotations, well-known names and titles, and the like) chosen at random; and not, say, strings of (in some sense) randomly chosen words, like can building of lease my out if I zombies get legally my bought (the 13 words of Zippy’s fresh catchphrase in random order) or level righteous quicksand join sedate nine songs murky promise arrange blind man voice (13 content words selected at random from the English vocabulary)

But in the air we can sniff the sense ‘(informal) odd, unusual, or unexpected’ (NOAD) of the adjective random. So we can wonder about expressions like see how they snide and semolina pilchard (from the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus”; or Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh (Frank Zappa album titles from 1970); or runcible spoon (Edward Lear nonsense verse) and slithy toves (Lewis Carroll nonsense verse); or portmanteau jam and Jelly Roll Morton’s saltwater Taffy was a Welshman (a POP chain / portmanteau jam from my 1/31/22 posting “The portmanteau truck”).

Meanwhile, Claude asks, “How do you make money out of stringin’ a few unrelated words together?”

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Posted in Catchphrases, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Paisley weather

November 29, 2021

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with weather forecasting in action:


(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

Ah, a bit of word play: a pun on pattern.

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Posted in Formulaic language, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Cooking with gas: a guest posting

November 21, 2021

Grant Barrett (of the Barnette-Barrett radio show A Way with Words — and a real lexicographer, one of the lexicographers I sometimes hang out with, even though I’m not of that tribe) tried to post this as a comment on my posting yesterday, “Now we’re cooking with carrots”, but it appears to have been indigestible to WordPress, so I’m publishing it here as a guest posting. Remember: what follows below the line is Grant, all Grant, not me (except for some formatting).

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Posted in Formulaic language, Language of advertising, Lexicography, Pop culture, Slogans, Snowclones | 2 Comments »

Now we’re cooking with carrots

November 20, 2021

From Ann Gulbrandsen (in Sweden) on Facebook today, a wonderful still life of earthy carrots:

Ann wrote (in Swedish; what follows is the Google Translate version in English, which is, um, flatfooted, with one paraphrase by me):

Thought to pick up the last small harvest of carrots when it will be minus degrees next week. I clearly underestimated what was [underground]. May be cooking with carrots [Sw. matlagning med morötter] a couple of weeks ahead.

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Posted in Alliteration, Idioms, Language and food, Language and plants, Language play, Photography, Slogans | 1 Comment »

Masculinity comics 1

October 5, 2021

[Proviso: this posting is mostly about cross-dressing, but it doesn’t pretend to be an essay on the very large number of forms and functions of cross-dressing, even in the modern U.S., much less in different sociocultural contexts around the world and throughout history.]

I’ve been accumulating comic strips having to do with boys and masculinity, in particular about what they’ve picked up about normatively masculine behavior and attitudes by the age of 8 or so: the age of the character Joe in the comic strip One Big Happy, who’s the older brother of Ruthie, age 6, who’s the central character of the strip. At the moment I have 5 strips (4 OBHs, plus a Zippy), covering a wide range of themes in normative masculinity for boys. To judge from the comics (and my recollections of boyhood), an 8-year-old has an extensive and pretty fine-grained command of the cultural norms of masculinity within his social group.

Example 1, the OBH of 4/16/21, on attitudes towards transvestism / cross-dressing:


(#1) The attitude here is that male cross-dressing — prancing around dressed in women’s clothing — is ridiculous, maybe pitiful, but in any case not compatible with ferocity, that is, symbolic masculinity ; this is one step in sophistication past the attitude that it’s against nature, therefore pathological and dangerous, though possibly usable as entertainment, in the theatre of ridicule

Two linguistic side issues here: the idiomatic slang says you, expressing disagreement with an interlocutor’s remark (from Joe, to Ruthie, in the last panel); and the 2pbfV cross-dress (a derivative of the synthetic compound cross-dressing). Before that, the background of the Boy Code.

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Posted in Back formation, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Stock expressions, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »

Read the message in my face

September 12, 2021

(Warning: there will eventually be a naked male pornstar, but without his naughty bits visible, plus some mention of feminism and same-sex attraction.)

Two faces that recently caught my eye. I saw them first in a rich context, including the rest of the pose they were in; a background behind the pose; information about the place where the larger photo appeared; and some knowledge about that place and the function of the photo there. Here they are, as bleached of context as I could manage: just the faces:


(#1) Call this person A


(#2) Call this person B

What personas are these two people projecting? What are they like, and what are they doing in the photos?

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Posted in Clothing, Faces, Facial expression, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Photography, Slogans | 5 Comments »

Lupine Sapir-Whorf allusions

September 8, 2021

(That’s the adjective /lúpàjn/; the noun referring to a flower in the pea family is /lúpǝn/ — but this is not the Lupine Express.)


Francis Barlow’s illustration of the fable, 1687

Today’s morning name: the phrase the boy who cried Whorf. A paranomasic play — wolf vs. Whorf — on the boy who cried wolf, as in the Aesop fable, alluding to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the relationship between language and thought.

Oh, I thought on coming to full consciousness, surely someone has messed Whorfianly with the formulaic phrase.

And so they had; here I’ve just picked the first one that came up in googling: the heading The boy who cried Whorf, in Anthropology for Dummies by Cameron M. Smith, p. 48.

Then I tried some other formulaic expressions (again picking just one occurrence, the first one to come before my eyes):

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Posted in Formulaic language, Language and thought, Language play, Morning names, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Zippy exits, pursued by a board

August 16, 2021

(Warning: high fecality content, which some may find unpleasant.)

Todays Zippy strip, in which Zippy is subjected to stoner / surfer verbal abuse:


(#1) Zippy and his surf iron

As usual, there’s a lot here — I admire Beavis’s one wave shy of a wipeout (see Mark Liberman’s 7/14/05 LLog posting “A few players short of a side” on the Snowclone of Foolishness {small quantity of essential items} short / shy of a {desirable collection}) and the laundry-musician pun in the title “Bleach Boy” — but I’ve picked out the mildly abusive expression iron my shorts for full-bore scrutiny.

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Posted in Catchphrases, Etymology, Idioms, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Slang, Slurs, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »

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