Archive for the ‘Common & proper’ Category

More surprise etymologies

November 30, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate November and the feast day of St. Andrew the Apostle, patron saint of 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (and several other countries) and of fishermen, fishmongers, rope-makers, textile workers, singers, miners, pregnant women, butchers, farm workers. and more

A follow-up to my 11/28 posting “Today’s surprise etymology”, about the history of Jordan almond, which elicited a nice brief comment by David Preston about Baker’s Chocolate and German Chocolate Cake. Which I now elaborate on.

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Posted in Common & proper, Ethnonyms and demonyms, Etymology, Language and food, Names | 4 Comments »

great pumpkin pie

November 28, 2024

The Wayno Bizarro for today, 11/28, is an exercise in cartoon understanding:


(#1) Wayno’s title: “Horrifyingly Tasty”; I would have suggested the more bloodthirsty “Eat Your Gods” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

But it’s all totally baffling unless you recognize the references to Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts; you really have to know about Linus and the Great Pumpkin. (Meanwhile, your appreciation of the strip will be enriched if you know that today is US Thanksgiving, a harvest festival for which the traditional foods include pumpkin pie for dessert.)

And while we’re talking festivals, the cartoon is a festival of ambiguities in English, structural and lexical.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Common & proper, Grammatical categories, Holidays, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Parsing, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »