Archive for the ‘Count & mass’ Category
May 1, 2024
đ đ đ from my 5/1/20 posting “Trois lapins pour le premier mai”:
Itâs the first of the month, which I have learned to greet with three rabbits â by starting the day saying ârabbit, rabbit, rabbitâ. More than that, itâs the first of May â by some cultural reckonings the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere and also (in some countries) International Workers Day, so: dance around the maypole, set bonfires for Beltane or Walpurgis, prepare for outdoor bo(i)nking (rabbits again!), break out the lilies of the valley (muguets pour le premier mai), cue the choruses of LâInternationale, and march in solidarity with the workers. (Feel free to choose from this menu, as your taste inclines and your schedule allows.)
But enough of lapins; time to attend to our moutons, the sheep of the day being English NPs of the form N1 of N2Â (like bouquet of flowers and tons of stuff) and how they work as subjects of clauses. These sheep came to us on 4/29 from Steven Levine, who wrote on Facebook:
Here’s a sentence I just came across that seems odd to my ears:
By the mid century a variety of celebrations was engaging morris dancers.
I know that the subject is variety [AZ: no no no; the subject is a variety of celebrations; this is important] and the verb is was, and yet it seems off to me — I was expecting were. I’m not asking for a grammatical analysis, I’m asking if this would stop you for a second if you were just reading along.
To which I wrote:
Steven said he didn’t want a grammatical analysis, but here it comes anyway.
I warned you.
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Posted in Agreement, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Constructions, Count & mass, Dialects, Grammatical categories, Holidays, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
December 12, 2023
Barbara Partee on Facebook yesterday, on the English noun AI [Úåj], historically an initialism for the nominal artificial intelligence, but with a lexical life of its own, writing about:
— the new use of AI as a count [C] noun, as in these examples I heard on the NPR program 1A this morning about the use of AI bots in psychotherapy: âWould you use an AI?â, âAIs donât have hangups, they donâtâŠâ etc. The same conversation had the familiar [mass [M]] noun use as well: âIs there a chance that AI would be better than a trained psychotherapist?â
[Chris Waigl noted that the C usage has been common for a while in some sci-fi subgenres.]
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Posted in Beheading, Conversion, Count & mass, Grammatical categories, Metonymy, Personification | Leave a Comment »
July 9, 2022
(Some indirect and asterisked reference to man-on-man sex, but, hey, it’s from the Associated Press.)
Or: Love among the mobsters. Â In some hot news:
Chicago (AP wire story) — An odd chapter in American mobsterdom came to an end in a hail of bullets yesterday as thugs of the Buonanotte crime family gunned down Pasquale “Patsy” Baloney, the famously vicious soldato for — and long-time secret lover of — capo Carlo “Charlie” Ravioli of the Bastardo family, who died of a massive heart attack only two months ago.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Beheading, Count & mass, Etymology, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Idioms, Language and ethnicity, Language and food, Language of sex, Masculinity, Metaphor, Phallicity, Puns, Taboo language and slurs, Vaginality | 1 Comment »
April 16, 2021
(About the language of sex, with plenty of discussion of sexual acts, some of it in very plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Sexual vocabulary day, inspired by my puzzling about the syntax of the item trade (in examples like He’s looking for trade to service and He’s trade), which led me to a 2004 e-mail exchange — yes, still relevant — with a colleague about this item and its sexual lexical cousin trick.
Ajaxx63 Rough Trade t-shirt, on offer on the DealByEthan (men’s fashion shopping) site
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Posted in Count & mass, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Semantics, Syntax | 3 Comments »
March 24, 2021
In the New Yorker, “Tom Stoppard’s Charmed and Haunted Life: A new biography enables us to see beneath the intellectual dazzle of the playwright’s work” by Anthony Lane, in the print edition of 3/1/21:
In 2007, the playwright Tom Stoppard went to Moscow. He was there to watch over a production of his trilogy — âVoyage,â âShipwreck,â and âSalvage,â collectively known as âThe Coast of Utopia.â The trilogy had opened in London in 2002, and transferred to Lincoln Center in 2006. Now, in a sense, it was coming home. The majority of the characters, though exiled, are from Russia (the most notable exception being a German guy named Karl Marx), and, for the first time, they would be talking in Russian, in a translation of Stoppardâs text. Ever courteous, he wanted to be present, during rehearsals, to offer notes of encouragement and advice. These were delivered through an interpreter, since Stoppard speaks no Russian. One day, at lunch, slices of an anonymous meat were produced, and Stoppard asked what it was. âThat is,â somebody said, seeking the correct English word, âlanguage.â
Since this is a blog mostly about language, you have no doubt seen where that answer came from.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Count & mass, Metonymy, Writers | Leave a Comment »
January 19, 2021
(Well, men’s underwear, so men’s bodies play a significant role, but nothing raunchy. Look at #1, just below, to get a feel for the content and your comfort level; this is about as racy as things get in this posting.)
Passed on to me by Sim Aberson a few days ago, with the comment “Pair?”, this jockstrap ad from the men’s underwear company TBĂŽ (sometimes T-BĂŽ):
(#1)
Not just “pair”, but “pair of jockstrap”, with SG jockstrap.The ad will take this posting  in many different directions, sometimes inconclusively, so the posting will proceed as a collection of very loosely connected mini-essays.
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Posted in Count & mass, Grammatical categories, Inflection, Names, Singular & plural, Switzerland and Swiss things, Underwear | 4 Comments »
October 15, 2020
Today’s morning name, surely triggered in my mind by a line from the song “Ya Got Trouble” from the musical The Music Man (about kids in pool halls): “They’re … tryin’ out cubebs” (referring to cubeb cigarettes).
Brief background, from NOAD:
noun cubeb: [a] a tropical shrub of the pepper family, which bears pungent berries. Genus Piper, family Piperaceae: several species, including the Asian P. cubeba [b] the dried unripe berries of the cubeb, used medicinally and to flavor cigarettes. [also, not given by NOAD: [c] a cubeb cigarette] ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French cubebe, from Spanish Arabic kubÄba, from Arabic kubÄba.
Note: most uses of the noun cubeb are M[ass] nouns, but the use for ‘cubeb cigarette’ is C[count], and so pluralizable, as in the quote from The Music Man.
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Posted in Count & mass, Language and food, Language and plants, Morning names, Movies and tv, Music | 2 Comments »
May 7, 2020
Today, Alex [Alessandro Michelangelo] Jaker (posting from Toronto) on Facebook:
So unfortunately I can’t go home and visit my family in Minnesota đđđđŁđĄ because of the virus, so I decided to just go ahead and make my own hotdish đđ„đ
.
… Although actually, it’s sort of a hybrid between hotdish and lasagna đ
đ§đźđč.
(#1) Jaker Hotdish (photo from the author)
… [about hotdish] Apparently it is what people from other places call a “casserole”. In the present case, I used ground mutton đ, onions, celery, carrots đ„, a leek, tomatoes đ
, mushrooms, a can of cream of mushroom soup đ„«, parmesan cheese đ§, and noodles. And beans. First stir fry all the ingredients except the noodles, and boil the noodles separately, then combine into a baking dish and bake for ~40 minutes.
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Posted in Count & mass, Language and food, Movies and tv, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »
June 9, 2019
The 6/7Â Zippy takes us to the Jersey Shore for some water ice in a squeeze cup:
(#1) At the Strollo’s Lighthouse Italian Ice shop in Long Branch NJ: Zippy (alarmed at climate change) speaking on the left, Claude Funston (who denies climate change) on the right
On the setting. On Strollo’s. On lemon as the vanilla of Italian ices. On the relevant C(ount) noun ice, the nominal Italian ice, and the compounds water ice and squeeze cup. On Italian ice and the family of similar confections.
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Posted in Combining forms, Compositional semantics, Compounds, Count & mass, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Semantics, Snowclones, Subsectivity | Leave a Comment »
May 29, 2019
The 5/27 Wayno-Piraro Bizarro strip, set in the Land of Dogs:
(#1)Â (If you wonder about the secret symbol in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip â see this Page.)
A dog food with Quibbles in its name is of course not going to agree with you, in one sense of agree with. So you can understand the cartoon, and see that the pun on agree with in it makes it amusing — and still miss the extra joke that Wayno and Piraro threw in for you.
The cartoon would have been funny if the dog food had been named just Quibbles. But Quibbles and Fits is a lot funnier, because it’s another pun, on the name of the (actual) dog food Kibbles and Bits. But of course you have to know about this particular commercial product to get that joke.
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Posted in Conversion, Count & mass, Language and animals, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Poetic form, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
