This Non Sequitur cartoon by Wiley Miller:
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squid / quid. And squid as a source of ink, squid as food. .
Archive for the ‘Count & mass’ Category
Squid Pro Quo
May 20, 2017Special counsel appointed
May 19, 2017Informed opinion has been very positive about the appointment of Mueller as special counsel to investigate allegations in the semolina affair. Commenters are generally agreed that Mueller is a respected authority in such matters, with a long public career in the field and experience in both semolina matters and the byzantine world of elbow-cheese casseroles.
ice plants
May 16, 2017… that is, plants in the Aizoaceae, or ice plant, family. On the occason of recent visits to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden, where there’s a spread of gorgeous Lampranthus spectabilis (syn. Mesembryanthemum spectabile), trailing ice plant:
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(photo by Kim Darnell)
Technical terms
March 13, 2017A recent One Big Happy, in which Joe faces a test question on the term collective noun:
Joe hopes that he can use what he knows about the verb collect and its derivatives to guess at what the grammatical term collective might mean. Ah, a mail carrier collects the mail (from a mailbox) and delivers it (to a mailbox), so mailbox must be a collective noun. BZZT!
data
August 10, 2015A recent PHD Comics:
C (Count) — and PL — or M (Mass) — and SG — that is the question. But, yes, you need more than one data point.
[Addendum: I have added a Page about postings on C/M, here.]
‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ’
July 26, 2013Yes, there are words — compound nouns — specifically for this meaning, but unless you’re into gay porn, you might not be familiar with man pussy, boy pussy, man cunt, boy cunt, man hole, or boy hole. These are terms strongly associated with gay porn (fiction, scripts of videos, and descriptions of videos) but not much used by gay men in everyday life; they are part of a specialized porn register, akin to the specialized registers in some other domains, for instance, restaurant menus (with vocabulary items like the adjective tasty that rarely occur outside the menu context).
Respecting each other
July 20, 2013The short version of an ad for a gay dating/cruising app:
MISTER is an online community for men who value themselves and other men. Unlike other gay social networking apps, MISTER encourages users to show their faces, show respect, spend less time searching and more time meeting men in the real world. The users of our app are proud to say, “I am MISTER.”
(There will eventually be a linguistic point.)
Manwich and Beefaroni as portmanteaus
May 16, 2013My “Grocery store semiotics” posting looked briefly at two canned-food preparations: Manwich and Beefaroni. Manwich: “a canned sloppy joe sauce … The can contains seasoned tomato sauce that is added to cooked ground beef in a skillet” to yield a filling for hamburger buns. And Beefaroni: “pasta with beef in tomato sauce”, essentially a ground beef casserole in a can. Both names are portmanteaus, and both are somewhat opaque in their meaning.
