Archive for the ‘Grammatical categories’ Category

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The news for penises, Norwegian edition

June 27, 2015

Passed on by Chris Hansen on Facebook, this story of 6/23 from thelocal.no (“Norway’s news in English”), “Is this the worst summer job ever?”:

A nineteen-year-old in Norway has been hired by a sexual health charity to play a giant penis who surprises passers-by by spraying them with golden confetti.

“I thought it was hilarious. If I can do a good thing for others, just by being a dick, there is nothing better,” Philip van Eck, the man inside the penis costume, told Norway’s Tønsberg Blad newspaper.

It’s all about STDs.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Gender, Grammatical categories, Language and the body, Phallicity, Slang | Leave a Comment »

“Hash Brown Built-In”

February 9, 2015

On Facebook, this photo:

(#1)

Jeff Shaumeyer wondered:

(1) Does “hashbrowns” really have a common singular form, and is this it?

(Bob Boutwell amplified on this, saying that “Hashbrown potatoes” is commonly used on menus, but he’d never seen “hashbrown” used as a singular noun.)

And Robert Coren asked:

(2) And what’s a “hash brown built-in”, anyway?

I’ll have answers, but there’s a good bit of background to get through.

(more…)

Posted in Idioms, Language and food, Singular & plural | 2 Comments »

Data on xkcd

February 6, 2015

On Language Log, a posting of today’s xkdc, #1483 on Quotative Like, posted by Geoff Pullum under the title “Linguists get tough on promoting language change”. And then from Mike Pope, a pointer to an earlier xkcd of linguistic interest that I’d missed:

One of Randall Munroe’s cartoons on how to annoy people.

Posted in Conversation, Linguistics in the comics, Singular & plural | Leave a Comment »

Tall guys

December 31, 2014

(About gender rather than language.) Today’s Dilbert:

Meanwhile, collected in real life at a local restaurant yesterday, one Silicon Valley tech guy to another, veering briefly from Valley Talk to personal matters:

Chicks dig tall guys.

In another context, this could have been framed as

Guys dig short chicks.

On height, there’s a strong tendency towards dissortative mating, the socially ideal pair having a man taller than his female partner.

(more…)

Posted in Gender | Leave a Comment »

The definite article of fame

August 6, 2014

In the NYT yesterday, an August 1st  letter from Pamela Shifman and Gloria Steinem in response to a July 30th op-ed essay on “The Girls Obama Forgot”. The letter-writers are identified in the Times as follows:

Ms. Shifman is executive director of the NoVo Foundation, which focuses on girls’ and women’s rights. Ms. Steinem is the writer and activist.

Both identifcations are semantically (or pragmatically) definite, conveying uniqueness in this case. The first has an anarthrous (article-less) title: executive director of X ‘the executive director of X’; in fact, the executive director of X would have been an entirely acceptable alternative, but the anarthrous version is shorter.

The second has the definite article, in a context where an indefinite article would have been entirely acceptable;

Ms. Steinem is a writer and activist

is not only syntactically well-formed, but also true. Why the definite article?

(more…)

Posted in Definiteness, Names, Pragmatics, Semantics | 1 Comment »

Tenses here, tenses there

May 12, 2014

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky offers this passage from the Ask a Manager blog of the 12th:

Managers and the possessive tense

I have a new manager who has placed his desk in the middle of the room, and conducts all of his conference calls in a rather loud fashion. In doing so, he constantly refers to the employees (myself and my peers) as “his” — e.g. “my team,” “my testers,” “my people.”

Am I wrong to feel a bit demeaned that my new manager is placing himself as a king among the common employee? His self-placement of prominence above those that he rules is causing quite a bit of resentment amongst “we the people.”

Elizabeth reports that this is otherwise an excellent blog (offering good advice on managing), but possessive tense is nonsensical as a technical term of grammar.

(more…)

Posted in Grammatical categories, Ordinary vs. technical lg, Singular & plural, Tense-aspect-mood | Leave a Comment »

Calvin faces grammatical gender

March 1, 2014

The Calvin and Hobbes strip from 2/26:

Calvin shows the common confusion between sex and grammatical gender, compounded by the apparent assumption (incorrect) that the assignment of nouns to grammatical genders is the same in all languages with grammatical gender. I sympathize with the teacher’s frustration.

Posted in Gender, Grammatical categories, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »

Playing with French morphology

September 15, 2013

From Benita Bendon Campbell, this reminiscence of a moment during her time in Paris with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, many years ago:

Ann and I and aother friend were having afternoon tea at our local café on the Boulevard Saint Germain. The patron and patronne had just acquired a German shepherd puppy named Rita. In French, a German shephejrd is “un berger allemand.” Our friend remarked that Rita must be “une bergère allemande” — or a Gereman shepherdess. That is funny in French as well as in English. (The correct form is “une femelle berger allemand.” The name of the breed is invariable.)

Bonnie’s sketch of une bergère allemande:

(more…)

Posted in Agreement, Derivation, Gender, Grammatical categories, Inflection, Language play, Morphology, Playful morphology | 3 Comments »

‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ’

July 26, 2013

Yes, 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).

(more…)

Posted in Compounds, Connotation, Count & mass, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Slang, Style and register | 2 Comments »

Respecting each other

July 20, 2013

The 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.)

(more…)

Posted in Count & mass, Gender and sexuality, Insults, Language and sexuality, Language and society, Usage | 1 Comment »

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