Via Jack Hamilton, this Spanish cartoon on soccer and inflectional categories:
Archive for the ‘Grammatical categories’ Category
Football grammar
June 3, 2011Loinfruit
May 26, 2011Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky ranted in Facebook a while back, when Mothers Day loomed:
As a breeder, let me go on record as saying get over it already and stop turning my ability to produce loin fruit [she meant to type “loinfruit”] into an excuse to plaster the world with commercialized guilt and stereotyping.
First, there’s breeder, which has two salient senses here (both applicable to Elizabeth): ‘a heterosexual’ and ‘someone who has had a child’. But her posting was noticed mainly for its use of loinfruit ‘child, children’, which was new for some readers and struck them as inventive and entertaining.
Elizabeth was in fact using an expression she had learned some years ago on the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss. She and I picked it up from Gwendolyn Alden Dean, who referred to her son as “the loinfruit”. So I asked about the expression on the Facebook descendant of the newsgroup and got the local history of the expression.
C > M conversion in the popular media
April 20, 2011Neal Whitman sends a link to this Penn Jillette video on his exchange with Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty about which is the better porn title: “Men Who Crave Big Cocks” or “Men Who Crave Big Cock”.
More on C/M
February 21, 2011Over on Language Log, Mark Liberman reported a headline that lots of people find at least a bit off:
(1) Unrest Spreads, Some Violently
As so often happens with attested examples, there are several things going on here at once, and they need to be disentangled: the adverbial violently (what does it modify?), the verb ellipsis in some violently (in which spreads is ellipted), and the ellipsis (or whatever it is — see below) within the M NP some (understood as some of it or some unrest). The last point is what I’m primarily interested in here.
C/M
January 28, 2011Thought-provoking Stanford talk yesterday: “What Can Be Ground? Noun Type, Constructions, and the Universal Grinder” by Alex Djalali, Scott Grimm, David Clausen, and Beth Levin (all of Stanford).
Porn hypallage and sex-part conversion
December 13, 2010From the 1988 gay porn flick Cruisin’: Men on the Make, in scene 2, dominant man says to his submissive fellator:
You suck good cock.
meaning ‘you suck cock good/well, you’re a good cocksucker’ — that is, with a modifier of one type realized as an adjectival modifier of the direct object. This is a transferred epithet, or hypallage (some discussion here, with some links to earlier postings), related to the hypallage in give good/great/fantastic/… head.
Entheta
August 10, 2010A correspondent has written me (presumably in my role as Zero-Plural Man, possibly because of my recent note on nouning and zero plurals in the case of the noun background ‘movie extras’) a message with the header
A rather famous zero plural
and the one-word body
Entheta
That rang only the most distant of bells for me, but of course I have on-line resources, from which I concluded that entheta is a Hubbardism (as in L. Ron Hubbard), a bit of Scientology-speak. And that it’s not a zero plural of a count noun, but instead a (singular) mass noun.