Archive for the ‘Illusions’ Category
November 6, 2025
I had much more interesting things to post about, after my adventure at the lawyer’s, endlessly signing my name, dating and locating my signature, and then having it all notarized. But I’m the go-to guy on the Recency Illusion — surely not the first to notice the phenomenon, but I gave it a name and talked it up, so I come with a small but bright aura of Recency fame.
Which brings me to Grifterissimo Grabpussy, who in the past two days has burbled on about becoming aware of the word affordability. Who would have thought that so many Americans would be so deeply concerned about the cost of living?
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Posted in Illusions, Language and politics | 2 Comments »
December 2, 2023
A common joke form exploits an ambiguous expression E. Prior likelihood or the preceding context in the joke favors one understanding for E, but then fresh context (in the joke) brings out another, more surprising one. The effect is that the sense of E has shifted as the joke proceeds. It’s a pun, son. Used in a sense-shifting pun joke. (Puns get used in all sorts of jokes: knock-knock jokes, one type of riddle joke, and more.)
I now offer two examples that especially tickled me, to show how such ((phonologically) perfect) puns work. Then some comments on a different joke form, formula pun jokes, which can turn on imperfect puns and involve a different kind of set-up / pay-off from sense-shifting pun jokes.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Illusions, Jokes, Language and race, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Performance, Puns, Quotations, Snowclones, Taboo language and slurs, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
May 26, 2022
More from the annals of selective attention and confirmation bias, now in the journal Psychological Science.
The umbrella phenomenon is the Frequency Illusion: if your attention is drawn to some phenomenon, it’s likely to appear to you to be very frequent, all around you. Then in the special case of the Out-Group Illusion, in which your attention is drawn to a phenomenon associated with a group you don’t belong to (which then appears to you to be characteristic of that group and especially frequent there). Now in the even more special case of what I’ll call the Threat Illusion, in which your attention is keenly drawn to a phenomenon associated with an out-group you perceive as being threatening to you (which then appears to be not only characteristic of that group but extraordinarily frequent there).
A Frequency Illusion cartoon (under the more colorful label of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, a name based on one example of the effect, the sudden omnipresence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s name):
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Posted in Illusions, Linguistics in the comics, Psychology, Psychology of language | Leave a Comment »
August 5, 2021
In today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s title: “The Mammal in the Mirror” (a play on the song title “Man in the Mirror”) — a manatee primps at his vanity, yielding the vanity + manatee portmanteau vanatee, and crossing genders as well as words (masculine manatee — “Man in the Mirror”, addressing himself as handsome, bristly body — at a conventionally highly feminine item of furniture, a vanity table, for applying makeup in the bedroom):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
I’ll start with the two contributors to the portmanteau and follow them where they lead, which is many surprising places.
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Posted in Beheading, Gender and sexuality, Illusions, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Poetic form, Portmanteaus, Prosody | Leave a Comment »
March 20, 2019
Announced yesterday on Language Log, in a piece by Ben Zimmer entitled: “Frequency illusion” in the OED. It begins:
The latest batch of updates to the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary includes a term that originated right here on Language Log, in a 2005 post by Arnold Zwicky. The term is frequency illusion, first attested in Arnold’s classic post, “Just Between Dr. Language and I.” Here is the OED treatment, an addition to the main entry for frequency:
frequency illusion n. a quirk of perception whereby a phenomenon to which one is newly alert suddenly seems ubiquitous.
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Posted in AZ terminology, Illusions, Lexicography, Music, Psychology of language | 3 Comments »
August 30, 2018
Two recent magazine articles of linguistic interest: from the Atlantic issue for September 2018, “Your Lying Mind” by Ben Yagoda, about cognitive biases; and in the New Yorker‘s 9/3/18 issue “The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages: What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?” (on-line title; “Maltese for Beginners” in print) by Judith Thurman.
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Posted in Books, Illusions, Language learning, Psychology | 1 Comment »
December 7, 2016
On the SNAP.PA site (PA is the Press Association in London) yesterday, a piece by Thomas Hornall, “After you learn a new fact it appears everywhere again and again – here’s why”, about the frequency illusion, a selective attention phenomenon closely related to confirmation bias — on which, see this Gary Larson Far Side cartoon (from the Sex Mahoney website on 12/6/11):
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Posted in Illusions, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »
December 28, 2014
Ann Burlingham writes from Canada to report two non-standard verb forms she found there:
(#1)
(#2)
And she asked: are Canadians regularizing verbs faster than USAns?
Well no, but she’s noticing the verb forms more when she’s away from home (western New York state): a version of the Local Color Illusion.
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Posted in Illusions, Inflection, Morphology | Leave a Comment »
