Let’s dive right in, with two disparate items: an old One Big Happy cartoon recently reprised in my comics feed; and Ta-Da!, a 2018 hardcover picture book by Kathy Ellen Davis (author) and Kaylani Juanita (illustrator):
Archive for the ‘Interjections’ Category
ta-da!
April 23, 2023All about /aj/: the trisyllables
October 4, 2022The Zippy strip of 9/29 interjects:
(#1) The strip is all about eyeglasses (with the wonderful name Thelma Nesselrode as a bonus), but this posting is about oh!, interjections / yeah!, exclamations / and, like, discourse markers and stuff
So, what’s up with eye-yi-yi!? This is presumably an orthographic representation of an English exclamation /aj aj aj/, with the accent pattern /àj aj áj/, and pronounced as a single phonological word /àjajáj/. In fact, I’m aware of — and at least an occasional user of — three English exclamations /àjajáj/, with three syllables: one a borrowing from (Latino) Spanish; one in Yinglish (taken from Yiddish); and one in PDE (Pennsylvania Dutch English, taken from Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch, that is, Pennsylvania Dutch / German). (There are probably more, in other German-based varieties of English, in particular.) They have somewhat different contexts of use and a wide variety of ad hoc spellings, though ay-ay-ay seems to be the closest there is to a conventional spelling for all three of them (my childhood spelling for the PD and PDE exclamation was ai-ai-ai / ai ai ai, and it’s still the only one that looks right to me).
So: something about the range of the phenomena in this exclamatory domain, with special attention to my personal history. In this posting, just about the exclamatory triples, but folding in the de facto national ballad of Mexico, “Cielito Lindo”, and some Texas klezmer music.
Then, in a later posting (bear with me, my life is over-full), my discovery that OED3 has relatively recent entries for the interjections ai, aie, and ay, and my subsequent disappointment in the content of these entries — as against, say, the rich OED3 entries for the interjections oh and ah. And finally, some aimless wandering about in the world of interjections, exclamations, discourse markers, and related phenomena.
Nobody expects the Yinglish interjection
September 29, 2021An e-mail exchange on 9/28 between Richard Vytniorgu and me, thinking out loud together on various topics, including the prejudice within the LGBT community against the twinkish, the sexually receptive, the submissive, and the effeminate amongst us queers — all, apparently, on the grounds that such men are wanting in conventional masculinity and so are defective even as queers; they’re just too gay-acting, in the view of some of our number. Richard is an effeminate submissive sexually receptive twink, so he’s got a huge emotional investment in the matter; I am merely a bottom by preference, but I’ve been becoming increasingly militant and outspoken in this arena, moving towards the view that Richard and his kind should be seen as central to the larger community, not as peripheral misfits.
But that’s not what I’m after in *this* posting. Instead, it’s what happened in this exchange between us:
RV: I feel for Tannor [Reed] as I do for all twinks in the [gay porn] industry. Gays can be so hypocritical sometimes: they love to watch us, but will publicly punish or shame us when it suits them. You may have heard of [twink X; his story isn’t the point here, just his being treated with contempt]
AZ: Oi.
RV: What does this mean?
Here’s where I need to remind you that Richard is British and I am American.
Yo Day 2: OY/YO at Stanford
January 6, 2020(Continuing the Yo! theme for today, following “King/Saint Melchior”. I note that these postings have absolutely nothing to do with the Star Wars character Yoda.)
From Stanford News, the piece “Saying hello to OY/YO at Cantor Arts Center: Deborah Kass’ bold sculpture welcomes guests from its new home at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center” by Beth Giudicessi on 12/30/19 (mailed out today when the university reopened after the holiday break):
(#1) From the YO viewpointCantor Arts Center hopes its newest sculpture, OY/YO by artist Deborah Kass, acts as an extension of the museum’s new vision to present art and ideas in contemporary and inclusive ways. The piece was installed Dec. 20 and is now on view to the public.
The signs of speechlessness
December 7, 2019What do you say to convey that you can’t find any words to describe your state of mind? What’s the verbal equivalent of the speechlessness emoji 😶 ? (Which literally has no mouth, indicating an inability to speak.)
Some people have conventional expressions for this purpose. Here’s one of them, homina, in today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
(#1)
As a cartoon bonus, we get the (metonymic) conversion of an expression evincing some state of mind — homina evincing bewilderment, surprise, or shock to the point of speechlessness — to a measure noun denoting a degree of the evinced state of mind — homina as a unit of bewilderment etc. A special sort of nouning, generally available for interjections:
I give that experience three eeks / ughs / ewws / ouches / …
Follow-up: BOOIESUZYKQHHHH
June 2, 2019From the annals of Cartoonland spelling bees, in my 5/31 posting “Ultimate spelling bee”, this Bob Eckstein cartoon:
(#1) The contestant offers BOOIESUZYKQHHHH as the spelling for the given pronunciation /búwisúzikyú/ (or something very close to that)
In creating this cartoon (hastily — if you’re doing a bunch of cartoons a day, you don’t have a lot of time for reflection), Eckstein pulled some pronounceable nonsense out of his head as the contest word. The result is an expression with recognizable parts, two of which, /súzi + kyú/ form a familiar name — Susie Q — while the other, /búwi/, might be heard as any of several names, but in Eckstein’s mind was just two nonsense syllables that bubbled up in the heat of the moment.
The town that time forgot
March 15, 2018Today’s Zippy, touring the center of historic Dingburg:
A great compendium of Zippy preoccupations: Hostess cupcakes and Little Debbie snack cakes, bowling, Poindexter barbats, topknots, beatniks, and much more. Somehow frozen in a past between 1885 and 1945, so that it’s historical, fantastical, and absurd, all at once.
And then there’s the conversational language: beep, honk, and urp.
All the /do/s
August 10, 2017
(#1) Homer Simpson ejaculates
From the American tv show Psych, S2 E12 “The Old and the Restless” (2008):
Shawn Spencer: Can you check for a John Doe, please?
[Desk clerk nods, turns to her computer]
Shawn Spencer: Actually, can you check all the Does? Tae Kwon, Cookie, Play, Do-Si…
An extended play on the syllable /do/ in English.
The art of interjection
November 13, 2015In yesterday’s national edition of the NYT, a Jason Bromwich story with the arresting head:
Oy or Yo? Sculpture With Something to Say Lands at Brooklyn Bridge
(#1)
The rude interjection is a staple of New York life. Now, the landscape of the city will itself heckle residents and tourists, with a brash new sculpture in Brooklyn Bridge Park that yells “YO” if you are looking at it from Manhattan or “OY” if you are gazing out from Brooklyn.
The sculpture, “OY/YO,” is the first of this size from the artist Deborah Kass, who describes herself as a “total, absolute, 100 percent provincial New Yorker.” It was commissioned by a Brooklyn developer, Two Trees Management Company, and was placed in the park on Monday.