Archive for the ‘Language and animals’ Category
December 6, 2025
My morning name for 11/28: The Nairobi Trio (TNT). An instant trip back to my teenage years, the 1950s, when my friends and I were wildly entertained by Ernie Kovacs’s TNT skits on television. Today I’ll give you something like the basic facts about TNT (which involves three people in gorilla suits moving in sync with the tune “Solfeggio”) and its creator. But then I’ll ask the question: why is TNT funny? And eventually the question: why does TNT make many people feel uneasy? (One writer has declared it to be “incredibly controversial” and “completely unacceptable by today’s standards”.)
On this last question, I’ll look ahead and suggest that the twinges would vanish if the skit were called, say, “The Solfeggio Players” — no Nairobi reference — and the gorilla suits were replaced by, say, chicken suits or frog suits. Observations that take us into facts about Africa and gorillas, tons of beliefs and attitudes from common culture, assorted tropes from popular culture, and written and filmed works of imaginative fiction (King Kong! Tarzan!). I’m not sure I can do justice to all of this, but I’ll try to at least skim the surface. Just not today.
(more…)
Posted in Humor, Jokes, Language and animals, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »
December 6, 2025
A Glen Baxter cartoon in the latest — 12/8/25 — issue of the New Yorker:
The scheduled event will go on, complete with umbrella to shelter the picnickers from the blazing sun, even in the snow; even when polar bears arrive (attracted by the smell of food) to steal bites of avocado toast, the way jays and gulls do in the summer
It’s a feature of local life (on the SF peninsula) that temperatures drop about this time of year to chilly nights and daytime highs hovering around 60, while some guys — I am one — persist in going about in short pants (low today 47, high 59, I am in rainbow flag gym shorts), but with a warm shirt (fleece-lined flannel if necessary); I do not, however, picnic in this weather.
And we are unafflicted by polar bears. Chipmunks, roof rats, squirrels, ground squirrels, jays, crows, gulls, hawks, owls, raccoons, skunks, the occasional lynx, every once in a while a mountain lion, but even the tantalizing scent of Safeway’s jambalaya heated up in my microwave has failed to lure polar bears south from Alaska to Palo Alto. But then we are woefully lacking in ice floes and meaty seals.
Posted in Clothing, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Seasons | Leave a Comment »
November 28, 2025
Briefly noted. In the latest New Yorker issue (of 12/1/25), cartoonist Meredith Southland suggests a solution to the puzzle of what penguins are doing when they waddle around waving their wings in the air:
(#1) They are playing Charades! Well, life on the ice floes of Antarctic imagination offers few interesting diversions, but this communal game can occupy plenty of dark cold time
The all-time favorite penguin game, however, is Hide and Seek, a spheniscid take-off on Where’s Waldo? Sometimes known as Lost in the Crowd. Though ice-sliding and egg-rolling races are both tremendously popular. Never a dull South Polar moment.
(more…)
Posted in Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins, Toys and games | 2 Comments »
November 21, 2025
(#1) Alfred Tennyson,”The Lady of Shalott” (1832)
A Joe Dator cartoon in the latest (11/24/25) print issue of the New Yorker poses the question, “What if Humpty Dumpty had survived his fall?”
Humpty Dumpty is an egg. An egg contains a developing chicken embryo. The embryo will eventually mature, crack through the egg, and emerge as a chick. (There is even theme music for this scenario, Mussorgsky’s “Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks / the Chicks in their Shells”, from “Pictures at an Exhibition”.)
JD shows the first moment of emergence, the chick’s head bursting through the chest of a dismayed Humpty Dumpty, who is toppling backwards in his chair — a scene that will be viscerally painful for modern audiences familiar with the 1979 movie Alien, with its famously grotesque Chestbuster scene, but will in any case evoke a fatal heart attack :
(#2) Humpty Dumpty and his female companion at table, when the mortal wound opens up; it will crack him from side to side
(more…)
Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Monsters, Movies and tv, Music, Poetry | 5 Comments »
October 30, 2025
💀 💀 💀 three days in October: Halloween Eve, Halloween, Day of the Dead — with today’s Bob cartoon for the second of these occasions; and then the Day of the Dead is also a significant day for me personally — my (Path to) Sobriety Day, the day I took my last drink, 5 years ago now
(more…)
Posted in Books, Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and animals, Language of medicine, Linguistics in the comics, My life, This blogging life, Writers | Leave a Comment »
October 12, 2025
An Ellis Rosen cartoon that came by on Facebook recently:
(#1) The hybrid creature the pomeranian-nimbus, being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner — so being presented as an extraordinary dog, a cloud canine; note that the woman’s dog recognizes the p-n as a dog, and appears to want to play with it (see the wagging tail)
(The name of the dog breed is standardly capitalized, because it’s a proper name denoting a creature originating in the geographical region of Pomerania, and I’ll use Pomeranian from here on.)
The compound Pomeranian-nimbus is a copulative N1 + N2 compound (like Swiss-American or hunter-gatherer), denoting a thing or things of both the N1 type and the N2 type. But in fact the creature is not just a mix of Pomeranian dog and nimbus cloud, but is actually a nimbus Pomeranian ‘Pomeranian dog that is (also) a nimbus cloud’ (your standard N + N compound in English is semantically modifier + head) — rather than a Pomeranian nimbus ‘nimbus cloud that is also, or at least resembles, a Pomeranian dog’. A nimbus Pomeranian, or, more compactly, a nimbopomeranian, a nimpom for short.
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Meteorology, Music, Names, Poetry, Portmanteaus, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Word attraction | 3 Comments »
September 26, 2025
In today’s Bizarro cartoon, a hybrid portmanteau, a portmanteau name for one kind of hybrid referent, a referent with an assortment of features drawn from the referents of the contributing expressions; think of triceradoodle (referring to a hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle cross) = triceratops + doodle ‘a poodle cross’ (to be illustrated below):
(#1) Venus flytrap + bear trap = Venus bear trap: the appearance of a giant Venus flytrap leaf, with the bait of a foothold bear trap (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
To come: details about the two contributing referents, the Venus flytrap and the (foothold) bear trap; then a factor that makes this portmanteau especially rich and satisfying, in contrast to the less complex (but far more preposterous) triceradoodle.
(more…)
Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
September 20, 2025
This Chris Hallbeck cartoon came by me on Facebook this morning — a strip packed with matters of science (paleontology, specifically), lexicography and usage (the senses of the noun dinosaur, and the contexts in which they’re used), and pragmatics (the way in which the noun is used in interactions, especially in language about language; in the enforcement of language norms; and, oh alas, in the relevance of things said to the interests of those participating in the speech context):
A Maximumble cartoon from 5/24/14, whose humor turns crucially on the pragmatic foolishness of the (now deceased) professor (in the face of a ravening monster, he stops to insist, irrelevantly in the context, that his companion must use the proper terminology, while the companion flees to safety); and which is based on the usage of the noun dinosaur — for a member of a clade of prehistoric reptiles bearing the zoological taxonomical label Dinosauria; versus, in non-technical American usage, for any dinosaurid creature, resembling the prototypical dinosaurs (many people have seen a family resemblance)
(more…)
Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Context, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Relevance, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »
September 18, 2025
Encountered in going through stuff on Facebook: the episode “Fozzie encounters a bit of a language barrier” from “Rocky Mountain Holiday”, a 1983 Muppet special; in the episode, Fozzie Bear describes himself to Gonzo (a character of ambiguous species) following on reports of a bear in their vicinity:
Have you not noticed that I also am of the ursine persuasion … I’m a bear too and I speak fluent bearish
A huge ferocious bear appears, the main characters flee to Kermit the Frog, and Fozzie explains:
Gonzo! Gonzo! Just a slight dialect problem … she speaks Grizzly and I only speak Paddington
You can watch the episode on YouTube here.
(Nice ellipsis of the BEAR in grizzly bear (the name of a type of bear) and Paddington Bear (the proper name, on the pattern of FN + LN, roughly like Stanford Linguist) of a fictional bear, discovered in London’s Paddington Station), as if they were structurally parallel.
The principal characters:
Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo
(more…)
Posted in Ellipsis, Language and animals, Language change, Lexical semantics, Movies and tv, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »
September 15, 2025
Found in a mountain of boxes full of photos from all of my life, this sweet photo that I’m sure I haven’t posted before: of a fine collie (Blaze, by name, according to the note on the back) and Blaze’s boy, who looks like he’s sprung up some in a growth spurt — and his face has left soft childhood and developed fine adult features, though in size S — but hasn’t yet gotten the shot of pubertal testosterone that builds adult muscle mass:
(#1) A boyhood shot, taken ca. 1950, when the boy was 9 or 10
Here he is ca. 1978, plying his adult trade, teaching linguistics:
(#2) Now with a 70s haircut, and now more markedly a man of the south of France (with his mother’s features)
Someday he’ll come along
The man I love
And he’ll be big and strong
The man I love
— George and Ira Gershwin
Yes, my leanly muscular man, Jacques Transue, from before all the disastrous things that befell us.
Posted in Childhood, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Music, My life, Photography | Leave a Comment »
