Archive for the ‘Language and animals’ Category

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Rabbits massed at the month’s border

February 27, 2025

It’s penultimate February. Tomorrow, tigers pounce, to devour the month. And then on Saturday, the hordes of rabbits (bearing leeks and daffodils for St. Dafydd’s Day, purely as ornaments, since both are toxic to rabbits) that have been massing at the month’s borders will stream in and overwhelm us all. Sandra Boynton has a cartoon for Rabbit Days (of course she does, bunnies are adorable, and SB is an artist of the adorable), which she last posted on Facebook on 1/31, just before the last onslaught:


Boynton writes: The new month approaches, so I am once again sharing the highly scientific fact that if you say RABBIT RABBIT! as your very first words of the month, they will bring good luck all month long. Additional irrefutable fact is that in worrisome times, the more rabbits mentioned the better.

Sing out, Louise! Now is the time to loudly chant RABBIT RABBIT RABBIT — Marche is icumen in / Lhude sing rabette — as a mantra of protection, a prayer for salvation:

From the fury of the Muskmen free us, O ye rabbits!

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Quotations | 6 Comments »

May I take your coat?

February 7, 2025

A Sandra Boynton turkey cartoon from 1980, showing a  (polite) offer framed as a request in the form of a question, using the formula May I VP?:


(#1) The exchange — with the offer made by a turkey who appears to be an attendant at a women’s checkroom (see the window in the background, with women’s dresses on hangers in the room behind the window) — follows the polite service script (involving an attendant and a customer, female in this case) in the first two panels, then runs off the rails in the third panel, where an ambiguity in the verb take rears up; the turkey assumes ownership of the coat and walks off with it as their own, leaving a nonplussed coatless customer

Three things here: the turkeys (who are a long-standing thing for Sandra Boynton); the polite service script (which incorporates conventionalized versions of some very indirect speech acts); and the ambiguity of take (which provides a surprise shift from the sense appropriate to the service script to an outrageous and dumbfounding larcenous sense).

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Posted in Allusion, Books, Cartoonists, Jokes, Language and animals, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Politeness, Pragmatics, Semantics, Social interactions, Speech acts | 1 Comment »

The poetic groundsow

February 2, 2025

Links from Wayles Browne (a regular visitor to this blog from far above Cayuga’s waters), attached to my Ancho Rabbit posting from yesterday, which I will now expand into a posting for Groundhog Day (2/2):

The BBC reports on Groundhog Day: it’s six more weeks of winter.

And of linguistic interest: a Pennsylvania Dutch poem about the groundhog and his, or rather her, day [the BBC report “How the Pennsylvania Dutch created Groundhog Day”; in PaDu, it’s die Grundsau ‘the groundsow’] (as read by Cornell’s old grad student Mark Louden).

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Posted in Ethnonyms and demonyms, German, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and class, Language and ethnicity, My life, Poetry, Variation | Leave a Comment »

The culinary artmanteau

February 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to welcome the month of February, the month of Lincoln Darwin Day and of Valentine’s Day (this year, Mardi Gras doesn’t come until early in March)

It’s Rabbit Day, and what happens to be at the top of my posting queue has nothing to do with rabbits; it’s a Bizarro cartoon (from yesterday, 1/31) with a tasty culinary artmanteau:


(#1) The portmanteau Michelancho = Michelangelo (the 16th-century Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarotti, painter of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome) + ancho (the dried poblano chili / chile pepper) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

(an alternative culinary artmanteau: (Michelangelo) Anchorotti  = ancho + Buonarotti)

(plus, I note that #1 is about Michelangelo the Ancho Honcho, the Man of La Mancho, also one of the lesser-known film Manchowiczes, etc.)

Now some brief notes on anchos, and then a surprise finale in which today’s rabbits get cooked with anchos, in the triumph of culinary artistry conejo en adobo with red chiles, which you can think of as Rabbit Michelancho.

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Posted in Art, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns, Spanish | 4 Comments »

Beanies, baby

January 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅  three tigers for ultimate January, and a day continuing the theme of late-January early-death birthdays: Robert Burns, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Edward Sapir in an earlier posting of mine (“Luminous birthdays” from 1/26); now, Anton Chekhov two days ago and Franz Schubert today

Meanwhile, tigers savage rabbits, but the rabbits of February are clamoring at the door, growing in size and ferocity, and are now prepared to chew up the tigers like mere blades of grass. A monument in bread to the coming triumph of these adorable but gigantic bunnies:


(#1) Today: from Benita Bendon Campbell, who got it from Jacqueline Martinez Wells

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Posted in Clothing, Events and occasions, Hats, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Variation | 2 Comments »

The fox plays in many memes

January 22, 2025

A Mark Thompson cartoon in the 1/20/25 issue of the New Yorker offers a foxy goulash of cultural forms: cartoon memes, joke forms, story formats, and conversational routines:


(#1) The Dog in Bar cartoon meme (with a fox instead of a dog), the Walk Into Bar joke form (a fox walks into a bar,…), the Fox Eludes Hound(s) story format, and the Tell Them I’m Not Here conversational routine

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Conversational formulas, Jokes, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Movies and tv, Narrative, Routines and rituals, Stories | 2 Comments »

The axolotl poem

January 6, 2025

1/6 it’s Epiphany and 2001 Insurrection Day, and there’s fresh news from the salamander hotline, a follow-up to my writing yesterday, in the posting “That’s a lotta axolotl”:

I have known about axolotls since the 1950s, when Mad magazine was responsible for potrzebie as a non sequitur nonsense word, ferschlugginer as a sort of all-purpose modifier of negative affect, … and axolotl as a nonsense reference.

Which elicited this comment from Robert Coren:

As you may not be surprised to learn, my thoughts also went to Mad magazine as soon as I saw the word. I particularly remember fragments of a parody of Wordsworth’s Daffodils …

I omit RC’s recollections, which are indeed fragmentary, after the first two lines (memory is a fickle thing); but the parody / burlesque (which I’d forgotten about) manages to be both clever (maintaining the form of the Wordsworth — 6-line verses of iambic tetrameter, with rhyme pattern ABABCC — and catching its spirit) and crude, just as a Mad parody ought to be.

(Rhymes for axolotl are not plentiful: the Mad parody uses bottle, twice, rejecting glottal, throttle, and wattle, and also AmE waddle, twaddle, toddle, swaddle, coddle, and model.)

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Posted in Humor, Language and animals, Language play, Parodies, Poetic form, Poetry | 1 Comment »

That’s a lotta axolotl

January 5, 2025

🎁 🎁 🎁 three presents for 1/5, the 12th day of Christmas, Epiphany Eve (I am Melchior, King of Persia, an old graybeard bearing gold), as I struggle with the afflictions of my body (plus some extras, like ten days of near-deafness) and with a long litany of Things Gone Wrong, including the roof rats that have been eating away a wooden door on my patio (it’s winter, and they got cold and hungry, and seem to have imagined that things would be better inside my storage closet) and a prescription drug service whose erratic and incomprehensibly shifting software has consumed significant chunks of four of my days as I tried to get some prescriptions refilled on-line for mail delivery — I tell you this to explain that my absence from posting has been neither thoughtless indolence (stretched out on a plushy sofa while snacking on chocolate truffles) nor yet another near-death episode (with ambulances, emergency rooms, and surgeries), but just the confluence of a high level of everyday medical awfulness and the howling devils of daily life (les choses sont contre nous, et les bêtes aussi)

So let’s talk about axolotls. This from an elfshelfism that came my way back in December on Facebook, which I failed to save, but then it turns out to have surfaced in a posting on Threads on 12/13 — these things get passed around from hand to hand, like jokes and nursery rhymes — by charlesrathmann, who wrote

Elf on a shelf. eh? I give you:

(#1)

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Posted in Holidays, Language and animals, Riddles | 7 Comments »

Melchior

December 30, 2024

The 12 days of Christmas click by as we advance to Twelfth Night — Epiphany Eve — and then on 1/6 to Epiphany itself, the day of the Three Magi, or Three Kings, conventionally each the king of a distant land, each with a characteristic appearance, each with a name, and each with his gift for the Christ Child in Bethlehem. In one tradition, Melchior (alongside Caspar / Kaspar and Balthazar) is King of Persia, the oldest of the kings (a graybeard), and the giver of gold (rather than frankincense or myrrh).

The thing is, I am Arnold Melchior Zwicky, son of Arnold Melchior Zwicky and grandson of Melchior Arnold Zwicky, the last of whom, oh yes, had brothers named Kaspar and Balthazar. I have the name, the age and the gray beard, but lack the kingdom and the gold. Yet for a brief period in January each year, I am Melchior as well as Arnold, I am resplendent, I am a king.

For this period, I rise above the fact that in my country all three parts of my name are seen as strange and foreign, none more than Melchior (for the rest of the year, when I have to clarify my middle initial, I say “M as in Michael”, leading many people to think that my middle name is in fact Michael, so they could call me Mike). Only this year did it occur to me that I should add Michael / Mike to my alter ego’s name Alexander / Alex Adams: ALEXANDER MICHAEL ADAMS, the weighty A. M. Adams, the amiable Alex “Mike” Adams, hookup name Alex, just Alex.

Now, two things. First , an alternative view of the royal Melchior, from a 2022 posting in which he’s depicted as, wow, not only young and virile but also as the (mythic) king of France. And then another 2022 posting that starts out being about okapis and somehow ends up with “M as in musk ox” for my middle initial (plus “O as in okapi” for the O of ARNOLD).

Meanwhile, Epiphany is coming and my royal robes need fluffing.

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and religion, Music, My life, Myths, Names, Spelling, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

On antepenultimate December

December 29, 2024

👴 👴 👴 three old men for antepenultimate December (3 days left), also the 5th of the 12 days of Christmas (five golden rings!) and the 5th of the 8 days of Hanukkah (so there’s still plenty of oil)

These have been difficult days — the latest rainstorm came in on a wave of low air pressure, felling me with joint pain and stopping up my ears so that I can barely hear (and I probably won’t be able to get help until sometime in the new year) — so I’m going to just randomly take stuff to post about and run with it, helter skelter.

First up: three seasonal presents from Ann Burlingham, in Pittsburgh, delivered to me yesterday by my grandchild Opal Armstrong Zwicky, who’s in town on break before their last semester at the University of Pittsburgh. In size, from the smallest to the largest:

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Signs and symbols, Toys | Leave a Comment »

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