Archive for the ‘Language and class’ Category

Half-assing things

March 20, 2022

(It’s all about some English expressions using the bodypart-term ass, but without any reference to human buttocks. The verb fuck (up), figuratively ‘mishandle, damage, ruin’, puts in a cameo appearance at the beginning. But: no actual bodyparts, no sexual acts, presented either verbally or visually.)

Advertised in my Facebook feed yesterday, this t-shirt, available from many sources (this via Amazon, in five colors):


The verb half-ass, here ‘do (something) incompletely or incompetently’ — as opposed to totally messing it up

We start with the racy slang verb half-ass and work back from there.

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Posted in Language and class, Language and gender, Metonymy, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 8 Comments »

You can’t get no ways…

March 23, 2019

… if you don’t know the phrase. An exercise in cartoon understanding that came to me from Facebook connections, but without any credit to the artist:

(#1)

If you don’t recognize It don’t mean a thing as part of a particular formulaic expression, you’re screwed; the cartoon is incomprehensible.

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Posted in Dialects, Formulaic language, Language and class, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Truncation, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »

Gleaning

February 1, 2019

The rooms in the grade school of my childhood — West Lawn Elementary School in West Lawn PA, west of Reading — had high ceilings, and all the rooms had, I believe, reproductions of artworks above the blackboards, where there was plenty of space for them. Uplifting artworks on patriotic, social, or religious themes (yes, religious; every day started with recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag and the Lord’s Prayer).

One classroom — my third grade, I think — had Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners:

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The significance of the painting, we were told, was that just as these women were gathering food in the field, so we children were extracting useful knowledge — gleaning it — from our lessons at school. (This is a specialized metaphorical sense of the verb glean: ‘[with object] extract (information) from various sources: the information is gleaned from press clippings‘ (NOAD)). I don’t think anyone ever explained to us who those gleaners were or what they were actually doing, so I recall being surprised when, more or less by accident, I came across the details in my World Book Encyclopedia.

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Posted in Art, Language and class, Language and food | 1 Comment »

The Rickford plenary address

October 2, 2018

Tomorrow at Stanford, John Rickford is doing a dry run for his plenary address at the NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) conference later this month:

Class and Race in the Analysis of Language Variation and the Struggle for Social Justice: Sankofa
John R. Rickford, Stanford University
Abstract for NWAV-47 plenary, NYU, 10/20/18

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Posted in Announcements, Language and class, Language and race, Linguists, Social life, Sociolinguistics, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

A musical decline

May 3, 2017

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, which presents the reader with a challenge in understanding. You need to know something about music, and a lot about urban life:

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That’s a grand piano on a cinder block, with its lid propped open by a shovel, on the grassy lawn (BrE garden) in front of the house; and there’s a BEWARE OF DOG sign, indicating the presence of a guard dog. Signs of urban blight (see the title of the cartoon), decline, diminishment (a diminuendo). All very troubling (in musical Punnish, treble-ing) to the musical old couple walking by.

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Posted in Language and class, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Understanding comics, Verbing | Leave a Comment »

This weekend’s tv hunk

February 25, 2017

… hails from New Zealand. Pana Hema Taylor (or Hema-Taylor), who I recently watched in the first season of the New Zealand detective series The Brokenwood Mysteries, in which he plays Jared Morehu. The man in a p.r. head shot:

(#1)

Hema Taylor has a sturdy physique, a powerful but attractive face, and a strong physical presence – definitely a hunk.

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Posted in Actors, Language and class, Language and ethnicity, Movies and tv, Names, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »

Roll, Brittania

February 23, 2017

A piece in the NYT on the 20th, by Steven Erlanger, under the head

British Snobbery Still Found In Paychecks, a Report Says [in print]

Hear This: Class Pay Gap in Britain Shows Snobbery Persists [on-line]

To a (very) rough approximation: in the UK, the most significant social fact about a person, the thing you register first about them, is their class; in the US, it’s their race. What follows from this is that the most powerful forms of social discrimination in the UK are based on class, in the US on race. And while some advances have been made in reducing the baleful effects of these types of discrimination in both places, the fact is that great and shameful social disparities, seriously disadvantaging the disfavored groups, persist (and fuel angry backlash towards the favored groups). In particular, Britannia rolls on in her disdain for the working class, and the first and easiest signal of class identity (though not the only such signal) is language.

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Posted in Language and class, Language and race, Language in social life | 1 Comment »