[revised version]
From David Preston, yesterday’s Brewster Rockit comic strip, in a male character attempts to mansplain mansplaining to Pamela Mae Snap (aka Irritable Belle):
(#1) (Note strategic use of speech bubbles in the third panel.)
Archive for the ‘Language and gender’ Category
Brewster Rockit to the rescue
July 15, 2017Fellows
June 29, 2017A Dilbert from 9/7/91 (passed on by Tom Limoncelli):
Betty balks at the title fellow — because she thinks of only one of the three lexical items fellow, informal ‘man, boy’. But there are two others, and the one she’s thinking of is the most recent.
Conjunct order in the comics
May 5, 2017Today’s Rhymes With Orange.on love and conjunct order:
So: in coordinated pairs of names, which comes first, and why?
In the case at hand, whoever creates the coordination (here, carving it into a tree) will almost always put their own name first; people are strongly inclined to take themselves to be the measure of all things. Similarly, if you’re referring to a couple of people and one of them is a friend of yours while the other is someone you know mostly through your friend, you’ll probably put your friend’s name first. But beyond that, there’s a complex set of factors that tend to favor one order of names over the other. It seems that these factors conspire in (now well-studied) ways to favor — wait for it… — Guys First.
Annals of interruption
April 30, 2017Some well-known phenomena: ceteris paribus, in conversations between men and women, (a) men speak significantly more than women, and (b) men interrupt women significantly more than vice versa. The effects carry over (not surprisingly) to argument between justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, and there they are augmented by another effect, that conservatives interrupt liberals significantly more often than vice versa. (These results from a study now in press for the Virginia Law Review.)
These effects can be seen as instances of a larger phenomenon: a tendency of those who are, or believe themselves to be, more dominant in an interaction to feel free to impose themselves on their partners and a corresponding tendency of those who are, or believe themselves to be, less dominant in an interaction to avoid imposing themselves on their partners.
The story came to me in the NYT on the 18th, in a piece by Adam Liptak. Well, in print in the national edition on the 18th, under the title “Let Me Finish, Please: Conservative Men Dominate the Debate’ — and on-line on the 17th, under the title “Why Gorsuch May Not Be So Genteel on the Bench”:
Language Sunday in the comics
December 12, 2016Four in my comics feed Sunday morning: a One Big Happy with the derived adjective quotatious; a Zippy on pangrams; a Mother Goose and Grimm with an ambiguity in marine biologist; and a Doonesbury nominally about pronoun choices, but about much more.
Color-coordinating college
November 30, 2016Yesterday’s Zits:
Some other orange schools: Florida, Princeton, Univ. of Miami, Oregon State, Idaho State, Oklahoma State. There’s also a bunch of schools with gold — but that’s yellow-orange, not straightforwardly orange. As for teal: Eckerd College, UNC-Wilmington, Coastal Carolina. Scripps has sea-foam green, which is very close to teal. (In any case, teal isn’t a basic color word in English, while orange is, so there’s a big imbalance here.)
There’s a suggestion in the strip that choosing a college on the basis of the school colors is silly, frivolous, inconsequential — the sort of thing an air-headed girl would do. I don’t see that it’s any more frivolous than choosing a college on the basis of the current fortunes of the football and basketball teams. (Please don’t just baldly assert that sports are important, serious, and fashion isn’t.)
November 11th, 2014
August 25, 2016… was a banner day for cartoons in the New Yorker. Waiting a few minutes to get called in for routine blood tests at the Palo Alo Medical Foundation this morning, I chanced upon this particular issue of the magazine and found five cartoons of interest for this blog (plus some others I enjoyed but had no special interest here); all five were from artists already familiar on this blog.
xkcd mansplaining
August 6, 2016
Pleasures of patriotic penetration
June 17, 2016(Well, dildos and vibrators, so not for everybody.)
Passed on by Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook, a startling sex toy, from the BlogRebellen website yesterday:
(#1)
Fühl den Nationalstolz tief in dir mit dem Deutschland-Dildo ‘Feel national pride deep within you with the Deutschland Dildo’
Black, red, and gold (the colors of the German national flag, in order, here from the black Eichel, or dickhead, to the gold Hoden, or balls), in silicone, with natural-looking veining and a suction-cup base. Be a penis patriot: fuck yourself the bold Teutonic way!
