Two very different occurrences from my experience.
The Fillmore plea. From the late 1960s, Chuck (Charles J.) Fillmore, tapped (as senior member of the linguistics department at Ohio State) to serve as acting chair of the department while Ilse Lehiste was on leave, hesitantly addressing the first faculty meeting of the year (I was one of those faculty):
(CJF) I can do this job if you all tell me, often, that you love me.
The Transue plea. From ca. 1990, my guy — my husband-equivalent — Jacques Transue, with some visible anxiety, pulling me aside for a moment of serious couple-talk, holding my hand, gazing into my eyes:
(JHT) I need you to tell me more often that you love me.
Two clearly different senses of the verb love (but both, of course, capable of different shadings in different contexts).
From the American tv series Emergency! S7 E11 “The Convention” (from 7/3/79), a tv movie following the regular series. Two women end up serving as a paramedic team together — female paramedics were a new thing at the time, only grudgingly accepted, and they were normally paired with a male partner — so a male paramedic tells them the watch commander wouldn’t approve of the women teaming up. One of the women good-naturedly but pointedly snaps back at him:
(1a) How would you like a thick lip, to go with your thick head? No offense.
With the idiomatic tag No offense — a shorter version of No offense intended — literally meaning something like ‘I intend/mean you no offense by saying this’, but almost always conveying something more complex than that.
The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from yesterday, on running evolutionary errands:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
Venture Fish crawls out onto land, no doubt to return after foraging there, then will venture onto land again, and in time its descendants will have become amphibians, and then, well, you know the story.
But why does Venture Fish go on land? It insists on doing this for some reason — the primary reason for the act — that is inscrutable to its aquatic companion, but Home Fish asks that Venture Fish meanwhile run an errand: fetch some things on the trip, thus supplying an additional, secondary reason for the act. Home Fish uses the format BACKGROUND CONDITION + REQUEST:
BACKGROUND CONDITION: If you’re going out / Since you’re already up / As long as you’re up / While you’re up / …
+ REQUEST: (could you / would you / why don’t you / please /…) VP-BSE
— made famous in the slogan for an early 1960s ad campaign:
(Sex toys and all they bring with them, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Today, a leek (for St. David’s Day, March 1st), but yesterday (the intercalary day February 29th) a leap.
The mail arrives and wow! (you exclaim) there’s a Leap Day flash sale at the Guy Gear Store, just for today! You have visions of well-designed equipment for hunting, fishing, and camping; cool bikes; hot athletic shoes; t-shirts for teams, bands, and plain ol’ aggression; tools Craftsman never dreamed of; electronics to rule the world of the future; and all that good guy stuff.
And then you examine the ad in detail:
(#1) Quick! Identify the three sale items in the ad; the model’s shapely buttocks are not actually on offer
In anticipation of a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden with motss.conners on Saturday, two items from my last visit to the garden (on 7/31): blue flax-lilies, which are neither flax nor lily plants, but do have bright blue berries; and dark purple, almost black, hollyhocks.
Mike Pope on Facebook, following up on my posting of the 25th “Lilo & Stitch”, with a question about the naming of the characters in the movie:
(#1) Stitch and Lilo
MP: Do you think the animators consciously followed a kiki/bouba paradigm?
AZ: Almost surely not consciously; they just chose names that “sounded right” to them.
In general, writers’ name choices for fictitious characters are inscrutable in detail; even if the writers have an explicit account of where the names came from, unconscious preferences for certain kinds of names can usually be seen to be at play.
One of these preferences is the bouba/kiki effect, which has to do with the visual appearance of the referents (see the images above). Also involved are effects having to do with the gender of the referents (Stitch is male, Lilo female). No doubt there are more.
Today’s morning name. I really have no idea why. I haven’t even seen the movie and was only vaguely aware of its theme. Maybe the sound-symbolic values of the names, the contrast between the /l/s of Lilo, voiced liquids, symbolically flowing; and the /s t č/ of Stitch, all voiceless obstruents, symbolically spiky and aggressive. And the /aj/ of Lilo, long and with a low nuclear F2; versus the /ɪ/ of Stitch, quite short and with a very high F2. Lilo is female, human, and family-oriented; Stitch is male, alien, and destructive.
(Discussion of men’s bodies and mansex in very plain terms, photos of naked, though not quite X-rated, men, so not at all for kids or the sexually modest.)
Liam Riley, actually an ubertwink we’ve seen before, but now — to celebrate the completion of a “Twinks” Page on this blog (with links to postings on twink as a body type, a persona, and a sexual identity) — viewed in conjunction with his CockyBoys stable-mate Levi Karter.
Levi and Liam, Levis and lace, (more) butch and (more) femme, twink and near-twink (more muscles, swimmer body type). Both playful, affectionate, and (professionally) adorable. And competitors in the Ace Ass department.
That’s the portmanteau in yesterday’s Luann strip:
voluminous + voluptuous, probably with a bit of sumptuous mixed in — but certainly ample heft combined with sensuousness. Not a waif, and not any typical fashion model.
