Archive for the ‘Language and gender’ Category

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LGBT news from Stanford

January 19, 2018

(A posting delayed by assorted computer upheavals at my house and a monster cold, which has caused me to sleep 11 hours a day. In any case, LGBT news bulletins, but no sex at all.))

News from Wednesday the 10th, the monthly Happy Hour! of Stanford’s QUEST group:

(#1) Logo provided by Ryan Tamares for the QUEST website

The gathering (almost all staff these days, and very heavy on librarians of various sorts) was our 8th anniversary event, a return to the Old Pro, a sports bar just up Ramona St. in Palo Alto from my house (yes, a sports bar, but it’s convenient to Stanford, lots of parking, and the CalTrain).

(more…)

Posted in Death notices, Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, My life, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

The triumph of confidence over expertise

January 11, 2018

A J.A.K. cartoon in the January 15th New Yorker:

Classic mansplaining, right down to the interruption.

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Posted in Conversation, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

The Unusual Two

November 29, 2017

In the tradition of Judi Dench and Vin Diesel (in a posting of 3/29/15 here), an unlikely pairing of actors in an episode of The Twilight Zone: Elizabeth Montgomery and Charles Bronson. Two gender icons of pop culture, early in their careers — a few years before Montgomery started her role as Samantha Stevens on the fantasy tv sitcom Bewitched, about the same time as Bronson broke through as Bernardo O’Reilly in the movie Western The Magnificent Seven.

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Posted in Actors, Language and gender, Movies and tv, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

Gendered moments in the comics

October 25, 2017

Gender stereotype time: a recent Calvin and Hobbes re-play, with Calvin expounding on the art of girls vs. boys; and a classic Zits (in two parts), on gender differences in same-sex interactions:

(#1)

(#2) Sara and D’ijon

(#3) vs. Jeremy and Hector

(more…)

Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Public and private | Leave a Comment »

Irmas

September 8, 2017

Hurricane Irma works its way through the Caribbean, now aiming at Florida. There’s nothing useful I can do at this distance, so I’ve been frittering away my time recalling the famous Irmas of my world — your list might well be different — namely Irma S. Rombauer, the Irma of Irma la Douce, and, top of the list, the Irma of My Friend Irma, the apotheosis, oh alas, of the Dumb Blonde stereotype in American popular culture.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Sociocultural Roles, Stereotyping | 4 Comments »

Sea foam

September 4, 2017

The Zits from August 31st:

(#1)

About color naming, and its association with sex/gender. The stereotype is that males use only a small number of color names, but that females draw on a much more diverse collection of names, and that this difference follows from differences — perhaps learned, but perhaps inborn — in the interests and inclinations of the sexes, with females engaged in fashion and interior decoration (where a rich color vocabulary is useful) in a way that males are not.

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Posted in Color, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Sociocultural conventions | 2 Comments »

Revisiting 1: Will McPhail

August 25, 2017

Cartoons by Will McPhail, last seen here in three cartoons on 4/15/17, in particular a wordless cartoon (in which God slam-dunks in an angel’s halo). Now from the August 28th New Yorker, this complex exercise in cartoon understanding, drawing on several pieces of very specific cultural knowledge:

(#1)

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Evolution, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

Brewster Rockit to the rescue

July 15, 2017

[revised version]

From David Preston, yesterday’s Brewster Rockit comic strip, in which 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.)

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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and gender, Language and medicine, Language in advertising, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Fellows

June 29, 2017

A 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.

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Posted in Language and gender, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Usage attitudes | 1 Comment »

Conjunct order in the comics

May 5, 2017

Today’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.

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Posted in Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Word order | Leave a Comment »

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