Archive for the ‘Language and medicine’ Category

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A Promethean hepatical

April 26, 2024

The liver. Patent medicine. Greek mythology. Advertising. The illustrator’s art. All together now.

In the hands of French illustrator Charles Lemmel (1899 – 1976), the task of devising a poster to advertise a hepatical (a patent medicine for maladies of the liver) somehow fixed on the myth of Prometheus, punished by Zeus (for having stolen fire from Olympus and given it to humans) by being chained, naked, to the side of a mountain and subjected to endless hepatophagy: every day, Zeus’s eagle feasts on the Promethean liver, which then regrows for the next day’s torture.

Not, you might have thought, an ideal theme for a medicine ad; but look what Lemmel did with the idea in the poster (from the 1930s):


(#1)  Lemmel presents Hepatior as a rest and relief from the pain of hepatic ailments, a pain like that of Prometheus’s aquiline torment; meanwhile, he elevates the real-life sufferer by depicting the suffering Prometheus as a hot hot muscle-hunk and also a curly black-haired Greek dude — who is smiling and winking at us through the ordeal, reassuring us that it’s all a joke

That’s quite an artistic performance, also soft porn at several levels (extravagant body display, proud masochism). I happen to think it’s deeply silly, but enjoyable in its crudeness.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and sports, Language and the body, Masculinity, Metaphor, Myths | 1 Comment »

Easter punday

March 28, 2024

It’s Holy Thursday, and today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro: cartoon jumps the Easter gun, / with an outrageous rabbit pun:


Wayno’s title: “Side Effects May Include Hallucinations” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)

model /ístǝr/ Easter, pun /íθǝr/ ether, shared /í…ǝr/, with coronal obstruents between the two syllabics, so not bad for an imperfect pun; meanwhile, the Easter bunny is administering ether as an anesthetic, so the pun fits the image nicely

Two things: Holy Thursday (and Easter Sunday); and anesthetic ether.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Morning name: urticaria

December 24, 2023

Today’s morning name, the nettlesome noun urticaria: the medical name for an allergic rash commonly known as hives. This time, I knew exactly why my morning name was in my head, and it had nothing to do with the Philip Glass music breaking in waves over me as I woke: it came right out of an re-run episode of the tv show Rizzoli & Isles that I had seen the day before.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Morning names, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »

Placebo Domingo

December 10, 2023

Not a mangled tenor, but the Sunday (12/10) Doonesbury strip, back to savaging the dietary supplements Prevagen and Balance of Nature as expensive placebos:


(#1) Both companies advertise relentlessly on MSNBC (my background source of news and commentary), so causing me to swear a lot at my television set

These days the ads seem only to have engaging older people reporting their subjective feelings — of improved memory (Prevagen) or improved energy and well-being (Balance of Nature). No more rat studies. Just placebo effects down the line.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Rehab return day

December 5, 2023

It’s a foggy day in Palo Alto town, on the anniversary of my return home from a Palo Alto rehab center on 12/5/20, after having given up drinking several weeks before, a decision that impelled me into Stanford hospital with alcohol withdrawal syndrome on 11/11; I was moved to the rehab center on 11/17, and then discharged into the world on 12/5, as a recovering alcoholic beginning a new life. So 12/5 is a kind of rebirth day for me.

12/5 comes in between the death days of two remarkable musicians: Frank Zappa on 12/4 and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on 12/6. This year Zappa’s death day was anticipated by Kyle Wohlmut’s posting, on Facebook on 12/3, this inspired digital creation honoring FZ:


(#1) Seeing nothing like this on the (delicatessen food company) Dietz & Watson site, I assume that the Zappa Franks billboard is the work of ingenious bots.

It occurred to me that FZ might have composed the thing himself, that would have been so FZ, but I can find no evidence that he did. So this will be our “Eat Me” homage to him now.

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Posted in Art, Death notices, Holidays, Language and food, Language and medicine, Music, My life, Phallicity, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Autoimmune annals

December 4, 2023

Mostly an accumulation of unblogged material from the past — on, however, a topic that’s immediately relevant to my current medical treatments (stemming from two doctor’s appointments on 11/21), which I’ll get to eventually. But one thing at a time: start with the background.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Linguists, My life, Names | 1 Comment »

A high-theatrical digital collagist

November 29, 2023

That’s Hector de Gregorio, whose fantasist digital collage Love of Hermes came past me on Pinterest recently:


(#1) The male figure’s face is (a version of) de Gregorio’s own; the composition is packed with symbols and allusions of many kinds. only a few of which I can identify

Some of the iconography in #1 might be understood from information in the Wikipedia article on the Greek god Hermes:

Hermes is an Olympian deity in ancient Greek religion and mythology considered the [emissary and messenger] of the gods.

… his main symbol is the caduceus, a winged staff intertwined with two snakes copulating [sometimes crowned with a pair of wings and a sphere]

[AZ: Among the many female objects of his love was the love goddess Aphrodite, with whom he fathered the god Hermaphroditus — born a handsome boy, then transformed into a hermaphrodite, with a name compounded of the names of the two parents]

… Hermes also loved [many] young men in pederastic relationships where he bestowed and/or taught something related to combat, athletics, herding, poetry and music

Now, four more of de Gregorio’s dream-like, often highly theatrical, body-focused compositions — two relatively spare ones, two densely symbolic ones. Then some words about the artist.

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Posted in Art, Chinese, Collages, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and plants, Language and the body, Music, Myths | Leave a Comment »

Three words to marvel at

November 1, 2023

🐇 🐇 🐇 trois lapins to inaugurate November, the final month of autumn or spring (depending on which hemisphere you’re in), and celebrate the Day of the Dead. A day on which we’ll enjoy three English words that have entertained posters on Facebook (from now on, FB) recently: calceology ‘the study of footwear’; telamon ‘male figure used as an architectural pillar’; and hallux ‘the first and largest toe (on a human foot)’.

At this point, you might admit that these terms are English words but, quite rightly, object that it would be bizarre to talk about expressions that almost no speakers of English know or use as words of English. Certainly, if I asked you whether English has a word for the study of footwear, you’re almost surely going to say no, because part of our everyday understanding of word of English is that such an expression has some currency, and hardly any speakers of English know or use the expression calceology.

On discovering the technical term calceology, then, you might be willing to say that the term is an English word, or maybe even a word in English, but still balk at saying it’s a word of English. It should by now be clear that we’re dealing with distinct concepts here, and grappling, awkwardly, with putting labels on them. At least one fresh label is called for. I’ll hold off on choosing a label to cover the territory that includes words of English until after I’ve looked at three other characteristics of CTH — calceology, telamon, and hallux — separate from their lacking currency.

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Posted in Architecture, Art, Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Holidays, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Names, Shoes, Words, Words and things | Leave a Comment »

Doctor vs. vampire

October 27, 2023

A wonderful wordless cartoon by Liana Finck from the 10/30/23 issue of the New Yorker presents a  challenge in cartoon understanding: what do you have to know and what do you have to recognize in the cartoon if you’re going to understand what’s going on in it and why that’s funny?


An intense confrontation between a doctor and a vampire: the doctor seeks to repel the vampire. while the vampire, in turn, seeks to repel the doctor; each is shielding their eyes, to avoid seeing the repellent brandished by the other (the crucifix threatening the vampire, the apple threatening the doctor); the confrontation appears to be a standoff

A full appreciation of this comical Mexican standoff requires that you recognize the two characters, one drawn from the real world, the other from a fictive world of popular culture, somehow (absurdly) joined, indeed frozen, in mortal combat — which means recognizing why the crucifix is a threat to the vampire (this requires your knowing some vampire lore) and why the apple is a threat to the doctor (this requires your recognizing the joke’s inspired mainspring, a subtle pun on a proverb in English).  Truly awesome.

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Posted in Books, Fiction, Formulaic language, Implicature, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Proverbs, Puns, Semantics, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »

A sick day

September 20, 2023

Meant to post about Probal Dasgupta on autoimmune diseases and about my raft of them, but I lost the day to a mystery sickness, no doubt made worse by the smoky air outside, which leaks into my house and makes breathing uncomfortable; and certainly made worse by extravagant joint pain (in my hips and knees, subverting my new-found ability to walk with a cane or on my own two feet; and spectacularly in my hand joints — the right hand fingers swollen and painful for some days, on top of their existing damaged-nerve disability and pain; the left middle finger and two knuckle joints red, swollen, inflamed, made useless with pain).

I got my meals (using my poor right hand to substitute for the useless angry left one, usually my “good hand”) and otherwise slept through the day, feeling utterly exhausted and headachey.

A rapid Covid test showed nothing. My blood pressure and pulse rate remained excellent throughout the day. Early in the day my temperature was 96.5 F, significantly lower than my normal temp, which hovers around 97.6 (a degree lower than most people’s). But just now, after a salad for dinner, I felt a bit feverish, and indeed my temp was a bit elevated (for me), 98.5.

Testing my O2 uptake turned out to be tricky. My right-hand fingers are undependable, period, and it turns out that an inflamed finger gives an alarmingly low (false) reading. But I had one finger on that hand that wasn’t inflamed, the ring finger, and the oximeter read 97% for that finger this morning, still does.

Otherwise, I just feel really really crappy.

Oh, yes, that joint pain is what I’ve come to call osteoarthritism, a nasty autoimmune affliction that mimics osteoarthritis (a named disease that involves actual degeneration of cartilage), but travels around the body in unpredictable attacks that consume anywhere from minutes to days.

Now I’m going to try to figure out how to wash my dinner dishes and go back to bed.

When this passes, I’ll post about Probal and about my osteoarthritism, my DoE (dyspnea on exertion), my spontaneous aphonia, and more.

I really really want to get back to walking. That was truly delightful.

 

Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life | Leave a Comment »

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