Archive for the ‘Language play’ Category
December 1, 2025
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the month of December and to begin a new work week
Another lesson from a visit a little while back from an old friend and colleague in linguistics in which three meals (deliveries from local restaurants) were a stand-out feature. I quietly insisted on doing the ordering, so as to offer my guest an array of pleasant surprises. I have since realized that what I was doing was displaying an ability of social value; in earlier years, I would have cooked the meals (I was genuinely good at that), but I’m long past being able to cook, and now (for complex reasons) I’m also unable to take guests out to dinner — but I can still play the role of host, by foraging takeout skillfully.
In a similar vein, though I can’t cook, I can produce new meals in my kitchen, using takeout, household staples, and a microwave [I realize this sounds like the description of a MacGyver episode, with our hero, oh, escaping from a prison using only leftover lasagna, plastic cutlery, and a thimble]; I can still play the role of cook, through my skill at assembling new dishes. As a boast: I Am the Great Assembler. (Totally over-the-top theme music here: Freddy Mercury singing “The Great Pretender”, in this YouTube video.)
(more…)
Posted in Language and food, Language play, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Pop culture, Puns | Leave a Comment »
November 20, 2025
Another chapter in foraging for food by restaurant delivery. I had a desire for some gyros, an old favorite in the wide world of demotic cuisines, in this case Greek: from Merriam-Webster online (considerably amended):
noun gyro (plural gyros): /jíro/ [North American] a sandwich especially of lamb and beef [roasted on a spit and sliced], tomato, onion, and yogurt sauce [tzatziki] on pita bread [AZ: the name comes originally from Greek, but has been thoroughly Anglicized, so that the phonology and morphology of the Greek name are no longer relevant to the American name]
(more…)
Posted in Chinese, Greek, Korean, Language and food, My life, Palo Alto, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »
November 10, 2025
In e-mail from Tony Velasquez on 11/8:
your 11/7 blog post about category errors and the potential for making jokes with them … reminded me of something I’m reading, How God Becomes Real, by Tanya Luhrmann …, who argues that knowing … that a god exists uses a different ontological attitude than knowing … that a table exists. She also points out that this attitude toward the spiritual has a lot of affinity with the sort of ontological attitude taken in play. It’s interesting to me to think that the attitude toward category errors you take that leads you to create jokes is opposed to a very different attitude to what could be called the category error, on Luhrmann’s thinking, that spiritual beings are real in the same sense that tables are real — an attitude that, instead of leading to play or jokes, often leads to violence and war.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Jokes, Language and religion, Language play, Lexical semantics, Philosophy, Semantics, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
November 7, 2025
Yesterday’s Wayno/ Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) The coupled life, with cook and diner; cooks — I was the diner and helper in Ann’s and my life, the cook in Jacques’s and my life, and I can say that the cook is often anxious about pleasing their audience, the diner (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Now, highlights of an exchange between Wayno and me that starts out being about this cartoon.
(more…)
Posted in Cartoonists, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Marriage, Puns, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »
November 7, 2025
Let’s dive right in, to a back-and-forth on Facebook yesterday between Gadi Niram and me:
— GN: Pick a color from 1 to 10. [AZ thinks: obviously, lavender 7 — something that’s both a color and also a number from 1 to 10]
— AZ [actual reply]: parsley [something from yet a third, hitherto unmentioned, category, herbs] … alternatively: Benjamin Harrison [US Presidents] [separately, continuing the Still Another Category theme, Sophie Silberpup suggested: antelope, in the animals category]
[now breaking out into the form of three-part solutions to the mystery in the board game Clue] titanium, in 753 BC, with a ball-peen hammer [titanium, located in 753 BC, killed the victim using a ball-peen hammer]
— GN: You crack me up, dude!
— AZ: Three more shots [each a triple: responsible person or thing, location in space or time, instrument or accompaniment], dude, and then I rest.
Minerva, in Flagstaff, with a night-blooming cereus … a jackalope, in Ursa Major, with John Waters … the ulna, in Narnia, with Moomins
I note that the responses seem to be crystallizing, developing some internal organization, over time. Starting to approach poetry, rather than pleasurable nonsense.
Not that there’s anything wrong with pleasurable nonsense.
(more…)
Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Errors, Jokes, Language play, Nonsense | 2 Comments »
November 2, 2025
Faced with this judgment on Facebook today about the Spelling Bee puzzle from the New York Times,
(#1) POETITE: not a word (in the Spelling Bee dictionary)
Dennis Baron owlishly protested with word play incorporating a pun on concrete:
It’s the stuff concrete poems are made from.
Well played, Dennis!
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Derivation, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Poetry, Puns, Word play | 1 Comment »
October 21, 2025
Gretel Cunningham Young (of Columbus OH, where she grew up, with my daughter Elizabeth, many years ago) on Facebook yesterday:
— GY: My goal was to make a half-vegetarian, half-carnivorous quiche, so I ordered this divided pan
Noting her reference to carnivorous quiche, plus an odd quirk in way English vegetarian is used, I reacted to her statement with some alarm (my response in an expanded and improved form here):
— AZ: But I don’t think I want to get near a carnivorous (‘meat-eating’) quiche, lest I be devoured by it. vegetarian quiche has the adjective vegetarian ‘(of food or diet), plant-based, excluding meat’, not the noun vegetarian ‘(of people) a vegevore, someone who eats only plant-based food; a non-carnivore, someone who does not eat meat’. A quiche that’s a vegetarian would not be a threat to me (as a being made of meat), but it would nevertheless be creepy, in a cannibalistic sort of way. The meaty correspondent to vegetarian quiche ‘quiche for vegetarians’ would be quiche for carnivores.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, French, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Slogans | 1 Comment »
October 11, 2025
🏳️🌈 👨❤️👨 🏳️🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)
The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:
(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)
The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.
(more…)
Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, History, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and politics, Language and religion, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Puns | 9 Comments »
October 9, 2025
Adventures in furniture inspired by a Benjamin Dreyer posting on Facebook yesterday:
Goshamighty, I completely forgot to mention, when I posted my Old Acquaintance piece a few hours ago, that in commencing this morning to read John Van Druten’s 1942 The Damask Cheek (co-written with one Lloyd Morris), I learned a new word! It’s cellarette: “a movable cabinet or container, often made of wood, designed to store and secure alcoholic beverages.”
If there’s a more perfect word to turn up in a play set in “The library of MRS. RANDALL’s house in the East Sixties, New York. December 1909,” [the setting of The Damask Cheek] I can’t think of it.
BD locates the sociocultural milieu of the item (and then its name as well) as privileged urban upper class — traditional, elegant, and elite — and we will see that his classdar is first-rate.
I then broke in with the news that I have one of these things, a very nice one, of Danish design, made of teak, on wheels, with a durable bar top, in two parts that slide open to reveal the storage spaces within (there will be photos). I am neither elegant nor elite — I have several good points, but they are not these — but this clever and handsome object suits me (and it was mine and Jacques’s, and before that mine and Ann’s, so it comes with with waves of sweet memory; I will soon pass it on to my grand-child Opal).
But first, the cellaret / cellarette. The object and the name.
(more…)
Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and food, Language play, Music, My life, Plays, Social class | Leave a Comment »
