Archive for the ‘Tongue twisters’ Category

Pickled pricks

May 4, 2018

(Treat the title as a warning — or as an invitation, whichever suits you.)

Yesterday, the posting “He said “prickles””, on prick, prickle, dick, prickly, and pickle (with notes on pickles as phallic symbols) and various combinations of these words, including prickle as a portmanteau of prick and pickle. To which Chris Hansen commented:

I can’t tell whether you’ve ever referred to a work of art I remember seeing but can’t locate online. It was a pickle jar filled with penises, and it was named “Prickles” There was vinegar in it too.

Well, yes and no. I’ve posted on an artwork of this description, but it wasn’t entitled Prickles (though it could have been).

That will take me to Peter Piper, and also to actual pickled penises.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language play, Phallicity, Tongue twisters | Leave a Comment »

The fan, the spathiphyllum, and the impressionist garden

September 10, 2017

Juan came by on Friday to replace the left fan in my laptop (it had reached airplane takeoff mode) and bring me small birthday presents: some mini-cheesecakes from Whole Foods (one berry, one espresso), an excellent but hard to pronounce houseplant, and a visit to the Gamble Garden to view ranks of gauzy late summer and autumn plants in bloom.

The computer repair took only a few minutes — I am now enjoying the silence of the fans — so I’ll focus here on the vegetative side of things: the birthday plant, a spathipyllum (say that three times fast!); and those seasonal flowers, which are gauzy only to a cataractive guy like me (but the Monet impressionist-garden effect is actually quite pleasing, one of the very few positive consequences of gradual vision loss).

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Posted in Language and plants, Language and the body, Signs and symbols, Subsectivity, Tongue twisters | Leave a Comment »

Metalinguistic tasks

August 12, 2017

In a recent One Big Happy, Ruthie’s father tries to get her to play with tongue twisters, but she treats the texts as stories about events in a real world:

Playing with tongue-twister texts is metalinguistic behavior, an activity in which bits of language are treated as objects in themselves, rather than being used to report, inquire, exclaim, instruct, etc. Small children (as above) and people in nonliterate societies are known for sometimes resisting metalinguistic talk of various kinds, instead confining themselves to concrete talk — what I’ll call planolinguistic talk (suggesting ‘flatly linguistic’, rather than ‘beyond and above’ language).

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Metalinguistics, Tongue twisters | Leave a Comment »

Three more Reapings

April 13, 2017

The latest bulletin from Pinterest featured a Reaper Jokes board maintained by Kathy-Lynn Cross. More Grim Reaper cartoons, including one that especially caught my eye because of the two idioms in the text. A Mark Parisi showing one (angry) Reaper confronting another (disconsolate) Reaper: “I’ve had it with you! From now on, you’re alive to me!”. Nice reversal of the idiomatic you’re dead to me ‘I disown you, cut you off, will never see or speak to you again’. Spoken by Death to Death, you’re alive to me conveys the same.

More on this cartoon, then two more Grim Reapers, to add to the 14 already posted on this blog; it’s a very popular cartoon meme.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Idioms, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Tongue twisters | Leave a Comment »