… Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with its excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) laissez-fairy godmother:
(#1) laissez-faire + fairy godmother yields a hands-off mentor and guide, of not much use to the disgruntled Cinderella, who will now have to do her own prince-finding (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
From the annals of remarkable commercial names, a delicious punmanteau name for a Phoenix AZ taco truck, which just flashed by, without remark, in the first sentence of the piece “Motor Mouth” by Aaron Timms in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:
Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix.
Juanderful = Juan (a stereotypical Mexican name) + wonderful, so conveying something like ‘wonderfully Mexican’ or ‘wonderful in a typically Mexican way’.
(#1) The sprightly logo (you can imagine the patter: “Hi! I’ll be your carnitas tacos today! Enjoy my meat!”); the food truck has a website, here
Today, a long guest posting on intellectual history, specifically on the transmission of ideas in linguistics, in particular on the innovation and spread of linguistic terminology. This is an immensely scholarly follow-up to my 4/15/24 posting “Greek-letter variables and the Sanskrit ruki class”, in which I reproduced a 1970 Linguistic Inquiry squib of mine with that title and wrote:
and then there’s the question of the useful ruki terminology, whose history [the Indo-Europeanist Michael L. Weiss (Professor of Linguistics and Classics at Cornell)] has been trying to trace (this squib might have been the source of its spread throughout the linguistic literature)
Today’s guest post is the current fruit of Michael Weiss’s RUKIstorical investigations, with minimal intrusions in his text by comments from me.
A Linguistic Inquiry squib of mine from 1970 (LingI 1.4.549-55) that for complex reasons hasn’t been digitally available on this site; thanks to the Indo-Europeanist Michael L. Weiss (Professor of Linguistics and Classics at Cornell), I am able to reproduce the squib here so that it will be available for inspection along with (most of) my other publications; the issue of the individuation of rules — of descriptive generalizations — is still a live one (independent of the formalisms of classical generative phonology), and then there’s the question of the useful ruki terminology, whose history MLW has been trying to trace (this squib might have been the source of its spread throughout the linguistic literature; I hope to post eventually on the history of the term).
Now: the 1970 squib, page by page:
From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook yesterday, this Tintin panel (whose specific source I do not know), in which Tintin and Capt. Haddock finally reach the famous machine for understanding women:
bon sang!, Capt. Haddock exclaims (literally ‘good blood’, used as an exclamation covering a range of high affect: roughly ‘Damn it!’); and Tintin prefaces his announcement of their amazing find with alors voila enfin ‘here it is finally’
La célềbre machine is a monster of science-fantasy invention, the sort of unimaginably intricate device that might revivify corpses, transport people through time, or launch a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth. But this one is devoted to understanding women, as if this project were on a par with revivifying corpses, transporting people through time, and launching a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth.
Men! I cry out, peevishly, at the ways of normative masculinity. As women and gay men are given to doing (often together, since many of our annoyances are shared).
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, 🃏 🃏 🃏 three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and 🌼 🌼 🌼 three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:
(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”
Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.
In recent days, I’ve been exchanging e-mail with my (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi) linguistics colleague Luc Baronian about ethnic and linguistic history, with special reference to the Welsh (and the Welsh language, Cymraeg) in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Dutch (and their language, Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch); and about tracing ancestral history. Three pieces of background here:
First, Luc is an Armenian-Canadian, the way I’m a Swiss-American. Luc is by recent paternal ancestry Armenian (as you can tell from his surname), by upbringing French Canadian; I am by recent paternal ancestry Swiss (as you can tell by my surname), by upbringing (and maternal ancestry) Pennsylvania Dutch (a descendant of primarily 18th-century immigrants to southeastern Pennsylvania, mostly from the Palatinate region of southern Germany).
Second, some years back, Luc — whose ancestry-search competence is vastly better than mine — helped me trace connections on my mother’s side and correct my misrecollections of several facts.
Third, Luc had gotten interested in the history of the Welsh language in Pennsylvania, which begins in colonial times, with late 17th-century negotiations over the Welsh Tract as a landmark event, and then apparently vanishes, leaving only place-names in its wake.
On the heels of yesterday’s posting about the early 19th-century composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, more people named Hummel (with the accented vowel rounded [U] (as in English put) in German or German-influenced English varieties, like Pennsylvania Dutch English; but unrounded [Ʌ] (as in English putt) in ordinary American English). The German landscape painter Carl Hummel. The fictional Kurt Hummel in the American tv series Glee. And the artist nun Maria Innocentia Hummel, whose paintings provided the original models for Hummel figurines, which is what this posting is mostly about.
An old One Big Happy strip in my comics feed today — posted here on 3/28/14 in “OBH roundup”, but with little comment — in which Ruthie reveals her aide-memoire for the name of a fish her mother sometimes cooks for dinner:
(#1) buncher, crowder? — or flocker, packer, ganger, batcher, schooler? — but actually grouper
At this point, you’re probably thinking that groupers are so called because they travel in schools, that is, in a kind of group. But no; there’s an etymological surprise here.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, with yet another pun on the name of a rock band; this time it’s Rage Against the Machine that’s being punned on:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Tomato Based Ideology”, alluding to the fact that what’s commonly called ragu (or Bolognese sauce) in the US is tomato-based (and sometimes meatless, as in the “traditional” variety of the commercial brand RAGÚ), though classic Italian ragù (aka Bolognese sauce) is a meat-based sauce with only a bit of tomato in it, and though the most common US name for meatless tomato-based pasta sauce is just spaghetti sauce (in fancier settings, AmE marinara sauce) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
The text in the speech balloon — with a RATM anti-corporate political message — coming from a thoroughly American source, emphasizes the meaty side of (some) American ragu; this is ragu used to name what is mostly called just spaghetti sauce in the US (a tomato-based sauce with substantial amounts of browned minced meat, usually ground beef, in it), though in fancier settings this everyday pasta sauce might be billed as AmE Bolognese sauce.
Obviously, food naming in this domain is a gigantic rat’s nest, but vocabulary isn’t the point of the cartoon, the band name pun is, so I’ll put off the lexicography for the moment and focus first on the pun and the rock band.
