Archive for the ‘French’ Category

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The Austria ostrich

November 15, 2024

Very briefly noted.

Passed on back on 11/9 by Michael Palmer on Facebook, this fine reworking of the map of Austria as an ostrich:


MP came across it on the Language Nerds Facebook site, but I don’t know who created the image in the first place

In English, Austria (a Latinization of the German name Österreich ‘eastern realm’) and ostrich (from a compound of the Latin avi- stem meaning ‘bird’ and the Greek struth– stem meaning ‘ostrich, big sparrow’) have only medial /str/ as clearly shared material, so are very distant puns, if they count as puns at all. Much the same is true of Spanish Austria and avestruz.  Things are even more distant in Italian (Austria and struzzo) and of course German (Österreich and Strauß).

But in French, as I pointed out on Facebook, by the accidents of phonological change, Latinized Austria > Autriche and the avi– + struth– compound > autruche, yielding a truly fine pun: Autriche is an autruche!

So Austria not only looks like an ostrich, in French it sounds like one too. This makes me happy.

 

Posted in Art, Compounds, French, German, Greek, Language and animals, Language change, Latin, Placenames, Puns, Spanish | 3 Comments »

favoris

October 21, 2024

A fallout from my 10/17 posting “An underwater Psychiatrist cartoon” (“all about the noun favorite: an implicit superlative, denoting a top-ranking element in some comparison set”), this e-mail from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell this morning:

the word favoris in French, as you probably know, means ‘sideburns’ and I can’t imagine why

Bonnie, who’s had a long career as a teacher of French, tends to assume that my command of that language is vastly greater than it actually is — a kindly person would say that my knowledge of French is spotty — but in this case, yes, I had a dim recollection of this odd fact, mostly because favoris ‘sideburns’ got borrowed into (British) English, where it enjoyed a brief fashion in the 19th century. Summarized from OED (1972) under the noun favourite, with a colorful cite from Benjamin Disraeli (the British novelist and Prime Minister):

noun favori ‘sideburn’ (usually in plural); 3 19th-century British examples (Disraeli from 1831: His beard, his mustachios, his whiskers, his favoris.) Etymology: a borrowing from French.

So it’s into French that we must go.

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Posted in Art, French, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Slang | 2 Comments »

Penguins at play

October 10, 2024

Max Vasilatos had warned me they were coming, but I didn’t know when. But today was their day, and they were a cheering relief from the deep dysfunction that a week of extravagant heat has visited upon me: from the Play Visions company in Woodlinville WA (but, yes, made in China), the Club Earth Penguin Parade — 6 nesting penguins (the biggest only 5 inches tall, so they fit in easily with almost any home decor):


(#1) An ad display of Les Six Antarctiques; can you tell which of the six is the Swiss penguin (known professionally as Arthur Honegger)? What gives him away as a Swissie and not a Frenchie like all the others?

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Posted in French, Language and the body, Music, My life, Penguins, Play, Toys | Leave a Comment »

Garden days

September 30, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate September, which has 30 days and, here in the Bay Area, often brings the hottest days of the year; this year, it’s been a strange rollercoaster, erratic enough to puzzle the plants in my little container garden, but hot enough overall to bring me plenty of breathing misery

Today I bring you three pieces of news from my garden: on the persistence of the acorn-burying squirrel Écu and on two disappearances, of the cobwebs that used to festoon the ivy on the walls and the cymbidium orchids in their pots; and of the dark grit that used to rain down on everything outdoors (and undoubtedly will again).

First, some background about the territory.

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Posted in French, Language and animals, Language and plants, My life | 5 Comments »

The NASCAR snail races

August 20, 2024

That is, the NASCARGOT races, as a Bizarro of 12/26/10 has it, reveling in the portmanteau of NASCAR and escargot (French ‘snail’) and showing us Dan Piraro’s goofy conception of snails in a NASCAR race:


(#1) The cartoon appeared as the middle panel of a Bizarro Sunday Punnies strip with three bits of word play in it, posted about (without further analysis) in my 12/26/10 posting “Punnies #11” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

Hat tip to Susan Fischer for dredging up this old cartoon on Facebook yesterday. Causing me to reflect on the fact that not all of my readers will be familiar with the American popcultural phenomenon that is NASCAR; there are people who wouldn’t be surprised to see that contestants in a race carry numbers, but would be baffled by all those ads on the snails’ shells. Indeed, DP has managed to transport the physical trappings of NASCAR vehicles to le monde des escargots. Motor sport meets malacology.

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Posted in French, Language and animals, Language and sports, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Portmanteaus | 3 Comments »

Monday morning delight

July 22, 2024

For Pied-Piping Day — see my 7/23/13 posting “Pied-Piping Day”, on 7/22 as Ratcatcher’s Day (cue the Pied Piper of Hamelin), with a discussion of pied-piping in syntax — the wonderful French-English pun Philippe Philoppe:


(#1) Punnng on flip-flop ‘a light sandal, typically of plastic or rubber, with a thong between the big and second toe’ (of imitative origin) (NOAD) — currently being passed around on Facebook (I got it first from Susan Fischer yesterday)

As a jokey bonus, the image is a portrait of an actual Philippe — Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans [known as le Petit Monsieur or simply Monsieur] (from Wikipedia: (21 September 1640 – 9 June 1701) the younger son of King Louis XIII of France and Anne of Austria, and the younger brother of King Louis XIV) — as painted by Pierre Mignard (from Wikipedia: (17 November 1612 – 30 May 1695) … a French painter known for his religious and mythological scenes and portraits).

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Posted in Art, Compounds, French, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

New preposition in town

July 1, 2024

Posted on the LINGTYP (Linguistic Typology) mailing list today, reproduced in this posting to illustrate one of the ways linguists play around with data and ideas as they try to figure out what’s going on on some specific case — looking for inspiration in (roughly) similar cases in other varieties of language.

If  that’s what you want to do, you want to go where the linguistic typologists hang out. On LT, from Wikipedia (very briefly):

Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world’s languages.

LTists have a society, the Association for Linguistic Typology (webpage here), which organizes meetings, publishes a journal, and sponsors that mailing list, for open discussion of typological matters. Like the one I brought up today:

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Posted in French, Language change, Languages, Linguistic diversity, Poetry, Syntactic categories, Variation | 1 Comment »

Perfecto Fancy-Boy

June 24, 2024

Perfecto Fancy-Boy, the Dingburg psychoanalyst, analyzes the appeal of Helmet Grabpussy in today’s Zippy the Pinhead strip:


(#1) Grabpussy’s real name is suppressed above, as too indecent to mention, even on this blog; but what grabbed me first in this strip was the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy for the psychoanalyst — a name that is most unlikely to have ever been given to any actual person, but is instead a pure creation of Zippy‘s cartoonist Bill Griffith

Zippy is a savorer of words and phrases. (He is also the playful lord of nonsensicality, call him Absurdo.) He has favorite names — Ashtabula, Estonia, Valvoline, Ding-Dongs, taco sauce, and more, treasured just for the way they sound, not for what they refer to; the Talking Heads album Stop Making Sense could have been named in his honor.

And he’s forever latching onto random expressions whose sound enchants him, so that he repeats them for pleasure, like mantras — what Griffy, the cartoon avatar of Bill Griffith, calls onomatomania. (There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania.)

Then there’s Griffith’s choice of names for his characters — like Perfecto Fancy-Boy. No doubt intentionally crafted to some degree, but also to some degree pulled out of thin air, from Griffith’s subconscious, picked because they “sounded good”. I’m in no position to say which part is which, so here I’ll just unearth some possible ingredients in the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy, specifically in this name referring to a psychoanalyst.

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Posted in Art, French, German, Language play, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Nonsense, Psychology, Puns, Writers, Writing | 1 Comment »

Free-range folklore

May 5, 2024

… 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)

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Posted in Dance, Folklore, French, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »

La machine à comprendre les femmes

April 5, 2024

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).

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Posted in AI, French, Gender and sexuality, Language and the sexes, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | 2 Comments »

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