Archive for the ‘French’ Category
January 19, 2024
I recently discovered (through friends on Facebook) that 1/16 is Appreciate a Dragon Day — an excellent occasion, in my view. How do I appreciate my dragon? Let me count the ways.
One, dragons have picked up a ton of gay vibes (there are lots of rainbow dragons around, many on the cute side, but some fierce), and I am way gay; two, a Year of the Dragon is the upcoming year (beginning on 2/10/24) in the 12-year cycle of the lunar calendar and I am in fact a dragon, born in the dragon year 1940; and three, since dragons are (fanciful) gigantic serpents, they are natural phallic symbols, really big and powerful penises (the objects of my desire), frequently with wings, and that means they slot right into my sexual fantasies. Il y a un dragon dans mon lit!
(#1) On the kisspng images site: a rainbow Chinese dragon, by Oluoko
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Posted in Art, Books, Calendars, French, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »
January 3, 2024
I have this digital-artist friend (on the other side of the country) who proposed to give me a Christmas gift: daily cards (delivered by the USPS) for the AI Hot Hunk Days of Christmas (with Hot understood as HomoHot ‘arousing to homos’); the (very sweet) idea was to arouse me on a daily basis with a surprise hot guy, one for each of the 12 days from Christmas to Epiphany Eve, as in the song. Mail delivery this Christmas season has been — let me put this in a kindly fashion — erratic. The day 1 card arrived on day 4, not an unreasonable journey across the country, but then nothing, nothing at all, through to day 8 (8 maids a-milking, New Year’s Day), when the artist and I began to fear that the cards had gone astray, been seized by the post office, whatever, so that I anxiously awaited yesterday’s (day 9) mail. Which brought me days 2 through 4, whew.
By then, the artist had supplied me (by e-mail) with an X-rated version of day 5 (which their printers had rejected as too raunchy) and also its steamy but non-X substitute. So today (day 10) I’m hoping for the day 6 card. And then on from there. Meanwhile, I’ll improve the hours until the mail comes by showing you days 2 through 4.
Along the way, the artist compressed the AI Hot Hunk Days of Christmas to the Hot Days of Christmas, which I think is a stroke of abbreviatory genius, and hereby adopt for my postings from now on.
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Posted in Art, French, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and the body, Male art, Music, My life, Puns | Leave a Comment »
December 6, 2023
Today (12/6: St. Nicholas Day, Finnish Independence Day, and Mozart’s death day) my morning name was the Italian phrase dalla sua pace ‘on his / her peace’. From a Mozart opera. The music playing on my Apple Music when I awoke was indeed from opera in Italian, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, so if the phrase had come from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro — Figaro being the barber in question — the appearance of that phrase in my morning mind would have been easy to explain. Alas, Dalla sua pace (On her peace) is an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, quite a different plot, entirely barber-free and Figaro-free.
It is, of course, possible that my unconscious mind is not as up on the details of opera in Italian as my conscious mind, so it made this distant operatic association. Or maybe I was just reviving an interest in the preposizioni articolate ‘articulated (i.e., articled / arthrous) prepositions’ of Italian, of which dalla — combining the versatile preposition da (expressing source ‘from’, location ‘at, on’, and goal ‘to’) with the fem.sg. definite article la — is a prime example; here it is in a display of the articled prepositions (versions of this chart are found on many sites):
Prepositions down on the left, definite articles across at the top
(Articled prepositions are found in many European languages, as in French du = de ‘of’ + le (masc.sg.) and German zur = zu ‘to, towards’ + der (dat.fem.sg.), with very different details in each language.)
But the aria from Don Giovanni, what of that?
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Posted in French, German, Holidays, Italian, Morning names, Morphology and syntax, Morphophonology, Music, Quotations | 2 Comments »
August 21, 2023
In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro: croissants as a characteristically French pastry; then pulling out the ANTS part of the spelling CROISSANTS (never mind how this word is actually pronounced, in either French or English) for a far-fetched pun, with two ants — the insects — exemplifying characteristics of the stereotypical Frenchman (Wayno’s title is “The French Bugs”):
(#1) Breton striped shirts, or marinières; berets; a pungent cigarette in a cigarette holder for Ant 1; a mustache (curled at the tips), French scarf, glass of wine, and baguette for Ant 2 (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in French, Language and animals, Language and ethnicity, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Stereotyping | Leave a Comment »
August 11, 2023
In the current issue of the New Yorker, in the Talk of the Town section, a Paris Postcard by Lauren Collins: on-line on 8/7, with the title “Bartender, There’s a Beer in My Wine: Paris has been blanketed by posters for vière, a mix of vin and bière drunk from a wineglass, whose name, its creators say, started out as a joke”; in print on 8/14, with the title “Vière here” — about the hybrid beverage with a portmanteau name. Beginning:
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Posted in French, Language and food, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
May 23, 2023
Today’s Bizarro continues the Wayno / Piraro explorations of outrageous puns:
(#1) The title raisin d’être is an extraordinary pun on the French nominal raison d’être (literally ‘reason for being’), but with English raisin [ˈrezn] ‘dried grape’ in the place of French raison [ˌreˈzɔ̃] ‘reason’ (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
English [ˈrezn] ‘dried grape’ and French [ˌreˈzɔ̃] ‘reason’ share the initial segmental phonology [rez], but otherwise are phonetically quite distant (aside from being in two different languages) — utterly different prosody (accent + accentless vs. secondary accent + primary accent), with final syllables that share only an element of nasality (syllabic nasal consonant, nasalized vowel).
The basis of the pun, from NOAD:
noun raison d’être: the most important reason or purpose for someone or something’s existence: an institution whose raison d’être is public service broadcasting. ORIGIN French, literally ‘reason for being’.
What makes the pun so — forgive me — delicious is the fact that French raisin does not mean ‘dried grape’ but in fact ‘grape’; a raisin in French is a raisin sec (literally ‘dry grape’). French raisin d’être would presumably mean something like ‘grape of being’.
Earlier from Bizarro in the outrageous pun genre, from my 5/21 posting “It’s endive!”: alive [ǝˈlajv] in It’s alive! vs. endive [ˈɛnˌdajv] in the pun, sharing the final segmental material [ajv], but utterly different prosodically (accentless + accented vs. primary accent + secondary accent) and in their initial segmental material ([ǝl] vs. [ɛnd]).
But phonetically very imperfect puns can succeed as jokes if their basis is a well-known formula: a quotation (as in It’s endive!), an idiom (as in raison d’être), whatever.
Posted in Formulaic language, French, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »
December 29, 2022
From Ryan Tamares on Facebook on 12/19:
In this morning’s work queue:
(Ryan is Head of Collection Services at Stanford Law School, overseeing the cataloging, processing, and preservation of the Law Library’s collection, so things like this come to him for cataloguing)
Then a FB exchange:
Jackie Koerber Magagnosc: Not law of the food, rats
AZ > JKM: I too was hoping for an authority on the law governing hot peppers, or perhaps the law governing spicy meat stews, but it was not to be.
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Posted in Books, French, Language and food, Names, Spanish, Spelling | 6 Comments »
December 26, 2022
Two things: Christmas dinner the day before, with a muzzled French dessert; and seasonal decoration by a callipygian young man wearing a big grin and virtually nothing else. (Warning: racy stuff in this second section, not to everyone’s taste.)
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Posted in French, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and food, Language and religion, Language and the body, Metaphor, Underwear | 3 Comments »
October 5, 2022
In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, the (somewhat idealized, but real) world of male athletes intersects with the (fictive) world of stereotypical Frenchmen via an imperfect pun:
(#1) In both worlds at once: the object that is a (symbolic) baseball bat in the sports world and also a (real) baguette in the French world (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
The elements of my titular phrase Zhock jock (admittedly, a play on shock jock, though the cartoon isn’t about disc jockeys — jocks — or provocative, offensive humor — shock — or provocative, offensive talk radio — shock jocks): Jacques [žak] (with initial fricative, in both French and English, though with different phonetic details in the two languages) vs. jock [ǰak] (with initial affricate, in English). So we get these three hybrid guys, flashing signifiers from both the French Zhock world — details below — and the (American) jock world (football, soccer, baseball) — cleated shoes, football jersey, padded pants, sports shorts, baseball cap.
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Posted in Clothing, French, Hats, Language and food, Language and sports, My life, Names, Pop culture | 4 Comments »
September 20, 2022
(Warning: a vulgar term for the primary female sexual anatomy will end up playing a big role in this posting.)
Where this is going: to an alternative name for an American President (#45, aka TFG); and to an alternative name for a classic American novel (by J.D. Salinger) — both names being exocentric V + N compound nouns, the first in English, the second in French. (I’ll call them exoVerNs for short.)
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Posted in Architecture, Art, Books, Compounds, Derivation, French, Language and gender, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language in politics, My life, Synthetic compounds, Taboo language and slurs, Writers, Writing | 1 Comment »
