🐇 🐇 🐇 trois lapins to inaugurate the little month of February (which stretches this year to 29 days), beginning unfortunately in these parts in cold rains that will last for a week, and (this morning) in low air pressure that makes my joints so painful that I can barely get this posting typed and has depressed my vital signs (blood pressure, pulse rate, body temperature) so much that I’m light-headed, unsteady on my feet, and muzzy-minded (the upside is that low air pressure inevitably goes on to rise, so that if I can hang on a while things will get better)
But I’m not dead yet, and (for reasons I don’t understand) I’m not at all depressed — low air pressure often causes me to break into weeping in despair at the slightest provocation, and the unbroken gloom of these days would test anyone — just pissed off at being so incapacitated.
My morning has been cheered by today’s Rhymes With Orange comic strip (involving a talking pet fish and its keeper), which plays in a surprising way with two of the many verb senses of see:
Minimal lexicographic facts about the senses of see involved in this strip, from NOAD:
verb see: 1 [a] perceive with the eyes; discern visually … 4 [a] meet (someone one knows) socially or by chance … [c] meet regularly as a boyfriend or girlfriend
On hearing “You’ve been seeing other fish”, most people would understand it to be conveying sense 4c (for reasons I’ll explore below); what’s funny is that the strip sets things up — via three pieces of evidence that the keeper has just been to an aquarium, a place people go to to watch fish — so that we will take the fish to be using the unexpected sense 1a: surprise!
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