Today’s Frazz, by Jef Mallett:
The substance of the strip is entertaining in itself, but here I’m interested in quotative (be) all, in
Mrs. Olsen was all, “I can’t …”
Research a few years back suggested that this quotative, which once was widespread among young speakers in the U.S., was receding fast, in favor of quotative (be) like. But here it is in the mouth of 8-year-old Caulfield (Frazz himself is 30). Well…
In collecting material for blog postings on recent exhibitions at the Cantor/Anderson galleries at Stanford, I came across a staff page with an excellent photo of Matthew Tiews, Associate Vice President for the Arts at Stanford:
I first knew Matthew as the Associate Director of the Stanford Humanities Center, a position that calls for a serious scholar who is generally knowledgeable about the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, and is also an able administrator, good at working with people, and (very important) with a solid sense of humor. Now Matthew oversees the arts programs and the arts complex at Stanford, which has developed into an entire campus neighborhood, or zone (three museums, a very spiffy concert hall, and more).
So I wrote Matthew about my Stanford art museum postings (which I thought might interest his staff), and now I’m reporting all this to you.
Three new Pages on my blog this morning:
Penis art, under the parent Page “Xblog essays”, building on the inventory of postings in my recent “Art of the penis” posting: about artworks in which penises figure prominently.
Categorization & labeling, under the parent Page “Linguistics notes”: conceptual categorizations vs. linguistic expressions, an inventory assembled by Kim Darnell on my behalf
Clothing: general, under the parent Page “Clothing postings” (which it shares with pages on shirtlessness and underwear — reflecting some of the preoccupations of this blog): another inventory assembled by Kim Darnell on my behalf
WordPress gives me, every day, a report on how many views of my postings there have been (a) in the last week and (b) in the last day. I’m baffled by how these stats are collected, but still I notice them. For a long time, statistic (a) was close to 1,000 views per day, then some time ago, it dipped to about 750 views per day. Puzzlement.
But the postings that draw people don’t change a whole lot. A posting on parts of the body almost always leads by a considerable margin, then a lot of sex-related postings. Sex sells. Recently there was a remarkable shift.
Not the Egyptian goddess, certainly not the Islamic terrorist organization, but instead a phenomenon of English syntax involving an unexpected, extra, form of the lexeme BE, most often resulting in the sequence is is, hence the label Isis. There is now an “Isis: is is, double is” Page on this blog, listing postings on the subject on Language Log and this blog, plus bibliographic resources of several types. The Page is freely available publicly, and (like my other Pages) will be updated and added to as new material comes in.
From a 2007 handout:
{For at least 45 years now (2016)] (Dwight Bolinger’s first example is from 1971), English speakers have been producing sentences with an occurrence of a form of BE that is not licensed in standard English (SE) and is not a disfluency – what I’ll call Extris (“extra is”). There are many subtypes… The Isis (“is is”, “double is’, etc.) subtype has gotten much attention – from Bolinger (1987) [on]…
[Two varieties of Isis:]
[N-type, with a “thingy”-N subject] The thing that’s most interesting about the film is is that it’s…
[PC-type, in a pseudocleft sentence] Basically, what they were trying to tell me was, is that whatever Federal Prison Industries was doing was more important…
Isis is one of those things that people keep rediscovering, and then grope their way through questions that have been pretty well settled for some time. For them, I’d recommend a look at this 2007 handout of mine and at the summary in the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America page on “Double IS”. Of course, they’d have to know that such resources exist — and that I don’t know how to fix.
Not about language, but about gay porn as visual art. Just a link to material on AZBlogX, but not for kids or the sexually modest.
Today on AZBlogX, two postings:
a follow-up to “Jim French / Rip Colt” of 2/24/13: “Another shot at French/Colt”, with photos from the 1992 “The Macho Image” by Rip Colt (the porn side of French/Colt): randy men in costumes
“Cinco de Mayo with Lucas men”: a Cinco de Mayo sale ad from the Lucas gay porn studio, with an Anglo boy engaging two Latino studs for the holiday
Created yesterday, a Page on this blog (under “Linguistics notes”) devoted to pronoun case in English, created originally for the use of Tyler Lemon, who’s working on a Stanford undergraduate honors thesis in linguistics on the topic, but now made availabe to everyone interested.
The page inventories postings (mostly on this blog, but some on Language Log, and a few elsewhere) on the choice between Nom and Acc in English, including who vs. whom, the case of conjoined objects, especially in the NomConjObj (Nom Conjoined Objects, like between you and I) construction, the case of subjects in embedded clauses (Acc case in ISOC — In-situ Subject of Clause — and ESOC — Extracted Subject of Clause), the case of pronouns in combination with preceding items like as, beside(s), but, including, like, than, case in inversion constructions (Along came me), case in predicatives (It is I/he/*they, It’s me/*I, That’s me/*I in the photo), case in fragment constructions (for example, short answers to questions: Who’s there? Me/*I), case in formulas (Woe is me, Till death do us part), Nom he (He ‘God’, generic he) as object of preposition, case in appositives (we/us Americans), case choice and style/register, case choice influenced by the exigencies of rhyme (Oh where oh where has my little dog gone? / Oh where oh where can he be? / They make them [sausages] of dog they make them of horse, / I think they make them of he), case choice in nonstandard dialects, and more. Possessives (Poss my etc.) and reflexives (Refl myself etc.) are clearly related but this imventory touches on them only tangentially.
Added on the 20th on this site: three Pages, two under “Comics lists” and one under “XBlog essays”.
Under “Comics lists”: Archie comics (Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica) and Batman postings. The latter is about all things Batman, with links to postings about the many incarnations of the Dark Knight (not just the Batman of the DC comic books), to images of Batman, to parodies of Batman, and to incorporations of Batman (and Robin) into other comics and cartoons (Batman and/or Robin are recurrent figures in Bizarro cartoons, for example).
Under “XBlog essays”: b/t roles, with postings (mostly on AZBlogX) about the roles taken by characters in gay porn films, with the b man acting as subordinate to the t man, who runs the show. b and t are not the same thing as bottom and top in anal intercourse, though the two things are related in complex ways. The assignment of characters to the roles b and t is also a complex matter, being connected significantly to f/m gender roles in the straight world and to attributions of femininity and masculinity in both the straight and gay worlds: roughly, the more masculine character (on a number of dimensions) is likely to be assigned the t role, and then the b/t role assignment to characters will correlate with the likely course of their sexual interaction: who does what to who, in what order, etc. (These expectations are sometimes frustrated for dramatic effect, of course.)
I had considerable trouble assembling this Page. AZBlogX is a livejournal blog, and Google doesn’t track livejournal entries, so I couldn’t do a Google search; livejournal does have an internal search engine, Yandex, but it’s pretty much a worthless piece of crap (this might be connected to its being a Russian product), so I’ve had to resort to hand searches, and I’ve surely missed some postings that should be on the Page.
In any case, I’m now preparing an AZBlogX piece with some b/t analysis of (parts of) a gay porn flick I recently viewed. Stay tuned.
On AZBlogX on the 26th, a posting “Dean Phoenix in disguise” that starts (#1 there) with an ad (titled “Ahead of the Curve”) for the Dirk Yates gay porn flick God Was I Drunk (2013), in which the DP character is presented as a straight army private who, under the influence of drink, agrees to have sex (for cash, in a video) with another straight soldier. This is a routine story line for the Dirk Yates flicks, which purport to show straight military men having sex with men (other straight military men) for the first time (for cash, in a video by Yates). The men are framed as real military men, not actors, and they always get seriously into the sex.