Archive for the ‘Compounds’ Category
July 13, 2017
It’s about the N + N compound pretzel dog, and its many possible understandings: a dog that delivers pretzels, a dog that likes pretzels, a dog twisted into the shape of a pretzel (or merely contorted), a dog-like object made of pretzels, and so on.
If I tell you that the dog in pretzel dog is to be understood as short for hot dog ‘frankfurter’, you’ll come up with another set of possible understandings: a contorted hot dog, a hot dog with pretzel bits on it, a frankfurter-like object made of pretzels, and so on. But unless you’ve actually experienced something marketed as a pretzel dog (at a Sonic Drive-In or from the Auntie Anne’s company, say), you probably woudn’t think of interpreting pretzel as a reference to pretzel dough. But that’s where we’re going.
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Posted in Compounds, Language and food, Language of advertising, Lexical semantics, Names, Subsectivity | Leave a Comment »
July 4, 2017
Yesterday’s posting on cow-tipping and related matters distinguished two verbs tip, played with in a cartoon by Daniel Beyer:
(1) give (someone) a sum of money as a way of rewarding them for their services
(3) overbalance or cause to overbalance so as to fall or turn over
and provided a joke sign prohibiting cow-tipping. There are of course also NO TIPPING signs, usually in restarants, prohibiting gratuities.
Now Benita Bendon Campbell reminds me of NO TIPPING signs in the UK that often baffle American visitors because they appear along roads, in places where gratuities would seem to be irrelevant. There are variants that show that a third verb tip is at issue here, one related to the
noun tip: British a place where trash is deposited; a dump. (NOAD2)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Back formation, Books, Language and food, Signs and symbols, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »
July 2, 2017
(About men’s bodies; some readers may want to exercise caution.)
The Michael Lucas (gay porn studio) Fourth of July sale for this year:
(#1)
They are covering their junk with the Stars and Stripes (and their hands): the flag as fig leaf, or modesty shield.
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Posted in Clothing, Compounds, Gay porn, Holidays, Language and the body, Pragmatics, Reference, Semantics, Slang, Subsectivity, Underwear | 1 Comment »
June 11, 2017
Two Batman cartoons have just come to me. Passed on by Chris Hansen, this uncaptioned (and unsourced) cartoon:
(#1)
Batman at a bustop with four old women: what to make of the scene?
And in today’s comics feed, this Bizarro:
(#2)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 13 in this strip! — see this Page.)
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Posted in Art, Compounds, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Parody, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
