Archive for the ‘Compounds’ Category
June 18, 2019
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a clown facial:
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From NOAD, the nouning of the Adj facial ‘of or affecting the face’:
noun facial: a beauty treatment for the face.
Then the noun facial ‘facial treatment (for beauty)’ serving as head in the N + N compound clown facial (for a pieing — a pie-in-the-face — involving a clown or clowns), which contrasts in interpretation with the compounds cum facial (for a sexual practice in which semen is ejaculated onto the face) and beauty facial (used to clarify that the ‘facial treatment’ sense is intended).
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Posted in Compounds, Language and culture, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »
June 9, 2019
The 6/7 Zippy takes us to the Jersey Shore for some water ice in a squeeze cup:
(#1) At the Strollo’s Lighthouse Italian Ice shop in Long Branch NJ: Zippy (alarmed at climate change) speaking on the left, Claude Funston (who denies climate change) on the right
On the setting. On Strollo’s. On lemon as the vanilla of Italian ices. On the relevant C(ount) noun ice, the nominal Italian ice, and the compounds water ice and squeeze cup. On Italian ice and the family of similar confections.
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Posted in Combining forms, Compositional semantics, Compounds, Count & mass, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Semantics, Snowclones, Subsectivity | Leave a Comment »
May 28, 2019
The semantics of English modifier + head nominal composites — but especially of N + N compounds — is a recurrent topic on this blog; the array of semantic relationships exemplified in the data here is enormous, and might give the impression that things are just chaotic, though I’ve tried to pull out frequent patterns that dominate the data. One way to approach the matter in more nuanced fashion is to search for preferences for certain kinds of interpretations according to the semantics of the component elements.
And now, just appeared, we have “Systematicity in the semantics of noun compounds: The role of artifacts vs. natural kinds” by Beth Levin, Lelia Montague Glass, and Dan Jurafsky, in the De Gruyter journal Linguistics. Published online 5/16/19; I’ve found no volume, issue, and page numbers for the print version, but this is the DOI, and Lelia now reports that a pdf is freely available here. The abstract:
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Language and food, Language and plants, Semantics, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
May 15, 2019
(Reference to penises, plus some penis art and garments for penises, so not to everyone’s taste.)
From Kyle Wohlmut on Facebook today, items from the gift shop at Castello di Fénis, in the Italian Alps:
(#1) Models of the castle, the castle in snowglobes, but featuring a bag with Fenis (easily read as Penis) in a red heart, conveying ‘I love Fenis’
First: on the castle, the town, and its location (so close to Switzerland — on this blog, many roads lead to Switzerland; or Homoland; or both). Then the red meat: on readings of Fenis; on penis bags (bags with penises on them); on penis bags (bags with penis on them); and on the intimate men’s garment the penis bag (aka penis pouch or cock sock).
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Posted in Clothing, Compounds, Language play, Phallicity, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Switzerland and Swiss things, Underwear | 2 Comments »
May 9, 2019
During the frustrating days of searching for a source of the Japanese-Spanish “Ariperro” cartoon (5/5 report on this blog here), I wrote on Facebook:
Stacy [Holloway] says there’s no clear answer. I say I’m sad about the unclear answer.
And Stacy offered to allay my sadness with something happy, specifically, from the My Modern Met site, “Adorable “Leaf Sheep” Sea Slugs Look like Cartoon Lambs” by Jenny Zhang on 8/22/15:
(#1) A leaf sheep sea slug, Costasiella kuroshimae
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Posted in Compounds, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Tongue twisters | 1 Comment »
April 27, 2019
(Mesh Man in his underwear, leading us in many directions, but with plenty of sexual content — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
From the 12th: Mesh Man returns to the Daily Jocks underverse, flogging their fabulous Varsity Mesh Shorts, flaunting his famous receptive organ — he’s all man and a foot deep — kneeling with feeling in #1 and flashing a finger gun to his fans in #2:
(#1) Party shorts! (see the ad below) — I go down on one knee to go down on my guy
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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Clichés, Compounds, Gesture, Idioms, Language and religion, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Music, Parody, Phallicity, Photography, Signs and symbols, Underwear | 10 Comments »
April 11, 2019
Yesterday in the posting “Crunching the festive rabbits” on this blog, Godzilla consumed Peeps. Just as I posted that, the Mental Floss site came through with more thrilling Peepsiana: “Artist Turns 5000 Marshmallow Peeps Into a Game of Thrones Dragon” by Michele Debczak, with a dragon composed of Peeps:
(#1) A Peeps dragon; so far as I can tell, there are no dragon Peeps (that is, Peeps in the shape of dragons, though there also are no Peeps composed of dragons, no Peeps manufactured by dragons, etc.)
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Posted in Books, Clothing, Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Movies and tv, Puns, Toys and games | 5 Comments »
March 24, 2019
This week’s inspiring words on the social progress front, from Gloria Ladson-Billings, circulated on Facebook by H. Sami Alim on the 22nd:
I know that I am 4 generations out of chattel slavery, 3 generations out of sharecropping, 2 out of legalized apartheid, and I’m an endowed university professor. Not because I’m great, but because people kept on pushing the boulder up the hill.
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Posted in Compounds, Euphemism, Language and the body, Language play, Race and ethnicity, Slang, Social life | 4 Comments »
March 21, 2019
From Karen Chung on Facebook a while back, this complex pun in the 9/25/15 Bizarro, illustrating (among other things) a nice contrast in accentual patterns: front stress (or forestress), the default for N + N compounds, in MOVING sale; back stress (or afterstress), the default in Adj + N nominals, in moving SALE:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
So the hinge of the pun is the ambiguity of moving: as N, (roughly) ‘the act or process of changing residence’; or as Adj, (roughly) ‘causing strong emotion, esp. of sadness’ (both senses are ultimately semantic developments from the simple motion verb move, intransitive or transitive; but they are now clearly distinct lexical items). Then from the difference in syntactic category follows the difference in accentual pattern.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Common vs. proper, Compounds, Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Phonology, Pop culture, Semantics, Syntactic categories, Variation | 3 Comments »
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