Archive for the ‘Compounds’ Category
October 21, 2017
Assembled in a group photo, three pleasingly thoughtful household gifts:
(#1) A penguin tea towel and a purple plant mister flanked by two hand-blown flared glasses
The tea towel with penguin slogan (the penguin is one of my totem animals) brought back from the New England Aquarium (in Boston) for me by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky. The purple plant mister given to me by Kim Darnell (who found them on-line) to mist my mini-phal (which likes high humidity, but not wet roots). The flared glasses blown by Amanda Walker, who made them for me so I could grasp them firmly with my damaged right hand..
A little festival of household furnishings and English N + N compounds as well: tea towel, distantly related to tea (referring to the hot drink made from the leaves of the tea plant); the synthetic AGT compound plant mister; the synthetic PSP compound hand-blown; and the compound punty mark, the (totally opaque) name Amanda gave to the glassy scars at the bottom of the glasses.
And, oh yes, the idiom in the tea towel slogan. Let’s start with that.
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Posted in Compounds, Idioms, Language and plants, My life, Penguins, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »
October 20, 2017
That’s from the NYT on the 17th (on-line), Frank Bruni’s op-ed column “Will Pumpkin Spice Destroy Us All?”:
(#1) In the labyrinth of pumpkin spice
It’s invention run amok, marketing gone mad, the odoriferous emblem of commercialism without compunction or bounds. It’s the transformation of an illusion — there isn’t any spice called pumpkin, nor any pumpkin this spicy — into a reality.
Pumpkin on its own is bland. What to do, if you’re not fond of bland? Pumpkin pie can get some pizazz from spices — especially cinnamon and nutmeg, also used to flavor eggnog, for similar reasons.
Such spice mixtures have been around for centuries, but only in recent years has pumpkin (pie) spice achieved commercial superstardom. Leading to Bruni’s comic savaging above, and to a Kaamran Hafeez cartoon (yesterday’s daily cartoon for the New Yorker).
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Posted in Compounds, Count & mass, Language and food, Language in advertising, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Subsectivity | Leave a Comment »
October 13, 2017
(Fun with names and language play, but mostly Zippyesque popular culture in many manifestations.)
In recent days, Zippy has gone to a psychic shop (offering “crystals, past lives, tarot cards”), to the Tropical Treat in Hanover PA, to Luna Park in Sydney (NSW), to the ghost of a Mickey Rooney hotel in Downington PA, and to the ghost of the Justin Time diner in Meriden CT.
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Posted in Compounds, Diners, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Pop culture, Puns | Leave a Comment »
September 17, 2017
Today’s Zippy takes us to a scenic lookout and its technology, the tower viewer:
(#1) Binoculars / Telescope on a stalk
Bill Griffith exploits the anthropoid appearance of the device to turn this one into a speaking, grinning, yellow-haired, cheeky, creepy being.
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Posted in Compounds, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »
September 16, 2017
When you explore something on the net, your searches come back to you in messages of all sorts. So when I looked around at rubber ducks / duckies — for a posting on the 9th — I set off duck alarms in several quarters, most impressively at amazon.com, which is now enticing me with a gigantic array of artificial quackers, in all sizes, colors, and types. I am especially taken with these little guys:
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Posted in Compounds, Idioms | Leave a Comment »
September 9, 2017
Back on the 6th, in “Birthday notes”:
From Benita Bendon Campbell (and Ed Campbell) a Jacquie Lawson animated card of Indian runner ducks in the rain, ending with a duck and a rainbow. In medias res: [image #1]
To come, in a separate posting, on Indian runner ducks and Indian (or scarlet) runner beans, which are not at all the same thing.
And then to add to those, India(n) rubber ducks, which aren’t ducks, though they are duck-simulacra (runner ducks are ducks, and runner beans are beans — that is, bean plants).
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Posted in Compounds, Language and animals, Language and plants, Parsing, Rainbow clothing, Subsectivity, Toys | Leave a Comment »
August 29, 2017
A low-growing sturdy plant, now in bloom in many places around here. Observed yesterday in the Palo Alto Demonstration Garden, a small plot of city park land devoted to illustrating “Bay-friendly principles” of gardening.
(#1) Epilobium canum
The plant is commonly known as California fuchsia, a name that’s strictly speaking not subsective, since California fuschia is not in fact in the genus Fuchsia — but its genus, Epilobium, is closely related to Fuchsia, and you could argue that the common name fuchsia takes in a range of plants, not limited to the botanists’ Fuchsia., in which case California fuchsia would be a perfectly ordinary subsective compound, not a resembloid.
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Posted in Compounds, Language and plants, Names, Subsectivity, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »
August 14, 2017
Today’s Bizarro, in which Mr. Peanut (a registered brand) and Ms. GrapeJella (my invented name), a jar of grape jelly, face off:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
So many ways to combine the grape and the peanut, directly or via their metonymic associates (Ms. GrapeJella and Mr. Peanut) and their metonymic associates (grape jelly and peanut butter); and by combining things or by combining words (more carefully: linguistic expressions denoting those things).
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Posted in Compounds, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Words and things | Leave a Comment »
August 13, 2017
Appearing around the drain of my bathroom sink on Friday, a small swarm of tiny black flies, which fled from my investigations by running, rather than flying, away. Ah, fungus gnats — usually found in soil, as around houseplants, rather than in household drains, but there probably was organic material in the trap for them to feed on.
A shot of bleach, followed by flushing with hot water, cleaned up the infestation.
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Posted in Compounds, Language and animals, Ordinary vs. technical lg, Subsectivity | Leave a Comment »
(#1) A penguin tea towel and a purple plant mister flanked by two hand-blown flared glasses
