Archive for the ‘Beheading’ Category
October 3, 2024
Every morning and every evening I send a brief e-mail to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, to reassure her that I’m still functioning. In the G’MORNIN bulletins I report my sleep times and summarize my morning vitals — my morning vital signs (always blood pressure and pulse rate, occasionally more tests if they seem to be called for). It was only this morning that I realized that morning vitals ‘morning vital signs’ was an especially nice example of a subtype of what I’ve called beheadings. To go along with, from previous postings, examples like chewables ‘chewable vitamins’ and squares ‘square meals’ (in three squares a day ‘three square meals a day’).
The relevant subentry in NOAD just says:
noun vitals: short for vital signs.
Well, yes, but short in a very specific way:
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Posted in Beheading, Conversion, Modifiers, My life, Nouning | 1 Comment »
September 26, 2024
Complex ambiguities in the 9/25 comics: a Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange turning on the ambiguity of sham; and a Wayno / Piraro Bizarro turning on the ambiguity of tom:
(#1) sham conveying fraud, hence illegality; vs. sham for a decorative pillow cover (being manufactured in a small workshop, though note the suggestion in the title panel that the place might be a cover — ambiguity alert! — in the sense ‘an activity or organization used as a means of concealing an illegal or secret activity’ (NOAD) — but why are these pillow coverings called shams?
(#2) Personified, talking animals: two toms, a tomcat and a tom turkey, presented as characters named Tom, who work for the same company and are encountering one another over coffee, hence Wayno’s title “Breakroom Encounter” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Beheading, Comic conventions, Compounds, Conversion, Furnishings and tools, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Personification, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
March 29, 2024
For some time now, I’ve been collecting examples of a scheme of English derivational morphology I’ve called beheading, as in
crude (Adj) oil (N) -> crude (N), where the derived item crude ‘crude oil’ is a Mass N (like oil)
commemorative (Adj) stamp (N) -> commemorative (N), where the derived item commemorative ‘commemorative stamp’ is a Count N (like stamp)
A great many of the examples come from jargons, the vocabularies of specific occupational or interest groups, like people in the energy business or philatelists — or medical professionals (N attending ‘attending physician’), food preparers, servers, and sellers (N Swiss ‘Swiss cheese’), and so on. More generally, most beheadings are notably context-specific. But some come from everyday language and don’t need much contextual backing.
Here, after a somewhat more careful account of what beheadings are, I’ll add a few everyday beheadings to supplement the ones in my files (see the Page on this blog). Then I’ll veer all the way to the other pole and note that with enough contextual backing, completely novel beheadings can be coined and understood. Finally, I’ll cite the everyday beheading that inspired this posting: three squares a day ‘three square meals a day’, from US President Joe Biden, which I put off because some commenters took it — or, possibly, the idiom square meal itself — to be outdated, hence a sign of Biden’s being old and out of touch, a development that merited some discussion on its own. But there are plenty of cites, including a NOAD entry for the beheading square; and then all those comments vanished from the net, so I had no one to bash.
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Posted in Beheading, Context, Conversion, Jargon, Language and culture, Language and politics | Leave a Comment »
December 12, 2023
Barbara Partee on Facebook yesterday, on the English noun AI [èáj], historically an initialism for the nominal artificial intelligence, but with a lexical life of its own, writing about:
— the new use of AI as a count [C] noun, as in these examples I heard on the NPR program 1A this morning about the use of AI bots in psychotherapy: “Would you use an AI?”, “AIs don’t have hangups, they don’t…” etc. The same conversation had the familiar [mass [M]] noun use as well: “Is there a chance that AI would be better than a trained psychotherapist?”
[Chris Waigl noted that the C usage has been common for a while in some sci-fi subgenres.]
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Posted in Beheading, Conversion, Count & mass, Grammatical categories, Metonymy, Personification | Leave a Comment »
August 8, 2023
Not manmeat dreams, which I have all the time, usually quite pleasantly, my desires being inclined that way. But slabs-of-meat dreams, all through last night’s sleep. Not distressing, but inescapable: a continuing presentation of one piece of raw animal flesh after another, with titles out of Monty Python, things like:
#10, the breast of chicken; #45, the ham hock; #17, the pork loin; #99, the strip of bacon; #4, the leg of lamb; #57, the veal cutlet; #62, the porterhouse steak
I kept thinking: these are all really important, I’ve got to write them all down. But it was all in my head, where there’s no place to write things down. Frustrating.
When I eventually woke fully, at 1 am, I realized that my subconscious was sending me a message: IT’S TIME TO START EATING REAL MEAT. My subconscious was firmly convinced that my body had recovered sufficiently from my gall bladder surgery (almost 2 months ago) to cope with the full range of food. It was now shouting at me: GET ON WITH IT, DUDE!
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Posted in Art, Beheading, Language and animals, Language and food, My life | Leave a Comment »
March 19, 2023
Phrasal Overlap Portmanteau time, starting with one from yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, which is (by accident) regrettably topical; and going on to a more complex one from cartoonist Leigh Rubin’s Rubes strip back in 2016 — complex because Rubin probably was thinking of the joke as a cute pun (I told you it was complex).
But first, yesterday’s Bizarro:
(#1) Drag queen meets legendary lumberjack: the POP RuPaul Bunyan = RuPaul + Paul Bunyan (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Abbreviation, Beheading, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
February 5, 2023
Today’s (2/5/23) Doonesbury strip shows us artist J.J. Caucus and her husband Zeke Brenner in her studio, with J.J. fuming about being labeled a creative:
(#1) “I’m a noun, not an adjective!” But then Zeke shifts the ground from be a creative to be creative, noting (in effect) that be creative denotes a characteristic, not an identity, so “less pressure”
J.J.’s complaint is about the nouning of the adj. creative, yielding a C[ount] noun creative that apparently just means ‘creative person’, but she’s more than a creative person, she’s a professional creator, an artist. As it turns out, the C noun creative is a great deal more specific that ‘creative person’ — and in its established usage it refers to a type of professional in the advertising industry, so in fact doesn’t apply to J.J. at all. Gripe on, J.J.!
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Posted in Beheading, Context, Conversion, Nouning, Pragmatics, Style and register | Leave a Comment »
September 9, 2022
The 8/11/22 Rhymes With Orange, exploiting an ambiguity in the noun killer as the modifier N1 in N1 + N2 compounds, in this case in killer abs (literal ‘abs that are killers, abs that kill’ vs. figurative ‘abs that are killer / remarkable’):
(#1) In the worlds of advertisements featuring beautiful people, the health and fitness literature, and soft porn, figurative killer abs are commonplace; abs that kill, however, have (so far as I know) never once appeared on a police blotter
Wider topic: the figurative modifiers of mortal power — premodifying killer (killer abs, a killer app), postmodifying of death (the cruise of death, referring to a penetrating sexual facial expression).
Male body parts and sexual connections between men plus a ton of linguistic expressions in their social contexts, what more could I ask for?
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Posted in Address terms, Beheading, Clipping, Facial expressions, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Nicknames, Penguins, Semantics of compounds, Truncation | Leave a Comment »
August 3, 2022
The killing of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri by a targeted U.S. drone strike (taking him down as he stood on a balcony) over the weekend in Afghanistan was described by an MSNBC commentator yesterday morning as
a stiletto strike: with the N1 + N2 compound N stiletto strike ‘sudden (military) attack resembling a stiletto (in being very narrowly focused lethal weaponry)’; the sense of the N2 strike here is NOAD‘s 2 [a] a sudden attack, typically a military one
Possibly it was stiletto airstrike; it went by very fast, I haven’t seen another broadcast of it, and it’s not yet available on-line, so I can’t check — but I am sure of the N stiletto and the N strike and the intent of the commentator to commend the pinpoint accuracy of the operation.
It seems that the metaphor has been used occasionally in military circles for some years, but very rarely outside these circles, so that it came with the vividness of a fresh, rather than conventional, metaphor — but while it worked well for me (evoking the slim, pointed, lethal daggers of assassins), it might not have been so effective with others, whose mental image of a stiletto is the heel of a fashionable women’s shoe (slim and pointed, but alluring rather than lethal).
Yes, the two senses (plus a few others that I won’t discuss here) are historically related, with the dagger sense the older and, in a series of steps, the source of the shoe sense. But of course ordinary speakers don’t know that, nor should they be expected to (such information is the province of specialists, historical linguists and lexicographers); what they know is how stiletto is used in their social world, and that’s likely to involve trendy footwear rather than medieval weaponry.
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Posted in Beheading, Beheading, Clothing, Compounds, Conversion, Derivation, Fashion, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Metaphor, Metonymy, Morphology, Semantics of compounds, Shoes, Truncation, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
April 4, 2022
Today’s morning name, the C[ount] noun non-profit, as in this real-life example (lifted from this very blog):
Partners of the Common Cents Lab are tech companies, banks, credit unions, non-profits, and government organizations
And in this NOAD entry:
adj. nonprofit [AZ: very frequently non-profit]: [attributive] not making or conducted primarily to make a profit: charities and other nonprofit organizations. noun mainly North American a nonprofit organization: I spent the next six years working for small nonprofits.
(With clearly C noun occurrences boldfaced)
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Posted in Beheading, Derivation, Language and medicine, Morning names, Morphology, My life | 1 Comment »
