Archive for the ‘Nouning’ Category
December 7, 2019
What do you say to convey that you can’t find any words to describe your state of mind? What’s the verbal equivalent of the speechlessness emoji 😶 ? (Which literally has no mouth, indicating an inability to speak.)
Some people have conventional expressions for this purpose. Here’s one of them, homina, in today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
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As a cartoon bonus, we get the (metonymic) conversion of an expression evincing some state of mind — homina evincing bewilderment, surprise, or shock to the point of speechlessness — Â to a measure noun denoting a degree of the evinced state of mind — homina as a unit of bewilderment etc. A special sort of nouning, generally available for interjections:
I give that experience three eeks / ughs / ewws / ouches / …
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Posted in Conversion, Emoji, Interjections, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Nouning, Semantics | Leave a Comment »
October 18, 2019
It’s been about ten days since the last POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) here — a 10/9/19 posting “Two old cartoon friends”, with doctors without border collies — so, on the theory that regular POPs are good for the mind and the spirit, today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, at the very gates of heaven:
pearly gates + gate-crasher
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Appreciating the cartoon requires that you be familiar with the pop-culture story (whose source is the Christian Bible) of St. Peter at the pearly gates to heaven; that you be familiar with the belief (spread by an 1989 animated movie) that all dogs go to heaven; that you know the idiomatic synthetic compound gate-crasher; and that you know the idiomatic nouning plus-one. That’s a lot of cultural stuff.
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Posted in Back formation, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Nouning, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Pop culture, Proverbs, Synthetic compounds, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
July 4, 2019
The 7/3Â Rhymes With Orange takes us to the Home for Aged Superheroes, where Superman is unsure of the volant creature he sees in the mirror and fears he’s going blind, or slipping into dementia (an unusually poignant theme for a cartoon):
(#1) In the land of the caped superheroes
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Posted in Art, Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Myths, Nouning, Poetry, Semantics | 3 Comments »
May 31, 2018
A delicious Jew that would improve your dog’s joint health through glucosamine. Well, that’s what I heard, and it certainly made me sit up and take notice. So much so that I didn’t catch the name of the product being advertised on tv. There are a lot of possibilities; it might have been this one:
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Posted in Mishearings, Nouning | 2 Comments »
January 12, 2018
From the recent Linguistic Society of America meetings in Salt Lake City, via Mike Pope, this sign in the window at the downtown restaurant Mollie & Ollie:
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Of linguistic note: the spelling STIR-FRYS — rather than STIR-FRIES — for the plural of the C[ount] noun STIR-FRY (most commonly spelled as hyphenated STIR-FRY, but occasionally solid STIRFRY or separated STIR FRY). This spelling preserves the identity of the base word FRY and so treats the noun STIR-FRY as an inviolable unit.
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Posted in Beheading, Conversion, Count & mass, Nouning, Singular & plural | 1 Comment »
November 16, 2017
Following up on my posting on the 14th, “toss salad, fry shrimp, and other t/d ~ ∅”, two complex cases: dark fire tobacco, from Clai Rice’s recent fieldwork, as he reported on ADS-L yesterday; and t/d-deletion as a contributor to eggcorning.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Nouning, Phonology, Truncation, Variation | Leave a Comment »
July 3, 2017
Yesterday, from Chris Hansen, this cartoon by Daniel Beyer:
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Chris’s comment:
It took me a minute to “get” it (I’ve been in England for a looooong time)
(Chris is an American long resident in England.)
Another exercise in understanding comics. In this case, requiring a crucial piece of knowledge about American popular culture.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Dance, Folklore, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Nouning, Pop culture, Understanding comics, Verbing | 1 Comment »
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