A brief Friday delight, to which I was alerted by Gadi Niram on Facebook: a passive-only verbing based on a proper place name. In today’s CBS News from Boston, the story “3 trucks, including one from Trillium Brewing, get “storrowed” in one day on Storrow Drive”:
Archive for the ‘Verbing’ Category
Annals of verbing: to get storrowed
May 10, 2024Cum All Ye Faithful
November 24, 2023(About a gay porn flick, with naked hunky models displaying their bodies, but no actual genitals on display or descriptions of man-on-man sex, just some vulgar slang and reference to ejaculation. Still, not to everyone’s taste.)
In my e-mail on 11/22, a Falcon | Naked Sword mailing for its 2023 Christmas gay porn movie, whose title is a cheap raunchy pun:
The guys with the Xmas goodies (I’ve fuzzed out their pornstar dicks for WordPress modesty): Beau Butler (who’s been featured a number of times on this blog; here displaying his pornstar butt), Damian Night (new here), and Reign (from my 2/20/22 posting “Men’s Briefs: the locked gaze”)
My interest at the moment is not really in the flick or in the actors, but in the pun in the title. (“How like a linguist”, you are saying, “to disregard the hot stuff and focus on the wording”. As it happens, I’m entirely capable of getting off on the hot stuff while making mental notes on the wording.) But I will post Falcon’s publicity for the flick for you, because it actually describes the background plot, without the sex-act by sex-act retelling of the individual scenes:
Ditto ditto my song
November 17, 2023A serenade on my Apple Music in the dark night of 10/13, Danny Kaye singing Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs, with warmth rather than the sharp edges of the D’Oyly Carte patter specialists; at my 2 am whizz break, he had arrived at the Lord Chancellor’s “Nightmare Song”, from G&S’s Iolanthe, with its concluding:
the night has been long —
ditto ditto my song —
and thank goodness
they’re both of them over!
Being (more or less relentlessly) a linguist, I asked myself, not for the first time: What kind of word is ditto? It looks a lot like some kind of adverb here, with the crucial line paraphrasable as (awkward) thus thus my song, or (better) also also my song, or (even better) so too my song. (Although you might argue that ditto‘s a special kind of noun, since it’s paraphrasable as the same.) And, while we’re on the subject: Where on earth does it come from? I entertained speculations about some connection to double, maybe Greek di– ‘two’, or possibly to dot, given ditto marks.
My etymological speculations are provably off-base; the closest English words are diction and dictate, from the Latin stem dict– ‘say’. Meanwhile, my off-the-cuff part-of-speech assignment is flatly contradicted by the authority I look at first, NOAD (a lexicographically respectable dictionary of manageable size, and — unlike AHD or the M-W dictionaries — one accessible directly from my browser). NOAD is based on the resources of the OED, and the OED (which I can access on-line) on ditto classifies the word as a noun — but in an entry from well over a century ago, so we need to look critically at its evidence for this classification. Which shows that in the 18th century the word was incontestably a noun (with a plural dittoes). That usage, however, is long dead. The question is what to say about modern usage, and there my adverb idea has a lot going for it (and is also the classification given in Merriam-Webster’s word history for modern ditto).
So we’re in for a bumpy ride, much like the Lord Chancellor’s, with possibly more questions than answers. Hang on.
ta-da!
April 23, 2023Let’s dive right in, with two disparate items: an old One Big Happy cartoon recently reprised in my comics feed; and Ta-Da!, a 2018 hardcover picture book by Kathy Ellen Davis (author) and Kaylani Juanita (illustrator):
Today’s verbing
December 9, 2022From WIRED magazine’s Plaintext web column by Steven Levy today (with the notable verbing bold-faced):
This week the social media world took a pause from lookie-looing the operatic content-moderation train wreck that Elon Musk is conducting at Twitter, as the Oversight Board [of Meta] finally delivered its Cross Check report, delayed because of foot-dragging by Meta in providing information.
The verb lookie-loo (more commonly looky-loo), in this example roughly ‘stop to look at something out of curiosity’ (it can also mean roughly ‘view something for sale without intending to buy’), occurs here in its PRP (-ing) form lookie-looing, used in a nominal gerund phrase (which is the object of the preposition from). Finally, the verb lookie-loo here is transitive (with the NP the operatic content-moderation train wreck that Elon Musk is conducting at Twitter as its direct object); most occurrences of this verbing seem to be intransitive — examples to come below — though transitive uses are also attested.
Where to door knock and cold call
October 19, 2022… and, eventually, how to abracadabra things out of sight. Yes, it’s Verbing Day on AZ Blog!
Politics and real estate: to door knock. It started on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC on 10/11, with the cite presented here in its larger context:
(#1) to door knock / door-knock ‘knock on doors’ (in political canvassing): a N + V verb, whose origin lies in a back-formation from the synthetic compound door knocking / door-knocking
The semantics / pragmatics of the synthetic compound is specialized — not merely knocking on doors, but doing so in specific sociocultural settings (political canvassing and door-to-door solicitations by real estate agents, in particular) — and this specialization is shared by the 2pbfV (two-part back-formed V)
When the palm trunks
March 5, 2022Report on Facebook today from Sim Aberson (in South Florida) about his “daily constitutional” with his husband, where they encountered:
Copernicia macroglossa, petticoat palm, a very slow-growing species
Sim wrote:
When they eventually trunk, the old fronds produce a beautiful petticoat.
Yes, the noun trunk ‘stem of a tree’, verbed, to yield intransitive trunk ‘(of a tree) produce a trunk’.
For a moment, I thought that Sim had salted the verbing in there just for me to find — he knows my tastes — but then I realized that this is the way palm people talk (Sim and Mike are serious plant guys) — because the verb is a genuinely useful one for growers of palms.
An old story: people go around promiscuously nouning and verbing, occasionally for cleverness (and there’s nothing wrong with that), but usually because in one of their worlds — often a very specialized world — the innovative form is a good thing to have to hand.
surfdom
February 22, 2022The Zippy strip for 2/20, in which Bill Griffith gets to goof on surf vs. serf:
(#1) Zippy’s title: “Serf City!!”, playing on the song title “Surf City”
panel 1: the serf wakes up in his cell and gets up — the idiomatic phrase surf’s up, roughly ‘the waves are good for surfing; let’s do it’, so figuratively ‘conditions are good for action; let’s get on with it’
panel 2: the serf surfing the net — the (metaphorical) verb surf ‘move from page to page or site to site on’
panel 3: the serf channel-surfing — the (similarly metaphorical) synthetic-compound verb channel-surf ‘change frequently from one television channel to another’
The Crosse-Jones spunk affair
November 6, 2021(The spunk in question is semen, so, yes, we’re going on another adventure with men’s genitals and sex between men, so this posting isn’t suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
[Background note: see my 10/30/21 posting “Bearing the face for our era”, about the faces of Carolus-Duran (late 19th-century European art world) and Peter Korn (early 21st-century Silicon Valley tech world).]
Today’s story starts with my coming across Face 1 below (from a Lucas Films photo), on the cover art for the gay porn DVD London Spunked.
(#1) On the expression: narrowed eyes, lowered brows, intense gaze, somewhat tight mouth — possibly conveying a challenge, or dominance
We are all attentive to faces: we usually look at them first when we view a scene with figures in it, we check them to see if they’re familiar, we try to interpret their facial expressions, and so on. In this case, I think that, in any context whatsoever, on a quick view I’d have identified Face 1 as belonging to the same person as Face 2, a face I know very well (as a favorite actor in gay porn):
(#2) A different facial expression: eyes somewhat widened (especially his right eye), brows somewhat raised (especially his right brow), gaze alert but not intense, corners of the mouth slightly raised to make the hint of a smile — possibly conveying friendly interest
The two men have the same hair style and facial hair style, though #2 is darker and longer in both respects, but that could be just a temporary matter of grooming. #2’s skin tone is more golden-brown than #1’s pale skin, but that could just be tanning, or the lighting of the photos. #2 has a furry chest (visible at the neckline), while #1 is smooth, but that could just be a matter of trimming (in fact, the guy in #1 is not very furry, but keeps his chest trimmed down but not actually smooth, while the guy is #2 is naturally furry as above, but often trims his chest hair in similar fashion.
But then, but then …