Archive for the ‘Derivation’ Category
September 25, 2019
A Mick Stevens Caveman cartoon in the 9/30/19 New Yorker (about to arrive in the mail), memorializing a signal moment in the cartoon Stone Age:
(#1) The weaponization of sarcasm in prehistoric times
The later history of weaponized sarcasm is vast, but certainly reaches one of its high points in 1970 in the career of British gangster Doug Piranha. During a period of perhaps 70 years sarcasm has spread to become, in the view of some cultural critics, absolutely pervasive in modern society, at least in the Anglophone world.
Meanwhile, the idea that elements of culture can be weaponized — used like bludgeons not just against individuals, but also to aggressively serve social or political purposes — has recently become fashionable.
(And then, of course, there’s the question of the semantic work that the derivational suffix –ize does in converting various groups of lexical items to verbs (as in N weapon > V weaponize).)
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Posted in Comic conventions, Conversion, Derivation, Language and politics, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Sarcasm and irony | Leave a Comment »
June 4, 2019
From an exchange on Facebook a few days ago, in which (at least) two of the participants use the term perennial to refer to plants that are green all year round, that don’t lose their leaves for a dormant season. The discussion was set off by DA (not knowing the privacy wishes of the participants, I refer to them by their initials), posting about a practice that puzzles him:
DA: I never understood why [people] bother to plant [fruit] trees that don’t bear fruit.
To which DS replied with a number of reasons for the practice, but along the way introducing perennial in the sense ‘green all year long’ (relevant materal boldfaced):
DS: They provide many other benefits, for birds, shade, soil augmentation … they hold together hills so they don’t wash away .. and much more. Besides, they can be lovely. As far as I know, there are no perennial fruit trees so they can’t be used for privacy.
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Posted in Derivation, Language and food, Language and plants, Metaphor, Names, Naming, Taxonomic vs. common | 5 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 »
September 14, 2018
(Not suitable for Facebook, because double entendres and incidental naked men, but not actually X-rated. Mostly about food.)
Fruit cream tarts, one with pansy. Plus a little Echeveria plant. These are more birthday presents from the 6th, from Juan Gomez and the aging care company he works for (a big tart — not merely una tarta, but un tartone — plus the little succulent) and from Kim Darnell (a cute fruit cream tartlet with a pansy).
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Posted in augmentative, Categorization and Labeling, Derivation, Double entendres, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Names | 1 Comment »
August 3, 2018
The One Big Happy from July 5th, in which Ruthie and Joe get some dubious advice from their father:
(#1)
Their dad’s advice will no doubt warm the hearts of language teachers and multiculturalists, but it’s dubious as practical advice for everyday life.
Meanwhile, Ruthie wrestles with the question of how to get a language name from the noun doughnut / donut. Donuttish (with an all-purpose adjective-forming suffix, –ish) would certainly be possible, but, probably on the model of Dutch, Ruthie goes for Donutch, that is, Donut-ch (this is spoken, rather than written, by Ruthie, so it could have been spelled Donutsh, like Welsh).
(It tickles me to think of the language name as Dutchnut, a portmanteau of Dutch and doughnut. Or maybe that should be the name of the food.)
In any event, Ruthie has stumbled slant-wise onto the idea that doughnuts are of Dutch origin — an idea that confuses words and things, labels and the categories they label, but nevertheless incorporates a genuine bit of history.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Derivation, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Portmanteaus, Rainbow, Words and things | 2 Comments »
May 31, 2018
A Leigh Rubin cartoon from the 22nd, illustrating an exit and a dramatic exit:
(#1)
First, this is a play on the ambiguity of exit, as a N referring to a concrete object (a door, used for exiting) or an act (of exiting). Then there’s another ambiguity, in the sense of dramatic in the nominal dramatic exit: it could be taken literally, as ‘pertaining to a play’, but here it’s used with a figurative sense ‘melodramatic, stagey, flamboyant’ (note the man’s gesture). In its second use, dramatic incorporates a figurative sense of the N drama seen also in the (originally US gay) slang compound drama queen.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Compounds, Derivation, Figurative language, Gesture, Homosexuality, Language and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Memes, Pop culture, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »
May 16, 2018
Darya Kavitskaya on Facebook yesteday:
This is sour cherry clafoutis. No more food for today.
I commented:
I think French needs a verb clafouter ‘to cook a clafoutis; to devour a clafoutis’.
Come to think of it, I could use an English verb clafoute /kla’fut/ with these senses:
I think I’ll clafoute for tonight’s dessert. Maybe plum.
Terry piggishly clafouted. Seven at a sitting!
To come: a reminder about what clafoutis is; about the forms of the invented French verb clafouter; on “having no word for” some concept; about needing — or at least wanting — a word for it; about the ambiguity of these invented verbs (both ‘to cook’ and ‘to eat’); about the source of such ambiguities in marker-poor combinations of elements (lacking explicit indicators of the semantic relationship between the elements — there’s nothing in French clafouter or English clafoute to indicate the semantic role of the referent of their subjects, as creator or consumer); and about the motivation for marker-poor combinations, in a drive for brevity (vs. clarity). French and English could be clearer, less ambiguous — I’ll illustrate with still more invented French verbs — but only at the cost of greater length and effort.
All this from (delicious) French sour cherry flan.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Brevity vs. Clarity, Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Conversion, Derivation, French, Language and food, Metonymy, Morphology | Leave a Comment »
