Archive for the ‘Derivation’ Category
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 »
May 16, 2018
Today’s Bizarro/Wayno collaboration goes to the neighborhood taproom:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
There’s the question of why Toper 3 can’t find his beer. That has a simple answer: the apple obscures his vision.
Then there’s the claim that Toper 3 is a surrealist — but actually he’s a surrealist character, not a surrealist (an exponent of surrealism). That does make the cartoon surreal, bizarre, because it juxtaposes two ordinary topers at a bar with a fictional character (one from surrealist art, to make the scene more delicious).
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Posted in Art, Derivation, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
November 26, 2017
A follow-up to my posting on the 23rd, “Two Thanksgiving meals”, in which one of the meals had as its main dish vermicelli Singapore-style, with rice vermicelli as the base. So now I’m all about vermicelli.
Warming up to the pasta topic, let’s consider Zesty Anderson Davis consuming some string pasta made from wheat:
(#1) #2 in a 6/23/13 posting, showing Zesty AD sucking up worms (well, spaghetti) in a panoply of sexual imagery
(#2) Abasement, comfort food, or oral sex?
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Posted in augmentative, Derivation, Diminutive, Language and food, Names, Phallicity | Leave a Comment »
November 13, 2017
It starts with an ordinary noun source and an ordinary verb sustain and eventually works its way to the adverb sustainably as a modifier of a verb source, strikingly in the split infinitive construction to sustainably source, which Wilson Gray reported in an ADS-L posting on the 11th, citing a General Mills ad in which to sustainably source oats figures prominently.
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Posted in Back formation, Derivation, Language in advertising, Lexical semantics, Semantics, Split infinitives, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
November 8, 2017
Q: Did they ever have anatomic war?
A: Have you never heard of the great Anatomic War and one of its signal encounters, the 1346 Battle of Extremities, in which the Phalanges, with their long bones, overwhelmed the armored Carpals and Metacarpals?
(#1) Phalanges shooting down the Carpal and Metacarpal forces
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Derivation, Language and the body, Metaphor, Mishearings, Morphology, Movies and tv, Ordinary vs. technical lg | Leave a Comment »
November 5, 2017
From a posting to the Linguistic Typology list, a proposal for a workshop on Attenuated qualities in a cross-linguistic perspective, beginning attenuatively:
Our smallish-to-middling workshop focusses on the diverse morphological and lexical means of expressing attenuation (reduced degree of a quality) in the languages of the world.
More of the proposal to follow. First, a few notes on two more familiar grammatical categories related to attenuatives.
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Posted in Derivation, Grammatical categories, Morphology | 1 Comment »
October 30, 2017
Came by on Pinterest some considerable time ago, a photo billed as “Gartenkeramik Reiervogel – ein Designerstück von Brigitte Peglow”, showing a ceramic bird posing in a luxuriant garden, much like this:
(#1) Ceramic bird among variegated vinca, hostas, ferns, and more
Certainly looked like a heron, but I was puzzled by the German noun Reier.
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Posted in Art, Derivation, German, Morphology | 1 Comment »
October 22, 2017
A comment on the vulgar noun crapola in yesterday’s posting “A portmantriple”, from David Preston:
[cited by AZ] “-ola, a suffix used humorously to extend standard words.”
Wasn’t the original ‘ola’ the shoe-polish brand Shinola? Then it became humorous with the phrase “know shit from Shinola.”
Actually, playful -ola didn’t start with Shinola, though Shinola appeared fairly early in the history.
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Posted in Derivation, Idioms, Playful morphology | 3 Comments »
