Archive for the ‘Common vs. proper’ Category
February 26, 2024
From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday, coping with the day’s Spelling Bee game on the web, in which she was told that her candidate UNVOICING was not a word — well, not a word acceptable in the game. Her hedged response:
UNVOICING is a word. (Well, maybe.)
(CW is, among other things, a linguist, and linguists often have complaints about what Spelling Bee is willing to accept as a word of English.)
I’ll expand on CW’s comment, and that will take us to a surprising place (AI chatbots and their discontents). But first, some background on the NYT Spelling Bee.
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Posted in Common vs. proper, Language of science, Language play, Lexicography, Metaphor, Names, Ordinary vs. technical lg, Synonyms, Taxonomic vs. common, This blogging life, Titles, Toys and games | 2 Comments »
August 10, 2023
A comment from Bill Stewart this morning on my posting from yesterday, “The states of matter: coconut X”, with reference to the third of the (temperature-sensitive) states of coconut X considered there: not the free-flowing oil nor the spreadable semi-solid fat / cream, but a firm solid:
You remind me that I can take advantage of this unwanted by you hardening to make our own Magic Shell. Not that we need the ice cream anyway, or even the decadent indulgence of Magic Shell, which we’ll impose upon our grandson.
What caught my eye was the treatment of Magic Shell, obviously a proper noun (and a brand name), as a common noun (and a generic name): you can make your own.
But then I had to face up to the hard truth that I was utterly ignorant of what (commercial) Magic Shell or (homemade) magic shell might be. From Bill’s context, some sort of killer dessert, with coconut X as an ingredient.
So, the first order of business was to learn about Magic Shell. Then some recipes for making your own stuff. Then some comments about the generification / genericization of brand names, and the commonification (my term) of proper nouns.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Common vs. proper, Language and food, Opposition, Semantics, Trade names | 1 Comment »
April 17, 2023
Well, the title pretty much gives the joke away. An outrageous (but phonologically perfect) pun in a Bizarro cartoon from 9/6/12:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just 1 in this strip — see this Page.)
What the woman and her two kids get to view is Disney on ice —
(the body of the dead-since-1966 Walt) Disney (resting) on (a block of preservative) ice (in a display case)
What she bought tickets to was an entertainment (especially aimed at children) called Disney on Ice —
(an entertainment in which characters from the Walt) Disney (Company’s animated cartoons are portrayed by performers skating) on ice
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Posted in Ambiguity, Common vs. proper, Context, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Puns, Reference, Relevance | 4 Comments »
April 27, 2022
(This has turned out to be quite a large meze, but it’s only about one idiomatic slang expression. Well, men and masculinity come into the thing, and you know what can happen then.)
Reflecting a couple days ago on my Princeton days (1958-62) and the tangle of the attitudes of the (all-male) students at the time towards (among things) masculinity, male affiliation (as systematized in a pervasive system of male bands, the eating clubs of the time), women, homosexuals, race, and social class. The topic is vast, also deeply distressing to me personally, and I suspect that I’ll never manage to write about the bad parts of it in any detail — note: there were some stunningly good parts — but in all of that I retrieved one lexical item of some sociolinguistic interest (and entertainment value), one slang nugget: the idiomatic N1 + N2 compound noun face man / faceman / face-man.
A common noun frequently used among my friends, which was then also deployed as a proper noun nicknaming one of our classmates, a young man notable for his facial male beauty: everybody had to have a nickname (mine was Zot, for the Z of my name and the cartoon anteater), so we called him Face Man because he was a face man.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Common vs. proper, Faces, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Idioms, Innovations, Language and gender, Lexicography, Masculinity, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Music, Nicknames, Semantics of compounds, Slang | Leave a Comment »
February 7, 2021
Three more Bizarro cartoons from the past, from another crop on Pinterest, with: an allusion you need to catch to understand the cartoon; a complex pun; and laugh-inducing names.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Art, Common vs. proper, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Puns, Slang, Synthetic compounds, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
July 27, 2020
In the 9/24/19 One Big Happy, both Ruthie and her mother name fingers, but in different ways:
(#1)
Ruthie gives them (descriptive) nicknames — the proper names Hitchy, Pointy, Big Girl, Wiggles, Wee One — while her mother Ellen provides the common nouns referring to the five fingers: the thumb, the index finger, the middle finger, the ring finger, and the pinkie / pinky (aka the little finger).
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Posted in Common vs. proper, Gay porn, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Metaphor, Names | 1 Comment »
June 26, 2019
From the northern edge of the world, specifically: the town of Inuvik NWT in Canada, from which a postcard showing this welcoming billboard:
(#1)
The card was from Chris Waigl (bought in Dawson City YT), who mailed it from the extremely small town of Chicken AK.
And now there’s a surprising lot of stuff to say about the card.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Common vs. proper, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Names, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »
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 »
