(This is very much a not-dead-yet posting. I’m just barely hanging on through still more medical afflictions, but now think the little time I’m able to devote to posting is better spent on upbeat things rather than intimations of mortality.)
Discovered on my desktop, a three-part Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal from 12/19/18. Part 1, the teaser:
(#1)
From my mountainous posting queue, this gem of a risonymic riff:
(#1) Bodysnatch Cummerbund, Buffalo Custardbath, Bumblesnuff Crimpysnatch, Mr. Cabbagewank — four mockings, ridiculous manglings, of the already remarkable name Benedict Cumberbatch; otherwise, the first two paragraphs are an actual news item, accurate in its details, about the 2014 engagement of actor Benedict Cumberbatch to theatre director Sophie Hunter
đ đ đ (the commencement of September) The Calvin and Hobbes comic strip from 9/1/92, reprised in my comics feed on 8/30:
(#1) We can achieve intergenerational incommunicability! Yes we can!
Calvin articulates a view of word use, call it CalWord, which comes in two parts:
Endless lability. Any word can be used to convey any meaning. In the CalWord view, a word is merely substance — pronunciation or spelling — that can be put to any use.  So words are the stem cells of the linguistic world. From NOAD:
compound noun stem cell: Biology an undifferentiated cell of a multicellular organism which is capable of giving rise to indefinitely more cells of the same type, and from which certain other kinds of cell arise by differentiation.
Social fencing. Socially distributed variants can serve as social fences, separating the Ins from the Outs and impeding the Outs’ ability to comprehend and communicate with the Ins — impeding, for example, one generation’s ability to comprehend or communicate with the generations after it. The fencing effect is very noticeable for lexical variants — different bits of substance for the same use (soda vs. pop, say); or, especially relevant here, different uses for the same substance (gay ‘lighthearted, carefree’ vs. ‘homosexual’ vs. ‘foolish, stupid, unimpressive’, say).
Zippy’s guide to food-buying in today’s strip: packaging, monosyllabicity (hereafter 1-icity), and collectibility, in that order:
(#1) As ever, thoroughly steeped in pop / mass culture: in the 3rd panel, not just the orange-flavored drink mix Tang, but also the astronaut allusion (“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”); it then turns out that the panel also takes us to orangutans (which are neither orange in color — ok, some reddish tones, but not orange, see #3 below — nor have a tang in their name, but but …)
(The customary warning: male sexual parts, man-on-man sex, and street language about all of it, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Zach Astor, a porn name that caught my eye this morning (while I was engaged with various recent CockyBoys porn offerings, for reasons both personal and professional) — because it’s ZA, while I’m AZ. The reverse of me. (Alas, the bearer of the name isn’t from South Africa, and I’m not from either Azerbaijan or Arizona, but then nobody’s perfect.)
It turns out that ZA is (of course, being a gay porn actor) young, young enough to be my grandson, or maybe even my great-grandson; with curly hair that is sometimes mostly blond, sometimes brown with blond highlights (vs. my very fine very straight brunet-gone-gray); with a slim build (vs. my fat one); with a smooth body (vs. my hairy one); with a really big dick (a thick 8Êș — vs. my svelte 5Êș); and he’s a devoted top (while I’m an enthusiastic bottom). Well, we’re both gay men, both born in Pennsylvania (ZA in Philadelphia, AZ in Allentown), and both circumcised — but that’s not a lot of common ground. I should ask him if he’s thought about trying … linguistics:
(#1) Not, as you will soon see, ZA, but a different porn actor, the one I put in this collage (set on Potrero Hill in SF) long ago
Today is the birthday of my second mother-in-law, Monique Serpette Transue (born 1912). And also of Samuel “Dictionary” Johnson (born 1709). A coincidence of dates that entertains me. When I noted this on Facebook yesterday, Ned Deily wrote:
The interwebz assert that no single word exists, in English at least, to describe people who share the same birthday anniversary. Time to invent one? A lexicographerâs work is never finished.
After a digression on what lexicographers do and another on Samuel Johnson and a note about Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, I’ll make a stab at coining.
Following up on my posting yesterday, “Flirting with magenta” (about three plants with magenta flowers), Randy McDonald has sent me a piece from the site Speed River Journal: An urban naturalist’s progress: “Magenta spreen, a worthy spring green” on 5/29/19 by Van Waffle — about the plant often known as tree spinach:
(#1) Close-up of Chenopodium giganteum leaves (from Wikipedia)
Mike Pope on Facebook, following up on my posting of the 25th “Lilo & Stitch”, with a question about the naming of the characters in the movie:
(#1) Stitch and LiloMP: Do you think the animators consciously followed a kiki/bouba paradigm?
AZ: Â Almost surely not consciously; they just chose names that “sounded right” to them.
In general, writers’ name choices for fictitious characters are inscrutable in detail; even if the writers have an explicit account of where the names came from, unconscious preferences for certain kinds of names can usually be seen to be at play.
One of these preferences is the bouba/kiki effect, which has to do with the visual appearance of the referents (see the images above). Also involved are effects having to do with the gender of the referents (Stitch is male, Lilo female). No doubt there are more.
