Through a chain of people on Facebook, who passed it from one hand to another, this painting (captioned by an unknown wag):
(#1)
Ah, in a different genre of art, a version of this joke that I’ve posted on a couple of times:
(#2) A One Big Happy strip
Bonnie Taylor-Blake to ADS-L on 8/10 under the heading “Another zoological crash blossom”:
The headline for a blog post hosted by the Smithsonian:
“Scientists track a mysterious songbird using tiny backpack locators“
This reminded me of a favorite from a few years ago, “Public urged to keep track of squirrels with mobiles.” (See Ben Zimmer’s column about this and other crash blossoms [here].)
Two ambiguous headlines that might be understood in an unintended way because of how modifying phrases (underlined above) are attached to preceding material:
The One Big Happy from February 10th:
The sign says (but with reduced and):
SCRATCH AND SNIFF CARDS
Is that to be parsed as conjoined imperatives — you are to scratch and to sniff cards — or as an NP describing some cards — these are cards you can scratch and sniff, cards for scratching and sniffing?
Back on the 6th, in “Birthday notes”:
From Benita Bendon Campbell (and Ed Campbell) a Jacquie Lawson animated card of Indian runner ducks in the rain, ending with a duck and a rainbow. In medias res: [image #1]
To come, in a separate posting, on Indian runner ducks and Indian (or scarlet) runner beans, which are not at all the same thing.
And then to add to those, India(n) rubber ducks, which aren’t ducks, though they are duck-simulacra (runner ducks are ducks, and runner beans are beans — that is, bean plants).
xkcd strip #1681 Laser Products:
Two main axes of variation:
the parsing of the 3-part compound X Y Z as
[ X Y ] [ Z ] vs. [ X ] [ Y Z ]and various possibilities for the semantic relation between Y and X in a 2-part compound X Y
Note: eye removal ‘removal of an eyeball’ is known technically as enucleation.
Four recent cartoons in my feed that have to do with language: Mother Goose and Grimm (attachment ambiguity), Zits (greetings), Bizarro (labeling a bat(h)room), xkcd (knowledge about the referents of names).
(Mostly about gay porn resources, with some plain language but no actually X-rated images (though the images flirt with the rating). And there are several linguistic points.)
Yesterday I stumbled across a Gay Porn Site (as it labels itself) called “cocksuckers guide” (how crude is that?). The name cocksucker here is not used more or less literally, as ‘fellator’ (esp. a male fellator), and it certainly is not used as in this NOAD2 entry for the word:
vulgar slang, chiefly N. Amer. a contemptible person (used as a generalized term of abuse)
Instead, it’s used in a sense that’s historically intermediate between those two senses, as ‘gay man, queer’: though what gay men actually share is a sexual attraction to other men, fellating other men is the characteristic sexual act of a gay man, so it was natural to extend cocksucker to refer to gay men in general; but then distaste for gay men and their sexual activities contaminated the term cocksucker, and it became a slur, a term of abuse, at first used of gay men and then generalized, ultimately even to inanimate objects: (said of a recalcitrant corkscrew) This cocksucker [or: this cocksucking corkscrew] doesn’t work!
