Today’s Bizarro plays on Adam vs. atom and on the ambiguity of bomb:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 11 in this strip — see this Page.)
The sentence Adam bombs, with intransitive bomb ‘fail miserably’ — hey, it’s a really tough audience — in the pres. 3sg. vs. the (plural) compound N atom bombs.
The One Big Happy from the 2nd, with Ruthie dealing, once again, with a word she’s at best vaguely acquainted with:
The word Ruthie and Joe’s father is aiming at — readers of the strip know this, because the word is spelled for us in his speech balloon, but Ruthie and Joe don’t — is the Adj mere, a relatively infrequent item, certainly much less frequent in the kids’ experience than the N mirror. Then we stumble into a gigantic rat’s nest of massive variation on a large assortment of phonetic details.
The One Big Happy from February 9th:
in other words > nudder words. Part of this is just ordinary stuff in connected casual speech. Then there’s the [d] for standard [ð] in other.
The morning began with:
Xenophon Bellerophon
Two Ancient Greek names — the philosopher, historian, and soldier Xenophon and the mythical hero Bellerophon — together making a line of trochaic tetrameter (when the secondary accents on phon are treated as accented in the poetic line).
As a linguist, I had hoped that the phon in these names would be the Greek ‘sound’ stem, so that Xenophon would be equivalent to an English noun xenophone, referring either to someone who speaks a foreign language (parallel to Anglophone and Francophone) or to a non-native sound, from a foreign language (like the voiceless velar fricative [x] in relatively German-faithful pronunciations of the noun Bach in English).
But apparently not (though the etymologies of the names seem to be uncertain). My hopes are dashed.
Today’s (Halloween) Zits, with a big “Aww” response from Jeremy:
Unlike trickle treat (reported on here in a 11/27/14 posting), which has a syllabic r (in casual-speech trick or) misheard as a syllabic l (so that trick or is misidentified as trickle), twicker tweet is entirely a matter of production (rather than perception), with [w] for English approximant r [ɹ̠] in child phonology.
Another underwear ad, with a somewhat raunchy (but indirect) caption, with references to mansex, so not to everyone’s taste. This will lead us to Swiss comedians on ice skates, the Backstreet Boys, and much more.
(#1)
Flic and Flak
Share a moment of
Post-wallow bliss, after
Connecting in the
Backroom of a
Backstreet bar,
While seeking dirty
Backdoor action
Flic is the blond one, and he’s French (Fr. slang flic ‘cop’). Flak is a gunner’s mate in the U.S. Navy (flak ‘antiaircraft fire’). They both know how to handle guns. They become BBFs, best buddies forever, but also backdoor buddies forever — who first connected tricking in a backroom bar (a gay backroom bar, one with a secluded space for sex in situ). They’re backboys.
… the male model, in body-display, rather than fashion-display, mode — so only a little about language. On the other hand, this posting is, in word and image, at least technically SFW (though homo-steamy).
It begins with a Facebook comment from Ken Rudolph about image #1 in my “Hitchhiking” posting of yesterday:
(#1)
Ken asked:
Who is #1? And where did that still come from…it looks more like a regular movie than a porn.
Not any kind of movie, but a posed still done by a professional photographer (as are, I think, #2-7 in my hitchhiking posting, and the three photos in the accompanying AZBlogX posting). Meanwhile, a Google Images search led me to Saucier.
Today’s Zits has Jeremy breaking out in asterisks, and they’re neither taboo avoidance characters nor stigmata of ungrammaticality:
What Jeremy’s mother perceives as a spoken asterisk is some complex of vocal quality, pitch. intensity, and timing that marks an expression as produced with some reservation, rather than whole-heartedly. Notably, in the last panel, Jeremy’s production of No corresponds to a Jeremy-mental Yes.
(Well yes, men’s bodies, and lots of gay innuendo, but nothing to frighten the horses.)
Headline in The Gaily Male:
“How Giacomo ‘Giacco’ Giaccone’s
SuperSnapJock made me into a sniveling bitch”
(#1)
Big
Jimmy ruled the
Gym with a thumb of
Steel – one
Snap of his
Strap made the
Strongest man
Kneel
