This image came to me via Ann Burlingham on Facebook (I don’t know the ultimate source):
[Added 10/8/13. Arthur Prokosch posted the source on Facebook: Preserving Traditions: Preserving our harvest, our heritage, our community, and our future.]
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A pun on can ‘be able’ vs. can ‘preserve (food) in a can’ (or, in this case, a Mason jar).
I’ll start with a three-strip series from One Big Happy:
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The two features at issue here — the discourse particle like and “uptalk” (a high rising intonation at the end of declaratives) — have been much discussed in the linguistic literature. The popular, but inaccurate, perception is that both are characteristic of young people, especially teenagers, especially girls, and both features are the object of much popular complaint.
Follow-up to the Häagen-Dazs gelato campaign here, with its tasty names: a story in Stanford Magazine of July/August about research by my colleague Dan Jurafsky: “Why Ice Cream Sounds Fat and Crackers Sound Skinny: Words carry weight. A linguist explains”. The brief version:
… front vowels are used in words for small, thin, light things, and back vowels in words for big, fat, heavy things
… Since ice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be rich, creamy and heavy, it is not surprising that people seem to prefer ice creams that are named with back vowels.
… In a study for an upcoming book based on my freshman seminar The Language of Food, I checked to see whether commercial ice creams (like Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s) make use of this association by using more back vowels in their names, and conversely whether thin, light foods like crackers would have more front vowels. I found more back vowels in ice cream names — Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge, Chocolate, Caramel, Cookie Dough, Coconut — and more front vowels in cracker names: Cheese Nips, Cheez-It, Wheat Thins, Pretzel thins, Ritz, Krispy, Triscuit, Chicken in a Biskit, Ritz bits.
The Bizarro of the 25th:
An imperfect pun: hanger /hæŋǝr/ vs. anger /æŋgǝr/. Note the divergent treatment of orthographic NG in medial position: typically /ŋ/ before agentive or instrumental /ǝr/, but /ŋg/ otherwise. (There are well-known exceptions, like dinghy, with /ŋ/; and medial NG sometimes spells /nǰ/, as in dingy.)
Talk Like a Pirate Day isn’t until September 19th, but George Takei posted this entertaining piratical moment (passed on to me by Victor Steinbok) recently, and I don’t want to wait two months to post it here:
That would be Alexander Pope (“To err is human; to forgive, divine”, from An Essay on Criticism) crossed with stereotypical pirate talk (“Arr, me hearties!”).
A note on the pronunciation of actor/model Kellan Lutz’s family name. This is so uncontroversial that sources seem never to comment on it: it’s /lʌts/, with the vowel /ʌ/ of luck. But where I grew up, in Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e., Pennsylvania German) country, where there were a great many people with the family name Lutz, it was uniformly pronounced /lʊts/, with the vowel/ʊ/ of look — following German pronunciation rather than the English spelling.
I was moved yesterday to wonder about the whoopee cushion, its history, and the various names for it. In particular, I mused that there would be no good way to predict what the thing is called in English, given a description of it; fart cushion would be the obvious candidate.
Following on my posting on gnomes at the Chelsea Flower Show, Andy Rogers remarked on Facebook that he had a garden Noam, and I recalled two Language Log postings from 2010 on gnome puns: one on Gnome Chomsky the Garden Noam (on the Just Say Gnome site); and one on Gnomeland Security (from several sources). But wait, there’s more.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a portmanteau:
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That’s despair + asparagus. This is a stretch as a portmanteau for me, because the accented vowels in the two contributing words are distinct for me: [e] in despair, [æ] in asparagus. For me and some other American speakers — and for virtually all English speakers outside of North America. But for other Americans, the vowels are quite close (with [ɛ] in asparagus) or identical (with [e] in asparagus). This is merry–Mary–marry territory.
