On the Language Nerd Facebook page yesterday, this playfully framed, but seriously intended, flowchart, “Your guide to being polite in French”, for choosing between the 2sg pronouns tu (‘familiar’) and vous (‘polite’) in current French — a bow to the treatment of T and V pronouns in Brown & Gilman 1960:
(#1)
Posted in Address terms, Books, Familiar and polite, French, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics | 3 Comments »
The Palo Alto Medical Foundation periodically revises the format for its on-line statements, including after visit summaries to its physicians and labs. As far as I can tell, every such software upgrade arrives with bugs, sometimes spectacular ones; this is, after, the way of software the world over.
So it was with recent after visit summaries, in which my name at the top was given as
Dr. Zwicky M. Zwicky
I have an idea about how this might have come about. Probably not verifable, since it involves decisions by two different people, neither of whom could easily be identified.
Posted in Address terms, Errors, Technology | 1 Comment »
Today’s Zippy has Mr. the Toad recruiting a Pinhead named Foswelch — Toad uses the name as an address term in every panel of the strip except the last — as a Formstone siding salesman in Baltimore:
(#1)
There’s the name Foswelch, another in a series of F-initial family names that Bill Griffith seems to be fond of. And the combination of siding and Baltimore — a natural for Formstone, but also evoking the movie Tin Men.
Posted in Address terms, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names | 2 Comments »
About the N bro, used first as an address term and then as a referential N with several senses, and available as an element in N + N compounds: as the first element in Bro Code and bro subculture, as the second element in code bro (roughly) ‘guy into coding’ and (hat tip to Tyler Schnoebelen) the academic-cool character named Philosophy Bro. Then, thanks to Ben Barrett on ADS-L (on May 23rd), on to crypto bro / cryptobro, which looks like it might be a portmanteau of cryptocurrency (or cryptocoin(age)) and bro, but is probably better analyzed as a straightforward compound of the clipping crypto and the N bro.
Posted in Address terms, Books, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Philosophy, Portmanteaus, Slang, Slogans, Social interactions, Sociocultural Roles | Leave a Comment »
There’s Fenwick, and then there’s Fenwich, a Zippy name to conjure with: used as a narrative semi-generic address term, and in explicit discussions of names and their uses.
Posted in Address terms, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Nicknames | Leave a Comment »
Just posted on this blog, this Zippy:
(#1)
Zippy-God as the psychiatrist, a very Zippy-like generic Pinhead as the patient; he’s given the name Fenwick in the third panel. The artist is fond of Fenwick.
Posted in Address terms, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Narrative, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Zits:
Jeremy is mistered for the first time, Connie recalls being ma’amed for the first time.
The topic here is vocative (vs. referential) expressions, in particular the subtype of calls (vs. addresses), a domain in which it’s well-known that there are very substantial differences between the subtypes — between the expressions usable in each subtype and the social meanings they convey.
Posted in Address terms, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
Recently in my comics feed, a Calvin and Hobbes re-run with endearments:
pooty pie, bitsy pookums, snoogy woogy — from Wiktionary:
term of endearment: a word, phrase, or nickname used as a term of address expressing affection (synonym: endearment)
Posted in Address terms, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Nicknames, Pragmatics, Semantics | 4 Comments »
(Men’s bodies, underwear, snarky captions, and some slang.)
A recent offer from Daily Jocks, SUP BRO t-shirts from the Australian company Supawear:
(#1)
That’s my shirt bro
It comes from A U
I’m Buster Brown
Look for me down there too
Posted in Address terms, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Language and the body, Slang, Style and register, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
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).
Posted in Address terms, Conversation, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Parsing, Pragmatics, Semantics | 1 Comment »
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