Archive for the ‘Pragmatics’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The risks of pedantry

September 20, 2025

This Chris Hallbeck cartoon came by me on Facebook this morning — a strip packed with matters of science (paleontology, specifically), lexicography and usage (the senses of the noun dinosaur, and the contexts in which they’re used), and pragmatics (the way in which the noun is used in interactions, especially in language about language; in the enforcement of language norms; and, oh alas, in the relevance of things said to the interests of those participating in the speech context):


A Maximumble cartoon from 5/24/14, whose humor turns crucially on the pragmatic foolishness of the (now deceased) professor (in the face of a ravening monster, he stops to insist, irrelevantly in the context, that his companion must use the proper terminology, while the companion flees to safety); and which is based on the usage of the noun dinosaur — for a member of a clade of prehistoric reptiles bearing the zoological taxonomical label Dinosauria; versus, in non-technical American usage, for any dinosaurid creature, resembling the prototypical dinosaurs (many people have seen a family resemblance)

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Context, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Relevance, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »

Gay banter: great big green beans

August 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) 🔧 Labor Sunday 🔨 (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B

Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:


graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty

A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:

— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!

This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.

And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff  further on green beans / string beans / snap beans. (more…)

Posted in Alliteration, Events and occasions, Formulaic expressions, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Insults, Intention, It's Just Stuff, Language and plants, Language play, Masculinity, Metaphor, My life, Phallicity, Pragmatics, Routines and rituals, Speech acts | 1 Comment »

Eggcorns, innocent and deliberate

August 26, 2025

From a reader on 8/24:

Are you involved in collecting eggcorns?  In case you are, I thought you might be interested in a potential one that I’ve encountered “in the wild” (i.e., a Reddit post).  This person wrote jig solve puzzles instead of jigsaw puzzles:

I should have been diagnosed [with ADHD] as a child but it was the early 90s in a poor rural area. Special ed at my school didn’t diagnose me with anything specific … they just told my mom I needed to spend time doing jig solve puzzles. So, I forced my way through. (Reddit posting)

My response:

I certainly have been involved in collecting eggcorns. But there are only so many balls you can juggle at one time, and I am now a old man with not a lot of time left, so I’ve been pretty much out of the eggcorn business. But you will be pleased to hear that jigsaw > jig solve isn’t in the eggcorn database and hasn’t come up in the eggcorn forum, so I might post on it.

And now I am.

(more…)

Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Formulaic language, Intention, Language play, Names, Play, Puns, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »

The Crab City Darkness

August 17, 2025

As Brutus is an honorable man, so The Crab City Darkness is a beacon of free speech.

A report on Facebook today from one newspaperman, quoting this (slightly edited) opinion from another:

This week marks the completion of my 39th year at [The Crab City Darkness]. Much has changed during my tenure including the policy regarding social media posts. So let me just say that I offer absolutely no criticism of the organization or owner [Dinosaur Broadcast Man] here. None whatsoever. Indeed, I am happy to have my speech restricted in this manner. Isn’t it best for all involved? I really appreciate the reassuring sense of being monitored 24/7 for content by my employer. Wouldn’t you?

Yes, of course. Please slam your boot on my neck; I feel unbearably unconstrained. Illiberty, that’s the ticket.

 

 

Posted in Language and politics, Quotations, Sarcasm and irony | Leave a Comment »

Cheating at golf

August 5, 2025

Recent news: Our Overlord Grabpussy (POTUS 45 + 47) is suspected of cheating at golf. For instance, in the Guardian, the story “‘Dodgy looking’ clip of Tr**p playing golf in Scotland sparks cheating debate: Video appears to show aide dropping ball in favourable position, as golf fans say it is a bad look for the sport” by Steven Morris on 8/1/25.

This is in not even slightly news.

(more…)

Posted in Language and politics, Language and sports, Language and thought, Lying | 1 Comment »

Comma, comma, comma chameleon

August 3, 2025

Yesterday on Facebook, Michael Israel re-posted an item from The Oxford Comma site (showing the cover of an old issue of Tails pet magazine), with the (in this context) foolish advice “Use the Oxford comma, folks”:

(more…)

Posted in Address terms, Books, Conjunctions, Coordination, Faith vs. WF, Movies and tv, Music, Prosody, Punctuation, Quotation, Signage | Leave a Comment »

F-lexicography: the guest posting

August 2, 2025

What follows is a response to my 7/26 posting “F-lexicography, in which I wrote, combatively (and, as it turns out, not entirely accurately):

I argue that the OED treatment of the semantics of the sexual verb fuck is unsatisfactory, not compatible with the actual usage of English speakers for a long time now — apparently because earlier lexicographers, embracing normative views of sexual behavior, posited a single sense of sexual fuck, centrally denoting an agentive act of penis-in-vagina intercourse but with a large penumbra of vagueness, embracing many other sorts of sexual encounters. Then this inadequate treatment was adopted without comment or critique in Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word. So that essentially all the authoritative literature on sexual fuck gets things wrong.

What follows is not the scorched-earth savagery that I would have expected from some of my colleagues, but a calm, thoughtful, and clarifying response from JS, which I reproduce here almost untouched, as a guest posting from him. I have some brief reflective words of my own afterwards.

(To properly appreciate much of what follows, you would really need to look at the (often technical) material reproduced in my 7/26 posting — admittedly, enlivened by a fair number of raunchy real-life citations, but still essays on technical syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Not, I think, impenetrable, but also not especially reader-friendly.)

I had intended to go on to celebrate JS’s character — in particular, as shown in his response, but also more generally — and to situate him in a larger academic and personal context. But recent days have been medically perilous for me, so I’m settling for the bare bones right now, with a promissory note to get on with the rest of the picture later, painting in the humanity.

JS’s response, in between the lines:

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Argument structure, Language of sex, Lexicography, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs, Vagueness, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Reading signs

July 27, 2025

Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes With Orange strip of 7/21 presents us with a dog that can read — not just converting text to sound (speaking written or printed matter aloud), but, crucially for the strip, converting text to meaning (‘looking at and comprehending the meaning of written or printed matter by mentally interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed’ (a definition adapted from NOAD)):


(#1) Panel 1: happy dog, in a state of innocence; panel 2, where all the action happens: dog sees sign, recognizes that it is a sign, reads it, understands that the sign says that its reader should beware of some dog in the sign’s surroundings (specifically, in the yard the sign is posted in), and recognizes that it is a dog in that yard, consequently concluding that it is the dog the sign’s reader is supposed to beware of, and unpacks the meaning of imperative beware as a warning, about the potential danger of this dog, therefore concluding that it has a reputation as a dangerous animal; panel 3, dog exhibits ferocity fitting to its reputation, by growling at passers-by

So that is one astoundingly clever dog. with an understanding of English and a ton of culture-specific information (about keeping dogs as pets and confining them in enclosed yards, about issuing warnings, and about the interpretation of material printed on signs, not to mention self-recognition, the knowledge that he is a dog). Why, you might think that dog was human — an American, in fact.

Now, some earlier postings (from 2015 and 2021), and notes from 2018 for one that never got posted, because it had started to branch into an essay on everything there is to say about signage– so here you’ll get the notes.

(more…)

Posted in Context, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Reading, Signage, Sociocultural conventions, Speech acts, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Withering, take 2

June 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit — the trois lapins inaugurating the month of June, and in the northern temperate zone, devastating young gardens; meanwhile, summer rushes in, as chronicled in a modest way in my posting yesterday, “Withering away, or not” (the cymbidium orchids are rapidly withering away, with only 5 flower stalks still standing at the end of yesterday’s garden work; in contrast, I was thriving)

This morning’s update (I was up at 3:40 and labored steadily on house and garden from 4 to 9, when I started work on this posting): only 2 flower stalks remain (the withered flowers and the long thick stalks have been cut into compostable bits); while I continue to thrive, despite seasonal allergies (one more day of stunningly good morning vitals — blood pressure and pulse rate). Meanwhile, in a kind of compensatory bloom, the big-leaved hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla) has three flower heads opening up into bright pinkish-red panicles, the tallest (and reddest) on a stem that now looms over 4 ft from the ground (since the plant’s in a big pot, that flower-ball is now right at my eye level).

And then I got the sweetest compliment from Robert Coren this morning, in a comment on yesterday’s posting that took off from the verb wither in the posting. To which I had a complex response.

(more…)

Posted in Allusion, Events and occasions, Language and plants, Metaphor, My life, Plays, Pragmatics, Quotations | 3 Comments »

Nutritional mishearing

May 28, 2025

I posted this query on Facebook yesterday:

— AZ: I’ve been regularly getting a tv spot ad for the Boost Max nutritional drink , ‘Here’s to Now: Boost Max’ (published 8/13/24), in which a young Black man says what I hear as “Here’s to bean meat soup every Thursday” (which puzzles me). Can anyone correct — or confirm — my impression?

You can view the ad, from ispot.tv, here.

Crucially, I failed to take into account the context the speaker is in; I really should know better.

(more…)

Posted in Context, Language and food, Language of advertising, Mishearings | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »