From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook on 10/5, passing on material from Tony Michaels’s Facebook page (“The Tony Michaels Podcast: Considered ‘The Rush Limbaugh of the Left’”), also from 10/5:
A Tony Michaels fabrication (see below)
Archive for the ‘Pragmatics’ Category
Revolt against the bad guys
October 15, 2025
From the annals of NAA
October 15, 2025The most recent Stephan Pastis Pearls Before Swine strip:
A classic NAA (non-apology apology): if you take offence, it’s your problem (in the strip: I’m sorry you were offended; ramped up: I’m sorry you’re an oversensitive ninny) (see Edwin L. Battistella’s Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology (Oxford, 2014))
From Wikipedia:
A non-apology apology, sometimes called a backhanded apology, empty apology, nonpology, or fauxpology, is a statement in the form of an apology that does not express remorse for what was done or said, or assigns fault to those ostensibly receiving the apology. It is common in politics and public relations.
Can I help?
October 1, 2025🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the new month, which is coming in locally with October showers (a tiny amount of rain, but always an excitement in what is still the dry season in this part of the world)
And now I turn to a William Haefeli cartoon from the New Yorker issue of 9/22/25 (this is only a bit behind the times; I have promised follow-up postings to first installments going all the way back to January, and my life is now spectacularly more difficult than it was before, so I’m just taking random shots). This cartoon:
(#1) All about the complexities in offers of help — from anyone, from someone who shares your household, from your spouse (or equivalent partner), or specifically from your same-sex partner, or (since this is Haefeli) even more specifically from your gay male partner; and also about the division of labor in households of all sorts
The cartoon is in face exceedingly rich, readable at several different levels. It is, in fact, funny even if you eliminate all the rich social specificity Haefeli has built into it.
A thought experiment: replace the highly socially located characters in #1 by cute indistinguishable cartoon creatures not identifiable by species or sex. One is engaged in some neutral task, like sorting unidentifiable objects; the other, standing by and observing, asks (in a way that presupposes that the observer doesn’t already know how to do the task):
Can I do something to help that won’t take you twenty minutes to show me how to do?
(This is an offer to help, couched indirectly, as a question, and also hedged, with a precondition on the offer.)
It’s still funny — because all tasks require skills, which must be learned (by observation or instruction, and then by practice), but there’s a wide range of complexity and difficulty for these skills, and at the upper end of the range, it could take a significant amount of time for a new helper to pick up the skill, so the observer conveys that their offer is conditional on the learning time being short; 20 minutes would be too great an investment for them. We then have some wry mockery of the observer’s attitudes — that they’ll do it, but only if it’s not too much trouble. They want the credit for offering, but don’t want to commit much to the task.
In real life, I have often had the experience, in difficult times, of having someone turn up offering to give me whatever help is needed, but then when asked to do some specific task, demurring on the grounds that “Oh, I couldn’t do that!” I have an especially unpleasant memory of my stepmother-in-law arriving in Cambridge MA (in the middle of a bitter winter, from Florida), after our daughter Elizabeth was born, to help out with the baby. Almost anything that would have helped us — doing some cooking, getting groceries, taking clothes to the laundromat, whatever — was greeted with “Oh, I couldn’t do that!”. After a few days she went back to Florida and out of our lives for a while, to our great relief.
But now in the social context. As soon as you add some social context, the cartoon becomes much richer.
First, the task is cooking, which is famously complex and time-consuming. And look at that kitchen! Crowded with pots and pans and, everywhere, ingredients. Conveying that helping out is likely to be no small undertaking.
Second, the the cartoon is about a cook and their housemate, so the division of household labor now comes to the fore: how does it come about that one person does all the cooking while the other merely observes, sometimes extending a conditional offer of help?
Third, domestic cooking in our sociocultural context is “women’s work”, so we would guess that the cook is female and the observer male, that these roles are assigned by gender-normative conventions, with the result that the observer is being cast as normatively masculine: pointedly not doing women’s work, because that would be feminine. But he might, um, lend a hand to the little lady. As a favor. If it wasn’t too much trouble. Then the cartoon is a poke at the pretensions of the observer.
But, wait! Fourth, the couple in the actual cartoon are both men. Whatever their relationship, if they are at least housemates, tasks have to get done, and somebody’s got to take the cook role. The roles have to be negotiated. And the cartoon is, again, a poke at the pretensions of the observer.
And then, in fact, the cartoon comes from Haefeli-land, a place of urban (very likely, NYC) upper middle class couples, many of them gay men. So fifth, the men in the cartoon are in fact a gay couple — and they are differentiated as two different types of gay men: the observer presenting himself as normatively masculine in appearance, the cook as deviating from these norms (earring, fashionable haircut, ponytail). Which, by playing on the norms (real men don’t cook), makes the cartoon an actual swipe at the pretensions of the observer.
The cartoon might have been titled “Sympathy for the Cook”. See, in this light, an earlier Haefeli cartoon:
(#2) Again, the cook
Real life is, of course, immensely complicated, and roles and presentations are distributed in all sorts of ways, at different times, in different contexts, for different purposes. This is literally the cartoon version.
An armed gunman
September 29, 2025From John McIntyre on Facebook today:
— JM: Today’s Pleonasm Award goes to outlets that referred to Thomas Jacob Sanford, who attacked the Mormon church in Michigan, as an armed gunman.
The risks of pedantry
September 20, 2025This 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)
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…)
Eggcorns, innocent and deliberate
August 26, 2025From 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.
The Crab City Darkness
August 17, 2025As 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.
Comma, comma, comma chameleon
August 3, 2025Yesterday 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”:
