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”:
Archive for the ‘Prosody’ Category
Comma, comma, comma chameleon
August 3, 2025
hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 2
April 30, 2025🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April; tomorrow the rabbit operatives of the revitalized Industrial Workers of the World will smash the tiger lackeys serving the corrupt octopus of big business and government; the Wobblies will, of course, dance onto the scene, tossing flowers to the audience (public service warning: do not eat the muguets; they are beautiful and sweet-selling, but toxic)
Previously on this blog. In yesterday’s “hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 1”, a Lynn Johnston For Better or For Worse strip, (re)published on 6/19/24:
(#1) There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented –illions words; and the thing [my correspondent Masayoshi Yamada] was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions
Yesterday, things 1 and 2; today, thing 3.
Today’s eccentric character
April 28, 2025If this blog were the New Yorker, this posting would be a Talk of the Town piece (after the first one, which is an editorial), a sketch of some intriguing person. Today’s eccentric character on this blog (other than me) is Mark Saltveit. In brief, from Wikipedia, much extended:
Mark Saltveit (born 1961 [Harvard ’83]) is a Vermont-based [but Oregon native] stand-up comedian, palindromist and writer, known for being the first World Palindrome Champion [AZ: also chronicler of the San Francisco 49ers (that’s American football, for my readers around the world) and scholar of Daoism (aka Taoism); and, he now — 4/28 — tells me he’s also interested in ancient coins].
MS (photo from him)
In more detail, from his WiX site:
Staff writer, NinersNation.com (leading San Francisco 49ers website)
Professional standup comedian, since 1999
Editor, The Palindromist Magazine
The first ever World Palindrome Champion (2012-2017)
Editor, Taoish.org (a website of contemporary, secular Daoism)
But why, you wonder, am I writing about him today? Because he wrote me yesterday about the TG/TB (“That’s Good” / “That’s Bad”) joke routine that I first talked about here in a 7/22/19 posting “Oh that’s good” — citing an ancient Chinese forebear of the routine. So: TG/TB back in the mists of time, though it came up on this blog through the American tv show Hee Haw.
All about /aj/: the trisyllables
October 4, 2022The Zippy strip of 9/29 interjects:
(#1) The strip is all about eyeglasses (with the wonderful name Thelma Nesselrode as a bonus), but this posting is about oh!, interjections / yeah!, exclamations / and, like, discourse markers and stuff
So, what’s up with eye-yi-yi!? This is presumably an orthographic representation of an English exclamation /aj aj aj/, with the accent pattern /àj aj áj/, and pronounced as a single phonological word /àjajáj/. In fact, I’m aware of — and at least an occasional user of — three English exclamations /àjajáj/, with three syllables: one a borrowing from (Latino) Spanish; one in Yinglish (taken from Yiddish); and one in PDE (Pennsylvania Dutch English, taken from Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch, that is, Pennsylvania Dutch / German). (There are probably more, in other German-based varieties of English, in particular.) They have somewhat different contexts of use and a wide variety of ad hoc spellings, though ay-ay-ay seems to be the closest there is to a conventional spelling for all three of them (my childhood spelling for the PD and PDE exclamation was ai-ai-ai / ai ai ai, and it’s still the only one that looks right to me).
So: something about the range of the phenomena in this exclamatory domain, with special attention to my personal history. In this posting, just about the exclamatory triples, but folding in the de facto national ballad of Mexico, “Cielito Lindo”, and some Texas klezmer music.
Then, in a later posting (bear with me, my life is over-full), my discovery that OED3 has relatively recent entries for the interjections ai, aie, and ay, and my subsequent disappointment in the content of these entries — as against, say, the rich OED3 entries for the interjections oh and ah. And finally, some aimless wandering about in the world of interjections, exclamations, discourse markers, and related phenomena.
Zippy, Elia, and Vilnissimo confront their stress
July 20, 2022(There will be a just barely not-naked moose-knuckled underwear model, plus references to male raunchy bits and man-on-man sex in plain terms, so, alas, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Three items on my computer screen this morning: today’s Zippy, in which the Pinhead totters from stress in a world of (historical) roadside seafood joints in New England, the last of which leads to today’s Daily Jocks swimwear ad for the Elia company; meanwhile, Zippy’s succumbing to stress leads to National Stress Awareness Day, and a Private Eye cartoon by Vilnissimo for the occasion (posted today on Facebook by John Wells).
(#1) Stressed-out Zippy shacking up with the shad, Chad going to the beach to spawn in Elia swimwear, Vilnissimo keenly aware of stress in Private Eye
Annals of research queries
August 21, 2021(Or, Cheers: Does anybody know some work?)
A comment from me yesterday on my 8/7 posting “Melecio / Biaggi”, in which I noted the lifelong social stigma for sexworkers (Melecio / Biaggi being one such),
which I posted baffled comments on in my posting: there’s a moral question here, lying in the nexus between matters of sexual morality and matters of economic morality. So I thought to appeal to a moral philosopher [Tim Scanlon of Harvard] to ask if the question had been considered in the literature in that field.
… I keep posing queries (arising from my postings) to academics who are old friends (Tim; the phonetician John Wells [at University College London] on “difference illusions”, illusions that certain homophones are actually distinct in pronunciation [in my 8/9 posting “The khan con”]; and the [Stanford] linguist Paul Kiparsky on the metrics of chants [in my 7/18 posting “Between the glutes”])
Tim and John were intrigued by my queries, but had no literature to offer. Paul’s response was more complicated: over brunch, he and I together were able to recall a few items, so that I could write to their authors for assistance, and our conversation led me to realize that the topic was a great deal more complex than I had thought when I posed the query.
The mirror of the manatee
August 5, 2021In today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s title: “The Mammal in the Mirror” (a play on the song title “Man in the Mirror”) — a manatee primps at his vanity, yielding the vanity + manatee portmanteau vanatee, and crossing genders as well as words (masculine manatee — “Man in the Mirror”, addressing himself as handsome, bristly body — at a conventionally highly feminine item of furniture, a vanity table, for applying makeup in the bedroom):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
I’ll start with the two contributors to the portmanteau and follow them where they lead, which is many surprising places.
Between the glutes
July 18, 2021(Some male body parts, depicted and discussed in plain, but not raunchy, terms. So not squarely in the Sex Zone, but not tasteful either. Caution advised for kids and the sexually modest.)
For me, it all started with a recent ad on Facebook for suit sets (sleeveless tank tops with bikini underpants) from the Fabmens company in a variety of intriguing patterns, including a (more or less) rainbow “color block” pattern seen here from the rear:
(#1) The design of the underpants strikingly accentuates the wearer’s ass / butt / bum cleft / crack / cleavage, in a way that in my queer fashion I (at least) find decidedly hot
Deacccenting
March 26, 2018Coming past me every so often on tv, a commercial for the Car Gurus company, in which the pronunciation of the company name varies from a clear car gurus, [ˈkarˌguruz], with a secondary accent on the first syllable of gurus, to something like cargaroos, [ˈkargəruz], with this syllable unaccented and its vowel reduced to schwa — indeed, including the intermediate variant [ˈkargʊruz], with that syllable deaccented and its vowel laxed but not reduced to schwa.
My ears perked up at the pronunciations with deaccented second element, because they sounded so odd — because they effaced the identity of the guru component of the name, which is surely semantically important to the image of the company, which proposes to offer gurus, in this sense from NOAD:
noun guru: an influential teacher or popular expert
When is Doris Day?
February 6, 2018It starts with a recent (January 4th) One Big Happy and will end with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in 1967. In the cartoon, Ruthie and Joe are unfamiliar with Doris Day the person and take Doris Day to refer to a holiday (like Flag Day):
(#1)