Archive for the ‘Quotations’ Category

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A hell of a queen

June 15, 2024

(Some readers will find some of the material in this posting distasteful, but there’s nothing visual or verbal in it to merit keeping the kids away from it.)

I’ll blame this on the luminous Minnie Driver, playing Queen Elizabeth I in season 2 of the Starz tv period drama The Serpent Queen.


(#1) MD in one of her fabulous QEI costumes; the character invites extravagance in costuming and makeup (further examples to come)

Through an accident of dates, QEI will take us to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” song and secret worlds hidden from everyday life (and, of course, gay bears). Then, through the excellent “hell of a queen” quotation, she will take us on a further wild ride to the Princeton Triangle Club in 1960 and, more generally, to queens in drag.

Buckle up.

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Posted in Actors, Costumes, Double entendres, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Princeton, Quotations | 1 Comment »

What lies ahead

May 23, 2024

Stability was the theme of my 5/15 appointment with Luis Alvarez (my nephrologist — who, since advanced kidney disease is my most salient affliction, has been in effect serving as my main physician). He was delighted with the most recent lab tests (everything holding at a good level) and with what he saw by examining and feeling various parts of my body and by observing my speech and behavior. He said to go on doing what I was doing and get an appointment in, wow, six months.

I allowed that I’d gotten used to the idea that death wasn’t very far off (every day is a surprising gift, to be treasured; my motto has been the Pythonic Mary Queen of Scots cry: Not Dead Yet), and he said that was reasonable before, but not now, since I probably had a long life still in front of me. And then we chatted for a while about the nature of diagnosis and prediction, as he and I are inclined to do.

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Posted in Language and medicine, My life, Quotations | 1 Comment »

The history-rebooted Easter egg

March 14, 2024

In the Economist‘s 2/10/24 issue, early in the piece “Chronicling the past: The present as prologue” (a review of 2020 by Eric Klinenberg, a book treating the Covid pandemic, still unfolding, as a historical event), this passage:

It has been an alarming few years. History — widely assumed to have stopped somewhere around the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Spice Girls’ first record — has got going again, with gusto.

The implicit claim is that any history worth recording came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989 (the end of an old political order), and the Spice Girls’ first record, in 1996 (the end of an old pop-cultural order), but sprung back to life with the onset of the pandemic; things are happening again.

Readers with a keen ear, especially if they are British (the Economist is a British publication), might have detected something vaguely familiar in the way that claim has been worded; it’s a distant, glancing allusion to the first verse of a famous (in some circles) poem by British poet Philip Larkin — easy to miss, especially since it contributes nothing of substance to a review of Klinenberg’s book, but is just a little gift to readers who recognize the allusion to a culturally significant text: it’s what I’ve called an Easter egg quotation.

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Posted in Allusion, History, Poetry, Quotations | Leave a Comment »

Dalla sua pace

December 6, 2023

Today (12/6: St. Nicholas Day, Finnish Independence Day, and Mozart’s death day) my morning name was the Italian phrase dalla sua pace ‘on his / her peace’. From a Mozart opera. The music playing on my Apple Music when I awoke was indeed from opera in Italian, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, so if the phrase had come from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro — Figaro being the barber in question — the appearance of that phrase in my morning mind would have been easy to explain. Alas, Dalla sua pace (On her peace) is an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, quite a different plot, entirely barber-free and Figaro-free.

It is, of course, possible that my unconscious mind is not as up on the details of opera in Italian as my conscious mind, so it made this distant operatic association. Or maybe I was just reviving an interest in the preposizioni articolate ‘articulated (i.e., articled / arthrous) prepositions’ of Italian, of which dalla — combining the versatile preposition da (expressing source ‘from’, location ‘at, on’, and goal ‘to’) with the fem.sg. definite article la — is a prime example; here it is in a display of the articled prepositions (versions of this chart are found on many sites):


Prepositions down on the left, definite articles across at the top

(Articled prepositions are found in many European languages, as in French du = de ‘of’ + le (masc.sg.) and German zur = zu ‘to, towards’ + der (dat.fem.sg.), with very different details in each language.)

But the aria from Don Giovanni, what of that?

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Posted in French, German, Holidays, Italian, Morning names, Morphology and syntax, Morphophonology, Music, Quotations | 2 Comments »

Sense-shifting pun jokes

December 2, 2023

A common joke form exploits an ambiguous expression E. Prior likelihood or the preceding context in the joke favors one understanding for E, but then fresh context (in the joke) brings out another, more surprising one. The effect is that the sense of E has shifted as the joke proceeds. It’s a pun, son. Used in a sense-shifting pun joke. (Puns get used in all sorts of jokes: knock-knock jokes, one type of riddle joke, and more.)

I now offer two examples that especially tickled me, to show how such ((phonologically) perfect) puns work. Then some comments on a different joke form, formula pun jokes, which can turn on imperfect puns and involve a different kind of set-up / pay-off from sense-shifting pun jokes.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Illusions, Jokes, Language and race, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Performance, Puns, Quotations, Snowclones, Taboo language and slurs, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

The cuke protrusion

August 12, 2023

The weekend winner in the phallic vegetable competition; all cucumbers are phallic, but this one takes cuke phallicity to a new level. From Kristin Landis Lowry on Facebook yesterday, reporting from her growhouse:


— KLL: This was bound to happen 😂😂😂

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Posted in Catchphrases, Formulaic language, Language and plants, Phallicity, Quotations, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Truly obscure quotation

January 23, 2023

The puzzle was set in my 1/17 posting “The bearded cartoonist, post-simectomy”: an often-cited Flannery O’Connor quotation that I could find no source for.  Reader Mark Mandel took my puzzle to the American Dialect Society mailing list, hoping that one of the hounds of ADS-L would do better, in particular that Quote Investigator Garson O’Toole had collected material for the QI site. And so it has turned out, though I doubt anyone will be especially satisfied by learning that she used the quotation in a 1948 letter to her publisher, while denying credit for it and attrbuting it to an “old lady”.

So here’s the story.

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Posted in Quotations | 1 Comment »

The Monster and the Minotaureador

September 21, 2022

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with an instance of one of the house specialties — the Psychiatrist cartoon meme — rich in mythic resonances, and incorporating a bovine Nietzschean pun:


Not just any old ruminant on the couch, but the chimeric monster the Minotaur, reflecting guiltily on, oh, the young people sacrificed to him in the Labyrinth, and now confronted with a Theseus figure, in the form of his therapist (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

Wayno’s title, another pun, but a perfect one this time: “Bull Session”.

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Posted in Catchphrases, Comic conventions, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Myths, Portmanteaus, Puns, Quotations | 3 Comments »

Panjandrumery

July 19, 2022

My morning name of 6/5, which came to me, not in my head on awakening (the way morning names usually do), but on Facebook upon my firing up my computer, from John Wells, who was exclaiming with surprised delight: “I’m now a panjandrum“.

JW had just come across a 1/29/19 piece on Tony Thorne’s language and innovation site, “Mockney, Estuary — and the Queen’s English”, in which Thorne referred to “the Linguistics and Phonetics department at UCL [University College London] under the panjandrum of phonology Professor John Wells”.


(#1) Not JW, but the Great Panjandrum of Randolph Caldecott’s 1885 picture book, on its cover (on the book, see below)

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Posted in Books, Language play, Linguists, Morning names, My life, Nonsense, Quotations | 2 Comments »

The second-greatest of these is monosyllabicity

July 8, 2022

Zippy’s guide to food-buying in today’s strip: packaging, monosyllabicity (hereafter 1-icity), and collectibility, in that order:


(#1) As ever, thoroughly steeped in pop / mass culture: in the 3rd panel, not just the orange-flavored drink mix Tang, but also the astronaut allusion (“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”); it then turns out that the panel also takes us to orangutans (which are neither orange in color — ok, some reddish tones, but not orange, see #3 below — nor have a tang in their name, but but …)

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Names, Naming, Professional names, Publications, Quotations, Trade names | 3 Comments »

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