Archive for the ‘Aktionsart’ Category

Nobody expects a baby

March 6, 2024

A carefully composed, subtle, and surprising ambiguity-driven cartoon by Mick Stevens in the New Yorker 1/1&8/2024 issue (on-line on 12/2/23):


Were we expecting a baby?, conveying not ‘Were we pregnant?” but the surprising ‘Were we expecting a baby (to appear at the door, to visit us, to be delivered to us, etc.)?’ — compare Were we expecting a special-delivery letter? Were we expecting the Spanish Inquisition? (meanwhile, there’s a Page about MS cartoons on this blog)

From NOAD:

verb expect: … [c] believe that (someone or something) will arrive soon: Celia was expecting a visit.

verb phrase idiom be expecting (also be expecting a baby): informal be pregnant: his wife was expecting again.

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You’ve been seeing other fish

February 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 trois lapins to inaugurate the little month of February (which stretches this year to 29 days), beginning unfortunately in these parts in cold rains that will last for a week, and (this morning) in low air pressure that makes my joints so painful that I can barely get this posting typed and has depressed my vital signs (blood pressure, pulse rate, body temperature) so much that I’m light-headed, unsteady on my feet, and muzzy-minded (the upside is that low air pressure inevitably goes on to rise, so that if I can hang on a while things will get better)

But I’m not dead yet, and (for reasons I don’t understand) I’m not at all depressed — low air pressure often causes me to break into weeping in despair at the slightest provocation, and the unbroken gloom of these days would test anyone — just pissed off at being so incapacitated.

My morning has been cheered by today’s Rhymes With Orange comic strip (involving a talking pet fish and its keeper), which plays in a surprising way with two of the many verb senses of see:

Minimal lexicographic facts about the senses of see involved in this strip, from NOAD:

verb see: 1 [a] perceive with the eyes; discern visually … 4 [a] meet (someone one knows) socially or by chance … [c] meet regularly as a boyfriend or girlfriend

On hearing “You’ve been seeing other fish”, most people would understand it to be conveying sense 4c (for reasons I’ll explore below); what’s funny is that the strip sets things up — via three pieces of evidence that the keeper has just been to an aquarium, a place people go to to watch fish — so that we will take the fish to be using the unexpected sense 1a: surprise!

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The lexicon of masturbation

December 30, 2020

(A spin-off from today’s posting “Manual labor”. Obviously inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest: it’s all about sex, and a lot of it is raunchy.)

This is a compact summary of usages, confined here to male masturbation (all participants are men), in particular such acts involving men who have sex with other men.

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Annals of burritio

October 29, 2019

(It starts with burrito-savoring, but immediately spreads to flagrantly carnal acts described in plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

An old ad campaign for Taco Bell’s beefy burritos, drastically pornphotoshopped so as to illustrate techniques for tackling those tasty tortilla tubes (10/12 hat tip to Chris Hansen):


(#1) Eat my burrito, dude!

Is this queer, or what? One shirtless guy takes tube lying on his side on a bed, the other eats it on his knees. Both have a hand wrapped firmly around the base of the object of their desire. Both have their eyes closed in the ecstasy of oral pleasure.

What do we call this act of sensual gratification? I’m going for burritio /bǝríšiò/: New Latin for ‘burrito-eating’, on loose analogy with fellatio /fǝléšiò/ ‘cock-sucking’, encouraged by the physical similarities between the two objects and between the two acts.

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Aspectual distinctions in the comics

July 22, 2018

Today’s Zippy involves a distinction in the interpretation of the VP own thirty-one muu-muus:

Does Zippy happen to own (only) 31 muu-muus at the moment? Griffy asks how many muu-muus Zippy owns, and that’s what Zippy apparently says in reply.

Or is Zippy’s way of life such that he always has (only) 31 muu-muus in his possession? That would indeed predict that Zippy has (only) 31 at the moment, but it would also predict that if you took one away, he’d have to get a new one to replace it, and that if you gave him a new one, he’d have to get rid of an old one — all to maintain the stable state of owning 31 muu-muus. That’s what Zippy says in his reply.

The distinction is aspectual, corresponding very roughly to the circumstances in which you’d choose a ‘to be’ verb in Spanish: estar (roughly) for temporary situations, not necessarily extending beyond the reference time period (hence mutable, contingent), ser (roughly) for enduring, even permanent situations, extending through time before and after the reference time period (hence unchanging, even necessary).

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Just a hijink

June 28, 2018

The Adam@home strip from June 5th (recommended to me by Robert Coren):

(#1)

It’s all about this hijink, with SG hijink, (roughly) ‘joke, bit of playfulness’. The usage is rare.

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Up in every way

February 13, 2018

“Nothing can stop me, I’m all the way up”, the song goes, and it manages to pack a whole bagful of uses of up into a few verses.

(#1) “All the Way Up”, with drugs, bitches and hoes, sex (“I’m that nigga on Viagra dick”), bling, success

And then Mountain Dew (the soft drink) extracted just a bit of the song for its own purposes.

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Ruthie verbs

December 5, 2017

The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed:

(#1)

Ruthie’s taken the predicative idiom in cahoots (with) — Dad is in cahoots with Joe, Dad and Joe are in cahoots — and extracted from it (by back-formation) a noun cahoot, which she then verbs, to get an activity verb cahoot with rather than the stative be in cahoots with.

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missing it

May 13, 2017

Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm:

(#1)

Ok, a simple ambiguity. The relevant subsenses of the transitive verb miss, from NOAD2, with my sense id codes:

— in the set of 12 failure-miss senses:
[1f] fail to attend, participate in, or watch (something one is expected to do or habitually does): teachers were supposed to report those students who missed class that day. [Mother Goose’s sense]

— in the set of 3 absence-miss senses:
[2c] feel regret or sadness at no longer being able to go to, do, or have: I still miss France and I wish I could go back. [Grimm’s sense, a willful misunderstanding of Mother Goose]

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