… Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with its excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) laissez-fairy godmother:
(#1) laissez-faire + fairy godmother yields a hands-off mentor and guide, of not much use to the disgruntled Cinderella, who will now have to do her own prince-finding (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
So cries Ruthie (in an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning), objecting to what she saw as her mother’s accusation that she and her brother Joe were being like pets:
Here Ruthie shows an admirable appreciation of the English derivational suffix –y ‘relating to, like, resembling’, while betraying her ignorance of the adjective petty ‘of little importance’ (which is not pet + –y).
That’s what the fuzzy sign said that was being passed around on Facebook, in appreciation of its unintended ambiguity: it’s supposed to be exhorting us to oppose hate (with noun hate), but it could be telling us to do our hating on our feet (with verb hate); consider some parallels in which the N and V readings are pulled apart:
Stand Up To Hatred [N reading] OR Stand Up To Execrate [V reading, with understood object]
Stand Up To Yelling [N] OR Stand Up To Yell [(intransitive) V]
Stand Up To Urination [N] OR Stand Up To Urinate [ (intransitive) V]
I’ll look at the ambiguity in detail in a little while. But first some words about slogans, like the one on that fuzzy sign.
An old One Big Happy strip in my comics feed today — posted here on 3/28/14 in “OBH roundup”, but with little comment — in which Ruthie reveals her aide-memoire for the name of a fish her mother sometimes cooks for dinner:
(#1) buncher, crowder? — or flocker, packer, ganger, batcher, schooler? — but actually grouper
At this point, you’re probably thinking that groupers are so called because they travel in schools, that is, in a kind of group. But no; there’s an etymological surprise here.
Yesterday’s news from East Sussex (the old original Sussex, in southern England), a Sussex News story (by Jo Wadsworth) that kicks off with this juicy summary sentence:
A handyman who masturbated over a tenant’s knickers has been acquitted of criminal damage.
The story is pretty much unavoidably raunchy, given the nature of the offense; nobody writes stuff like commit an obscene act these days. The reporter used the technical and punchier masturbated in the intro, I’d imagine because it was compact, but then opted for the euphemistic pleasured himself in the full story, which continues:
Simon Lawrence, 55, had been called to fix a faulty washing machine when he entered Joanna Hatton’s bedroom at the cottage she rented with her partner Thomas Jones.
But he didn’t realise the couple had installed a motion sensor camera there to watch their cat.
The couple were driving to Somerset for Christmas when Joanna got an alert on her phone that the camera had been activated on 19 December, 2022.
She watched in horror as Lawrence laid out her underwear on the bed and began pleasuring himself.
The reporter must have yearned to use the British slang wanked, which is vulgar but what ordinary people say in the UK. But you can’t talk like that in a respectable newspaper (though the tabloids can go pretty far).
But there would be room to veer towards vulgarity in the head; in fact, this is a dream story for an alert headline writer, who while casting about for alternatives to masturbated, to knickers (which is kind of giggly slang but not vulgar, and which doesn’t have to get into the head), and to be acquitted (which is legalese), might hit on the possibility for a somewhat rude pun on ‘masturbate’ vs. ‘be acquitted ‘, via the phrasal verb get off.
Or, of course, a headline writer might go for get off rather than be acquitted just because it’s a bit shorter (writing heads is sometimes like solving a devilishly complicated puzzle), in which case they could come up with the actual Sussex News headline in all innocence (until the laughter rolled in):
In today’s Bizarro, a dog park, with parking meters, where you can park your pooch by the hour:
Surprise! The strip exploits a possible sense of the N+N compound dog park — roughly, ‘an area or building where dogs may be left temporarily, for a fee’, the canine analogue of (largely British) car park ‘an area or building where cars or other vehicles may be left temporarily; a parking lot or parking garage’ (NOAD) — that you probably had never imagined.
Instead, you expected the everyday sense of dog park, ‘a park for dogs to exercise and play off-leash in a controlled environment under the supervision of their owners’ (Wikipedia) — a Use compound with the general meaning ‘park for dogs (to use)’, but coming with a sociocultural context that in practice conveys something considerably more specific.
Now, more details on everyday dog parks, and Bizarro dog parks too.
Very much a MQoS Not Dead Yet posting, as I’m barely functioning after one of those stunning drops in air pressure. Hanging around on my desktop for just just an occasion, this mystery-pun Pearls Before Swine cartoon from 2002 featuring Pig and Goat:
Pig, who has the personality of a trusting (but sometimes ignorant) child, assumes Goat doesn’t know the title of the book he’s reading — so does everything but point to the front of the book, to show that title.
Goat’s reply in panel 2, It’s a mystery, is ambiguous. Notably because mystery is ambiguous in this sentence. But so is it. And these two ambiguities are linked, by virtue of an ambiguity as to the construction they’re in. Now I’m going to cut a lot of corners in my discussion, because I’m barely able to get this posting done
🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate February; for Leap Day, the US is having wild weather (four days of cold rain predicted here on the SF peninsula, where the first flowering fruit trees are already in bloom)
An old One Big Happy strip that turned up in my comics feed recently. The linguistic point is a familiar one on this blog, the enormous potential for ambiguity in N + N compounds in English:
(#1) baby back ribs, baby snow peas, baby green beans, with N1 baby ‘young, immature; small, insignificant (in comparison with others of its type)’ (the sense on the menu) versus baby food, baby carriage, baby book, with N1 baby ‘intended for (use by) a baby’ (the sense Ruthie understands)
The contrast is between two semantic interpretations of the relationship between the modifier N1 and the head N2 in these N1 + N2 compounds.
On the one hand, baby food ‘food for a baby’ is what I’ve called a Use compound; Use compounds (‘N2 for (use by/on/in) N1’) are very common, and sometimes present a pesky ambiguity with also very common Source compounds (‘N2 made from N1’) — some contrasts: Use compound saddle oil ‘oil for (use on) saddles’ vs. Source compound mink oil ‘oil made from minks’ (ugh, but true); Use compound snow tire ‘tire for (use in) snow’ vs. Source compound snowman ‘(simulacrum of a) man made of snow’. The snow examples come from my 1/25/23 posting “Snow tires” on Use vs. Source compounds, taking off from
a classic Don Martin Mad magazine cartoon for the winter season, illustrating the utility and flexibility of N + N compounds in English — and also their enormous potential for ambiguity, which has to be resolved in context
… [with] four examples of N1 + N2 compounds in English, all four highly conventionalized to very culture-specific referents. In these conventionalized uses, two (snow tire, snowshoe) are use compounds …, two (snowman, snowball) are source compounds … But N + N combinations are potentially ambiguous in multiple ways; this lack of clarity is the price you pay for the great brevity of these combinations (which lack any indications of the semantic relationship between the two elements).
So: [in the cartoon] we get snow tire and snowshoe understood as source compounds …: ‘(simulacrum of a) tire made of snow’, ‘(simulacrum of a) shoe made of snow’.
On the other hand, baby back ribs ‘back ribs (of pork) that are smaller than the usual (spareribs)’ is what I will now label an Attributive compound, in which some characteristic that’s metaphorically associated with N1 is attributed to N2. Only a few Ns have been conventionalized for use in Attributive compounds: baby for attributing relative smallness (in baby back ribs) or immaturity (in baby peas); giant and monster ‘gigantic, huge’ for attributing (relative) great size (in giant marigold and monster truck); killer ‘exceptional, impressive’ for attributing excellence (in killer abs and killer idea). Since only a few Ns have been conventionalized in this way, Attributive compounds are not very common. But there’s another compound type that’s fairly common and superficially resembles Attributives: what I’ll call the Predicative type, conveying ‘N2 that’s a N1’: baby prodigy ‘baby who’s a prodigy’, killer clown ‘clown that’s a killer’, cowboy poet ‘poet who’s a cowboy’. (The compound killer clown is then ambiguous as between Attributive and Predicative: someone who’s really good as a clown vs. a clown that kills.)
🐇 🐇 🐇 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!
Immediately, I thought: Kelp and Skulk, Attorneys at Law, famously slimy and devious. But what came into my head on awakening was just the noun kelp, for the algae; and the verb skulk, roughly ‘lurk’. Suspiciously similar to one another phonologically. If you combine them, you get the name of a common fish, the scup. And each of them spins off a huge range of phonologically similar and possibly thematically related words.
I did have an idea of how kelp and skulk got into my head — through a proper name that’s phonologically similar to both of my morning names: the surname Delk. The last name of a character on the American tv show The Closer, which I’d watched two episodes of last night: Thomas “Tommy” Delk, a fictional Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (beautifully portrayed by Courtney B. Vance).
Scup the fish and Delk the cop:
(#1) Stenotomus chrysops, a porgy; and (#2) Tommy Delk, a chief
