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.
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.
🐅 🐅 🐅 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.)
Received in e-mail this morning, from Dave Sayers on the Variationist mailing list:
We are delighted to announce the next in the 2023-24 series of online guest seminars here in the English section at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland — open to all!
On Tues 10 Oct at 11:00 East European Summer Time Mie Hiramoto (National University of Singapore) and Wes Robertson (Macquarie University, Australia) will give a talk titled ‘Framing masculinity and cultural norms: A case study of male VIO hair removal in Japan’.
That’s it. I was baffled by VIO hair removal; it has two possible parsings, and some large number of possible interpretations. And I was baffled by what looked like an unfamiliar initialism, VIO. Masculinity and cultural norms being one of my areas of interest within the G&S (gender and sexuality) field, I wasn’t willing to let these puzzles just slide.
Two parsings (and many interpretations).
[ VIO [ hair removal ] ‘hair removal related to VIO’, where VIO is one of: a social group, the removers of hair (cf. born-again hair removal, transsexual hair removal, Ainu hair removal, Japanese hair removal ‘hair removal by Japanese (people)’), a method of hair removal (cf. laser hair removal), a philosophy of hair removal (cf. Buddhist hair removal), a place where hair removal is practiced (cf. Japanese hair removal ‘hair removal in Japan’), or any number of other interpretations
[ [ VIO hair ] removal] ‘removal of VIO hair’, where VIO hair is hair related to VIO, VIO admitting of a wide variety of interpretations: an area of the body (cf. armpit hair, pubic hair), a racioethnic group (cf. Black hair, Jewish hair), an evaluative characterization (cf. ugly hair, unwanted hair), a physical characterization (cf. kinky hair), a color (cf. gray hair), and much more
The (apparent) initialism VIO. Acronym dictionaries list a great many unpackings for VIO, but none even remotely hair-relevant. Searching on “VIO hair removal”, I eventually discovered that VIO is Japanese terminology for the bikini zone, with the initials standing for
V line (the pubes and genitals), I line (the perineum), O line (the anus)
So: the three Latin letters are to be understood as iconic signs, as (highly abstract) pictures of the three bodyparts, not as an acronym, not as the initials in an abbreviation. I don’t think that such an interpretation would ever have occurred to me.
No doubt it never occurred to Hiramoto and Robertson, steeped as they are in Japanese sexual culture, that the letter-sequence VIO would be utterly opaque to outsiders, but it is; I had no clue as to what their paper is about, except that hair removal and males are involved, and that the removal takes place in Japan.
Missing lexical items. A recurrent theme on this blog is that languages regularly lack ordinary-language, widely used lexical items for referential categories of things that are in fact relevant in the sociocultural context the language is embedded in.
So it is for English and the body region that extends from the waistline under the crotch to the anus: the pubes, genitals, perineum, and anus, taken together. This is a region of modesty, and it’s socioculturally highly salient in English-speaking communities generally, but English has no lexical item covering just that territory.
The composite phrase private parts would have been a good choice, but it’s already taken, as a euphemism for the central portion of the region of modesty, the genitals. In this case, it’s hard to see how we could get by with a narrow sense of the phrase (the current usage) alongside a broad sense (for the region of modesty). So we’ll bump along with things as they are, as we do in lots of other cases; people cope. Maybe someone can start a fashion for VIO in English.
Cover your VIO, dude! Were you born in a barn? (And while you’re at it, close the front door!)
A typo in writing — CARPTENTER, with an anticipation of the T in CARPENTER — which was then not caught by a proofreader, so that it got published looking like CARP-TENTER ‘someone or something for tenting carp’, but written solid. Exposed by Michael Palmer on Facebook on 8/15. The published display, with the beginning of the accompanying news article:
US Senator Sherrod Brown August 15 at 11:09 AM: Today our Butch Lewis Act saved the pensions of 5,400 carpenters in Southwest Ohio, restoring full benefits with NO cuts. When work has dignity, workers can take comfort that the pensions they’ve earned over a lifetime will be there for them when they retire
And then, of course, the playful Facebook comments, starting with Michael Palmer’s initial salvo:
I discovered the melting point of coconut X several summers ago. My air-conditioning aims to cool things to 80 F, so when it gets hot outside, inside my condo the spreadable coconut fat (used for daily treatment of my feet, legs, hands, and arms) melts (at around 77 F) to to a free-flowing liquid that’s very hard to cope with.
So this morning I put the jar in the refrigerator (where it’s probably between 35 and 40 F) — and discovered another state of the substance, a very firm solid that is also almost impossible to deal with; I have to chip away chunks of the stuff with a pointed implement, chunks that alas, do not spread (though I can get small amounts of the liquid state by using the (roughly 97 F) body heat in my hands to melt a chunk).
So now it’s back at room temperature, turning to oil again.
(A male model in nothing but totally revealing cotton briefs, mention of penises and stud hustling, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
A Daily Jocks sale ad that came in my e-mail yesterday:
Coming on the heels of my 5/18 posting “A fellatio-adjacent pitch for The Wiener the World Awaited”, Oscar Mayer’s heralding their new wiener on wheels, the Frankmobile. Here’s the story from the Out Traveler website (for Out magazine), “Say Goodbye to America’s Favorite Wiener on Wheels: The unexpected move is part of the rollout of Oscar Mayer’s beefy new hot dog recipe” by Jordan Valinsky of CNN Business on 5/17:
(#1) THE ALL BEEF BEEF FRANK FRANKMOBILE, that’s what it says on the label
— Wayno’s title for today’s (uncaptioned) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, in which Popsicle, Creamsicle, etc. artists gather to draw a model popsicle stick:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)
The cartoon juxtaposes two worlds:
— the world of (what I’ll call) -sicles, quiescently frozen snacks on a stick: ice pops and ice-coated ice cream on a stick (which is conventionally known as a popsicle stick, from its use in making Popsicle® ice pops)
— and the world of life classes, in which artists draw a human figure, traditionally nude, from observing a live model
A footnote to yesterday’s posting “DISNEY ON ICE”, which was about (among other things) ice shows, in the sense ‘shows on ice, entertainment productions primarily performed by ice skaters’. The N + N compound ice show is then a location compound, conveying that the referent of N2 is located with respect to the referent of N1, as being in or on it. So now a few words about the (many) interpretations of compounds.
