Archive for the ‘Semantics of compounds’ Category
August 9, 2023
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.
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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, My life, Names, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
May 19, 2023
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
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Posted in Compounds, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Phallicity, Semantics of compounds, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »
April 21, 2023
— 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
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Posted in Art, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Semantics of compounds, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
April 18, 2023
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.
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Posted in Brevity vs. Clarity, Compounds, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
April 9, 2023
It starts with a Jacquie Lawson e-card “Auricula Theatre”, sent to me by Benita Bendon Campbell for Easter. The auriculas in question are cultivars of Primula auricula (aka the mountain cowslip or bear’s ear), a species of primrose.
The final image of the e-card:
(#1) On the left, the Auricula Theatre
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Posted in Holidays, Language and plants, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
April 9, 2023
An exercise in nostalgia (much transformed) for Easter lunch today: sandwiches of slices of Kentucky country ham — KCH for short — and melted cheddar cheese. The nostalgia is in the ham:
(#1) Thinly sliced ham from Broadbent B & B Foods in the little country town of Kuttawa KY (in Lyon County in far (south)western Kentucky)
To come: on country ham the compound noun and country ham the foodstuff; on my personal history with KCH (associated in my household with Christmas rather than Easter); and on the Broadbent company.
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Posted in Compounds, Holidays, Language and food, My life, Semantics of compounds, Style and register | 4 Comments »
March 16, 2023
Passed around in various forms on the net recently, this truly distant, extremely imperfect, pun, partly in German, partly in English, which does, however, come with the signature of its putative maker (Ella Niemans, who, alas, I’ve been unable to find anything about — perhaps because her name might be a joke, playing on German niemand ‘nobody’):
(#1) A monstrously complex joke alluding to US President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech at the Berlin Wall, in which he declared (in his American-accented German) Ich bin ein Berliner, asserting that he was figuratively, in spirit, a citizen of Berlin
So it’s about bin liners and it’s about the Kennedy speech. Complexities on both counts.
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Posted in Furnishings and tools, German, Language and food, Language and politics, Language play, Puns, Semantics of compounds | 3 Comments »
February 13, 2023
(#1)
Thanks to this year’s alignment of the Gregorian and Roman Catholic church calendars and the schedule of official US holidays, the month of February 2023 has two periods of presidential pleasure in it — festivals of Lincoln and license (food and sex) embracing first 2/12 (Lincoln Darwin Day), 2/13 (today, LDV Day), and 2/14 (Valentine’s Day), and then 2/20 ((US) Presidents Day) and 2/21 (Mardi Gras).
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Posted in Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and food, Language of sex, Logos, Mascots, Phallicity, Poetic form, Semantics of compounds, Signs and symbols, Underwear | 1 Comment »
January 25, 2023
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:
(#1)
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 (‘N2 for use in some activity involving N1’), two (snowman, snowball) are source compounds (‘N2 made from N1’). 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: we get snow tire and snowshoe understood as source compounds in #1: ‘(simulacrum of a) tire made of snow’, ‘(simulacrum of a) shoe made of snow’.
I’ll turn to the four snow + N2 compounds in #1 in just a moment, but this presentation is now interrupted by breaking news from the snow-cartoon world, a wonderful wordless cartoon by snowman maven Bob Eckstein in the 1/30/23 issue of the New Yorker, which has in fact not yet arrived in my mailbox.
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Posted in Brevity vs. Clarity, Compounds, Context, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
