Archive for the ‘Signage’ Category
September 2, 2025
I’m Chiquito Quesito, and I’m here to say,
Cheese dip has to be made the Arkansas way
The jingle to go along with native Arksansan Bill Halstead’s reproducing (on 8/31) this silly dip pun he found on Facebook (from who knows what source):
(#1) The signage is for a dip in NOAD‘s sense 3a, wilfully misunderstood as about sense 2:
noun dip: … 2 a thick sauce in which pieces of food are dunked before eating: tasty garlic dip. 3 [a] a brief downward slope followed by an upward one: the road’s precipitous dips and turns. [b] an act of sinking or dropping briefly before rising again: a dip in the share price.
And queso is short for chile con queso (‘chili with cheese’), which Wikipedia identifies as:
an appetizer or side dish of melted cheese and chili peppers, typically served in Tex-Mex restaurants as a dip for tortilla chips.
Now three further explorations: about dip signage; about dipspreads and dips in general, and varieties of queso in particular; and then some Facebook exchanges with Bill Halstead about cheese dip as a significant item in Arkansas’s food culture.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Categorization and Labeling, Language and food, Language play, Logos, Puns, Signage | Leave a Comment »
August 3, 2025
Yesterday on Facebook, Michael Israel re-posted an item from The Oxford Comma site (showing the cover of an old issue of Tails pet magazine), with the (in this context) foolish advice “Use the Oxford comma, folks”:
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Posted in Address terms, Books, Conjunctions, Coordination, Faith vs. WF, Movies and tv, Music, Prosody, Punctuation, Quotation, Signage | Leave a Comment »
July 27, 2025
Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes With Orange strip of 7/21 presents us with a dog that can read — not just converting text to sound (speaking written or printed matter aloud), but, crucially for the strip, converting text to meaning (‘looking at and comprehending the meaning of written or printed matter by mentally interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed’ (a definition adapted from NOAD)):
(#1) Panel 1: happy dog, in a state of innocence; panel 2, where all the action happens: dog sees sign, recognizes that it is a sign, reads it, understands that the sign says that its reader should beware of some dog in the sign’s surroundings (specifically, in the yard the sign is posted in), and recognizes that it is a dog in that yard, consequently concluding that it is the dog the sign’s reader is supposed to beware of, and unpacks the meaning of imperative beware as a warning, about the potential danger of this dog, therefore concluding that it has a reputation as a dangerous animal; panel 3, dog exhibits ferocity fitting to its reputation, by growling at passers-by
So that is one astoundingly clever dog. with an understanding of English and a ton of culture-specific information (about keeping dogs as pets and confining them in enclosed yards, about issuing warnings, and about the interpretation of material printed on signs, not to mention self-recognition, the knowledge that he is a dog). Why, you might think that dog was human — an American, in fact.
Now, some earlier postings (from 2015 and 2021), and notes from 2018 for one that never got posted, because it had started to branch into an essay on everything there is to say about signage– so here you’ll get the notes.
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Posted in Context, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Reading, Signage, Sociocultural conventions, Speech acts, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
October 9, 2024
… in one sense / use of yes: ‘yes, I select this one’. Which came up yesterday as I was ordering an Original Italian Sub from the Jersey Mike’s Subs in Mountain View CA, just south of Palo Alto (they’re a huge national chain, offering a wide range of submarine sandwiches that are, in my experience, excellent examples of their kind — and Grubhub delivers from them); it turns out that their on-line menu software involves this positive selection-X, which took me a moment to get used to, especially since I’d posted not long ago on associations of the letter X, which included the X of NO — of prohibitions, bans, and denials — but not the X of YES. Well, X is a symbol, it’s just stuff (as I say) and can accumulate any number of uses, even ones that look contradictory.
The Jersey Mike X is the X of election ballots: an alternative to a check-mark ✓ or a plus-sign + in a box or circle (or to filling in an oval) to indicate selecting an item. In a use that was initially confusing to me, since the JM X is in contrast with the JM +, which turns out to convey something like ‘this is one of the available choices’; I eventually figured out how JM deploys X and + through a certain amount of trial-and-error fiddling with the menus. Yes, I’ll illustrate all of this in a little while.
But first, one more groaner penguin-pun joke, on the occasion of my consuming, at lunch today, the last of my birthday McVitie’s Penguin bars.
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Posted in Dialects, It's Just Stuff, Jokes, Language and food, My life, Names, Penguins, Puns, Signage, Signs and symbols | 5 Comments »
September 12, 2024
So reads a sign — a genuine sign, not an achievement of digital image-making — reproduced widely on Facebook in the past two days:
(#1) The sign at the Wiener Circle / Wieners Circle / Wiener’s Circle, 2622 N. Clark St., Chicago IL 60614; two things about it — its’s a joke, a pun dogs (short for hot dogs ‘frankfurters’) on dogs ‘domestic canines’; and it’s a piece of political mockery
A mockery of Grabpussy, in the US Presidential debates on 9/10, who cited as fact preposterous on-line rumor stories, among them that Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH are preying on people’s pets, eating their dogs and cats — thus painting immigrants as dangerous invaders, monstrous inhuman beasts.
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Posted in Compounds, Language and food, Language and politics, Linguists, Logos, Naming, Philosophy, Princeton, Psychology, Puns, Signage, Trade names | 2 Comments »
April 1, 2024
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.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Constructions, Emoji, Lexical semantics, Semantics, Signage, Slogans, Slogans, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
March 5, 2024
Recently I’ve been getting lot of e-mail from former students (at Ohio State and Stanford, both undergraduates and graduate students, from all periods of my roughly 50-year teaching career), mostly just saying hello and asking how I’m doing. They’re also mostly people who don’t read this blog or follow me on Facebook, so they really don’t know how I’m doing, and require a thoughtful response, one by one — and then I’ll want to hear how they’ve been doing, and the exchange takes a lot of time, so I’m perpetually way behind on maintaining these relationships. Which is where I am right now, somewhat desperate.
Now I take the coward’s way out, going first with the easy thing, responding to e-mail from a former student — Zheng-sheng Zhang, 1988 Ohio State PhD (Tone and tone sandhi in Chinese, for which I was the Doktorvater) — who does in fact follow this blog and was writing mostly to announce his latest book:
Zhang, Chinese Signs: An Introduction to China’s Linguistic Landscape (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2024)
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Posted in Books, Chinese, Signage, Teaching | Leave a Comment »
January 23, 2024
The Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 4/24/18, with a fresh take on dogs to beware of: not vicious guard or attack dogs, but hyperkinetic emotional-support dogs overwhelming passing pedestrians by lavishing empathetic concern on them:
(#1) An especially nice touch is the dog saying — this is cartoonland, where animals talk, in English — that it can smell the hurt, the cluster of emotional states that give off markers that many dogs can in fact smell and interpret
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Posted in Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Signage | Leave a Comment »
September 17, 2023
Reported on Facebook by a friend, who treated it as a display of real Amurrican values, this sign on an aisle in a US supermarket:
Aisle 11: a text culminating in Guns Bibles Sweatpants
As always, I wanted to know what store this came from and when, but the sign came to me as something just being passed around on the web, and nobody involved in such transmissions (of images or text or both together) has any interest in knowing where they come from, so it’s pointless to ask. Since such memic items are very often inventions, or involve doctored photos, I was suspicious of this one: too good to be true?
Some rooting around eventually brought me to the relevant fact-checking Snopes site, but not before I’d fashioned the climax of Aisle 11 into a parody song.
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Posted in Parody, Poetry, Signage, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
