Archive for the ‘Signage’ Category
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 Dale 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 »
August 3, 2023
From Steven Levine, reporting from Amsterdam, on Facebook this morning:
If you have time to learn only one Dutch word, I’d say wildplassen makes an excellent candidate.
(#1) Du wildplassen ‘wild pissing’, with Du wild in the sense ‘free, loose’ (yes, it also has the sense ‘savage, fierce’, and that adds to the excellence of the signage)
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Posted in Dutch, Euphemism, Language and the body, Pictographs, Signage, Signs and symbols, Taboo language and slurs | 4 Comments »
December 24, 2022
(#1) Xmas card from Tiny Bee Cards, offered on Amazon
Lizard warnings, lizzard warnings, lizards falling from the trees.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Mishearings, Portmanteaus, Puns, Signage | 2 Comments »
September 25, 2022
Passed on, back on 7/21, by a friend on Facebook, a dumpster texty (of murky origin) with a (N vs. V) pun that works in spelling (REFUSE) but not in pronunciation —
N /ˈrefˌjus/ vs. V /rəˈfjuz/
— plus, as commentary, Dylan Thomas expanding on the improbable (not to mention grotesque) V reading of the text (as opposed to the obviously intended N one). Which will then take us to Harry Diboula’s “Je refuse”, a French zouk song of lost love, which ended up in romantic Paris from the Kingdom of Kongo by way of the French Caribbean.
(#1) Like all right-minded people, I reject the idea that I — or, more precisely, my bodily remains — should be stored in black plastic sacks and placed in dumpsters. Ick. Je refuse!
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Puns, Race and ethnicity, Signage | Leave a Comment »
July 11, 2022
Appearing in my FB as a response to my 7/4 posting (for Fathers Day) “I am a good Boy for you, Daddy” (about Daddy – Boy relationships), this remarkable billboard (without identification or comment), featuring a pig-cop character — Mister Piggie — getting oral with an inert character Boy :
(#1) Pig Kisses Boy! Pig because he’s a cop? Pig because he’s unable to control his sexual impulses? (or, of course, both); I suppose that’s supposed to be life-saving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but still: ick
The text looks like a book title (or maybe a quotation from a book), attributed to some Bobby Peters we’re expected to recognize. Is the billboard advertising a book by football player and game analyst Bobby Peters? About whom I had trouble getting much information, but then that’s an alien world to me. I spent maybe half an hour fruitlessly trying to chase Bobby Peters down, and then a search on “some call him pig” turned up a Boing Boing posting “Some call him pig!” by Rob Beschizza from 3/3/22. To start with, the football Bobby Peters has nothing to do with it; it’s about a Columbus GA mayor named Bobby Peters. And there’s a 50-year history of “Some call him Pig!”.
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Posted in Address terms, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Memes, Music, Parody, Signage, Slogans, Slurs | Leave a Comment »
December 6, 2021
By Matt Diffee, in today’s (12/6) New Yorker:
(#1) There is a header on the menu that says Breakfast Served All Day, intended as an assertion that all the breakfast items are served all day — but understood by these diners as a label for a category of menu items, or even for a specific menu item, a label similar to Breakfast Special or (Special) Breakfast of the Day (an item whose identity is further specified on the menu or by a server)
(Yes, there is yet another reading, in which the diners are supposing that they can have their particular breakfast order served to them throughout the day, as one monumentally extended meal.)
So a rather complex kind of ambiguity, which might seem unlikely to be significant in real life, until you look at some actual menus without the knowledge that the assertion Breakfast Served All Day is a commonplace on menus at American family-style restaurants (fancy places don’t serve breakfast all day). But even if you’re firmly in possession of that knowledge, some menu designs invite the label understanding.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Signage | 1 Comment »
April 28, 2021
A Mark Stivers cartoon from 4/20/19 (first encountered in the Funny Times for May 2021):
(#1)
Dogs also can’t interpret pictographs, certainly not such abstract ones as the slash of prohibition, the NO symbol (seen here in a non-standard orientation and missing part of its conventional accompaniments). It’s doubtful, in fact, that they can recognize dog pictographs, highly stylized representations of a dog — and incredibly doubtful that they can recognize a pictograph of a dog taking a poop, and understand that a prohibition against dogs pooping applies to them. In fact, it’s beyond doubtful that even if they recognize the sign above as a prohibition against dogs pooping, they understand that the sign is locationally deictic, applying not just to the spot where the sign is planted, but to some contextually (and socioculturally) determined area around the sign — in this case, applying to the whole strip of lawn on this side of the fence (but not to any larger area).
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Posted in Context, Linguistics in the comics, Pictographs, Pragmatics, Signage, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »
