Today’s Zippy takes place in the Brunswick Diner in Brunswick ME, with a side trip to bowling balls; meanwhile, the Pinheads and the Roundheads each regard the other (somewhat surreptitiously) as exotic creatures:
(#1)
Lots of stuff about names to come, taking us from Brunswick ME to Brunswick stew with a lot of stops in between.
Posted in Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Social life | Leave a Comment »
Passed on recently on Facebook, this Wondermark cartoon from 6/25/15, “Throw Back the Dead Man’s Coin” (#1135), with two of David Malki’s top-hatted characters who are deeply contemptuous of their social inferiors (as evidenced in other strips), one of whom is given (as here) to arguing for the sake of argument:
This strip introduced the Earthworm Bucket metaphor that was then the basis for a series of four strips (#1136-9) that I posted about here in “Disruptive conversation” of 7/8/15, about (among other things) the troll of arguing for the sake of argument.
(Cartoonist David Malki has given names to his recurring characters — like the black-hatted asshole in this strip — but I don’t know this one’s name.)
Meanwhile, the strip gives some freshness to the figure labored metaphor.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Social life | Leave a Comment »
On the heels of my posting on the “Ivy League shirt” and its complex associations with class, status, masculinity, and sexuality, I finally got to a thought-provoking piece by Troy Patterson in last Sunday’s NYT Magazine: “The Politics of the Hoodie”, beginning:
On a recent night, shopping online for a light jacket or a cotton sweater — some kind of outerwear to guard my body against a springlike breeze — I clicked on the ‘‘new arrivals’’ page of the website of a popular retailer and encountered, unexpectedly, another instance of the complex oddity of race. Here, projecting catalog-model cordiality in the sterile space of an off-white backdrop, was a young black man in a hoodie.
On the street, a black guy in a hoodie is just another of the many millions of men and boys dressed in the practical gear of an easygoing era. Or he should be. This is less an analysis than a wish. The electric charge of the isolated image — which provokes a flinch away from thought, a desire to evade the issue by moving on to check the sizing guide — attests to a consciousness of the hoodie’s recent history of peculiar reception. In a cardigan or a crew neck, this model is just another model. In the hoodie, he is a folk demon and a scapegoat, a political symbol and a moving target, and the system of signs that weighs this upon him does not make special distinctions for an Italian cashmere hoodie timelessly designed in heather gray.
Posted in Clothing, Social life | 1 Comment »
In yesterday’s posting on “Address terms in service encounters”, I looked at an unfortunate confluence of two patterns of vocatives: one in address terms used to me by some Hispanic servers at the restaurant Reposado in Palo Alto (in particular, the address term Mr. Arnold), and one in address terms used by slaves to their masters in plantation days (in particular the address form Mr. FN, as in Mr. Simon used by slaves to address their master Simon Legree) and (historically, a continuation of the slave practice to post-slavery contexts, but still involving blacks addressing whites) by employees in some parts of the South to their employers (again, the address form Mr. FN, as in Mr. Keene used by a stableman to address his employer Keene Daingerfield in Lexington KY a couple generations ago). The two address forms are formally identical, and both are used by speakers providing a service to the addressee, but the sociocultural contexts are very different, and the (inadvertent) echo of slave usage in a Mexican restaurant is unpleasant.
Now it turns out that Prefix (Mr./Miss) + FN turns up in a number of circumstances where providing services is not at issue, including some in which the form is not at root a vocative, but functions instead as a kind of professional name, which can be used referentially or vocatively. In these contexts, race is not in the mix, and there are no unfortunate echoes of slavery. Get ready for teachers of young children, psychics, and male hairdressers.
Posted in Address terms, Names, Race and ethnicity, Social life | 2 Comments »
A Bizarro from long ago (May 25th), with a groan-worthy pun on senior and señor (roughly ‘Mr.’ in referential use):
Now some words about referential vs. vocative uses of names (Arnold Zwicky, Arnold, Zwicky, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Zwicky, Prof. Zwicky) and prefixes (like Mister or Professor on their own), both in English and Spanish, all this as a preface to some discussion of address terms in service encounters, where servers have a complex task in balancing the desire to show respect to the customer and the desire to express closeness and friendliness.
Posted in Address terms, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Social life | 3 Comments »
Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
Two things here: the adaptation of the Star Trek characters; and diversity as a sociocultural concept, including diversity officers in organizations.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Social life | Leave a Comment »
Another from the backlog of morning names here: back to the outrageous 70s (which we tend to think of as “the 60s”). From Wikipedia:
The Cockettes were a psychedelic theater troupe founded by Hibiscus (George Harris) in the fall of 1969. The troupe was formed out of a group of hippies, men and women, that were living together communally in Haight-Ashbury. Hibiscus came to live with them because of their preference to dressing outrageously and proposed the idea of putting their lifestyle on the stage. Their brand of theater was influenced by The Living Theater, John Vaccaro’s Play House of the Ridiculous, the films of Jack Smith and the LSD ethos of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. The troupe performed all original material doing mostly musicals with original songs. The first year they parodied American musicals and sang show tunes (or original musical comedies in the same vein). They gained an underground cult following that led to mainstream exposure.
… The Cockettes were the subject of a 2002 documentary, The Cockettes.
The name is a play on the name The Rockettes (the dance company that performs at Rockefeller Center in NYC), portmanteaued with cock ‘penis’.
A set of clips from the documentary:
Posted in Morning names, Portmanteaus, Social life, Theater | Leave a Comment »
Slowly working my way through the backlog of morning names listed here. Now the cartoonist Gluyas Williams. From Wikipedia:
Gluyas Williams (July 23, 1888 – February 13, 1982) was an American cartoonist, notable for his contributions to The New Yorker and other major magazines. … His cartoons employed a clean black-and-white style and often dealt with prevailing themes of the day such as Prohibition.
Williams’s work is not much seen today, perhaps because he was primarily an illustrator — of the writings of humorist Robert Benchley and as a social critic, observing the masses and the rising middle classes.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Names, Social life | Leave a Comment »
Yesterday’s Zippy:
Bill Griffith has done a number of strips on Schlitzie, the movie Freaks, and sideshow attractions. That was then. Now we have a freak show on tv, one that specializes in demeaning revelations and angry confrontations. A dismaying take on social life.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Social life | Leave a Comment »
The latest episode in the tale of B&H Dairy, in NYC’s East Village: from yesterday’s NYT, a triumph: “B&H Dairy in the East Village Reopens After Months of Red Tape” by Jim Dwyer:
At lunchtime Thursday, there wasn’t an empty stool or seat to be had at B&H Dairy, a venerable 400-square-foot restaurant in the East Village that survived the Second Avenue gas explosion in March but appeared doomed when it was bound and gagged in red tape. The place managed to reopen a few days ago, and everyone has come back.
… Working the cash register, Ola Smigielska, who owns B&H with her husband, Fawzy Abdelwahed, greeted each customer who stopped to chat and wondered how they had lasted so long without the stick-to-the-kishkes blintzes.
… B&H is a kosher dairy restaurant created 80 years ago for a generation of Jewish immigrants that has long since moved on. It is now run by a Polish Catholic, Ms. Smigielska, and an Egyptian Muslim, Mr. Abdelwahed. They sell T-shirts printed with the words “Challah! Por favor.”
A triumph of cultural diversity, pretty much possible only in a cosmopolitan city: a highly culture-specific resource maintains itself even after the people who originally used and staffed it have moved elsewhere, only to be replaced by people from other cultures. It’s as if Kosher Dairy Restaurant had taken on a life of its own. B&H Dairy is now staffed by a Polish Catholic and an Egytian Muslim (who are, wonderfully, married to one another) and its clientele, all devoted to the food, are drawn from a huge slice of urban groups.
Posted in Language and food, Social life | Leave a Comment »
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