In the NYT on the 20th, a piece ,”The ‘How Are You?’ Culture Clash” by Aline Simone, on a difference between Russian and American conversational patterns, having to do with the question “How are you?” and the answers it gets.
Archive for the ‘Social life’ Category
London Underground
January 22, 2014All over Facebook recently, this site, on “Fake Signs in London Underground”. Here are two of some linguistic interest — on visual communication in social space and on apologies:
(#1)
(#2)
Other signs have extra stations: Shepherd’s Pie, Stop Staring, The End, Nightmare on Elm St. And one station offers a submarine to Somalia.
Diversity
December 2, 2013Today’s Dilbert, with the pointy-headed boss and Catbert:
Note the internal contradiction: I want diversity of thought, so long as everyone agrees with me.
Arnie Levin
June 19, 2013This fine New Yorker cartoon by Arnie Levin, sent to me by Sally Page Byers and Amanda Walker (along with an X-rated composition by Pierre et Gilles and an X-rated photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans; posting on Tillmans on AZBlogX, here):
(#1)
A play on the proverbial “An elephant never forgets”.
The start-up interview
June 1, 2013(More about social and business life than about language, but today’s Dilbert struck a chord in many readers when I posted it on Facebook, so I thought I’d post it for a somewhat different audience.)
Dress for success.
(And awesome is a nice word choice in this context — conveying self-conscious hipsterdom.)
Adulthood
May 27, 2013Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
In everyday dealings, we tend to judge the stages of life by physical and behavioral signs, and the categorization is somewhat fuzzy, but for legal and administrative purposes, crisp categorizations are necessary, and chronological age provides the basis for them — however irrational it might seem to label someone as a child one day and an adult the next.
In this case, Jon Rosenberg is remarking not only on that irrationality, but also (as his comments on the strip make clear) on the bizarreness of treating gay adults (however adult is defined) as unsafe or untrustworthy in a way that gay kids are not. (I note further that the onset of puberty comes well before the age of 18.)