… with figurative roses. Recent gifts to me of many kinds: symbolic roses for me, in accord with a 1/29/20 posting of mine on a line from the Sacred Harp: “Give me the roses while I live” (SH340 Odem (Second)). I’m an old man, currently writing things under the Python Queen of Scots cry “Not Dead Yet”. Meanwhile, I have been given some excellent roses.
Archive for the ‘Argument structure’ Category
Unaccompanied
October 13, 2019This touching Sara Lautman pun cartoon from the 10/14 New Yorker:
(#1) “You know, sooner or later we’re going to have to let her go out unaccompanied.”
It all depends on what you mean by unaccompanied.
Is Timmy in trouble?
May 16, 2019The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from the 14th shows us Lassie trying to deliver a message about Timmy:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Ah, a variant of the Lassie-Timmy cartoon meme. With a play on the senses of be in trouble. From various dictionaries:
(i) ‘in a problematic situation or state of hardship’
(ii) ‘in peril, danger’
(iii) ‘subject to or due for punishment’
(iv) (euph.) ‘pregnant and unmarried’
In the usual cartoon meme, Timmy is in trouble in sense (i) or (ii) — classically, he has fallen down a well — but in #1, it’s sense (iii). I haven’t found an instance of the meme that bends gender to take advantage of sense (iv), but it’s certainly imaginable. (And for a possibility torn from the headlines, if you’re in trouble in sense (iv) and get an abortion, in Alabama you’re now in trouble in sense (iii).)
The self-published book
April 25, 2019In the recently published The Ultimate Cartoon Book of Book Cartoons —
edited by New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein (a regular visitor on this blog), this Ed Koren (who’s also on this blog):
V me, I’m Irish
March 17, 2019Another 100k spams
March 5, 2019… just came up on this blog. Since I last reported on the crowds of spam comments here, in my 10/20/18 posting “Numbers and names” (“The number of pieces of comments spam on this blog … passed 5.5 million a little while ago”).
Well, on the 3rd, when I first checked, some 5,600,601 had accumulated since this blog started in December 2008. At the moment, there’s an attack underway from a site with a clever strategy for evading spam recognition programs, so I’m getting more than a thousand new spam comments a day..
Meanwhile, there’s a certain amount of entertainment in the ebbs and flows in the views of postings on this blog — which will lead me eventually to some remarks on location expressions in the world’s language.
Peppernut Day
December 24, 2018Having tackled the Christmas season as a whole, Sandra Boynton examines one specific day: on FB yesterday, with “A helpful tip on National Pfeffernüsse Day” (December 23rd):
On peppernuts. And on the recipe register (here: Recipe Object Omission in roll thoroughly in confectioners’ sugar).
Penguins and packages
December 17, 2018Two Xmas cards from Amanda Walker, from 2016 (Advent penguins) and 2017 (Santa grabbing his package). (Warning about the second: there will be images of crotch-grabbing and crude plays on the noun package.)






