Three candy bulletins from the last month: the news (which came to me from Scott Schwenter on Facebook, reporting exultantly from Pickerington OH) that Trix Fruity Shapes (from General Mills) are back on the shelves; today’s Wayno & Piraro Bizarro cartoon with cotton gin ‘gin(-flavored) cotton candy’; and the Sunday 10/28 NYT Magazine Candy Issue.
Archive for the ‘Taboo language and slurs’ Category
Sweet stuff
November 1, 2018Revisiting 20: X Places
November 1, 2018The Scenes From a Multiverse of 10/9, entitled #NOTALLPLACES:
A riff on Michael Schur’s sitcom The Good Place, with Kristen Bell (as Eleanor, apparently sent wrongly to the place after her deathGood Plae modality is harsh.) and Ted Danson (as Michael, the designer of the place). Also a comment on social media (Twitter vs. Facebook). And of course on the nature of reality and our perceptions of it.
Chic peas and more
October 13, 2018The fall special at Dan Gordon’s (on Emerson St. in Palo Alto), as it first appeared on the menu, about a month ago:
Summer Stew $16.95
smoked pork / cippolini onions / chic peas / prunes / red rice
(with the very notable spelling chic peas and with the misspelling cippolini for cipollini). But now the ingredients list reads:
smoked pork / cippolini onions / chickpeas / dehydrated plums / red rice
(with the notable dehydrated plums). Actually, all four ingredients have linguistic interest.
I gotta go
September 11, 2018The catch phrase of writer and performer Merle Kessler’s alter ego Ian Shoales, just a bit short of the more vernacular I’m outta here. That’s motion go. Then there’s elimination go, and an ambiguity between the two, as exploited by Calvin in this (recently re-cycled) Calvin and Hobbes strip:
(#1)
Brush away the blue-tailed skink
September 4, 2018From Chris Zable on Facebook on August 3rd, a photo from her family’s holiday in Florida, with her comment:
(#1)
“Spotted this little lizard with a bright blue tail on a fence rail at the Tallahassee Museum. Much of their space is a zoo of local native species in generously-sized enclosures that are just fenced off bits of native habitat. We saw pumas, red wolves, and foxes among other critters.”
As good a photo of a blue-tailed skink as any you can find on the net. To come: on skinks; on the “Blue Tail Fly” song; and on my gay highjacking of the song, as “Blue Tailed Skink” (with skink as a portmanteau, skank + twink) — taking things far from Chris’s original child-friendly travel report.
“The hell is that guy doing?”: predator-truncated QuEx
August 23, 2018The word from predators, in this Jake Likes Onions cartoon (by Jake Thompson):
(#1) Title: “Maybe he’s running from the truth”
Predator 2 omits the what of what the hell (in a Wh, or constituent, question What is that guy doing? with the question word what emphatically extended by the expletive the hell).
About the syntax, and then about the strip and the artist…
Book flash: New Work on Speech Acts
August 16, 2018What looks to be an excellent report on work in semantics/pragmatics on speech acts, from OUP:
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How to use the F-word
July 8, 2018Yesterday’s Doonesbury:
Absurdly poor advice, but Trudeau knew that. (To start with, speech doesn’t have commas in it; commas are visual marks.) Still, lots of people think that using fuck is just a matter of plugging it in whenever the mood strikes you, while in fact in addition to its use as a copulatory verb (itself a topic of some complexity), fuck functions as a little grammatical word, with a syntax as complex as other little grammatical words — so, for, too, etc. Plus, of course, all sorts of sociocultural conditions on when it’s appropriate.
punks
May 30, 2018Or: new adventures in sexuality slurs. Brought to my attention by “Is Punk the New F Word?: The word has been used to bully gay black boys for decades” by Charles Stephens in The Advocate issue for June/July 2018:
… Of all the homophobic slurs thrown around, being called a punk is the one I recall the most vividly. It cut the deepest. I don’t remember the first time I was called a punk, but I do remember the faces of those who hurled the curse my way. I can still see how their mouths contorted as they pronounced the slur and the contagion that followed — poisonous words polluting the air, followed by the deafening silence of teachers and other adults watching passively. I learned two things from this: (1) adults don’t want to be punks either, and (2) you can fight back or run away, but no one will protect you.
(#1) Bikini boys: punks defiantly giving off “In yo’ face, bitch!”