Archive for the ‘Technical and ordinary language’ Category

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The risks of pedantry

September 20, 2025

This Chris Hallbeck cartoon came by me on Facebook this morning — a strip packed with matters of science (paleontology, specifically), lexicography and usage (the senses of the noun dinosaur, and the contexts in which they’re used), and pragmatics (the way in which the noun is used in interactions, especially in language about language; in the enforcement of language norms; and, oh alas, in the relevance of things said to the interests of those participating in the speech context):


A Maximumble cartoon from 5/24/14, whose humor turns crucially on the pragmatic foolishness of the (now deceased) professor (in the face of a ravening monster, he stops to insist, irrelevantly in the context, that his companion must use the proper terminology, while the companion flees to safety); and which is based on the usage of the noun dinosaur — for a member of a clade of prehistoric reptiles bearing the zoological taxonomical label Dinosauria; versus, in non-technical American usage, for any dinosaurid creature, resembling the prototypical dinosaurs (many people have seen a family resemblance)

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Context, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Relevance, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »

Ai, dem potent operators

February 16, 2025

Yesterday’s Zippy strip manages to combine abstract algebra (in the notion of idempotence) with linguistic behavior (in the notion of onomatomania):

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Posted in Formulaic expressions, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras, Mathematics, Music, Pronunciation, Spelling, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »

Sweatless in the poolside sun

November 24, 2024

(There will be mentions — in vernacular but not actually vulgar terms — of male-male sexual practices that some will find icky, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste; and it might stretch some kids’ horizons a bit, so a gentle warning)

From back on 10/30, e-mail from Gadi Niram, with a video gift for me, saying: I found this video (and the young man in it) to be quite a pleasant diversion:


(#1) Screen shot from the video, which you can view here

A shirtless young man in ripped denim shorts playing the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No.2) on a fancy grand piano (with a mirrored fallboard, as in the finest piano lounges). alongside the pool at at what looks like a tropical oceanside resort. (For a bit of extra sexiness, those shorts are down far enough in the back to expose the waistband of his black Calvins; here the girls and the gay boys swoon.)

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Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Context, Conversion, Derivation, Language and the body, Language of medicine, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Music, Portmanteaus, Technical and ordinary language | 4 Comments »

Annals of commercials music

August 30, 2024

It appeared a few weeks ago, and then was often repeated on tv stations I get. At first, I heard it out of the corner of my ear, got the brassy women’s voices  singing what was not quite “We Built This City”, but was instead, “We Quilt This City”. So a commercial for something. Quilted puffy jackets for the coming fall weather? Beautiful bedquilts, pieces of folk art? Well, something quilted as in this NOAD entry:

adj. quilted: (of a garment, bed covering, etc.) made of two layers of cloth filled with padding held in place by lines of stitching: a blue quilted jacket.

Then I listened a bit more closely and pieced out:

We quilt this city on a comfy roll. 

Whoa, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. What kind of rolls are quilted? Oh… So the song goes on:

Say it doesn’t matter, say it’s all the same,
But we are here to change your toilet paper game.

Ah, quilted toilet paper. It’s 3-ply — so, though it doesn’t fit the NOAD definition of quilted, it’s analogous to quilted stuff as in the NOAD definition. It’s a natural metaphorical extension.

What we have here is a sales-pitch parody of Starship’s “We Built This City”, in fact a whole production number built around that parody. In a one-minute music video (first used on 7/29/24) that opens with the three Quilted Queens — three women of varied age and racioethnicity (most toilet paper is bought by women) — taking over a grocery store in “Keep It Quilted” puffer jackets; the store then turns into a neon-colored set, while the three sing their sales pitch. (As it happens, I find the Starship original really annoying — probably a minority taste, but there it is — so I find its being hijacked for a paean to toilet paper refreshing.) You can experience the whole thing on a YouTube video here.

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Posted in Compounds, Furnishings and tools, Language in advertising, Metaphor, Music, Parody, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »

They’re a stink

March 20, 2024

(Very much a brief MQoS Not Dead Yet posting on my part, while I cope with a complex posting on the wonders of VPE in English)

In an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning, two of the kids — Ruthie and the neighbor boy James — undertake to go on a dinosaur hunt, expecting the creatures to be easy to find because, according to James, they’re a stink:


Ruthie’s grandfather is about to explain to James the difference between extinct and a stink

Once again, the kids are coping with unfamiliar, technical vocabulary by interpreting it, eggcornishly, as more familiar material. Something of a stretch in this case, though extinct and a stink are indeed phonologically similar. I do wonder if there have been kids who reinterpreted extinct this way, or whether Rick Detorie (the cartoonist) merely imagined a reinterpretation that might have happened. Oh, the things that might have been!

(The adjective extinct is historically a specialized variant of extinguished, so calls to mind the vivid image of these creatures having their flame of life quenched, put out.)

 

Posted in Eggcorns, Linguistics in the comics, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »

Do we contain multitudes?

January 21, 2024

Two cockroaches, you have a couple of unpleasant bugs. Undulating masses of cockroaches streaming over all the surfaces in a room, you’ve got a shudder-provoking pest infestation. (I’ve had the latter experience with Argentine ants, and it was the stuff of nightmares for weeks.) But when does the former turn into the latter? This is the question asked by self-aware cockroaches in this cartoon by Lonnie Millsap in the 1/29/24 print-edition New Yorker:


(#1) Cucarachas conscientes de ellas mismas, addressing the puzzle in the sorites paradox / the paradox of the heap

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Paradoxes, Technical and ordinary language, Vagueness | 3 Comments »

Two questions about today’s Bizarro cartoon

September 24, 2023

Today’s Piraro-only Bizarro (it’s a Sunday; Wayno’s doing other things) —


The gargantuan chalking project is, it seems, debilitating (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 11 in this strip — see this Page)

— is comprehensible only if you recognize the huge inert creature in it as the legendary prehistoric ape of a century of film, King Kong; and you recognize the fact that cops are drawing an outline around the creature in chalk as a sign that this is a scene of suspicious death. Kong is not just sleeping in the street, he’s dead; the cops are tracing Corpse Kong.

Two questions then occurred to me, and might well have occurred to others:

Q1: What do you call that chalk outline?

Q2: Just how big is / was King Kong?

Both questions have answers. Both answers are unsatisfying, but in different ways.

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Posted in Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Poetry, Technical and ordinary language, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Technical terminology: wine cask units

July 26, 2023

Passed on to me by Joel Levin, from Mike Galos on Facebook  on 7/25: A display of English wine cask units, from the largest to the smallest: tun, butt, puncheon, hogshead, tierce, barrel, rundlet, kilderkin, firkin, pin:


To which I add pipe, a synonym for butt, and of course the smallest unit, the gallon, whether imperial or US

For the most part, the names originated as everyday names of wine (or beer) containers of various sizes, then were extended to semi-technical or technical usage as the name of a volume of drink, in a process we might call technification  — a process amply illustrated in the practices of biologists who adapt everyday vocabulary like fly, bug, worm, and petal as technical terms, and then often privilege their usage as the correct one, as if ordinary people were carelessly mis-using the vocabulary (yes, that pisses me off).

After a brief reflection on technification, I’ll pass to the vocabulary in the display above, noting that most of them are in frequent enough usage to make it into the New Oxford American Dictionary (a lexicography-based one-volume dictionary).

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Posted in Language and food, Technical and ordinary language, Terminology | 10 Comments »

16 will get you 3

May 16, 2023

In my comics feed for today, May 16th, three excellent strips: a Zits on learning how to use a computer (and coping with explanations for how to use it from the deeply tech-embedded, like the 17-year-old Jeremy Duncan in this strip); a Rhymes With Orange with a truly bizarre way for spelling your name when ordering drinks at the neighborhood cafe; and a Bizarro with a high-groan pun.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Puns, Spelling, Technical and ordinary language, Technology, Writing systems | Leave a Comment »

Breaking through the wall

August 30, 2022

Today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange strip is a play on specific American tv commercials (with some gentle old-age mockery folded in), so will be baffling to any reader who doesn’t recognize the Kool-Aid Man mascot or know the wall-breaking “Oh Yeah!” tv ads featuring KAM:


(#1) There is, however, a hint to the reader in the “So not kool” (with kool instead of cool) in the title panel; note also the generational disparity reinforced by the GenX so there (see my 11/14/11 posting “GenX so“)

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Posted in Ambiguity, Context, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Mascots, Technical and ordinary language, Understanding comics, Variation | 1 Comment »

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