Archive for the ‘Technical and ordinary language’ Category
August 13, 2021
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with a plumber who really knows how to sling synonyms:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)
Hard to believe that any actual person ever uttered egress conduit for drain pipe, or saponaceous residuum for soapy residue — or, better, soapy gunk. So the plumber’s report on an ordinary household repair is absurd; it’s as if he’d been seized by a terrible fit of technicalism that left him unable to resist thesaurisizing.
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Posted in Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Style and register, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »
July 7, 2021
Ultimately, about the (semi-technical, commercial) categories of the clothing industries: named types of Xwear that mostly lack labels in everyday language. (Parallel in many ways to the categories of the household supplies industries, with named types of Xware.) But first:
On my Facebook feed yesterday, this ad for men’s lounge shorts (a type of outerwear) from the Nice Laundry company:
(#1) “The Palms Lounge Short”; from their ad: “The most comfortable lounge shorts ever featuring 4-way stretch nylon with soft Micromodal® interior. Made in the shade.”
— which caught my eye for two reasons. First, the label lounge short (with the commercial singular usage; from other companies, lounge shorts, with the everyday plural usage); I didn’t recall having previously experienced lounge as a modifier naming a type of short(s) before. Second, the gorgeous pattern (of palm fronds), rivaling some gorgeous floral patterns for men’s underwear — briefs, boxers, jockstraps — that had been appearing on my Facebook page recently. (As for colors, the Nice Laundry company offers lounge shorts in everything from the plainest of solid black and navy blue through various more arresting solid colors and patterns to the palms.)
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Posted in Classification and labeling, Clothing, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »
September 10, 2020
Today’s morning name, and for a change I was able to figure out why it was in my head.
From NOAD:
adj. diaphoretic: Medicine [a] (chiefly of a drug) inducing perspiration. [b] (of a person) sweating heavily. ORIGIN late Middle English: via late Latin from Greek diaphorētikos, from diaphorein ‘sweat out’.
It’s the b sense I had in my head, and I got it from watching reruns of the old Emergency! tv show.
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Posted in Morning names, Movies and tv, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »
July 23, 2020
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, a Psychiatrist strip (Wayno’s title: “Out of Frame”):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
And now we’re in the world of phobias, extreme or irrational fears of or aversions to particular things. People are exceptionally fond of finding or inventing unusual phobias — and, correspondingly, of finding or inventing unusual philias (attachments, especially sexually fetishistic attachments, to particular things).
Fear of furniture, as it turns out, is real but rare. There is even a celebrity afflicted with it.
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Posted in Actors, Comic conventions, Greek, Linguistics in the comics, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »
September 18, 2019
In a comment on my 9/14/19 posting “Clavicular knobs” (aka Ricardo’s acromia), Robert Coren writes about “the hollow space above the inner end of the collar-bone”, and I confess to not knowing a name for it. Roger Phillips (in England) fills in:
It’s not in Merriam-Webster, but all my British dictionaries have “saltcellar” for the collarbone pit. The first OED citation is:
[1870 O. Logan Before Footlights 26] I was a child of the most uninteresting age..a tall scraggy girl, with red elbows, and salt cellars at my collar-bones, which were always exposed, for fashion at that time made girls of this age uncover neck and arms.
The item has a complex social and cultural distribution, but knowing this much eventually led me to the technical term from anatomy: the suprasternal, or jugular, notch. Sometimes referred to in ordinary language as the hollow of the neck or the neck hollow.
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Posted in Dialects, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Names, Shirtlessness, Technical and ordinary language, Variation | 5 Comments »
July 11, 2019
Pride Month is past, and so is the Fourth of July (US Independence Day), but my postings on these celebrations will go on for some time. Today, three images for Pride: the art of the flag; penguins at work; and the M&S sandwich.
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Posted in Academic life, Art, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language of sex, Metaphor, Parody, Penguins, Photography, Rainbow, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Technical and ordinary language | 7 Comments »
July 9, 2019
In my e-mail on the 7th, this offer — merely the latest in a long series of virtually identical such offers from a wide assortment of sources — to provide postings on this blog:
I manage some relevant blogs and ecommerce sites in your industry and can write a feature blog, article or other piece with a link to our site.
Occasionally, these offers come with the suggestion of a possible payment for this site use, but usually not: the transaction is conceived of as one of mutual benefit, providing greater public access — eyes on the page — for both host and guest (the guest presenting themselves as experienced in the art of SEO, search engine optimization; the host having an already-established audience).
Characteristically, the offer above is pure boiler-plate, utterly vague about what industry the prospective host is in. What, in fact, is my industry?
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Metaphor, Syntax, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »
June 26, 2019
From the northern edge of the world, specifically: the town of Inuvik NWT in Canada, from which a postcard showing this welcoming billboard:
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The card was from Chris Waigl (bought in Dawson City YT), who mailed it from the extremely small town of Chicken AK.
And now there’s a surprising lot of stuff to say about the card.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Common vs. proper, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Names, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »
April 18, 2019
Umbro, the ceramic horticultural penguin, gay lover of wild strawberries, who lives in the shade of a pink cocktail umbrella:
(#1) Umbro, shaded by his pink cocktail umbrella and luxuriating under the spreading spathyphyllum tree and the watchful eye of the llama Glama Grrl
Cross the novel La Dame aux Camélias with the movie Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, cast a cocktail-loving penguin as the protagonist, and you get Le Pingouin aux Parapluies Roses, one of the famously bibulous singing penguins of Cherbourg (seen here visiting in Palo Alto).
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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Movies and tv, Technical and ordinary language | 5 Comments »
December 19, 2018
The One Big Happy of 11/20, in which, as usual, Ruthie copes with an unfamiliar (semi-)technical term (here, cross section) by extracting a familiar word (here, the cross of irritability) from it:
Ruthie crosses the cross ‘representative’ of cross section with the cross ‘snappish, angry’ of cross words. These are grossly different lexical items in modern English, but in fact they share an etymology that goes back to the noun cross of the hymns “The Old Rugged Cross” and “In the Cross of Christ I Glory”.
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Posted in Etymology, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »
