Technology | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Antique technology (and its songs)

September 6, 2017

For two days in the Zits strip, Jeremy’s mother worked at getting him to submit his application to renew his automobile registration via what some have come to call, retronymically, postal mail, using the antique technology and infrastructure of cards and letters, stamps, mailboxes, and a system for transporting and delivering physical pieces of mail. Today, Jeremy admits to his buddy Pierce that he capitulated to this exotic technology, and rather enjoyed the experience —

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but Pierce treats the technology involved as not merely antique, but literally ancient.

Yesterday I refrained from playing the Swiss card: the music of the PostBus service. But now I’ll dive into the great ocean of mailmusic.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Obsolete technologies and middle verbs

September 5, 2017

A pair of Zits strips, from yesterday and today:

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The theme is the looming obsolescence of technologies and their supporting infrastructures and social practices, in this case the system of mail delivery (cue Thomas Pynchon’s novella The Crying of Lot 49), with all its parts and accompaniments: postage stamps, envelopes and postcards, mail boxes, mail transport and delivery systems, posthorns and their tunes, delivery personnel in uniforms, mail slots, post offices, conventions for the form of letters, and more. If you’re young and well wired these days, this all could be as mysterious and exotic as analog clocks.

Jeremy is wary of the whole business.

And yes, Pynchon is relevant.

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Posted in Argument structure, Books, Homosexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Passive, Signs and symbols, Technology | 1 Comment »

Fixing things

July 9, 2017

Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm, featuring the computer dogs (the bull terrier Grimm at the keyboard, the Boston terrier Ralph advising him):

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To understand this strip, you need to know about keyboard shortcuts on a Mac computer, in particular the combination

Command-Z: Undo the previous command. You can then press Command-Shift-Z to Redo, reversing the undo command.

⌘-Z undoes, or reverses, keyboard actions. In the cartoon, the dimwitted Ralph suggests using this computer key combination to reverse events in general — in this case, the falling of the lamp to the floor and the breaking that resulted from the fall. ⌘-Z will fix it!

If only.

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Posted in Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Sarcasm and irony, Signs and symbols, Technology, Understanding comics, Variation | 2 Comments »

Audiences

May 21, 2017

Two recent cartoons, a One Big Happy in which the grandmother copes with black street speech with an app for her audience; and a Doonesbury in which marijuana companies tailor their products and their advertising for gay and black audiences.

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Posted in Language and race, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Race and ethnicity, Technology | Leave a Comment »

The Z with the ‘za

May 10, 2017

Caught on the streets of Palo Alto yesterday, a food delivery truck from this company:

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The one I saw had a snappier slogan, something along the lines of “World’s Only Cooked-On-The-Road Pizza”. And then there was the name: as a Z-person, I’m keenly alert to words beginning with Z. In any case, our robot overlords are now making pizzas in trucks. Right here in Silicon Valley.

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Posted in Language and food, Technology | Leave a Comment »

For want of an A, the world was saved

May 9, 2017

The latest xkcd cartoon, #1834 Lunch Order:

You say launch order, I say lunch order; let’s call the whole thing off

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Body works

March 5, 2017

(Frank talk about the male body, but no sex in this particular posting. Use your judgment.)

Four body items that have come my way recently: bouncing penises and testicles (and other intimate views of the body) in a new computer game; mussels as vaginal symbols; axillary delights; and anal art.

This is Part I: Dangly Bits.

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Posted in Art, Gaming, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

The little man with the laundry

February 28, 2017

Another item from my blog backlog file, this time a delightful (and informative and perceptive) piece in the Economist’s special year-end issue (of 12/24/16), “Mankind in miniature: A simple, oddly modern, oddly mystical machine”, illustrated here:

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A hand-carved little man

The piece (unsigned, as is standard in the Economist) begins:

The clothespeg [AmE clothespin] has an ancient look. The simplest sort, with rounded head and body carved from a single piece of wood, might have come from an Egyptian tomb or a Mesoamerican midden. Their shape is vaguely anthropomorphic, like a forked mandrake root (“dolly peg” is the name in commerce), suggesting an offering to the gods of fertility, or of nature. It would be no surprise to find one in an Iron Age settlement, still attached to an Iron Age loincloth.

Odd, then, that the first such peg is not recorded until the early 19th century.

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Posted in Art, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Understanding the comics

February 22, 2017

Once again, I return to the question of what you have to know to understand a comic strip or a cartoon, with two recent cartoons in my comics feed, a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro; in both, understanding requires that you supply a word that isn’t in the text of the cartoon:

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