Archive for the ‘Terminology’ Category

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What have you done with your life?

May 10, 2018

An innocent-sounding request a few days back, from a Daily Beast reporter on its lgbt beat: [I’m] “working on a series of interviews with unsung (or, at least undersung) LGBT heroes. … I’m wondering if you’d be interested in being interviewed about your contributions to linguistics?”

Two claims here: I’m a person of significance in a professional field, linguistics; I’m a person of significance in the lgbt world. I am now asked to defend these claims, to demonstrate that I have done important things in both these areas of my life.

Difficult fieldwork moments in the linguistics-lgbt interface

This is where I curl into a ball of misery, in two ways at once. What have I done with my life, that people should read about me? I’m very proud of what I’ve done, in the academic world and the lgbt world, but I’m not even remotely a magisterial figure, a Great Person, in either. Sigh.

Reflections on my academic work to come. There will be lists. Long lists. I can’t promise quality, but quantity I can deliver.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Linguistic theory, My life, Terminology, Words and things | Leave a Comment »

Syntext: basic concepts

February 10, 2018

Continuing my 1/23/18 posting “Syntax assignments from 20 years ago”, now with a section of these materials on some basic concepts in syntax.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Constituency, Constructions, Syntax, Technical and ordinary language, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

lucanicophilia, peniphilia, and all that

August 19, 2017

On Facebook, the following exchange:

Amanda Walker: Useful term of the day: “ventepølse”, (Norwegian: “waiting sausage”), the sausage you eat off the grill while waiting for your steak to finish cooking.

Jeremy Bornstein: I was hoping it meant something like “someone whose highest purpose would be to become someone else’s sausage”

AMZ: You are my sausage, my only sausage / You make me happy when skies are gray / You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you / Please don’t take my sausage away

It’s all about love of sausage(s) — Würste of many sorts, wieners, frankfurters, hotdogs, bangers, all of them. About what I’ll call lucanicophilia ‘love of sausages’ < Lat. lucanica ‘sausage from Lucania’, in Gk. lukaniko (λουκάνικο). Plus the phil– ‘love’ root.

On the table: the song “You Are My Sunshine”, love of sausage(s), love of penises (peniphilia — sometimes a sausage is just a sausage, but sometimes it’s also a penis), and the terms lucanicophilia and peniphilia.

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Posted in Language and food, Phallicity, Terminology | 1 Comment »

Magrittean disavowals

August 19, 2017

About the terminology Magrittean disavowal / Disavowal, not the phenomenon. Mike Pope suggests that the terminology may be original with me, and that might be so. But the phenomenon has been around since Magritte’s 1929 painting — the famous pipe image captioned Ceci n’est pas une pipe —  and similar examples have been around for longer than that, in apparently paradoxical sentences like the one above (or its French equivalent Ceci n’est pas une phrase), in a sign that announces This is not a sign (French: Ceci n’est pas un panneau), and, more distantly, in the ancient Liar Paradox, with a number of variants:  I am lying – Everything I say is false – This sentence is false.

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Posted in Philiosophy, Terminology | 2 Comments »

Emoji days

October 28, 2016

Emoji(s) are hot news these days. In the NYT yesterday, “Look Who’s Smiley Now: MoMA Acquires Original Emoji” by Amanda Hess. And just a bit earlier, two cartoons linking emoji to hieroglyphics, one by Cameron Harvey, the other by a cartoonist I haven’t identified. And before that, an article about emoji scholars, including our local specialist, Tyler Schnoebelen.

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Posted in Language technology, Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols, Social life, Social media, Terminology, Writing systems | Leave a Comment »

On the who/whom front, and AZ terminology

November 4, 2015

Caught in  the NYT Book Review feature “By the Book” on Sunday (November 1st), in an interview with Gloria Steinem, three questions from the interviewer, questions with Acc whom beginning a WH, or constituent, question:

(1) Whom do you consider to be the best contemporary feminist writers?

(2) Whom do you consider the most underrated or unappreciated writers, past and present?

(3) Whom would you want to write your life story?

The WH element in all three questions is “extracted” from a position that requires an Acc —

(1′) You consider  him / *he  to be the best contemporary feminist writers.

(2′) You consider  him / *he  the most underrated or unappreciated writers, past and present.

(3′) You want  him / *he  to write your life story.

and so Acc whom is prescriptively correct. My own usage has who in all three of these examples; I found the interviewer’s whoms to be stiff, over-formal (even prissy), and old-fashioned — but that’s a matter of taste.

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Posted in Pronoun case, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

Terminology: snowclonelet

October 24, 2015

I advance very slowly on the project of looking at terminology that I might lay some personal claim to. Now: snowclonelet, which I note on the occasion of my having assembled a “Snowclonelets” Page (under the “Linguistics notes” heading), listing postings on the topic from Language Log and this blog.

More to come.

Posted in Links, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

Zombie X

September 16, 2015

For some time, Mike Pope has been (gently) after me on Facebook to assemble a list of linguistic terms that are my innovations. This turns out to be a devilishly difficult enterprise, for several reasons, a prime one being something that afflicts any attempt to discover the “inventor” of an expression: as I’ve noted several times on this blog, most innovations exploit potentials in the language that are in principle available to everyone (various figures of speech, semantic extensions and specializations, patterns of word formation, and so on), so that it’s quite likely that an innovation has been made by many people on many different occasions, without anyone taking special notice or recording these events.

But sometimes one of these events is noticed, at least within a particular sociocultural community, and that’s taken to be a founding event (with an identifiable source), from which the innovation can spread within the community; the innovator is then given credit within the community.

And so to the story of metaphorical zombie.

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Posted in Figurative language, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Pop culture, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

paracuses?

June 8, 2015

In my “Mishearings” posting yesteday, I quoted Oliver Sacks:

I carefully record these in a little red notebook labeled “PARACUSES” — aberrations in hearing, especially mishearings.

Readers on Facebook were unable to find a reference on the term paracuses and entertained the possibility that Sacks had just made it up. As it turns out, no, or at least not entirely. The beginning of understanding is that the term is plural; it’s Sacks’s learnèd plural of the Greek-derived technical term paracusis. And that we can find in dictionaries.

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Posted in Errors, Mishearings, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

A little more on dog whistles etc.

April 7, 2014

In the previous installment (4/4/14, here), Geoff Nunberg was looking for a good term to use for a particular class of racially coded vocabularly, for a discussion on public radio: dog whistle, euphemism, whatever. He makes the point that the purpose of this vocabulary is crucial.

On the next day, on ADS-L, from Geoff:

the figure is designed to avoid unambiguously suggesting certain social attitudes to listeners who disapprove of them (as distinct from euphemisns, which enable the speaker to avoid uttering a coextensive term that some listeners find unsavory).  “Obliquity” conveys one part of this, and “conivinutation” nicely conveys the other, though neither is a word they would let you use on public radio.

Obliquity, though rare, is not unattested. But conivinutation?

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Posted in Language and politics, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

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