Today’s Dilbert carries on the mansplaining theme from the 7th:
Fear the wrath of Alice!
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
More mansplaining
April 9, 2015Movies and tv: ethnic versatility (Shalhoub)
April 1, 2015(Minimal linguistic content)
One more actor displaying ethnic versatility: Lebanese-American Tony Shalhoub (son of Lebanese-Americans, grew up in Green Bay WI). Some of his roles are not ethnically marked, but some are characters of Middle Eastern descent, and several are presented as ethnically Italian.
to frog-march
March 11, 2015From the NYT on the 9th, “Two Are Charged in Killing of Boris Nemtsov: by Neil MacFarquhar, beginning:
Moscow — Two Chechens, one a police officer who fought Islamic insurgents and the second a security guard, were charged in a Moscow court on Sunday in connection with the killing of Boris Y. Nemtsov, a leading Kremlin critic, while three other suspects were jailed pending further investigation.
… Given the intense national interest in the case, the arrival of the men in court was broadcast on state television. Uniformed security agents wearing black balaclavas frog-marched the suspects, bent over and wearing handcuffs, into the courthouse. Security forces established a tight cordon around it.
My interest is in the verb to frog-march here.
Joshua Fishman 1926-2015
March 3, 2015On LinguistList (26.1159), two death notices for Joshua Fishman, from Ofelia Garcia at CUNY and from Ghil’ad Zuckerman in Adelaide. From Garcia:
A beloved teacher and influential scholar, Joshua A. Fishman passed away peacefully in his Bronx home, on Monday evening, March 1, 2015. He was 88 years old. Joshua A. Fishman leaves behind his devoted wife of over 60 years, Gella Schweid Fishman, three sons and daughters-in-law, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. But he also leaves behind thousands of students throughout the world who have learned much from him about sociology of language, the field he founded, and also about the possibility of being a generous and committed scholar to language minority communities. As he once said, his life was his work and his work was his life.
Joshua A. Fishman, nicknamed Shikl, was born in Philadelphia, PA, on July 18, Yiddish was the language of his childhood home, and his father regularly asked his sister, Rukhl, and him: “What did you do for Yiddish today?” The struggle for Yiddish in Jewish life was the impetus for his scholarly work. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a Masters degree in 1947, he collaborated with his good friend, Max Weinreich, the doyen of Yiddish linguistics, on a translation of Weinreich’s history of Yiddish. And it was through Yiddish that he came to another one of his interests – that of bilingualism. …Yiddish and bilingualism were interests he developed throughout his scholarly life.
The local connection:
In 1988, he became Professor Emeritus [at Yeshiva University] and began to divide the year between New York and California where he became visiting professor of education and linguistics at Stanford University.
So for part of each year, he and I were colleagues. Learnèd, passionate, and humane — and with a delightful sense of humor.
Since 1895
March 2, 2015Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, celebrating the history of the comics:
(#1)
The cartoon takes Outcault’s Yellow Kid to be (in some sense) the first comic strip. This is disputable, but Outcault certainly deserves recognition.
Words for smells
February 16, 2015Today’s Calvin and Hobbes:
We accept the conceit that Hobbes is a tiger, with many tigerish properties, but a sentient tiger with the power of speech and an extensive knowledge of our culture. But now it turns out that tigers have a linguistic culture of their own, to fit with their tigerish nature.
A dangler in Belfast?
February 7, 2015In an anecdote about James McCosh in his years at Queen’s College Belfast (posted in “McCosh on NomPred” here), this sentence:
(1) Late one night, while proctoring one of the dormitories, loud noises of student revelry began to emanate from one if the third-foor rooms.
As Mike Pope noted to me, this has a classic dangling modifier — a subjectless predicational adjunct (while proctoring one of the dormitories) requiring a referent for the missing subject, but not finding this in the default place, the subject of the main clause (loud noises of student revelry); surely loud noises were not proctoring a dormitory.
But the Subject Rule for finding the missing subject is just a default, and as in many other cases I’ve posted about on this blog, another principle leads us easily to the intended referent — so easily in fact that most readers will not have noticed that (1) has what is technically a dangling modifier in it.
Dangler time
January 18, 2015It’s been a while since I posted about “dangling modifiers”, so here’s a nice example from the Economist last month (December 13th), in a story “Charting the plastic waters”. On p. 81:
The Five Gyres Institute, for example, is campaigning to phase out the use of plastic microbeads in facial scrubs and other consumer products in favour of natural alternatives made from such materials as apricot husks. Sewage treatment plants do not capture all the beads which wash down the drain, so some inevitably end up in the sea. And being so small, no one really knows where they are going.
The crucial bit is boldfaced.
Implied text
December 20, 2014A wordless cartoon from Maria Scrivan’s Half Full, caught in the January 2015 Funny Times:
There’s no text, but the implied text is the idiom breed like rabbits. Apparently, bunny slippers breed like proverbial rabbits.
States I’ve visited
November 20, 2014These maps seem to be all the rage at the moment. Here’s mine:
It’s the result of giving talks and going to linguistics conferences all over the place, plus all that commuting (by car, via various routes) between Columbus OH and Palo Alto CA.
I don’t count stops at airports; they would fill in some of the obvious gaps, and add Hawaii, but even that wouldn’t fix Mississippi and Alabama.