Today’s One Big Happy:
Inherently funny words: beanies, tweezers, snood. Or from the point of view of the audience: word entertainment.
Archive for the ‘Usage attitudes’ Category
Word entertainment
April 19, 2015Doing the fandango, from Venango to Ilopango
January 30, 2015In my posting on Padre Antonio Soler, I quoted a bit about
A fandango once attributed to Soler, and probably more often performed than any other work of his, is now thought by some to be of doubtful authorship.
and was reminded how much I enjoy the word fandango — a straightforward case of “word attraction” (the opposite of word rage). So I’ve gone on to play with the word.
No problem
December 31, 2014Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
Mother Goose objects to (what she sees as) an innovation in politeness routines, seeing it as recent (and characteristic of kids) and especially associated with serving people. These criticisms has been leveled by many others.
Two for Thursday
October 9, 2014Two cartoons this morning, a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro:
(#1)
(#2)
A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) on a usage-peeve theme; and borrowed vocabulary put to slangy uses.
Death to the non-standard
October 8, 2014A Cyanide and Happiness strip passed on by Facebook friends:
Extreme vigilance on the usage front. Multiple Negation = Death.
Two linguistics cartoons
September 28, 2014… in the latest (9/29/14) New Yorker: a Zach Kanin on writing systems and a Joe Dator with a snow cone snowclone:
(#1)
(#2)
to shallow
September 16, 2014From the 9/6 New Scientist, in a letter from Bruce Denness (p. 28):
The tank shallowed towards one corner so that deep-water waves … began to break as they approached the shallow corner.
That’s the inchoative verb to shallow ‘to become, get shallow(er)’ — a direct verbing (or zero conversion) of the adjective shallow. I’m not agin verbings (unlike a number of peevers, who are driven into rages by them), and this one serves a real purpose, but it was new to me. It’s also venerable, and has even made it into NOAD2.
How do you spell /fæp/?
September 16, 2014The story so far concerns three items pronounced /fæp/:
(fæp-1) an exclamation of annoyance, similar to drat!
(fæp-2) an onomatopetic expression, representing the sound of vigorous male masturbation
(fæp-3) a verb meaning ‘to masturbate vigorously’ (of a man)
(The first is discussed here, the others on 9/10 here, where the second is taken to be the source of the third, and on 9/11 here, about the second.)
How do we spell these items? As far as I can tell, the first has only the simplest available spelling, FAP, but the sexual items show variation between FAP and FAPP. What to make of this?
English only!
September 9, 2014Today’s (re-run) Calvin and Hobbes:
Calvin rages against school, and especially against the teaching of foreign languages (and, you’d guess, in general against the use of languages other than English).
Three diverse
May 21, 2014This morning: a classic Doonesbury on foul language; a Rhymes With Orange citing the spurious “rule” that an English clause must not end in a preposition; and a Zippy looking back at an ad icon of the 1940s and 50s (“drink more flavored liqueurs”, says Judge Arrow).