In the One Big Happy from 11/23, recently appeared in my comics feed, Ruthie and her grandfather spar over the choice between /ol/ and /old/ as the PST form of the verbs STEAL and TELL and the BSE/PRS forms of the verb HOLD.
There are, as it turns out, two quite different phenomena here, one having to do with the choice of an inflectional form (the PST of STEAL), the other having to do with the omission of word-final /d/ in casual pronunciations in connected speech (in the PST of TELL and the BSE/PRS of HOLD).
Ruthie’s grandfather, however, treats the two phenomena as comparable, and also, unreasonably, treats the casual pronunciations as requiring correction.
(About my life, though with a linguistic note along the way)
From Ann Burlingham in Pittsburgh, locally sourced gifts to comfort me in very tough times. In particular, cookies from Barlow Bakes in Ford City PA; and a flour sack tea towel (from the “love, Pittsburgh” site) with text on Pittsburghese.
A recent xkcd cartoon (#2372) plays with the sort of questionnaire that lexicographers and linguists have long used for investigating dialect differences:
A theme connecting two otherwise very disparate cartoons in my comics feed for today: in a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, an absurdist strip about Claes Oldenburg in the (mythical) American Old West; and in a Zippy, musings by Bill Griffith on a mystery Z structure in his part of rural Connecticut.
(It’s about slang, but there are going to be buttocks, mostly men’s, some startlingly bare, so this posting will not to be everyone’s taste.)
Following up on yesterday’s posting “Buttocks III: (mainstream) art, male art, porn”, Timothy Riddle offered some recently fashionable slang for ‘buttocks’: the M(ass) noun cake, as used by (straight) pornstar Johnny Stone (who has a famously fine ass, and is proud of it, even though it’s not an especially relevant feature in his porn work); and by DC Comics on its Twitter site, showing a photo of the superhero Nightwing (the former Robin / Dick Grayson), played by Brenton Thwaites, who’s also famous for his fine ass, which is much featured on the series.
So: into still more buttocks slang, both M cake and (more commonly) PL C(ount) cakes.
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
The two big things in #1: the stereotype of Southern charm (associated here with the 2pl pronoun y’all and the “drawl” of Southern speech, plus a characteristic Southern drink, sweet tea); and the Learn to Draw family of advertisements (which evoke social worlds in which most people smoked cigarettes and in which earnest young people sought to advance themselves by taking risks to learn a new skill).
These are lost worlds: very few people smoke, and then only in highly constrained circumstances; and the US now appears to be close to be bottom of the developed economies for advancement in social class (of the sort that moved my family from the farm and factory floor to a distinguished university professorship in two generations).
Plus, a personal Wayno bonus in #1, an homage to Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski.
Background, from my 3/12/20 posting “Higashi Day cartoon 1: grim Bliss surprise” about the series of 6 cartoon postings (of which this is the 3rd)
to celebrate March 15th: Higashi Day, formerly known in these parts as (spring) Removal Day, marking the day when, for roughly 10 years in the fabled past, Jacques and I set off to car-trek east, from Palo Alto (and Stanford) to Columbus OH (and Ohio State).
The Frazz strip of March 8th:
(#1) School custodian Edwin “Frazz” Frazier and 8-year-old bored genius Caulfield take on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”
In more or less reverse order: (a) the positive anymore of Caulfield’s
(ex1) Anymore, I just believe what rhymes
in the last panel; (b) the song and some of its most famous performances; and (c) the quote in the first panel,
(ex2) Believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear
In the 9/26 One Big Happy, Ruthie and Joe cope eggcornishly with the biblical name Iscariot (as in Judas Iscariot), attempting (as they so often do, quite reasonably) to make some sense of an unfamiliar and opaque name:
Today’s Zippy takes us to the shore of Lake Erie, in the roadside realm of Dolly Dimples (but, startlingly, it will end with the minstrel-show character Rastus and the Cream of Wheat box; you never know where things will go these days):
(#1)
DD is actually selling chocolates, statuary, and tchotchkes, not hamburgers. Her head is indeed unrealistically gigantic, but even with this selling point she’s probably not going to leave Silver Lake NY to pursue a failed movie career in L.A. (note the whimsical tense-aspect-mood semantics of intending to pursue a failed career).
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.
