Archive for the ‘Variation’ Category

Rabbit stew 2: vanella

December 1, 2024

Another Rabbit Day item in the stew (see my earlier posting today “Rabbit stew 1: Asian soup spoons”), taking off from this Facebook posting by Greg Morrow yesterday (with some editing by me):

In sort of an opposite of the penpin merger [AZ: in which syllable-offset /ɛn/, as in pen, and /ɪn/, as in pin, are both realized as [ɪn]], local dialect (including mine) has [vǝnɛlǝ] vanella as the pronunciation of vanilla [vǝnɪlǝ].

(Heard it today in the grocery, and I was like, yes that’s right, wait a second…)

A further comment went on with the idea that this ɪ > ɛ (before l) that gives widespread US vanella was in some way the opposite of the ɛ > ɪ (before n) shift that gives us US midlands inkpin [ɪŋkpɪn] ‘(ink)pen’.

(more…)

A dozen (or so) senses of the C-word

November 22, 2024

(Well, consider the title if this posting, which tells you that it’s going to get into some vivid descriptions of sexual parts and sexual acts — plus a photo that’s just barely WordPressable — and you’ll see that it’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; and from here on, you’re going to get the C-word raw and unconcealed, but your enthusiasm for this dirty talk will probably be diminished when it turns out that this posting is mostly about lexical semantics)

(more…)

Apostrophobia

November 16, 2024

Wayno’s Bizarro for 11/8 — yes, I am hopelessly overwhelmed with posting material, wondering whether I’ll ever catch up; on the other hand, my health has taken a turn back to normal awful, which I’m entirely able to cope with — is a Psychiatrist strip in which the patient is said to be suffering from (in fact, cowering behind the therapeutic couch in the grips of) the fear of contractions:


Of the types of traditionally-labeled “contractions” in English, the patient here — call him NoA — seems to exhibit sensitivity specifically to just one, now known in the linguistic literature as Auxiliary Reduction, AuxRed for short (in I am > I’mI had > I’d, and you are > you’re), though in fact Wayno sees NoA’s sensitivity as triggered by all occurrences of the punctuation mark the apostrophe, of which there are a great many types — hence Wayno’s title for this cartoon, “Punctuation Trepidation” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)

Now if this is NoA’s affliction, he’s in for a world of trouble, because in modern English spelling the apostrophe is used as an abstract mark for possessive forms of nominals — singular in someone’s cat and the queen of England’s hat, plural in the boys’ bat — a visual mark accompanying the possessive S; but while the the letter S in such forms corresponds to phonological content, the apostrophe neither represents phonological content nor indicates a place where some phonological content is omitted. So, how does  NoA know that /sʌm.wǝnz.kæt/ in some sense has an apostrophe in it and he should cringe in fear at it?

(more…)

SoCal lads with spread-lip smiles

November 12, 2024

…  and boy-foot bear with teak of Chan … no, no, Kent McCord and the Nelsons’ Rick, that’s the ticket.

(Tales of male-male desire and sexual acts — so this posting will be edgy for some readers — but not particularly vivid tales, and the photos are there for faces and torsos, not genitals)

Rick and Kent, figures of attractive, desirable masculinity — the first from my teenage years (there was a lot I didn’t understand in the Rick, or teenage hard-on, years, during which Ricky got me off, a lot), the second from young adulthood (it was during the Kent years that I gained some self-knowledge and entered into serious, life-long relationships with other men; suddenly it was important that Kent was not only a really hot guy as Officer Jim Reed on Adam-12, but that he also presented himself as a sturdy, dependable and empathetic nice guy, so an eminently satisfactory object of adult lust). Note: I was perfectly aware that Rick and Kent were, by all accounts, uncomplicatedly straight (as it happens, they became buddies when they worked in tv together); what I had in my head were fantasy Rick and Kent, and their kisses were sweeter than wine.

Now I tell you that Rick, Kent, and I were / are all essentially the same age; Rick 4 months older than me, Kent 2 years younger. (Rick died in 1985, but Kent is still alive, and he’s a great-looking 82-year-old.)

And while they’re interesting as objects of desire (on tv and elsewhere, notably from the 1950s through the 1970s), they get a posting here because of a characteristic facial gesture that they share: the spread-lip smile, a feature of Rick and Kent that large numbers of straight women and gay men find powerfully attractive (and that, no doubt, makes many straight men envious).

(more…)

“I have a ##”

October 20, 2024

So my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez said to me last Tuesday; ## represents a word I totally failed to recognize, at the most elemental level; I didn’t recognize any of the sounds in the word, though I thought it was probably of the form CV. L then came closer to me and said it again, more slowly: “I have a n#”. Ah, an initial n — a Spanish n (distinct from an English n), but clearly something in the [n] zone, and followed by a vowel.  On the third repetition, I was able to identify the vowel: u — a Spanish u (distinct from an English u), but clearly something in the [u] zone. Apparently, L was telling me that he had a [nu].

I recognized the word phonetically, but still totally failed to recognize the lexical item he was talking about. Surely he didn’t have a GNU. Is there such a thing as a NOO? Ah, finally it dawned on me: L was telling me he had a NEW. Hmm, a new what? And then, finally, the realization that he was telling me that he had a piece of news, that he had reconstructed a singular NEW ‘report of a recent event’ from the word NEWS ‘report of recent events’.  This is clever, but alas mistaken.

(more…)

Namesakes and surnamesakes

October 12, 2024

This is going to take us surprising places. Our guide will be the distinguished Slavist Wayles Browne, in (edited) excerpts from e-mail he sent me on 10/9:

I discovered your blog when [WB’s Cornell colleague] Michael Weiss wrote about early attestations of the term ruki rule [in Sanskrit and elsewhere: see the 4/22/24 posting “On the transmission of ideas: RUKI gets around”]. Since then I’ve been looking at older postings as well as your day-to-day ones. On 1/9/14 [in the posting “A recent birthday”, on the birthday of Nikolai Marr], you wrote, after quoting this from Wikipedia:

Marr earned a reputation as a maverick genius with his Japhetic theory, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and Basque languages. In 1924, he went even further and proclaimed that all the languages of the world descended from a single proto-language which had consisted of four “diffused exclamations”: salberyonrosh.

that

Marr eventually fell out of favor with Stalin.

Quite true, and there’s more to the story than that. After Marr died, his follower Ivan Meščaninov and others managed to get Marrism accepted as the official Marxist approach to linguistics, but finally in 1950 a Georgian linguist went to his fellow-Georgian Stalin and persuaded him that it was all fatuous and bad for the whole science of linguistics. Stalin then published an article in Pravda with essentially common-sense views of language. The name of the Georgian linguist? He was a namesake of yours: Arnold Chikobava.

In Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, the language(s) that I work on the most, ‘name’ is ime, ‘namesake’ is imenjak, ‘surname’ is prezime, and a person you share a surname with is, quite logically, prezimenjak. It would be nice to introduce surnamesake into English too.

So we start in Ithaca NY (with the Cornell Indo-Europeanist scholar Michael Weiss), pass through Ancient India (and the Sanskrit language, which was the topic of my PhD dissertation, back in the Cretaceous Period) on our way to the Soviet Union under Stalin, where we encounter the nutcase linguist Nikolai Marr, who takes us to Soviet Georgia (in the Caucasus) and the linguist Arnold Chikobava, whose name, coupled with mine, reminds WB that the Slavic language(s) BCS (in the Balkans) have the eminently useful term prezimenjak ‘surnamesake’. In this is concealed a good bit of complexity in the notion of namesake (which I have, in fact, posted on, so we’ll get to that eventually), plus a wonderfully sly choice of wording in WB’s reference to BCS as

the language(s) Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian

(which will require some explanation for readers who are not entirely up to date on the linguistic situation in the Balkans).

(more…)

When X means yes

October 9, 2024

… in one sense / use of yes: ‘yes, I select this one’. Which came up yesterday as I was ordering an Original Italian Sub from the Jersey Mike’s Subs in Mountain View CA, just south of Palo Alto (they’re a huge national chain, offering a wide range of submarine sandwiches that are, in my experience, excellent examples of their kind — and Grubhub delivers from them); it turns out that their on-line menu software involves this positive selection-X, which took me a moment to get used to, especially since I’d posted not long ago on associations of the letter X, which included the X of NO — of prohibitions, bans, and denials — but not the X of YES. Well, X is a symbol, it’s just stuff (as I say) and can accumulate any number of uses, even ones that look contradictory.

The Jersey Mike X is the X of election ballots: an alternative to a check-mark ✓ or a plus-sign + in a box or circle (or to filling in an oval) to indicate selecting an item.  In a use that was initially confusing to me, since the JM X is in contrast with the JM +, which turns out to convey something like ‘this is one of the available choices’; I eventually figured out how JM deploys X and + through a certain amount of trial-and-error fiddling with the menus. Yes, I’ll illustrate all of this in a little while.

But first, one more groaner penguin-pun joke, on the occasion of my consuming, at lunch today, the last of my birthday McVitie’s Penguin bars.

(more…)

This idiom has had the radish

September 25, 2024

In e-mail on 9/24 from Masayoshi Yamada, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Shimane University (author of, inter alia: A Dictionary of Trade Names and A Dictionary of English Taboo and Euphemism), substantially edited:

Recently, I happened to read the newspaper comic strip Zits; on September 23 and 24, the main character Jeremy uses the expression “I had the radish”. One of the few dictionaries which defines it:

have had the radish ‘to be no longer functional or useful; to be dead or about to perish’. Local to the state of Vermont. Primarily heard in US. (Farlex Dictionary of Idioms, 2024) (Free Dictionary link)

However, I don’t have any clue to its etymology: why radish? And is it so local to Vermont? I have no idea which language source the Farlex Dictionary is based on. [AZ: It cites the Free Dictionary, which aggregates information from many sources, so that’s not especially helpful.]

I pointed out to MY that in the strip, Jeremy decides to just invent (make up) some expression, to see if he can get it accepted. And picks had the radish. Presumably in the belief that no one had ever used it as an idiom. The first three strips (in strips to come, Jeremy eventually concedes that his idiom has had the radish):

(more…)

Mango(e)s and papayas, anything your heart desires

September 18, 2024

From the Economist‘s 8/24/24 issue, under the characteristically jokey head Beneath the (ap)peal, the informative subhead

South Asia’s long love affair with mangoes

(yes, about the appeal of the fruits in South Asia, incorporating –peal as a pun on peel ‘outer covering of a fruit or vegetable’)

Which stopped me in my tracks, because I would have written mangos rather than mangoes. It turns out that there’s real variation on this point; both mangos and mangoes are well attested (and have occurred in postings on this blog, though all the instances of mangoes are in quoted material, not from my hand). And, entertainingly, published lyrics for the song titled “Mangos” (made famous by Rosemary Clooney) come in two different versions, from different sources: one with mangos, one with mangoes.

(more…)

Cadbury’s puds

September 6, 2024

On Facebook today, an astonished observation by Martyn Cornell:

It’s early September — must be time for selling Christmas confectionery in the supermarkets of Britain …

Providing us with this store display for Christmas versions of Cadbury’s Puds:


The original Cadbury Pud — a brand name —  is a Cadbury milk chocolate bar with a truffle centre, hazelnut pieces, and crunchy puffed rice pieces

(more…)