Archive for the ‘Variation’ Category

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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):

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Posted in Catchphrases, Dialects, Formulaic language, Idioms, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Slang | 6 Comments »

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.

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Posted in Inflection, Music, Puns, Sociolinguistics, Spelling, Usage, Usage advice, Variation | 6 Comments »

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

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Posted in Abbreviation, Books, Dialects, Holidays, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Variation | Leave a Comment »

One Right Way

August 18, 2024

Another brief posting opening up a parallel, from the world of grammar, style, and usage, to yesterday’s posting “Accepting variation, or not”, about the (attempted) enforcement of normative prescriptions for other sorts of behavior. The two crucial panels of a Peanuts comic strip from yesterday’s posting:


(#1) Lucy relays to Linus their grandmother’s disapproval of his security blanket; Linus defies her admirably with a sarcastic defense of variation in behavior

Gramma’s disapproval is implicitly two-pronged. Prong 1 is that having a security blanket is, variously:

different, atypical, unusual, ill-adjusted, nonconforming

while Prong 2, unspoken, is that it is also

undesirable, reprehensible, even contemptible, potentially threatening

Gramma refuses to accept the behavioral variation that Linus displays, thus mirroring the lack of social acceptance of other kinds of variation — in particular, the disapproval, by many, of same-sex desires, practices, and identities; and the more specific disapproval of what I’ve called f-gay men — the effeminate and the faggy. Disapprovals that are especially wounding because Prong 2 is wrapped up in them.

Now to something that might at first glance might seem to be completely different, but also involves a judgment of disapproval — nonacceptance — on a different sort of failure to conform to normative prescriptions, coupled with what amounts to a companion moral judgment on the whole business, including the people involved in it.

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Posted in Language and society, Linguistics in the comics, Social life, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Toto, Tonto, let’s call the whole thing off

August 11, 2024

Today’s Dan Piraro Bizarro, in three panels: an odd title panel that seems to be mostly about phallicity in the mythic Old West, and two Toto / Tonto confusion panels: the Lone Ranger and Toto (with a glancing allusion to Little Orphan Annie); and Dorothy and Tonto — to which I’ve added a Gershwin song in my title for this posting — to make a rich stew of American pop culture, covering the comics, jokes, movies, radio, tv, and popular music:


(#1) It’s a Sunday panel, so it’s by DP, not Wayno, and it’s a horizontal strip rather than a vertical one-panel gag (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)

I’ll look at things panel by panel, then comment on my title for this posting — but first I’ll point out that

— the second panel, set in the desert of the mythic Old West, is from the Lone Ranger world, but with the dog Toto (intruding from the Wizard of Oz world) in place of the faithful Indian companion Tonto (Toto in effect punning on Tonto)

— while the third panel, with Dorothy confronting the Wicked Witch of the West (accompanied by one of her evil flying monkeys) on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City of Oz, is from the Wizard of Oz world, but with Tonto (intruding from the Lone Ranger world) in place of Toto (Tonto in effect punning on Toto)

Here I’m carrying over my analysis, in yesterday’s posting “Harry’s scaffolding”, of one type of absurdist cartoon as involving an anchor world and an intrusive world; the second panel of #1 stands on its own as one such absurdist cartoon, and the third is another. The special delight of these panels is that the two absurdist cartoons are converses, conceptual mirror images of one another.

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Posted in Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Phallicity, Phonetics, Pop culture, Puns, Sociolinguistics, Variation | 5 Comments »

New preposition in town

July 1, 2024

Posted on the LINGTYP (Linguistic Typology) mailing list today, reproduced in this posting to illustrate one of the ways linguists play around with data and ideas as they try to figure out what’s going on on some specific case — looking for inspiration in (roughly) similar cases in other varieties of language.

If  that’s what you want to do, you want to go where the linguistic typologists hang out. On LT, from Wikipedia (very briefly):

Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world’s languages.

LTists have a society, the Association for Linguistic Typology (webpage here), which organizes meetings, publishes a journal, and sponsors that mailing list, for open discussion of typological matters. Like the one I brought up today:

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Posted in French, Language change, Languages, Linguistic diversity, Poetry, Syntactic categories, Variation | 1 Comment »

frill

June 20, 2024

An old One Big Happy cartoon that’s been sitting on my desktop for some time: casual speech collides with dialectal variation to confound Ruthie’s grandfather (usually it’s Ruthie who misunderstands, but not this time):


(#1) What Ruthie has that her grandfather lacks is inside knowledge: experience with the speaker and how she talks

Ok, first the linguistics, then the frills. On the principle that a spoonful of linguistics helps the ruffles, sharks, and lizards go down.

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Posted in Clothing, Dialects, Diners, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Speech style, Variation | Leave a Comment »

N1 of N2

May 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 from my 5/1/20 posting “Trois lapins pour le premier mai”:

It’s the first of the month, which I have learned to greet with three rabbits — by starting the day saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit”. More than that, it’s the first of May — by some cultural reckonings the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere and also (in some countries) International Workers Day, so: dance around the maypole, set bonfires for Beltane or Walpurgis, prepare for outdoor bo(i)nking (rabbits again!), break out the lilies of the valley (muguets pour le premier mai), cue the choruses of L’Internationale, and march in solidarity with the workers. (Feel free to choose from this menu, as your taste inclines and your schedule allows.)

But enough of lapins; time to attend to our moutons, the sheep of the day being English NPs of the form N1 of N2 (like bouquet of flowers and tons of stuff) and how they work as subjects of clauses. These sheep came to us on 4/29 from Steven Levine, who wrote on Facebook:

Here’s a sentence I just came across that seems odd to my ears:

By the mid century a variety of celebrations was engaging morris dancers.

I know that the subject is variety [AZ: no no no; the subject is a variety of celebrations; this is important] and the verb is was, and yet it seems off to me — I was expecting were. I’m not asking for a grammatical analysis, I’m asking if this would stop you for a second if you were just reading along.

To which I wrote:

Steven said he didn’t want a grammatical analysis, but here it comes anyway.

I warned you.

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Posted in Agreement, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Constructions, Count & mass, Dialects, Grammatical categories, Holidays, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

The Ruthie versions

April 2, 2024

An old One Big Happy strip, recently up in my comics feed, has Ruthie once again coping with vocabulary unfamiliar to her:

Cirque du Soleil (presumably pronounced in English, as if it were Sirk do sew-lay), obstetrician, and false alarm (which Ruthie takes to be circus ole, lobstertrician, and fossil arm, respectively). These are three different cases, as I’ll explain below.

But then — knowing that in the world around her, different people have different pronunciations for expressions — she takes her mother’s intended corrections of her creative misinterpretations to be just repetitions of them (“Mom always repeats the stuff I say”), but with a pronunciation alternative to hers. Attempted corrections of kids often run aground in similar ways.

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Posted in Dialects, Linguistics in the comics, Phonetics, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Santa sport

February 6, 2024

An old One Big Happy strip that recently came up in my comics feed:


Joe writes to Santa with a very specific gift list, with an accusatory flourish at the end (presupposing that in earlier years Santa had failed to honor Joe’s requests and telling Santa that now it’s time for the old guy to get it right) in which he addresses Santa as sport

This is one of those occasions where I pose questions that I’m in no position to answer, because I don’t have the resources to pursue them. I am an address terms guy — see the Page on this blog with links to my postings on the topic —  but sport isn’t a term I use myself, so I have no self-report data on it; and though dictionaries have some useful information on sport, they aren’t able to describe the complexities of usage of address terms like it; and, finally, sport is not one of the high-frequency address terms (like guy) that have gotten the attention of variationist sociolinguists, so we have no systematic data on the way it’s used.

Even so, my first response to Joe’s use was that it was odd. Somewhat antique, but more significantly, impertinent — treating Santa as if he were an equal, or in fact a subordinate. My impression is that Santa, in a somewhat old-fashioned way, might amiably address a little boy as sport, but little kids don’t talk to adults (especially powerful adults) that way. Such an impertinence would, however, fit right in with Joe’s challenge to Santa to get with the program of supplying Joe with the toys he’s asking for (well, demanding). Cheeky monkey.

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Posted in Address terms, Variation | 4 Comments »

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