Of the form
V1 ya, wouldn’t wanna / shouldn’t hafta V2 ya (where V1 and V2 rhyme)
In a One Big Happy strip from the backlog on my desktop:
(#1) Ruthie and the tough neighborhood kid James trade taunts, until Ruthie’s mother drags her away from the encounter
This is a competitive performance of verbal skills, designed to insult without wounding. James’s first move is a pre-existing model, and then they go on from there.
(Or, for that matter, why not onety-one, onety-two?)
These are questions that kids acquiring English frequently ask, as Ruthie does in this One Big Happy strip:
(#1) Kids are pattern-seeking organisms, and when confronted with a deviation from a pattern, are inclined either to silently, unconsciously, eliminate the deviation in favor of the pattern; or to explicitly lodge a complaint, as Ruthie does here
Ruthie asks a why-question, and there is an answer to it — a complex, fascinating answer supplied briefly for the general reader by Arika Okrent in several places (see below) — but it’s of no use to Ruthie, because that answer is about the history of English, while she wants to know what sense it makes for English to work this way now, and why don’t we fix it.
Alas for Ruthie, the only fair answer to her question is that English just is as it is, and it doesn’t really make sense. Bite the bullet, kid.
From the annals of goofy commercial names, in this case a Thai restaurant name that seems to be intended to project both playfulness — the name is a pun — and power, as in the model for the pun, the adjective titanic ‘of exceptional strength, size, or power’ (NOAD). Thai food that will blow you away.
What makes it goofy is the unfortunate echo of the proper noun Titanic; from NOAD:
a British passenger liner, the largest ship in the world when it was built and supposedly unsinkable, that struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage in April 1912 and sank with the loss of 1,490 lives.
I was made aware of the restaurant name by a Susan Fischer Facebook posting yesterday; she was passing on, from others on the net, this restaurant image:
(#1) Not identified in its net appearances, but this is a real Thai restaurant, not a piece of digital art or photoshopping: Thai Tanic at 1326 14th St NW, Washington DC (near Logan Circle)
Commenter on this image, someone who got the ship echo: This restaurant is going down.
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the first of March; meanwhile, it’s St. David’s Day, and here comes Taffy with the leeks (from which many excellent soups can be made) and the daffodils (strictly for admiring; they are poisonous)!
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with an egg-themed Scrabble game, providing an excuse for the pun Scrabbled eggs, based on scrambled eggs:
(#1) Six ways of referring to eggs (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
At this point, I discovered that there’s a Scrabble cartoon meme, with huge numbers of cartoons using the word / board game as the setting for a variety of jokes.
Also that though Scrabble has been mentioned many times on this blog, I’d never posted anything about the game. So I’ll start with that.
Notified via Google Alert on Saturday: on the Jenkem Magazine (skateboarding) site, “Allies: Calder Zwicky of MOMA” (with a YouTube video) by Alexis Castro & Ollie Rodgers on 10/2/18. Another chapter in the story of artist Calder Zwicky — previously reported on in this blog back in 2016, so this is an update, but not actually up-to-date (though it gets skateboarding into CZ’s story, which is a good thing).
(#1) Screen shot from the video: CZ talking about a work of his from the Lonely Thrasher series — slang thrasher, roughly ‘excellent skateboarder’, also the name of a skater magazine — showing a cover of this magazine with the skater removed, to yield an image that, CZ argues, is still a skateboarding image, of the huge space and the complex physical structure that offers a challenge to a serious skateboarder; the skater is implicit in the image
Ann Burlingham, posting on Facebook today, recalled with delight the emergence in 2020 of the snowdrops that she had planted when she and Jason first moved to Pittsburgh:
(#1)
And then the discussion roamed far and wide, to fragrances, Switzerland, and Viking ships.
Stroll with me now through the fields of associative memory…
Which came to Monica Macaulay yesterday, who reported on Facebook, “I’m confused, as always.” The stuff:
(#1) [caption:] Here’s an emerald green and canary yellow roll of Linguistics Washi Tape featuring an array of global alphabets
Several readers wondered what the market would be for such stuff, except for us linguists, and would any of us actually want it? Fair questions, but as it turns out, they pretty much apply to all of Cognitive Surplus’s products, which are simultaneously earnest, quirky, and intellectually lightweight. But some are great fun, and some are beautiful.
But what’s it all about, Alfie?
Penguin spots — showing four penguins on holiday in New York City — by Milanese illustrator Antonio Giovanni Pinna in the 2/27/23 issue of The New Yorker:
(#1) Six of the spots: p. 21, bellhop / porter transporting the penguins in a hotel luggage cart; p. 24, special polar-temp accommodations for the penguins; p. 31, two penguins on a horse-drawn carriage ride in Central Park; p. 42, a penguin contributes to a street musician; p. 46, the four penguins emerge from the subway; p. 49, the penguins collaborate so that one of them can use a tower viewer to appreciate scenic views
The Story of Bob, by Max, in two parts, wood and bronze. In a Facebook posting this morning. There will be two pictures. one in wood, one in bronze.
It’s an old theme on this blog: 6-year-old Ruthie in the comic strip One Big Happy as a constantly entertaining source of efforts to cope with unfamiliar words and larger expressions by assimilating them, in one way or another, to things that are familiar to her. Some examples surveyed in my 2/3/19 posting “Ruthian lexical items in real life”; and then, yesterday, in the posting “Ruthie goes for the donuts”, she understands windchill as Winchell’s (donuts): the unfamiliar element is the technical meteorological term windchill. and Ruthie copes with it by replacing it with a phonologically similar item that’s familiar to her (she’s fond of Winchell’s donuts):
(#1) unfamiliar windchill / familiar Winchell’s
Over the past three years or so, I’ve been accumulating One Big Happy strips in this vein and am now disgorging six of them: a similarity case, in which Ruthie copes with unfamiliar material by treating it as phonologically similar familiar material (as with windchill / Winchell’s); two ambiguity cases, in which unfamiliar material is homophonous with familiar material, so she has to cope with her mistaken interpretation of what she hears; and three more complex cases (one involving portmanteaus, one involving orthographic abbreviations, and one involving Ruthie’s own analogical creation — Ruthie is indeed ingenious).
