March 12, 2022
From Andras Kornai on Facebook today:
AK: As they say on Sesame Street: brought to you by the letter Z!
(#1) A tank (Andras says it’s a Pantsir missile system) with the glyph Z on it — not a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet (in which both Ukrainian and Russian are written) and now symbolizing the Russian iron fist of death
Livia Polanyi [pursuing the Sesame Street theme]: Zombie zombie zombie starts with Z
AZ > LP: The letter Z long ago became part of my identity, a symbol of who I was. Now it’s become the equivalent of a swastika, and I feel that I have personally been assaulted, dirtied, and shamed. (I manage to surmount Z is for Zombie as just a piece of cultural silliness. But the Z on the tanks is, literally, dead serious.)
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Posted in Greek, Historical linguistics, Language and politics, Linguists, My life, Names, Russian, Spelling, Switzerland and Swiss things, Ukrainian, Zwickys | 7 Comments »
March 11, 2022
Some riffing on yesterday’s posting “Catchphrases for sale”, about this Zippy strip:
(#1) Offering fresh phrases — not already in circulation as catchphrases, sayings, proverbs, slogans, famous quotations, well-known names and titles, and the like — chosen at random
Zippy’s fresh phrases sound like catchphrases — roughly, free-standing expressions that you recognize as coming from a stock of quotations widely known in your culture, which then (if you wish) can be conventionally used to make some point — but are in fact novel. The things called catchphrases are then exquisitely embedded in particular cultures (note: “widely known in your culture” and also “can be conventionally used”).
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Posted in Catchphrases, Clichés, Formulaic language, Holidays, Humor, Language and medicine, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Nonsense, Poetry, Proverbs, Psychology, Slogans | 1 Comment »
March 10, 2022
(I’m struggling with medical issues and sleeping away much of the day, so this posting will serve as a kind of intro to a host of related topics having to do with formulaic expressions. Bear with me.)
Yesterday’s Zippy strip has our Pinhead (accompanied by Claude) selling fresh catchphrases from a van:
(#1) Zippy’s Guaranteed Random Phrases — meaning, in this case, fresh phrases (not already in circulation as catchphrases, sayings, proverbs, slogans, famous quotations, well-known names and titles, and the like) chosen at random; and not, say, strings of (in some sense) randomly chosen words, like can building of lease my out if I zombies get legally my bought (the 13 words of Zippy’s fresh catchphrase in random order) or level righteous quicksand join sedate nine songs murky promise arrange blind man voice (13 content words selected at random from the English vocabulary)
But in the air we can sniff the sense ‘(informal) odd, unusual, or unexpected’ (NOAD) of the adjective random. So we can wonder about expressions like see how they snide and semolina pilchard (from the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus”; or Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh (Frank Zappa album titles from 1970); or runcible spoon (Edward Lear nonsense verse) and slithy toves (Lewis Carroll nonsense verse); or portmanteau jam and Jelly Roll Morton’s saltwater Taffy was a Welshman (a POP chain / portmanteau jam from my 1/31/22 posting “The portmanteau truck”).
Meanwhile, Claude asks, “How do you make money out of stringin’ a few unrelated words together?”
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Posted in Catchphrases, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
March 9, 2022
I’ll start with straightforward typos, where it’s getting the fingers to hit the intended keys that’s at issue, and then work out from there. From Greg Morrow on Facebook earlier today (exchanges lightly edited):
GM: My Dad’s got the 9-inch double-serrated Wüsthof bread knife and it is sweet. I don’t cover it exactly, I just want one exactly like it.
AZ > GM: Entirely beside your point, but I don’t cover it exactly is a beautiful example of a keyboard typo: cover for covet because R is next to T.
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Posted in Errors, Typos, Word retrieval errors | 1 Comment »
March 8, 2022
… and the ferocity of gatherers. In the heat of the moment, it all came down to:
IT WAS IN THE WAY
The Sunday (and so landscape rather than portrait, also Piraro-only) Bizarro from 2/26, posted here for International Women’s Day, 3/8:
(#1) Mammoths, hunter-gatherers, and the power of women (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are, omigod, 13 in this strip — see this Page.)
Apparently, she took the mammoth down with a sharp stick, something she was perhaps gathering as firewood. Wow. Don’t mess with Bess.
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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Mammoths, Movies and tv, Philosophy | Leave a Comment »
March 7, 2022
No, not Linguistics 2, though LX, Lx, or lx often serves as an abbreviation for linguistics. (Meanwhile, when I was a lad at Princeton, the Lx / Ling 1 course — whatever its actual number was — was the Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics (taught by Samuel Atkins, a linguist in the Department of Classics), and the Lx / Ling 2 course was the Introduction to Historical Linguistics (taught by Henry Hoenigswald, commuting from the University of Pennsylvania for the semester).) But in any case, not the second linguistics course (or, for that matter Lx.2, the 2nd release of the field of Linguistics: only the second?).
Instead, Roman numerals for ’62, my class at Princeton. From my 2/11/22 posting “A note of pedagogical pleasure”:
I’m working on a silly photo for the 60th reunion of my Princeton class [May 19-22] — wearing a LXII class cap (provided by the class for this purpose), plus (as per instructions) “some orange and black” (and, because it’s me, a bit of rainbow Pride). Stay tuned for the visual.
Well, the request came in January, and I didn’t get around to fussing about the photo until well into February — my life is constantly fraught (‘affected by anxiety or stress’ (NOAD)) — and then, as I’ll detail below, I did a piss-poor job of it, so here I am reporting on the whole affair in March, well past the time when the photo might be useful, and anyway I’m not going to Reunions.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Clothing, Color, My life, Princeton | 1 Comment »
March 7, 2022
Those would be cymbidium orchids (Gk. kumbē ‘cup’), which have long-lasting blooms during the cool (but not cold), wet, and short days of winter here on the San Francisco Bay. John Rickford — author of the moving 2022 memoir Speaking my Soul: Race, Life and Language — has been Facebook-posting fabulous pictures of the cymbidiums flourishing in Angela Rickford’s front garden, so I’ve been moved to post another of my reports on the orchids in my little front garden.
The somber summary is that of 14 pots of orchids, only three have so far managed to produce blooming plants, and only three other plants are in bud (and might or might not make it to blossomhood). Of the six, none are clones of our original cymbidium, the Jacques Transue birthday (1/22/42) plant:
(#1)
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Posted in Language and animals, Language and plants, My life | 2 Comments »
March 6, 2022
(A posting for my half-birthday, 3/6. When you’re a child, half-birthdays are good things, because a year is a long time to wait till people celebrate your life on earth again. When you’re old and infirm, they’re good things again, because a year is a long time to hope you’ll live till such a celebration comes again. I’ve gotten through another 6 months: a small but significant accomplishment, though frankly it seems mostly to be luck.)
Choosing more or less randomly from the fish in the sea of unblogged postings: this wry Wayno / Piraro Bizarro from 1/28:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.) Like an antique prank phone call
The prank turns on an ambiguity, in this case on fresh as a predicate adjective: ‘(of food) recently made or obtained; not canned, frozen, or otherwise preserved’ vs. ‘(of a person) presumptuous, impertinent’ (with the mutton, preposterously, personified).
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Posted in Ambiguity, Dialects, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, My life, Pranks, Puns | 3 Comments »
March 5, 2022
… aka Ememem, le Flaqueur de Lyon. The artist came to my attention through a piece on the My Modern Met site, “Pavement Cracks Become an Opportunity for Colorful Mosaic Art”, by Margherita Cole on 2/24/22, beginning:
Cracks on the pavement are a common sight in cities. And while most people choose to step around them, one artist is using these gaps as an opportunity for urban beautification. French artist Ememem — sometimes known as “the pavement surgeon”— fills street fractures with dazzling mosaic art, which transforms the decay into something beautiful.
From large potholes to unsightly chips on a cobblestone path — Ememem fills all shapes of crevices with colorful designs.
(#1) An Ememem street mosaic, before and after
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Posted in Actors, Art | 3 Comments »
March 5, 2022
Report on Facebook today from Sim Aberson (in South Florida) about his “daily constitutional” with his husband, where they encountered:
Copernicia macroglossa, petticoat palm, a very slow-growing species
Sim wrote:
When they eventually trunk, the old fronds produce a beautiful petticoat.
Yes, the noun trunk ‘stem of a tree’, verbed, to yield intransitive trunk ‘(of a tree) produce a trunk’.
For a moment, I thought that Sim had salted the verbing in there just for me to find — he knows my tastes — but then I realized that this is the way palm people talk (Sim and Mike are serious plant guys) — because the verb is a genuinely useful one for growers of palms.
An old story: people go around promiscuously nouning and verbing, occasionally for cleverness (and there’s nothing wrong with that), but usually because in one of their worlds — often a very specialized world — the innovative form is a good thing to have to hand.
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Posted in Beheading, Conversion, Language and plants, Verbing | 4 Comments »
