February 22, 2022
The Zippy strip for 2/20, in which Bill Griffith gets to goof on surf vs. serf:
(#1) Zippy’s title: “Serf City!!”, playing on the song title “Surf City”
panel 1: the serf wakes up in his cell and gets up — the idiomatic phrase surf’s up, roughly ‘the waves are good for surfing; let’s do it’, so figuratively ‘conditions are good for action; let’s get on with it’
panel 2: the serf surfing the net — the (metaphorical) verb surf ‘move from page to page or site to site on’
panel 3: the serf channel-surfing — the (similarly metaphorical) synthetic-compound verb channel-surf ‘change frequently from one television channel to another’
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Posted in Art, Conversion, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Music, Puns, Slang, Understanding comics, Verbing | 3 Comments »
February 21, 2022
On the Language Typology mailing list this morning, a note from Grev Corbett:
A sobering question is “In ten years time, how many people in this linguistics class are going to care about the definition of phoneme, clitic or right node raising?” If the proportion is small, then a linguistics class can be invaluable in getting over messages which will matter in ten years time, such as:
– beware of arguments from authority
– respect the data
– don’t guess when you can measure
– beyond what we think we know there’s a seething mass of uncertainly and ignorance out there
– when we hit the ‘in-between’ cases, we don’t throw our toys out of the pram, but we try to understand the apparently clear cases better
– “… the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.” (Peter Medawar: Advice to a Young Scientist 1979 p. 39)
(You will note that these pieces of advice have a wider applicability than to linguistics.)
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Posted in Linguistic theory | 3 Comments »
February 21, 2022
It starts with my 2/19/22 posting “A regular genius”, on quintessential regular (NOAD example: this place is a regular fisherman’s paradise), vs. run-of-the-mill regular (NOAD example: it’s richer than regular pasta).
Which elicited this Facebook comment from Joel Levin:
I get a sarcastic note from he’s a regular genius, in that one might so describe a person who had done something particularly doltish. I thought I might see a mention of that sense in the column.
And then AZ > JL:
In some contexts I get that note too, but I think that’s just an example of the generalization that any compliment can be used sarcastically, not a fact specifically about regular.
And then a comment from Ben Yagoda, making the Jewish connection: it’s probably relevant that JL’s Jewish and I’m, so to speak, Jewish-adjacent; we’re more inclined than a random person to detect a sarcastic or ironic tone in he’s a regular genius. The tone is available for anyone to pick up, but some of us are predisposed to detect it (and to convey it in our own speech).
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Posted in Language and religion, Lexical semantics, Pragmatics, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »
February 20, 2022
(A little tribute to, among other things, man-on-man anal sex in the Cowboy position, and the facial expressions and gaze accompanying the act — so definitely not for kids or the sexually modest. There are fuzzed-up images below; the photos with the genitals untouched are in a parallel posting “The locked gaze” on AZBlogX today.)
A Falcon Studios e-mail ad yesterday:
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Posted in Ambiguity, Facial expression and gesture, Gay porn, Gaze, Gender and sexuality, Language play, Metaphor, Nouning, Puns | Leave a Comment »
February 19, 2022
The One Big Happy for 3/6/10 (yes, 2010), just arrived in my comics feed:
(#1) Ruthie, to her neighbor James, about the adjective regular ‘exemplary’ (in either of two different ways of being exemplary)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic expressions, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | 1 Comment »
February 18, 2022
From my 2/13/22 posting “On punctuation”:
Encountered recently in an interview, by writer I, of actor X, about X’s approach to their craft. The exchanges below are about punctuation, specifically in scripts; X reads other things, of course, but scripts are the central reading material of an actor’s life, the stuff they use to transform, through a collaboration with a director and other actors, into performances.
… punctuation can be a stumbling block, so they take it out. I’s note at this point:
This seems to be the master key to understanding X’s highly idiosyncratic line readings.
This is David Marchese interviewing the actor Christopher Walken in The New York Times Magazine, in print 2/13/22, p. 14.
Now, on Walken.
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Posted in Acting, Actors, Movies and tv, Punctuation | Leave a Comment »
February 17, 2022
Today’s Zippy strip has Griffy and Zippy inside the Boulevard Diner in Worcester MA while snow falls outside:
(#1) The two men exchange opinions about their two favorite things, which are definitely not raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens: Griffy’s (diners and snow) are more conventional, and are linked to their context; while Zippy’s (Vincent Price and sushi) are decidedly eccentric, and have no connection to the context or to each other
And now the time has come to speak of many things.
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Posted in Actors, Diners, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Music, Phallicity, Vaginality | 1 Comment »
February 16, 2022
Today’s Piccolo/Price Rhymes With Orange, with a perfect XYZ (= XY + YZ) portmanteau:
(#1)
marzipandemic
= /ˈmartsəˌpæn/ marzipan + /ˌpænˈdɛmɪk/ pandemic
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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | 1 Comment »
February 15, 2022
For Valentine’s Day, sexual (rather than social) kisses. And since this is my blog, male-male kisses, which have moved me since I was a child. The spurs being some male-male kisses recently in the news, plus a Daniel Mendelsohn piece in Out magazine, “Gay TV and Me: How my life would be different if boys were kissing boys onscreen 40 years ago — like they are today” on 9/20/12.
First, some boys kissing:
(#1) Cover photo for the YA (young adult) novel Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan (2013), a much-challenged book
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Posted in Art, Books, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Male art, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Photography | Leave a Comment »
February 14, 2022
(for 2/14/22, VDay, but more significantly, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s birthday)
Swooping overhead, clever pterodactyls (EDZ’s totem animals) shriek in delight! For it is EDZ’s Heinz Birthday:
(Heinz used to evoke steak sauce and the like, but for some time now it has come to call up warm thoughts of John Kerry for me)
Your 50th birthday (which came for EDZ a little while ago) is your Gold Birthday. And your 57th is your Heinz Birthday. Whoopee! (In fact “Whoopee once / Whoopee twice / Whoopee chicken soup / With rice!”, as EDZ’s godmother wrote to her this morning.)
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Posted in Holidays, My life, Poetry | 2 Comments »
