Skylunch 4, in Chicago

December 22, 2021

A few years back, members of the Chicago Iron Workers local #1 remade the famous “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932. In 2017 the two photos — which I’ll label Skylunch 4 and Skylunch 1 — were put together in a composite (Skylunch 4+1) on Reddit, which the Chicago Curbed site posted about on 10/17/17.


(#1) Skylunch 4+1: both photos have 11 men, grouped 2, 2, 3, 3, 1; but the tones of the two photos are very different (Skylunch 1 — in b&w, with a hazy Manhattan in the background, with mostly recent immigrant steelworkers — is a piece of magic realism, expressing ambitious dreams of a truly modern Manhattan rising into the sky; Skylunch 4 — in sharp color, with the solid buildings of the 20th century in the Loop constantly in restless revision, with American-born steelworkers, Union guys, in their harnesses and hard hats — is a piece of everyday urban realism, regular guys doing a tough job

I missed Skylunch 4 at the time it first appeared on the net, but in the last few days Skylunch 4+1 has been passed around on Facebook, so I’ve been taken back into the Skylunch world, where the meme has been reworked again and again.

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Posted in Art, Photography | 2 Comments »

The bell of the ball

December 21, 2021

E-mail from a friend I’ll call J, reporting on exchanges on an (unidentified) web site about the photo below, of a carefully printed note on what was said to be a badly parked car (with a Jesus Disciple sticker on it), crucially in the UK (US participants would have been just baffled by the note, in which bellend is used as a crude stinging insult; the rough American affective equivalent would have been asshole — but that’s anus-based rather than penis-based):


(#1) The website exchanges were all about bellend — which first came into widespread use in BrE about 25 years ago in the sense ‘glans penis, dickhead’ and immediately extended to a generic male-insult use (as above) — but which is virtually unknown in AmE; the lexical item has now been scrupulously described in OED3, but the photo above (from a Mirror (UK) story on 11/5/21) is of extremely dubious provenance

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Posted in Language and the body, Taboo language and slurs, This blogging life | 4 Comments »

The Christmas bag

December 20, 2021

On Liz Climo’s Facebook page on 12/5/19, Dog gives Cat a Christmas present: an empty Christmas bag. And that’s just perfect.

Readers of her FB page of course responded with a blizzard of photos of cats happily installed in bags and boxes (where they seek relief from stress in a protected space, and also warmth).

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Posted in Language and animals | 1 Comment »

Masculinity comics 8

December 19, 2021

Now in my comics feed, a 11/22 One Big Happy strip mostly about what home is, but with its first two panels on masculinity for boys (I’ll show you the whole strip at the end of this posting):


(#1) Guy stuff, no glitter — ’cause that would be gay stuff

Another item in my “Masculinity comics” series. From the first, on 10/5/21:

I’ve been accumulating comic strips having to do with boys and masculinity, in particular about what they’ve picked up about normatively masculine behavior and attitudes by the age of 8 or so: the age of the character Joe in the comic strip One Big Happy, who’s the older brother of Ruthie, age 6, who’s the central character of the strip. … To judge from the comics (and my recollections of boyhood), an 8-year-old has an extensive and pretty fine-grained command of the cultural norms of masculinity within his social group.

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Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Area 51 x 57

December 19, 2021

Today’s Piraro/Wayno Bizarro crosses iconic space aliens from popular culture (sequestered, according to lore, in Area 51 in Nevada) with an anthropomorphic Heinz ketchup bottle (advertising itself, on its label, as one of the Heinz 57 varieties):


(#1) This unlikely couple met on the arid high desert of Nevada; but the ways of the heart are inscrutable, so they now live together in a rough cabin in Area 54, along with their oddly tasty progeny — bottled as Out Of This World salsa verde (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Judging faces

December 18, 2021

Very brief note. I’ve spent the day being down about the spread of the Omicron variant and about this morning’s painfully low temperatures, which kept me from going outside at all, and also about a sinus infection, so I didn’t do what I’d intended to do today at all, and this is a minimal substitute.

Going through the Stanford Humanities Center annual report for 2020-21 (a year in which all events were virtual — nothing face-to-face at all, not Fellows’ weekly presentations, not lunches, not the eminent visitors, no random encounters in the building, none of that) and looking at the Fellows’ photos and brief identifications, I turned a page and came on a face that instantly grabbed my attention. And I thought: Nice guy. Gay guy.

And so he was. There were no doubt other queerfolk in the set, but this one just called out to me. I have no idea what things I was picking up on. Here’s his photo and thumbnail i.d. from the SHC:

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Posted in Academic life, Faces, Homosexuality | Leave a Comment »

Eye charts

December 17, 2021

Yet another cartoon meme, the Eye Chart, with an instance in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, set in the fictive city of Metropolis:


(#1) It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s Superman (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

Yes, it’s also an instance of the “It’s a bird” meme. Memes tend to travel together, like elephants, or municipal buses.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns, Rainbow clothing, Signs and symbols, Slang | Leave a Comment »

A collective cry

December 16, 2021

Monday’s (12/13) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with five crows — one of them speaking on a cellphone — in conference:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

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Posted in Dialects, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Paradoxes, Philosophy, Puns, Semantics, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

Cheeky Nishi

December 15, 2021

Two things about today. First, it’s Day 3 of the 12 Days of Commercial Christmas, celebrated on the Daily Jocks site with this vision of playfully phallic briefs (the Hot Dog pattern of Cheeky underwear by Maverick):


(#1) 🌭 🌭 Also available in trunks and jockstrap; and in a Peach pattern (the playfully pygic, or buttocks, counterpart to the phallic pattern above); more discussion below

The ad copy from DJ:

Look tasty in the new Maverick Cheeky Brief! Featuring a fun design of miniature hot dogs, this brief is fabulous and comfortable.  / Made from a soft and stretchy material, the pouch features contrasting piping to accentuate your assets.  / 88% Nylon, 12% Elastane

Second, it’s the traditional Nishi — Japanese for ‘west’ — Day in my household, the beginning of the 5-day drive from Columbus OH west to Palo Alto CA for winter quarter (matched by Higashi Day, March 15th, for the start of the return trip).

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Posted in Holidays, My life, Phallicity, Underwear | 1 Comment »

Count versus Mass in English: How to talk about plants

December 14, 2021

The title of a paper whose first version was a NWAVE presentation on 4 October 1991; revised for a presentation at the Deseret Language and Linguistics Society on 9 March 1995; here in the version of 4 April 1997, reproduced on this blog for its historic interest. It provided the basis for my 2001 Stanford SemFest talk “Counting Chad”, on the count/mass distinction in English, with special reference to chad, e-mail/email, and ice plant; the (detailed) handout for that talk can be viewed here.

The formatting for “How to talk about plants” is rudimentary, not at all elegant, but I hope serviceable.

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