September 27, 2025
Briefly noted. From Randy McDonald on Facebook yesterday, a nighttime-atmospheric photo of the Chew Chew Grill / Chew Chew’s Diner, 186 Carlton St., Toronto ON (open 8 am to 4 pm):
All-day breakfast, hot sandwiches, and burgers in a space with booth seating and train-inspired decor
You get the remarkable name, a kind of ludic trifecta — punning (choo punning on chew), imitative (choo-choo ‘train’), and metonymical (chew in the name of an eating place) — plus the wonderful train mural, especially vivid at night.
Posted in Art, Language and food, Metonymy, Onomatopoeia, Photography, Puns | Leave a Comment »
September 26, 2025
In today’s Bizarro cartoon, a hybrid portmanteau, a portmanteau name for one kind of hybrid referent, a referent with an assortment of features drawn from the referents of the contributing expressions; think of triceradoodle (referring to a hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle cross) = triceratops + doodle ‘a poodle cross’ (to be illustrated below):
(#1) Venus flytrap + bear trap = Venus bear trap: the appearance of a giant Venus flytrap leaf, with the bait of a foothold bear trap (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
To come: details about the two contributing referents, the Venus flytrap and the (foothold) bear trap; then a factor that makes this portmanteau especially rich and satisfying, in contrast to the less complex (but far more preposterous) triceradoodle.
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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
September 26, 2025
From Chris Ambidge on the soc-motss Facebook group yesterday, moose and squirrel in West Hollywood:
(#1) Rocky and Bullwinkle, a plaster, fiberglass, paint, and steel statue (1961 original by Bill Oberlin, 2014 restoration by Ric Scozzari), donated by Jay Ward’s family for the City of West Hollywood’s Urban Art Collection
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Posted in Art, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
September 25, 2025
In the new issue of the New Yorker (9/29/25), two monsters stalk the cartoons in its pages: Joe Dator’s hysterically creepy Wine That Breathes (It’s alive!) and Michael Maslin’s Cyclops waiter at work in an intimate little urban restaurant otherwise located in the waiter’s home territory, the hills of ancient Greco-Roman mythology.
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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Idioms, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Myths, Symbols | 2 Comments »
September 24, 2025
Today: Rosh Hashanah ends, and it’s the year 5786:
Originally published in ReadTheSpirit.com (Rabbi Roy Furman’s Read the Spirit site)
Posted in Holidays, Language and religion | Leave a Comment »
September 24, 2025
Creeping up on more difficult topics from my life history (along the lines of my 9/22 posting “Former Gifted Child”), here near-suicidal depression and bit of accompanying PTSD that’s still with me, almost 65 years later. The topics came up in an exchange with an old friend, a colleague in linguistics, and has finally moved me to talk about them on this blog, though the whole story is so long and complex — and throws up provocations to thought that hadn’t occurred to me before — that I’ll have to just jump in and write up chunks of it as best I can, building up the larger story.
The trigger was this 9/15 e-mail from my friend, who I’ll refer to as L (for linguist):
I only now checked your recent blog posts and found a mention of your work at the Reading Eagle [AZ: the afternoon and Sunday newspaper in Reading PA, where I worked from 1958 to 1961], where you stayed on even while studying at Princeton. All that work must have been a lot, though maybe something you handled by not wasting time on the more typical undergraduate frivolities.
And I jumped in with this answer to L:
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Posted in Language and medicine, Music, My life, Princeton, Psychology, Work | Leave a Comment »
September 23, 2025
(entertaining, but totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
The seminar was called to order on 9/21 on Facebook by Michael Thomas, who introduced the key background element, the internet fridge. The participants were three gay men, long-time friends (our shared backgrounds and the relaxed, playful atmosphere are important here): speakers Michael Thomas and me, with Michael’s husband Aric Olnes in a non-speaking role. From the transcript (somewhat edited):
— MT: We [MT and AO] hooked our fridge up to the internet the other day. Here’s a question for the ages: do fridges watch porn while the doors are shut?
— AZ: But of course. And then they fall asleep and dream of abusing electric sheep. And you thought that was condensation on the fridge walls, didn’t you?
— MT > AZ: fridge spunk. just scrape it off for your coffee in the morning.
— AZ > MT: Absolutely. The best jizz there is.
There’s an enormous amount of stuff packed into this — some from the widespread sexual culture of modern America or from popular culture but also some from gay male sexual culture. I will now do some unpacking.
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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Porn, Rhyme, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »
September 22, 2025
Now coming by me on Facebook every so often, this mock ad for a cosplay costume:
There is of course no Spirit costume supplier; the ad is a total invention, serving as a vehicle to heap scorn on adults who were gifted children / (child) prodigies — I’ll call them g/ps for short — in one of the four ways Americans spew hostility towards these kids and the adults they become
I was a g/p, and I need to trust someone pretty solidly before I’ll expose my childhood to them. I’m adept at dealing with hostility towards me as a faggot, but the hostility towards me as a former gifted child is hard to cope with; it feels like a contemptuous assault on a defenseless little kid, the one who became the me I am now. But I’m working on unearthing the skeletons in my life history, including this one, in the hope that my openness will help others.
Now: the topic of g/ps is far too complex to do justice to in one posting. This is just a beginning. And, as always, there’s some background to get through.
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Posted in Childhood, Costumes, My life, Psychology, Reading | 8 Comments »
September 21, 2025
From Andrew Garrett on Facebook today:
— AG: Glad to be in this (new, despite the ostensible date) issue of AL. The press perpetrated an amusing typo in Julie Marsault’s title:
(#1) Graduated consonants
I went right for the typo (quite likely to have been introduced by a spellchecker during the layout stage for the cover [but now see Michael Vnuk’s cogent critique of this idea, in his comment below]):
— AZ: Clearly, graduated consonants are like graduated pearls; they come in a series of sizes: bigger, louder, noisier. I can hear them now.
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Posted in Language and dress, Lexical semantics, Mistakes | 4 Comments »
September 20, 2025
This Chris Hallbeck cartoon came by me on Facebook this morning — a strip packed with matters of science (paleontology, specifically), lexicography and usage (the senses of the noun dinosaur, and the contexts in which they’re used), and pragmatics (the way in which the noun is used in interactions, especially in language about language; in the enforcement of language norms; and, oh alas, in the relevance of things said to the interests of those participating in the speech context):
A Maximumble cartoon from 5/24/14, whose humor turns crucially on the pragmatic foolishness of the (now deceased) professor (in the face of a ravening monster, he stops to insist, irrelevantly in the context, that his companion must use the proper terminology, while the companion flees to safety); and which is based on the usage of the noun dinosaur — for a member of a clade of prehistoric reptiles bearing the zoological taxonomical label Dinosauria; versus, in non-technical American usage, for any dinosaurid creature, resembling the prototypical dinosaurs (many people have seen a family resemblance)
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Context, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Relevance, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »
