For Alan Turing

June 23, 2020

On the occasion of Alan Turing’s birthday today, this release from NPL:

1912 – 1954:  Alan Turing’s work was instrumental in placing NPL at the forefront of computer technology.

Turing had already achieved a great deal before he started work at NPL. While at King’s College, Cambridge, he earned a scholarship, Maths Tripos Part II Distinction, fellowship and Smith’s Prize, as well as writing his paper on Computable Numbers. He then moved on to Princeton University and earned his PhD in 1938, before moving back to Cambridge and starting work at the Government Code and Cryptography School in 1939, where he was an essential part of the work to break the German Enigma code.

After the war he moved to NPL in 1945, and produced his plans for the ACE computer in 1946. He worked at NPL on the ACE until he left (after being on leave to Cambridge) in 1948, not long after writing his Intelligent Machinery paper.

Two things here: the identity of NPL; and more on celebrations of Alan Turing.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Homosexuality, Initialisms, Mathematics, My life | 5 Comments »

Raw, firm, and tasty

June 22, 2020

Back in the early days of the lockdown, there were bizarre runs on things in grocery stores — fabled shortages of toilet paper, paper towels, bleach — all more or less explicable — but also in certain stores at certain times, eggs, all the chicken, bean thread, all the pasta, and one memorable friday, at the local Safeway (where Kim Darnell shops for me once a week), all the cheese, of any kind (plain commercial cheese but fancy cheeses as well), except for some commercial smoked cheese in blocks, which apparently is not highly favored locally.

For complex reasons you really don’t want to hear about, I’m on a high-cheese diet — a while ago I had some mid-morning sharp cheddar and Stone Ground Wheat Crackers — and luckily I’m happy with chunks of smoked gouda, but not as my only cheese, day in, day out. I complained on Facebook, and my cry was heard. Astonishingly, by my old friend the excellent linguist Stephen R. Anderson, who wrote with brotherly concern (from Asheville NC, where he and his wife Janine have retired):

No Swiss person should have to survive on smoked cheese from the Safeway

Steve then conspired with his cheese specialist at the Asheville Whole Foods to send me an emergency cheese relief package, of five raw milk cheeses, all firm to hard in texture, four from Switzerland, one a Swiss-style cheese from France.

They arrived on April 22nd. There would have been volleys of  sounding trumpets, but, well, we were in lockdown.

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Posted in Language and food, Linguists, My life, Switzerland and Swiss things | 3 Comments »

Gay hedgehog

June 21, 2020

A week before Stonewall Day (1969), this celebratory hedgehog:


(#1) Gay Hedgehog design by JP House from Threadless, available in a great many colors

The hedgehog army

We are the hedgehog army!
Rainbow flags are the weapons we wave
In the fight against prejudice, fear, and rejection.
Ready, aim, be brave!

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Posted in Language and animals, Music, Parody, Rainbow clothing | 2 Comments »

Ephebe with a big package

June 20, 2020

(There’s a passing, but highly relevant, note about male genitals, and an ancient Greek male nude bronze. Just a warning for the wary.)

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Posted in Art, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Duolingo’s Latin cheese

June 20, 2020

From Mike Pope on Facebook yesterday, this Duolingo exercise:


(#1) Mike’s note: “Duolingo is really great for learning those phrases you need every day”; word by word: ‘Marcus cheese greatly smells’ (with verb-final syntax)

A little hymn to Marcus as a cheesy comestible:

Marcus smells greatly of cheese

ripe, redolent of cheddar, his
pubic bacteria broadcasting his
manscent to any intimate nose, a
deeply tasty hunk, serve him up
with a young cabernet

Well then: some Latin, and some reflections on cheese and male sweat.

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Posted in Argument structure, Captions, Language and food, Language and the body, Latin, Switzerland and Swiss things, Syntactic functions | Leave a Comment »

Flowers and a watch

June 19, 2020

… not to mention insects. And mortality.

From Hana Filip on Facebook, this extraordinary still life by 17th-century artist Abraham Mignon:


(#1) Still Life with Flowers and a Watch (c. 1660 – c. 1679) — Hana adds: “and a snail, a caterpillar, a thingy with big wings, butterflies …”

Still lifes are almost never just attractive arrangements of objects, but resonate with sociocultural meanings of all sorts; they’re about us. This Mignon, especially so.

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Posted in Art, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

Exulting in Pride

June 18, 2020

This afternoon my grand-daughter Opal arrived at my house (dutifully standing about 7 feet away and wearing a mask (as I was) to deliver two items: the DVD of Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (“It says GUB”), which she’d borrowed from me, oh, three years ago; and a celebratory Pride t-shirt from my daughter Elizabeth, whose bold NSFW message in Pride rainbow colors I defer to under the fold.

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Rainbow clothing, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

Smearing and taunting

June 17, 2020

(Adapted and expanded from a Facebook comment of mine a while back. Some coarse sexual language, notably from American newsmakers, but also enough about sexual bodies and mansex from me to make the posting dubious for kids and the sexually modest.)

Every so often, MSNBC commentator Ali Velshi tartly notes — alluding to the Imperator Grabpussy’s smears of President Barack Obama as a Muslim born in Kenya — that he is a Muslim who was born in Kenya (though he grew up in Canada).

There’s a linguistic point here, having to do with relevance and implicature. Why does Velshi say this? Yes, it’s true, but then “The freezing point of water is 32F” is true, but if Velshi had said that it would have been bizarre, because it would have been irrelevant in the context. So Velshi’s religion and nativity are relevant in the context. Cutting through a whole lot of stuff, I would claim that Velshi is implicating something like “Being one myself, I know from Muslims born in Kenya, and I know that Barack Obama is no Muslim born in Kenya”. And THAT brings me to a piece I’ve been wrestling with some time, about Grabpussy Jr. jeering at Mitt Romney, taunting him by calling him a pussy. (I have a Velshian response of my own to that.)

Hang on; this will go in several directions.

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Posted in Childhood, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Implicature, Insults, Masculinity, Metaphor, Negation, Relevance, Taboo language and slurs, Toys and games, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »

Using poetry in a street fight

June 16, 2020

(An earlier partial draft of this posting was inadvertently posted a while ago. This is the final draft.)

From Ryan Tamares (a Stanford librarian — this is relevant — who got it from other librarians on Facebook) a few days back, this image of a book:

(#1)

I was much taken by the title — who would not be? — and asked about the book. Ryan (who has serious resources for checking on such things) was surprised to discover that no such book seemed to exist. So, presumably a wry bit of language art, but who was the artist?

Indeed it is, and I found the source through a blog posting for National Poetry Month in 2016.

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Posted in Art | 4 Comments »

Pavlov’s novelist

June 16, 2020

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, with a groaner pun on the name F. Scott Fitzgerald (the American writer) plus an instance of the Pavlov cartoon meme:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

The pun is straightforward (it does depend on your recognizing Spot as a conventional name for dogs in English); but though Pavlov isn’t mentioned in the cartoon, it’s all about classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning, and the cartoon makes no sense unless you recognize the allusion to Pavlov, and also recall that Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate (and expect food) on hearing a bell ringing (here, the carriage return bell on a typewriter, which younger readers will be unfamiliar with, typewriters being an obsolete technology — but the cartoon helpfully fills in this bit of typewriter arcana).

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Psychology, Puns, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »

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