April 16, 2019
A celebrated example of word breaking or splitting (from the 1959 movie High Society), giving a joke turning on an ambiguity in how the the first part of the split word is to be understood: on its own, giving the off-color She got pinched in the ass; or as merely the first part of the split word, giving the less risqué She got pinched in the Astor Bar (in one or another sense of pinched).
Then I note that the first understanding has the in of body location, the second the in of event location — a distinction I’ve explored in three previous postings. This is the fourth, with some illumination in it, I think.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Homosexuality, Jokes, Lexical semantics, Movies and tv, Music, Puns | Leave a Comment »
April 16, 2019
A mailing from Joe and the Juice today, with the header
(#1)
(#2) The pronunciation (or pronuciation) given is, in full, ॑AH – SAH – EE॑
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Posted in Errors, Language and food, Language and plants, Typos | Leave a Comment »
April 14, 2019
(The TitanMen TaXXX Day special offer ad for this year is heavy with massive erections from the 2017 gay porn flick Taxxx, so that’s off on AZBlogX. What’s here is packed with crude language about men’s bodies and mansex, definitely not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
The DVD cover, just barely penis-free, for Taxxx:
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Posted in Facial expression, Gay porn, Gaze, Gender and sexuality, Music, Parody, Portmanteaus | 2 Comments »
April 13, 2019
[The body of this posting vanished from WordPress on 4/23/19. I am working on restoring the text. If anyone has pieces of the text, please e-mail me at zwicky@stanford.edu.
If you’re looking for my posting about Louis Flint Ceci and Magrittean disavowals, that’s “A Ceci disavowal” at:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2019/04/24/a-ceci-disavowal/ ]
Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Paradoxes, Poetic form, Poetry, Semantics, Writers | 4 Comments »
April 13, 2019
A NYT food story by Alexa Weibel on 4/8/19:
(#1,2)
I found the food overly precious (Weibel says fastidious), but mostly my eye was caught by the head “A Savory Tart for a Fickle Season”, which seemed to me to be just inviting the unfortunate Spooneristic speech error savory fart for a tickle season (with the onsets /t/ … /f/ exchanged, or reversed).
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Posted in Errors, Language and food, Word exchanges / reversals | 2 Comments »
April 13, 2019
Themes in the cartoons of Mike Twohy: woolly mammoths as gigantic sources of meat, the edgy relationships between dog and cat. Starting with a cartoon in the latest (4/15/19) New Yorker:
(#1) “You tend to overuse the exclamation point.”
The editor strikes. Eager-to-please, enthusiastic dog faces aloof cat.
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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Mammoths | Leave a Comment »
April 12, 2019
For a while now, I’ve been wrestling with the affirmative exclamation and how! (Do you like the soup? –And how!), which I’d thought of as uncomplicated but turned out to lead me down several rabbit holes (my life is studded with experiences like this one). One of which involves the ellipsis-under-identity construction known as Sluicing.
Then, as it happens, there’s a conference now going on — today and tomorrow — at the University of Chicago on “Sluicing and Ellipsis at 50”, celebrating the ground-breaking paper on Sluicing, presented at the spring 1969 meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society and then published in the CLS proceedings: Haj Ross’s “Guess Who?”
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Posted in Conferences, Ellipsis, Extraction, Music, Syntax | 2 Comments »
April 11, 2019
(About art rather than language.)
Through a chain of Facebook friends, this moving piece of land art by James Brunt:
(#1)
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April 11, 2019
Yesterday in the posting “Crunching the festive rabbits” on this blog, Godzilla consumed Peeps. Just as I posted that, the Mental Floss site came through with more thrilling Peepsiana: “Artist Turns 5000 Marshmallow Peeps Into a Game of Thrones Dragon” by Michele Debczak, with a dragon composed of Peeps:
(#1) A Peeps dragon; so far as I can tell, there are no dragon Peeps (that is, Peeps in the shape of dragons, though there also are no Peeps composed of dragons, no Peeps manufactured by dragons, etc.)
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Posted in Books, Clothing, Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Movies and tv, Puns, Toys and games | 5 Comments »
April 10, 2019
Easter creeps towards us
on little bunny feet,
Feet of marshmallow,
pink and yellow feet.
(#1)
Godzilla stalks,
Pursues, savages them.
Crunches their
Fluffy sweet bones.
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Posted in Captions, Holidays, Language and food, Libfixes, Movies and tv, Names | Leave a Comment »
