A lesson in abstraction (and role reversal)

August 10, 2025

Today’s Dan Piraro Bizarro cartoon, in which the roles of ordinary life are Bizarro-reversed:


(#1) Those are living, breathing inkblots sitting in the chairs: a therapist inkblot showing a picture to a client inkblot; where you expect people, you get inkblot entities, and where you expect the picture of an inkblot, you get the picture of a person (in the title panel and the main panel, there are a ton of odd symbols; if you’re puzzled by them, see this Page)

Abstracting away from the details, we’re looking at two instances of the situation XXY:

— XXY: a situation in which three entities — two Xs (a therapist and a client) and a Y — are participants in an event in which the therapist X shows a reproduction of a Y to the client X

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Posted in Comic conventions, Events, Figurative language, Inversion, Linguistics in the comics, Participant roles, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

In memoriam Ives Goddard

August 9, 2025

From Amy Dahlstrom on Facebook yesterday, an obituary for Ives Goddard (who was, oh dear, a year younger than I am) from the Smithsonian Institution:

Ives Goddard III [Robert Hale Ives Goddard III] (1941-2025) passed away peacefully in his sleep on the evening of August 6. Ives earned his A.B. (1963) and Ph.D. (1969) from Harvard University. Following a stint as a junior professor at Harvard after his Ph.D., in 1975 he came to the Smithsonian to work as a linguist and as the technical editor of the Handbook of North American Indians. After he retired in 2007, he continued his research as a curator emeritus.

Ives was a renowned linguist known as a leading expert on Algonquian languages.

… He will be fondly remembered for his dry wit, encyclopedic knowledge of Indigenous languages, generosity to language learners and to other scholars, and passionate support for linguistics and language revitalization.

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Posted in Death notices, Indigenous peoples, Linguists | 3 Comments »

The art and politics of representation

August 7, 2025

The cover of the 8/11/25 issue of the New Yorker:


Amy Sherald’s “Trans Forming Liberty”

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and politics, Museums, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

lx and g&s

August 6, 2025

(Not lox and Gilbert & Sullivan, though that’s a charming idea for a matinee; I’d prefer to think of lx (linguistics) and g&s (gender and sexuality studies) as two gay linguists, Lex and Gus, who go together like, oh, politics and poker (from Act I of the 1959 Broadway musical Fiorello!) — or, more relevantly, like mind and body)

A non-academic friend, new to my net presence, wondered what the things I said my blog is mostly about — lx and g&s — have to do with one another. My immediate, overly glib, reply:

Nothing intrinsic, but they happen to come together in me, along with gardening, Sacred Harp singing, an interest in food and cooking, Mozart and Haydn, and more. Various accidents of history and outgrowths of different parts of my make-up.

Strictly true, but in fact my postings about lx tend to have a lot of g&s content, and my postings about g&s very often end up illustrating points of lx. And sometimes they meld together — as in my recent (from 7/26/25) posting “F-lexicography”, on the semantics of the sexual verb fuck.

So now a quick visit to Lex and Gus’s world, just picking out things from here and there in work by me and my colleagues. Not a systematic survey, just the odd snapshots.

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Posted in Agreement, Chinese, Constructions, Gender and sexuality, Grammatical categories, Language of sex, Lexicography, Linguistic theory, Sociolinguistics, Taboo language and slurs, This blogging life | 5 Comments »

Cheating at golf

August 5, 2025

Recent news: Our Overlord Grabpussy (POTUS 45 + 47) is suspected of cheating at golf. For instance, in the Guardian, the story “‘Dodgy looking’ clip of Tr**p playing golf in Scotland sparks cheating debate: Video appears to show aide dropping ball in favourable position, as golf fans say it is a bad look for the sport” by Steven Morris on 8/1/25.

This is in not even slightly news.

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Posted in Language and politics, Language and sports, Language and thought, Lying | 1 Comment »

Advantages

August 4, 2025

A brief follow-up to my 7/31 posting “Of money, class, and prejudice”, where I told a story about an acquaintance, Johnny, from early in my life, who was blessed with privilege, family money, and social connections, and turned out to be, unsuspectedly, a reflexive anti-Semite, revealing himself while he was dissing me and my family (“they might as well be Jews”). My friend Bill (from summer camp in childhood, then from Princeton, and then from the summer of 1961, when I stayed in his family’s house) served as a kind of counterbalance in this tale, as someone blessed with privilege, family money, and social connections who has been a good friend to me and also has devoted a big slice of his life working doggedly against poverty, urban decline, and racial injustice, just because he thinks these things need fixing and he can do something to help).

At this point there’s a posting to be written on the nature of friendship, involving as it does a recognition, on both sides, of significant disparities between the two of you, which each of you then respect by working around them with as little comment as possible (adjustments often made without conscious reflection), in exchange for enjoying the good qualities the other person brings to the relationship.

In e-mail Bill and I have been looking at these disparities, at how we dealt with them long ago and how we come at them now. Back then, he was somewhat uncomfortable with his position of privilege, family money, and social connection, but is now untroubled by these things, understanding that, as I said to him:

in large part, these are things that just come to you, and the question is what you’ll do with them

and that he had in fact put these advantages to good use throughout his life. Indeed, one of our first exchanges had to be cut short because he was off to demonstrate in the local Good Trouble National Day of Action (honoring John Lewis) — at the age of 85 (Bill is 6 months older than I am, and obviously vigorous in a way I am not).

And then I riffed some on advantages:

privilege, family money, and social connections, along with other advantages on this (seriously incomplete) list (some of them guy-specific):

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Posted in Friendship, My life, Social class, Social interactions, Social life | Leave a Comment »

Comma, comma, comma chameleon

August 3, 2025

Yesterday on Facebook, Michael Israel re-posted an item from The Oxford Comma site (showing the cover of an old issue of Tails pet magazine), with the (in this context) foolish advice “Use the Oxford comma, folks”:

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Posted in Address terms, Books, Conjunctions, Coordination, Faith vs. WF, Movies and tv, Music, Prosody, Punctuation, Quotation, Signage | Leave a Comment »

F-lexicography: the guest posting

August 2, 2025

What follows is a response to my 7/26 posting “F-lexicography, in which I wrote, combatively (and, as it turns out, not entirely accurately):

I argue that the OED treatment of the semantics of the sexual verb fuck is unsatisfactory, not compatible with the actual usage of English speakers for a long time now — apparently because earlier lexicographers, embracing normative views of sexual behavior, posited a single sense of sexual fuck, centrally denoting an agentive act of penis-in-vagina intercourse but with a large penumbra of vagueness, embracing many other sorts of sexual encounters. Then this inadequate treatment was adopted without comment or critique in Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word. So that essentially all the authoritative literature on sexual fuck gets things wrong.

What follows is not the scorched-earth savagery that I would have expected from some of my colleagues, but a calm, thoughtful, and clarifying response from JS, which I reproduce here almost untouched, as a guest posting from him. I have some brief reflective words of my own afterwards.

(To properly appreciate much of what follows, you would really need to look at the (often technical) material reproduced in my 7/26 posting — admittedly, enlivened by a fair number of raunchy real-life citations, but still essays on technical syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Not, I think, impenetrable, but also not especially reader-friendly.)

I had intended to go on to celebrate JS’s character — in particular, as shown in his response, but also more generally — and to situate him in a larger academic and personal context. But recent days have been medically perilous for me, so I’m settling for the bare bones right now, with a promissory note to get on with the rest of the picture later, painting in the humanity.

JS’s response, in between the lines:

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Posted in Ambiguity, Argument structure, Language of sex, Lexicography, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs, Vagueness, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Lost in an uncrowd

August 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for August — and 🇨🇭 Swiss National Day 🇨🇭 (I am of course wearing my Swiss flag gym shorts — with a bright red FAGGOT tank top, to be sure, but I am sporting the flag of my forefathers)

Today’s (Piccolo & Price) Rhymes With Orange strip depends on the viewer identifying the main character, the one who says he wants to go someplace busy and crowded, as a pop-cultural figure known for losing himself in crowds:


British Wally / American Waldo, uncomfortable out in the open, with only one other person close to him

My 8/3/13 posting “The Weinerfest rolls on” has a section on the Where’s Wally / Waldo? books, with this Wikipedia note:

The books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations depicting dozens or more people doing a variety of amusing things at a given location. Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally hidden in the group. Wally’s distinctive red-and-white-striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses make him slightly easier to recognise, but many illustrations contain “red herrings” involving deceptive use of red-and-white striped objects.

So of course he’s uneasy, sitting in such an exposed spot.

Thanks to his distinctive garb, Waldo is a frequent subject of cartoons. My 2/17/18 posting “Tell them you haven’t seen him” has a sampling of 4 of them.

 

 

Posted in Books, Events and occasions, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Of money, class, and prejudice

July 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 Three tigers for ultimate July, while we anticipate the inaugural rabbits of August and the cheese and chocolate of 🇨🇭 Swiss National Day🇨🇭 — we await the edelweiss-bedecked Helvetia!

The territory. Meanwhile, I’ve been re-establishing an old friendship, one that goes back to childhood: Bill and I met at Camp Conrad Weiser, a YMCA-sponsored summer camp in the hills of Wernersville PA (some of these details will become relevant). We were later at Princeton together, and in the summer of 1961 (after my parents had moved on to California, while I continued my job as a reporter on the Reading (PA) Eagle and needed a place to stay), he offered a guest room in his family’s big house on Reading Boulevard in the suburb of Wyomissing —


(#1) An aerial shot of some big houses on Reading Boulevard (a stock photo from an article on Wyomissing as a planned community); there was housing for the rich on the boulevards, with workers’ housing in separate sections of Wyomissing (one of which my father grew up in) and on the side streets along the boulevards, in the adjacent boroughs of West Wyomissing, West Lawn (where I grew up), and West Reading, and in Reading itself

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Posted in Language and religion, My life, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

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