On Facebook yesterday, starting with a message from Andrew Garrett (the Berkeley linguist):
— AG: Couldn’t be happier for Leslie Kurke [interdisciplinary scholar of antiquity at the University of California, Berkeley] …, one of the new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in great company! [among them, CNN newsanchor Anderson Cooper; filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer Ava DuVernay; actor, producer, and humanitarian Danny Glover]
🗡 🐉 4/23 St. George’s Day, celebrating the dragon-slaying patron saint of England, who (according to tradition) died on this day in the year 303 — the most martial of the British fab four (David, Andrew, George, and Patrick); meanwhile, thanks to Ann Burlingham, today I also celebrate the superb fairy wren, a colorful little bird of southeastern Australia
The little bird first, then the sword-wielding saint of legend.
[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]
The Bizarro of 4/11, as US income tax day (4/15) was approaching; Wayno’s title: “Ax Deductions” (playing on tax deductions):
(#1) The ax-wielding Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz film confronts (with his characteristic facial expression) a special federal income tax form for metal filers, with an eccentric portmanteau name, Form 10-W40 (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
To come: very briefly, the Tin Man in the film; the contributors to the portmanteau word 10-W40; this portmanteau in a partial taxonomy of types of portmanteau words (it’s a sharing right portmanteau).
The cartoonist is bob, whose full name is Bob Eckstein, and the one-panel gag cartoon in question is a very recent one (from the May 2025 issue of Funny Times) and a pointedly topical one — and I greatly admire it:
bob’s lunch money cartoon; the cartoon — showing a middle-aged businessman who’s been somehow, absurdly, extorted for his lunch money online (just the idea of such a person having lunch money is funny) — would be entertaining in any circumstance, but in a world in which the US president is attempting to use online declarations to extort services and actions from various institutions (universities, law firms, media outlets, businesses), it’s painfully relevant
(For information about everything bob, see his official website)
The flip side of extortion is appeasement. So we are to assume that the businessman somehow appeased that bully by giving up his lunch money. Rather than fighting back — though it’s not clear to me what the online equivalent of punching the bully in the nose would be (but maybe Harvard is showing us the way). In any case, he probably believes be has gained, as Neville Chamberlain once thought, peace for his time. If so, he is doomed; today the lunch money, tomorrow the check at République. It never ends, it just gets worse, he’s on the hook, the poor sap.
So, to come: the English verbs extort and appease, with some lining-out of their meanings in detail, plus an excursus on Peace for / in our time.
(I know, I know, you let a linguist in the house, and suddenly you’re getting Little Lectures on Language. Life is perilous. Just be thankful I’m sparing you a gender and sexuality take on bob’s cartoon. There’s always a language point, in whatever, and there’s always a gender and sexuality take too, you just have to know how to look.)
[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]
Regularly playing on MSNBC, the tv commercial “No Time to Wait”, featuring an earnest and friendly Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (now 78 years old) telling us
I have AFib (/éfɪb/ atrial fibrillation, the irregular heart rhythm)
which I heard as
I have aphids /éfɪdz/
(You can watch the commercial here.)
A screen shot from the commercial; Kareem is holding a basketball just in case you’ve forgotten who he is
It’s immensely pleasing to me that he’s still alive and is doing good things.
[Naked men making love, so not to everyone’s taste (but so carefully done it can appear on a book cover, so no alarm bells)]
Briefly noted: a clever photo (attributed on Pinterest to male photographer Tom Bianchi) that pairs the two primary objects of gay desire with two soft drink vending machines: a Pepsi butt and a Coke basket:
(#1) And Coke Man offers a bonus of oral pleasure
Pinterest shows me this photo roughly once a day. It’s far from a typical Bianchi: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Bianchi in which his (male) subjects are completely clothed (his Wikipedia entry just describes him as “an American writer and photographer who specializes in male nude photography”).
[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]
“… and a shallow nonstick skillet”: Wayno’s title for today’s Bizarro egg-related cartoon:
(#1) Humpty Dumpty has fallen and can’t get up; it’s omelet time in Wonderland (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Ordinary chicken eggs are currently going for $12 a dozen at my local Safeway, so HD would be worth a small fortune.
The Peanuts strip of 2/16/58, posted on Facebook today by Jeff Bowles:
(#1) Schroeder on piano, Snoopy on violin, with a dance interlude; Lucy is dubious about the value of the performance
From Emily Menon Bender on Facebook today, with a bit of the menu at the restaurant Medici in Normal, in Normal IL:
[with EMB’s comment:] I’d keep making these puns too if I lived here
This following on a passing reference in my posting yesterday “Me lookee, no findee” to Kutztown State Normal School (as it was when I was a child), a state-supported teachers college in Kutztown PA, now Kutztown State University (that’s Kutz rhyming with puts, by the way; if you pronounce it to rhyme with putts, then in Pa. Dutch English, you’re talking about Barftown)
And with #1 echoing a famous headline announcing:
Oblong Man Marries Normal Woman
Oblong is a village in Crawford County IL. And Normal (as in #1) is a town in McLean County IL.
A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “One of these things is not like the others”, in which my (now AI-enhanced) Google search for
“African American linguists”
produced a display of 9 people (plus a further display of 4 others) which was instantly remarkable because the person in the position of pre-eminence in the first display, Walt Wolfram, was not (unlike all the others) African American / Black, but notably German American / white. WW is an amazing, prolific scholar of African American English and its uses and of African American communities, and he is a champion of those communities, certainly deserving of huzzahs and celebratory parades and official recognitions with laurel wreaths and gold-embossed certificates and all that stuff, but he’s unquestionably white — as, in fact, the photo accompanying his name in that display makes clear. (I’ll add that he doesn’t “talk Black” either. His everyday variety of English is working-class white Philadelphia, tenaciously maintained throughout years of formal education; it’s one of his badges of identity.)
