hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 1

April 29, 2025

👨‍🏭 👨‍🏭 penultimate April: in only two days, a gaggle of rabbits, strewing lilies of the valley promiscuously, will dance around an International Workers pole; be prepared

Meanwhile, Masayoshi Yamada, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics in Shimane University, in western Honshu (author of, inter alia: A Dictionary of Trade Names and A Dictionary of English Taboo and Euphemism), has appealed to me by e-mail on 4/24 with another puzzle from cartoons in English (his last query, reported on in my 9/25/24 posting “This idiom has had the radish”, had to do with the idiom have the radish in a Zits strip). This time it’s about one of Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse strips, (re)published on 6/19/24:


There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented -illions words; and the thing MY was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions

After some background words about the strip, I’ll take up these three things one by one, expanding on things I wrote to MY.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Mathematics, Onomatopoeia, Sound symbolism | 6 Comments »

Today’s eccentric character

April 28, 2025

If this blog were the New Yorker, this posting would be a Talk of the Town piece (after the first one, which is an editorial), a sketch of some intriguing person. Today’s eccentric character on this blog (other than me) is Mark Saltveit. In brief, from Wikipedia, much extended:

Mark Saltveit (born 1961 [Harvard ’83]) is a Vermont-based [but Oregon native] stand-up comedian, palindromist and writer, known for being the first World Palindrome Champion [AZ: also chronicler of the San Francisco 49ers (that’s American football, for my readers around the world) and scholar of Daoism (aka Taoism); and, he now — 4/28 — tells me he’s also interested in ancient coins].


MS (photo from him)

In more detail, from his WiX site:

Staff writer, NinersNation.com (leading San Francisco 49ers website)
Professional standup comedian, since 1999
Editor, The Palindromist Magazine
The first ever World Palindrome Champion (2012-2017)
Editor, Taoish.org (a website of contemporary, secular Daoism)

But why, you wonder, am I writing about him today? Because he wrote me yesterday about the TG/TB (“That’s Good” / “That’s Bad”) joke routine that I first talked about here in a 7/22/19 posting “Oh that’s good” — citing an ancient Chinese forebear of the routine. So: TG/TB back in the mists of time, though it came up on this blog through the American tv show Hee Haw.

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Posted in Jokes, Movies and tv, People, Prosody | Leave a Comment »

Valentine Marx redistributes

April 27, 2025

❤️ ❤️  In the great pile of things on my work table, a silly Valentine’s Day card from Ann Burlingham (from back in February, as is calendrically appropriate), a Guttersnipe Press card (“purveyors of fine, anti-social media since 2012”) showing a little-known member of the Marx family, Karl’s love child Valentine Marx, with an amatory reshaping of his father’s dictum on the redistribution of wealth, From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs:


Give me all your love, as Whitesnake said it in 1987 (official music video here)

 

Posted in Holidays, Jokes, Music, Quotations | Leave a Comment »

Hallucinated proverbs

April 26, 2025

In the Business section of WIRED Daily, a piece by Brian Barrett on 4/23/25 with the headers:

‘You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice’: Google Failures Highlight a Fundamental AI Flaw

Google’s AI Overviews feature credible-sounding explanations for completely made-up idioms

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Posted in AI, Formulaic language, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Proverbs, Slogans | 2 Comments »

Suzerains of sheldrake

April 26, 2025

Today’s (4/26) morning names: sheldrake (or Sheldrake) and suzerainty. I have no idea how the gorgeous big duck (or the parapsychologist) got into my head; suzerainty might have popped up because of its prominent medial /z/ — I am ever Z-alert — though I don’t recall having seen it in print recently (I don’t think I’ve ever heard it spoken), so it might have come to me just for its oddness. The workings of my mind are often mysterious.

(The music playing at the time — well into a performance of Handel’s Messiah — provides no obvious source for any of these words.)

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Posted in Alliteration, Language and animals, Language and politics, Morning names, Music, Names, Nicknames | 2 Comments »

Rest day

April 25, 2025

🐧 🐧 🐧 whoop whoop whoop it’s World Penguin Day, 4/25, and I have been pleasantly besieged with penguiniana from friends; as my contribution to the day, I offer a t-shirt with a double strength gayguin on it;


The bird’s coloration is rainbow-gay, and then it’s waving a rainbow flag as well

And then there’s the reductive mid portmanteau gayguin (gay + penguin), like liger, brunch, or smog — but with a whole word, rather than an initial word-part, as its first contributor (see my 4/22/25 posting “The tin portmantax man” on types of portmanteaus)

Today was supposed to be a rest day, in between a Thursday visit from my caregiver J (in which we got lots of housework done) and weekend work on a ton of blog stuff that has piled up dramatically. And a chance to tell you about the improvements in many small but significant aspects of my medical state, which my pedicurist and my caregiver (who observe me closely) have commented on with some amazement and delight. But all that was blanked out by endless hassles in trying to fix business stuff, by emergency academic matters, and by really foul weather (including a long spell of low barometric pressure that made it hard to use my hands at all).

Despite my not being able to get around to doing any of the things I’d planned for the day, I found pleasure in other, unexpected activities. Apparently, unreasonable equanimity in the face of unpleasantness goes along with the mysterious improvements in my physical state (J thinks that the attitude shift caused the physical improvements, and he might be right). But now I really have to get dinner and go to bed.  See you tomorrow.

 

Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, My life, Penguins, Portmanteaus, Rainbow | 1 Comment »

AmAcad 2025

April 24, 2025

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]

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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Linguists, Stanford | 3 Comments »

Saint George and the superb fairy wren

April 23, 2025

🗡 🐉  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.

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Posted in Art, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language and religion | 2 Comments »

The tin portmantax man

April 22, 2025

[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).

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Posted in Language play, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus | 3 Comments »

bob’s extortion / appeasement cartoon

April 21, 2025

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 RĂŠpublique. 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.)

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Posted in Argument structure, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics | Leave a Comment »

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