Two cartoons this morning with plays on proper names: a Mother Goose and Grimm playing on Simon & Garfunkel, a Bizarro playing on the Big Bang theory and possibly also The Big Bang Theory:
(#1)
(#2)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in #2 — Don Piraro says there are 2 of them — see this Page.)
From July 18th, Jon Lighter in ADS-L:
[1] A television journalist with an English accent reports from Jordan that after the Tennessee gunman “came back [to the U.S.], he drunk drove.” This reveals the deadly seductiveness of the New Syntax: “drive drunk” takes no longer to say and is arguably more euphonious.
Lighter has a long history of scornfully criticizing innovative back-formed verbs like this one (to drunk drive / drunk-drive). His plaint is that in general there’s no justification for innovating new verbs when we already have a way to express the meaning, though the innovation might be defended if it provided a briefer alternative to the existing expression, which is not the case here; moreover, he assumes that the reason people innovate such verbs is merely to sound fashionable, a motive he deprecates.
There’s a lot to be said in response. I’ll start with some background about syntax and morphology and then move to the functions of innovative morphology and some sage observations by Larry Horn.
A new feature in the set of “Linguistics notes” Pages on this blog: data postings, two so far. Each of them has three parts: an inventory of postings on the topic (from Language Log and this blog); “raw data” (a collection of numbered notes on examples (jottings on examples, observed on the fly or taken from e-mail, mailing lists, or blog postings); and an index to the examples, keyed to the numbered notes. All three types of material will be regularly updated.
This week in Antwerp, Belgium, the 14th International Pragmatics Conference. A giant conference, the 26th through 31st, with eight plenary speakers, a variety of panels, a great many lectures, and poster sessions.
I will have a small presence on the program, thanks to a paper my colleague Elizabeth Closs Traugott will be presenting:
Derailing Default Interpretations: Investigating the My Hobby webcomics by Randall Munroe (ECT in collaboration with AZ)
Click here to view the slides: IPrA handout
From the July 18th New Scientist, in the In Brief section, “Zoologger: The sex-addicted tiny lemur with giant testicles” (on-line; in print, “Tiny lemur is best endowed primate”):
“Oh my god! How do they manage to walk and climb without bumping these things on every branch?” asked Johanna Rode-Margono the first time she saw the testicles of a giant mouse lemur close up.
In turns out they don’t. They stumble and bump their balls with almost every step they take, says Rode-Margono, who is at Oxford Brookes University, UK. At a mere 300 grams, the lemur is roughly squirrel-sized. But for its size, it has the largest testicles in the primate world (American Journal of Physical Anthropology, doi.org/54q).
If we had the same testes size, relative to weight, the average man would have balls as big as grapefruits, says Rode-Margono.
The lemurs mate all year round but constant copulation has not saved them from deforestation – fewer than 17,000 giant mouse lemurs are left, she says.
Via Kim Darnell on Facebook (a very long time ago), this poster:
Eight composite names — some N + N, some Adj + N. The question here is the semantic contribution of each of the parts. The poster deliberately disregards the fact that these are common names, not technical labels from biology; and it insists on treating these names as definitions, which is something no mere label can do. And it throws in some tongue-in-cheek remarks.
A Tom Gauld cartoon in the latest (July 18th) New Scientist:
(#1)
Bacteria crossed with children’s picture books.
Following up on my “Name Rhymes” posting (with examples from Cab Calloway and Paul Simon), Mike Pope wrote to remind me about Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1,000 Dances”, with a rather different rhyme scheme involving names. From one version of this song (there are many):
Got to know how to pony
Like Bony Maronie
..
Do the Watusi
Like my little Lucy
..
Out in the alley
With Long Tall Sally
Twistin’ with Lucy
Doin’ the Watusi
In my earlier posting, the rhyming words are adjacent in a line. Here we have rhyming couplets, but still involving names.
Today’s Bizarro, with yet another King Kong cartoon (it’s a cartoon meme):
The movie King Kong has a firm place in American popular culture: the giant gorilla has appeared as a character in a long series of movies and tv shows after the 1933 original film.
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Don Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
xx