This week’s remarkable photo

April 8, 2015

From a memoir piece by Sissela Bok in the Spring 2015 issue of The American Scholar, “Meeting the Mystics: My California encounters with Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley”, about a time in her life shortly after she married Derek Bok (in 1955) and settled in the United States. Through her husband, she met a set of mystics, rebels, and countercultural icons. A photo from January 1960 in Southern California:

Left to right: Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, Sir Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley, and Linus Pauling

Rebels all, mystics, LSD explorers, and so on. All, of course, men. And all in suits; well, the ’60s had not really gotten underway yet. You can tell that Heard was the true rebel because he’s the only one with a beard.

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

Stan Freberg

April 8, 2015

In today’s NYT, an obit by Douglas Martin, “Stan Freberg, Madcap Adman and Satirist, Dies at 88”:

Stan Freberg, a humorist whose sprawling imagination fueled a multifaceted career that included pretty much inventing the idea of using satire in commercials, died on Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif.

… Mr. Freberg was a hard man to pin down. He made hit comedy records, voiced hundreds of cartoon characters and succeeded Jack Benny in one of radio’s most prestigious time slots. He called himself a “guerrilla satirist,” using humor as a barbed weapon to take on issues ranging from the commercialization of Christmas to the hypocrisy of liberals.

Freberg on a 1957 comedy album. Photo: Capitol Records.

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Posted in Death notices, Humor, Language in advertising, Music | Leave a Comment »

More pairings on AZBlogX

April 8, 2015

Over the years, I’ve posted (on AZBlogX and this blog) a number of paired photos, in several categories (some labeled as “bookends”), almost all supplied by Chris Ambidge. The most recent crop, on my X blog on the 6th, has three pairings: two of men clothed vs. unclothed, one of a (naked) young man in a front vs. a rear shot.

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Photography | Leave a Comment »

Vegan diners and gay opponents

April 8, 2015

Into the world of composite expressions, in particular N + N compounds and Adj + N phrases: vegan diner in today’s Bizarro, gay opponents in recent news stories. The first turns out to be pretty straightforward, but the second is more complex. The Bizarro:

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Posted in Compounds, Linguistics in the comics, Modification | Leave a Comment »

Allusion in The Economist

April 7, 2015

Every so often I post here on how some publications (science publications, especially, but plenty of others as well) indulge in various kinds of language play in titles, captions, lead sentences, etc. They are “ludic locales”. Now on the 4th, in the Economist, in a report on Peru: “A jarring defeat: The loneliness of Ollanta Humala”, the story leads with:

To lose one prime minister might be considered a misfortune, but to lose six in less than four years in office, as Peru’s president, Ollanta Humala, has done, must be seen as carelessness.

Ah, that would be Oscar Wilde, in The Importance of Being Earnest. Lady Bracknell, in Act I, to Jack Worthing.

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High Attachment in the NYT

April 7, 2015

In an NYT opinion column on Sunday (the 5th), a Jenny Wilkinson piece about her sexual assault at U.Va., including this:

The weak punishment meted out to the student whom the university found responsible for assaulting me doesn’t seem to have been unusual; as far as I know, no one has been expelled after being found responsible for sexual assault by the university.

The crucial part is bolfaced: in the intended reading, the VP being found responsible for sexual assault is modified by by the university (alternatively: being found responsible by the university for sexual assault). But in fact the boldfaced material has another potential reading, in which by the university modifies sexual assault. This would have the modifier by the university parsed with preceding material by Low Attachment (LA), and LA is, ceteris paribus, the default parsing, but in this case that reading is preposterous, so High Attachment (HA) applies, and presumably readers don’t even notice the possibility of LA.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Modifiers, Parsing | Leave a Comment »

Mansplaining in the comics

April 7, 2015

Today’s Dilbert has Alice exploding at the mansplainers in her department:

The pointy-headed boss can’t help mansplaining mansplaining.

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Posted in Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »

Edelweiss

April 7, 2015

Posting about Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music recently brought me to “Edelweiss” (the song) and Edelweiss (the plant).

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Posted in Language and plants, Music | 2 Comments »

Specialists in International

April 7, 2015

Slogan on the side of a DHL truck in Palo Alto:

DHL — YOUR SPECIALISTS IN INTERNATIONAL SINCE 1969

The adjective international is serving as a noun here, conveying something like ‘international shipping’ or ‘international mail’ or ‘international delivery’. Informally, this is “nouning by truncation”, but the implicit noun head isn’t uniquely identifiable.

Two pieces of background here: on “nouning by truncation” and on the DHL company and its slogans.

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Posted in Conversion, Language in advertising, Names, Nouning, Truncation | Leave a Comment »

snit

April 6, 2015

This morning’s One Big Happy:

Once again, Ruthie copes with vocabulary she doesn’t know — in this case, the word snit in in a snit, where she has to figure out which of the many senses of the preposition in is at play here.

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Posted in Errors, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Words | Leave a Comment »

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