Another quotation from Jane Austen (again, thanks to Chris Ambidge) — this time from a letter written on Xmas Eve 1798:
Chris reminds me that Jane Austen was the daughter of a parish priest, which (I suppose) would put her in a postion to long for release from being agreeable, especially in seasons of celebration..
From several sources on Facebook (but ultimately from the Oatmeal webcomic), this item:
This is accent taking in all aspects of a variety of a language, not just the phonological aspects. In this case, phonology is barely involved (though you can imagine some of it, using stereotypes of upper-class British pronunciation)): it’s all about lexical choices, register/style, and conversational topic (leaning heavily towards the sexual) — obscure, perhaps archaic, and pompously rakish.
(This is another case in which I don’t really know whether the item is to be classified as a cartoon, or what.)
From Ryan Tamares recently, a piece of a Subway Flatizza box. The box woudn’t scan for me, but what it says is Flatizza™: “Cheesy & delicious meets crispy & square” (easily readable as tetrameter, with front-accented feet). Square flatbread with pizza toppings: cheese, pepperoni, spicy Italian, veggie.
Flatizza is of course a portmanteau of flatbread (contributing flat-) and pizza (contributing -izza), without overlap between the two parts.
Cartoon traffic since the five items I talked about in this posting: a Bizarro on passwords, then and now; a Benjamin Schwartz New Yorker cartoon on Canadian eh; a One Big Happy on God talk; and a Zippy on Dagwood (Bumstead).
On May 2nd on the Everyday Feminism site, “Why Grammar Snobbery Has No Place in the Movement” by Melissa A. Fabello, presenting the customary linguists’ arguments that non-standard, regional, informal, etc. variants are not failed attempts to produce the formal written standard variety, but are instead features of alternative linguistic systems, each appropriate to certain social contexts — and moving on from that linguistic point to the wider sociopolitical point that these features should not be used as weapons against those who customarily employ the features; they are not failed citizens because they deviate from the use of formal standard written features in all contexts.
Fabello goes on to quote a moving poem by Aysha Syed on the matter.
Four recent cartoons, on varied subjects: two One Big Happy strips; a Bizarro with a portmanteau; and an ecard-like strip.
In the SundayReview section of the NYT on the 11th (in print), an interview by Kate Murphy with my friend and colleague Dan Jurafsky. The lead-in:
Daniel Jurafsky is a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford. He teaches a popular freshman seminar course called “The Language of Food,” which is also the title of his forthcoming book.
These Sunday interviews are all a single column (on p. 2), with some fixed topics and some designed for the interviewee’s experiences, opinions, and enthusiasms.
Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky offers this passage from the Ask a Manager blog of the 12th:
Managers and the possessive tense
I have a new manager who has placed his desk in the middle of the room, and conducts all of his conference calls in a rather loud fashion. In doing so, he constantly refers to the employees (myself and my peers) as “his” — e.g. “my team,” “my testers,” “my people.”
Am I wrong to feel a bit demeaned that my new manager is placing himself as a king among the common employee? His self-placement of prominence above those that he rules is causing quite a bit of resentment amongst “we the people.”
Elizabeth reports that this is otherwise an excellent blog (offering good advice on managing), but possessive tense is nonsensical as a technical term of grammar.