Today’s Dinosaur Comics:
A lot of stuff thrown in there. Soon T-Rex will have been being vindicated (in the future perfect continuous — a k a progressive — passive), bitches. Meanwhile, he claims precedence over Strunk & White.
The hedonistic monks of Mount Syntax
October 11, 2012More medical talk
October 10, 2012The osteoarthritis saga continues; the medical appointments in this drama began 3 weeks ago today (first posting here), and the latest was yesterday, with a doctor in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Palo Alto Medical Center outpost in Redwood City. As before, there are linguistic footnotes to this personal history — one about ordinary language, one about the language of medicine.
A tribute to Life in Hell
October 10, 2012Tim Wilson on Facebook points me to a Slate piece “To Hell With You, Matt Groening: A tribute to Life in Hell, with comics by Alison Bechdel, Tom Tomorrow, and others.” by James Sturm, celebrating 35 years of Life in Hell: Read the rest of this entry »
Andy Singer
October 10, 2012Encountered yesterday, this cartoon by Andy Singer:
(#1)
The cartoon plays on the political slogans “Life begins at conception” and “Abortion is murder”, and incorporates a powerful cultural prejudice against masturbation (on the grounds that it’s non-procreative sex, and therefore unproductive, wasted effort — and, if you adhere to certain religious beliefs, against God’s law).
Source or object?
October 9, 2012From Rick Gladsone and Anne Bernard, “U.S. Officials Say Hezbollah Helps Syria’s Military”, NYT 8/11/12, p. A1:
The accusations, which went beyond previous American claims about Hezbollah support for Syria’s government, seemed intended to counter Obama administration critics who say the White House is not doing enough to support the Syrian opposition now that diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict are paralyzed.
in lieu of
October 8, 2012From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, a report of mail she’d gotten from someone who used in lieu of to mean ‘because of’ — presumably a malaprop for in view of. Turns out to be pretty common.
Brief mention: words and things
October 8, 2012Daniel Mendelsohn in the New Yorker of April 16th, in “Unsinkable” (p. 66):
The aura of significance that attends the Titanic’s fate was the subject of another, belated headline, which appeared in a special publication of the satirical newspaper the Onion, in 1999, stomping across the page in dire block letters:
A figure in which metaphor stands for the ship. Iceberg sinks metaphor!
Mendelsohn continues:
The Onion’s spoof gets to the heart of the matter: unlike other disasters, the Titanic [note metonymy: participant in the disaster for the disaster] seems to be about something. But what?
A parable about the scope, and limits, of technology? A morality tale about class? A foreshadowing of the First World War? Or what?
Complex reversal: confuse
October 8, 2012From the weekly report (10/5/12) of the Bowman International School in Palo Alto, this note from a student in room 5:
The sand tiger shark lives near the shore. Sometimes they [sand tiger sharks] confuse surfers for seals and attack them.
This is certainly non-standard, but there are two distinct possible sources of the problem:
the choice of verb: confuse rather than, say, take or mistake (mistake surfers for seals); or
the choice of preposition: for rather than with (confuse surfers with seals)
What remains constant in all the examples so far is the assignment of participant roles (which I’ll refer to as RIGHT and WRONG, indicating correct and incorrect identification, respectively) to non-subject syntactic arguments (direct object and oblique object); all fit the template for “misidentification verbs”:
V DirObj:RIGHT P OblObj:WRONG
That is, the sharks are confronted with surfers (RIGHT), but perceive them as seals (WRONG), whether the event is packaged syntactically as (A) mistake surfers for seals, (B) confuse surfers with seals, or (C) confuse surfers for seals.
C-type examples (with a V of type A and the P of type B) are by no means rare, and there’s more to come.
Brief mention: the Cool Mom Test
October 7, 2012Just caught, a Swiffer commercial in which a mother wields her Swiffer to good effect, starts taking a Cool Mom Test, and asks her two kids,
Do you guys think I’m mom-tacular or mom-trocious?
(they roll their eyes pityingly).
Modest number of hits for mom-tacular, with the libfix -tacular (recorded by Grant Barrett in 2005, with some forms going back to 1958). But mom-trocious looks unique, still at the portmanteau stage, but set up by mom-tacular.
Pulpit Freedom Sunday and Bible banners
October 7, 2012Today some U.S. churches engaged in a type of civil disobedience; see “Pulpit Freedom Sunday: Pastors Challenge IRS Ban On Political Endorsements” (HuffPo piece by Lily Fowler on the 5th):
As part of “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” on Oct. 7, religious leaders across the country will endorse political candidates — an act that flies in the face of Internal Revenue Service rules about what tax-exempt organizations, such as churches, can and cannot do.
Also on the 5th, the NYT reported on a school story, in “Cheerleaders With Bible Verses Set Off a Debate” by Manny Fernandez, which begins:
Kountze, Tex. — The hand-painted red banner created by high school cheerleaders here for Friday night’s football game against Woodville was finished days ago. It contains a passage from the Bible — Hebrews 12:1 — that reads: “And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.”
That banner, and other religious-themed signs made by the high school and middle school cheerleading squads in recent weeks, have embroiled this East Texas town in a heated debate over God, football and cheerleaders’ rights.
The two episodes illustrate the tensions in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or …