Archive for the ‘Formulaic language’ Category
May 9, 2013
Yesterday’s Dinosaur Comics:

T. Rex maintains he just wants to warn people about doors hitting them — this strikes me as dubious indeed — so he has to rephrase an expression that has been lexicalized as “sassy/sarcastic” (conveying ‘Get out of here!’ or something of the sort) by one that has only the literal meaning he intends. Similarly for “What do you want me to do about it?” (conveying unwillingness to do anything about it) and “Welcome to the real world!” (conveying that things are generally tough in life, so you should stop complaining). Not a fully successful strategy.
On Facebook, Jeff Runner took great pleasure in the strip, noting that he especially liked “the part about words being filed under “sassy molassy” in the lexicon!”
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Formulaic language, Pragmatics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »
April 23, 2013
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Hippy-dippy, artsy-fartsy. Compound-like combinations with parts that aren’t semantically independent but are related phonologically, in this case by rhyme. In addition to rhyming reduplication (as in these cases), there’s also exact reduplication (yada yada, wee wee, chi chi; see this posting for the clever punning invention tako-taco) and ablaut reduplication (chitchat, dilly-dally, tittle-tattle), with the accented vowel varied but the remainder of the components remaining the same. Many reduplicative compounds are negative in tone, as hippy-dippy and artsy-fartsy are in ordinary usage. For hippy dippy in the cartoon, more is going on, since there’s a pun on dip involved.
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Posted in Compounds, Formulaic language, Idioms, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Rhyme | 6 Comments »
April 8, 2013
I was pointed to a classic gay comic by the bibliography in the entertaining and informative The Dick Book: Tuning Your Favorite Body Part (Micha Schulze & Christian Scheuss, Bruno Gmünder 2013, translation of Das Schwanzbuch. Tuning für dein bestes Stück 2008): Ralf König’s The Killer Condom (2009 Ignite! Entertainment (rev. ed.); 1992 The Killer Condom Catalan Communications, translation from German by Jim Steakley of 1988 Kondom des Grauens [‘Condom of Horror’] Edition Kunst der Comics/Ralf König). Aside from the pleasures of the story, there’s some snowclonish interest.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones, Idioms, Art/lit/music/film, Gender and sexuality, Pragmatics | 4 Comments »
January 27, 2013
Back on December 31st, I posted on male photographer David Arnot and his Boy Next Door calendars (for 2012 and 2013), with a full set of the images from the 2012 calendar. On Facebook, Michael Newman then inquired:
On a language point, doesn’t “boys next door,” imply a kind of (pseudo)unposed twinkish look? If so, these guys may be hot, but not in a boy-next-door way.
Michael is both a card-carrying linguist and a gay man, so brings two kinds of inside information to the discussion, both relevant, and, in this case, his critique is right on. These guys might or might not be hot — that’s a matter of taste — but they’re not boys next door, in modern American English, at any rate
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Photography, Technical and ordinary language, Variation | 5 Comments »
January 14, 2013
A display of new crayon colors, from the Miss. Fits Facebook site, passed along by Ruth Lawrence:

Think of it as a complex exercise in sociocultural knowledge. My favorites are yellow and purple, for their grotesque specificity, but the more cerebral among you might favor gray or black.
Then there’s the Eagle Shirtmakers contest of 1961 for naming shirt colors.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Formulaic language, Language play | 4 Comments »
December 15, 2012
Three items with language play in them that came by me recently, in the order of their appearance: (1) the Mental Floss list of their ten best-selling t-shirts; (2) an Ian Shoales piece rushing through “The Catchphrase History of the World”; and (3) some porn flick titles.
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Posted in Alliteration, Art/lit/music/film, Conversion, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Language play, Nouning, Puns, Truncation | 2 Comments »