Innovations

The June 9th NYT Magazine was an “Innovations Issue”, with pieces on the histories of devices (the Brannock Device, for measuring shoe size, the Cuisinart, the digital camera, keys, the salad spinner), products (the Band-Aid, diet soda, Liquid Paper), and sociocultural practices (brunch, the dog park, gay marriage, the nose job, prom, timeouts for children, 12-step programs) — plus a few linguistic items, notably the metaphorical idiom glass ceiling and the tv formula previously on …

In most cases of innovations (of devices, products, or sociocultural practices), there’s a substantive innovation, plus a linguistic innovation, the choice of a name or label for it: the device for washing and drying salad greens plus the synthetic compound label salad spinner; the product that covers up typing errors plus the metaphorical brand name Liquid Paper; the practice of offering and eating a late-morning meal that combines characteristics of breakfast and lunch plus the portmanteau name brunch.

On occasion, however, the referent has been around for some time but then achieves prominence when someone provides a label for it, as was apparently the case for glass ceiling.

And in still other cases, the innovation is itself linguistic, as for formulaic expressions like previously on … ‘in earlier episodes of …’

Possessive ambiguity

Today’s Pearls Before Swine:

The -’s possessive is multiply ambiguous, and that ambiguity can be exploited for language play. A few days ago, I posted about the greeting card caption “Here’s your dick in a card” (#3), turning on your dick ‘a/the dick for you’ vs. ‘the dick that belongs to you’. Now we have the the cat’s meow (idiomatic) ‘something/someone excellent’ vs. the (unlikely but possible) compositional ‘the meow that belongs to the cat’ (or possibly ‘the meow for the cat’, also compositional).

Bill is both the cat’s meow and the dog’s ruff.

Idiomaticity

Today’s Pearls Before Swine:

The idiom golden throat ‘a widely admired singing or speaking voice’ is both metonymic (throat for ‘voice’) and metaphorical (golden ‘like gold in value’), but it’s complex enough that someone could not see that. Rat, of course, just turns things to his own ends.

Brief mention: where … at

Mar Rojo recently posted this exchange to the Facebook group The British Grammar Nazis:

A (on the phone): Where are you at?
B: I’m in the car.
A: No, I mean where are you at?
B: Ah, I’m on the M62, near junction 7.

An invented conversation, I believe, but one intended to show that the at can have a use. In this case, it picks out a specific location, as I suggested in a 2012 posting:

My impression is that where … at is more likely to be used expressions referring to specific locations than to broader locations. But I don’t use the construction myself, so my impressions aren’t reliable and need to be checked out.

In a Language Log posting that year, Mark Liberman suggested another difference, having possibly to do with figurative vs. literal uses; even speakers who don’t use where … at literally (for physical location) often use the construction figuratively, in things like “where medicine is at these days”.

(If you’re inclined to comment on this posting, please read Mark’s and my postings first — and avoid reference to the red herring of stranded prepositions (“sentences ending in prepositions”, as it’s often put).)

 

 

A multiplicity of uses

… for the verb look, especially in combination with the particle up, in yesterday’s Zippy:

 

Nick Danger: an appreciation

My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed full of playfulness, silliness, and absurdity, much of it linguistic.

Orange and apple

From various sources on Facebook, but most directly from Engrish.com:

A pun on mandarin, and an allusion to the idiom comparing apples and oranges.

Reduplicative compounds

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.

An unfortunate mishearing

From Victor Steinbok on ADS-L, a link to a HuffPost Comedy posting with this photograph:

Ralf König

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.