Tea Party verbing

From Gail Collins’s op-ed column “Senators Bearing Arms” yesterday, a verbing of the adjective/noun primary, as in a primary election, or simply a primary: being primaried by the Tea Party.

The inevitable verbing

On ADS-L on the 8th, Garson O’Toole reported two instances of a new verb drone ‘attack with a drone, kill by a drone’. The verbing was inevitable, given the current controversy over drone attacks, especially on US citizens abroad.

England and Wales

Teaser on the front page of the NYT yesterday:

British Victory for Gay Unions

The House of Commons voted to legalize same-sex marriage in England and Wales, a sign that the bill is assured of passage as it advances. Still, dissent was a setback for the prime minister.

Note: England and Wales, not the UK. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legislatures.

So if you’re counting countries with same-sex marriage, England-and-Wales will count as one. But a same-sex marriage bill is working its way through the Commons in Scotland; that would be a second country. No forward movement in Northern Ireland, however.

 

not publicly acknowledged

Stories of secrets kept until death: Ed Koch’s homosexuality, Strom Thurmond’s fathering an interracial child. Neither publicly acknowledged during their lives.

Sylvia

More adventures on the comics pages, this time in Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia, from the 2010 retrospective on 30 years of the strip, The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama (with pointed commentary by Hollander on the already pointed cartoons).

From Jules Feiffer’s foreward:

For thirty years, long before Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, my friend Nicole Hollander has been one of our nations’s leading satirists. Than mean that she is in the business of telling the truth and making it funny. She is right about almost anything. And because she is right, and she is funny, she has no power whatsoever.

George Booth

This week’s featured Condé Nast artist is New Yorker cartoonist George Booth, a master of the absurd in the everyday. And famous among linguists for his 1975 story strip “Ip Gissa Gul”:

(Click on the image to embiggen it.)

Ziegler on toast

Two cartoons about toast from The Essential Jack Ziegler (ed. by Lee Lorenz, 2000): the Bureau of Missing Toast and The Scream in toast:

Toast is so ordinary, so everyday, so uncomplicated, that making anything of it is likely to be at least a bit funny.

Reality denialism

Yesterday’s Scenes From a Multiverse, entitled “Reality Denialism”:

Aside from the references to the current U.S. presidential campaign, there’s the entertaining kittenpocalypse, with the libfix -pocalypse.

Windmills and giants

In a comment on my “Sign of the times” posting yesterday, The Ridger described a Partially Clips cartoon on the theme of windmills and giants. The cartoon itself, from 2/10/09:

This can be read as illustrating a contrast in personality types, or in political stances, or both.

As is usual with this strip, the background image is the same in each panel. What differs is the text and how it’s placed.

 

Pronouncing names

In the NYT on Saturday, a front-page piece (“Missouree? Missouruh? To Be Politic, Say Both”, by Sarah Wheaton) about the pronunciation of names, with a political connection.