Ed Fisher cartoons

Passed on from the Archaeosoup site (via Facebook), this New Yorker cartoon (1/26/63) by Ed Fisher:

This tickles archaeologists’ funny bones. And epigraphers’, of course.

Slexicographic notes: sploshing

Caught in a rerun yesterday, a 2009 episode (season 6, episode 9) of CSI: NY with the investigators checking out underground “sploshing parties”. Sploshing has been around for some time, and has been mentioned by sex columnist Dan Savage, but somehow I wasn’t paying attention.

Surfer lingo

Today’s Zippy:

Earlier strips had God playing Parcheesi and wrestling alligators. Now he’s/she’s out on the boards, wielding surfer lingo: the intensive scubetublar, the Surf Weasels (“a legendary underground surf rock instrumental band” from Portland OR), the surfing move shredding, the gnarl (challenging conditions, like a large wave), hang ten, garshed ‘tired, beat’, noodled ‘stoned, intoxicated’, throwing buckets (making huge amounts of spray), the green room (the inside of a barrel produced by a wave), grindage ‘food’. Totally gnarly, dudes and dudettes!

Lexical gap filled!

Question: Given that an event that is depicted in a movie (or television show) is said to have happened on-screen, how do you refer to an event that is depicted in a comic strip?

A milestone

Now out: Volume V (the last) of The Dictionary of American Regional English (Sl – Z). Volume I came out in 1985, and the project goes back long before that. Now come digitization and indexing (and updating; see below); the lexicographer’s work is never done.

Wordless cartoons, words-only cartoons

In the latest (January 30th) New Yorker, this cartoon by Sam Gross:

Completely wordless — but how much cultural knowledge it takes to understand it! You need to know about doggie/doggy doors (or dog doors, as they’re usually called in the trade), balloon animals, helium, and clowns.

At the other end of the scale there are words-only cartoons, like this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal number (opposing social pleasures and stranded prepositions) posted by Mark Liberman a couple years ago:

Cartoons usually have both a picture and a caption (or speech bubbles), but there are limiting cases in both directions: pure sight gags and slogans presented as cartoons, for example.

More October holidays

We’ve just had the holiday triple play — Hangul Day, Columbus Day (U.S.) / Thanksgiving (Canada), National Coming Out Day, on successive days — and next up is Dictionary Day, October 16th, celebrated on Noah Webster’s birthday. Words running amok in the streets!

Break out those American dictionaries! In particular, NOAD, the New Oxford American Dictionary (3rd ed., out a year ago), and AHD, the American Heritage Dictionary (5th ed., officially released on November 1st).

Though purveyors of porn celebrate holidays of all sorts with sales of their wares (most recently, Thugmart celebrating Columbus Day, on AZBlogX, here), I suspect that they’ll give Dictionary Day a pass.

 

A lexicographic mystery

Now out in paperback, Emily Arsenault’s The Broken Teaglass (2009), an engaging mystery novel with lexicographers Billy Webb and Mona Minot as its protagonists.

Billy and Mona, who work for the dictionary firm Samuelson in Claxton, Massachusetts (a thinly concealed Merriam in Springfield, Massachusetts), discover a series of puzzling citations in the Samuelson slip files — unnecessarily long passages marked as being from the book The Broken Teaglass (which they cannot trace), which appears to be a pulp murder mystery set at Samuelson.

So: a lexicographic mystery (there can’t be a lot of those) with snappy repartee between the principals as a bonus. I’m only partway through, but enjoying it so far.

 

indaba

A while back, a friend wrote me about an Anglican indaba in Canada, going on to explain to me that an indaba was a conference with a serious purpose and that the term originated in South Africa. Then the September 14th Princeton Alumni Weekly arrived, with the story

Princeton ‘indaba’ supports effort
to develop new African leaders

So now, a few words about indaba and its spread.

Bromantic lexicography

A little note on lexicography in the media. As each new edition of a well-known dictionary comes out, there’s a little media blitz; it’s always news that new words are welcomed to “the dictionary” (or that some are retired). So for Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, now covered in many places. Here’s the beginning of the Reuters story:

US Merriam-Webster dictionary adds “tweet,” “bromance”
By Molly O’Toole
Aug 25 (Reuters) – Crowdsourcing tweeters bonding in bromance and tracking cougars earned an official place in the English lexicon on Thursday when Merriam-Webster announced the addition of 150 words to its 2011 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. (link)

(this following on the bromantic cartoon I posted recently).

The article is clear that dictionaries record established usages, not admit them to to some sort of inner circle of wordhood — “Gosh, bromance is a word now; it’s in the dictionary!” — but, still, the attraction of these stories lies in the perceived authority of dictionaries to govern usage. No doubt there are people out there bewailing the degradation of the English vocabulary by the inclusion of bromance, tweet, and the other newcomers in the new Webster’s Collegiate.