husband

On Thursday Max Vasilalatos and I fell into a discussion of how we manage to sleep sitting up when health considerations require it. I have a wedge I can use in my bed, and for many months I slept sitting up in a reclining chair. Max volunteered that she had a husband for this purpose, but it wasn’t entirely satisfactory. I was puzzled until she described the object — not a human being — that she used for this purpose. The Wikipedia account (in the pillow entry):

A husband pillow (also known as a boyfriend pillow) is a large, high-backed pillow with two “arms”. It is used to prop the user upright while in bed or on the floor, as for reading or watching television.

A picture:

Glass eels

In the NYT Sunday Review of 3/31/13, a piece by Akiko Busch (author of The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science) on “Why I Count Glass Eels”, about

half-hour increments spent on spring afternoons at the Fall Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River. In addition to pondering the notions of changeability and continuity that watching a stream flow into a river tend to prompt, I was also counting and weighing glass eels, tiny transparent fish only two or three inches long that enter the tributaries of the river each spring.

Which is to say, I was practicing something called citizen science, loosely defined as scientific research in which amateurs help experts gather data.

Here’s a single glass eel:

To come: some more about citizen science, then a bit about the compound glass eel, a fair amount on eels, and eventually eels as food, especially in unagi sushi.

Abutilon and its relatives

Caught sight of in a neighbor’s (walled) front garden: bits of a pretty vining abutilon, in bloom for a good part of the year. Much like this variety (Firefly):

  (#1)

And for several years, just around the corner (on the northwest corner of Emerson and Forest in Palo Alto) there used to be a big concrete planter with a sweet upright abutilon growing in it — until the shrub was vandalized to death, and then the planter as well, alas. The color of this one was much like the plant in (#1); here’s a gorgeous deep red variety (Nabob):

  (#2)

Coming up: discussion of abutilon and the mallow family to which it belongs. Marshmallows and gumbo will eventually appear.

Cyanide and Happiness roundup

Five strips from the webcomic Cyanide and Happiness, with various points of linguistic interest (some incidental to the humor of the strip).

Dance belts

In a comment on my “dress left/right” posting on Facebook, Mike McKinley asks for a posting on dance belts. (We seem to be in the Crotch Zone at the moment, what with that posting, the one on Jon Hamm’s moose knuckle / freeballing, and the one on the NuttyBuddy protective cup — and now this one. Well, these things come in waves; one leads to another.).

The Hamm knuckle

Passed on by Karen Erickson on Facebook (with general agreement from the readers that I would appreciate it), this photo on the HappyPlace site from 9/10/12:

HappyPlace commentary:

Jon Hamm’s penis photographed shopping on Madison Avenue

It was a pretty muggy in New York this past week, and like most penises suffering through the humidity, Jon Hamm’s apparently tried its best to get a little fresh air. Either those are some very thin pants, or the ridges of his member are as well-defined as his jawline. We can practically count the veins. Never has junk sagged with such gravitas. (Also, his dick looks fat.)

Annals of back-formation

From Jon Lighter on ADS-L, this report:

CNN tells of a hockey player who “loves to hard-hit.”

That’s a back-formation from the expressions hard-hitting and/or hard-hitter – synthetic compounds of a type I don’t think I’ve written about here (with an adverb incorporated into the compound, rather than a noun, as is usually the case).

I haven’t found the CNN quotation on-line, and searches for other examples of a verb hard-hit run up against the use of hard-hit as a modifier (with PSP hit), as in

Wintry storm brings new woe to hard-hit Northeast (link)

Can Hard-Hit States Reinvent Themselves? (link)

 

 

rescue dog

Another note on the ambiguity of compound nouns, inspired by a story on the radio about a dog that performed a rescue, a rescue dog with dog functioning like the subject of the verb rescue — that is, with the dog as agent in the rescuing event. But then there’s rescue dog with dog functioning like the object of the verb rescue — that is, with the dog as patient in the rescuing event. Call these the “agent reading” and the “patient reading”, respectively. The agent reading goes back at least to 1901, but the patient reading is much more recent; the OED‘s first cite is from 1980.

The news for libfixes

In the news this morning, an NPR Morning Edition piece by Louisa Lim, “Beijing’s ‘Airpocalypse’ Spurs Pollution Controls, Public Pressure”. Again, the disastrous libfix -pocalypse, just a few weeks after the libfixes -(po)calypse and -(ma)geddon (“hyperbolic combining forms for various catastrophes”) together won in the Most Useful category in the American Dialect Society’s 2012 Word of the Year competition, where hashtag was the overall WOTY winner and the portmanteau phablet (phone + tablet, “mid-sized electronic device between a smart phone and a tablet”) garnered the Least Likely to Succeed award.

The Dingburger bar bat, or barbat

The New Year’s Eve Zippy, with (among other things) a repeated theme of the strip:

The line I’m focusing on:

Do you realize this “discovery” of yours could cause th’ sales of Poindexter bar bats to plummet?!

Poindexter bar bats: Poindexter is just one of those names that entertain Bill Griffith because of the sound; but what about bar bat? Like many things in Zippy, this is surely meant to be absurd but suggestive.