Yesterday’s Dilbert, in which Dilbert confronts his pointy-headed boss:
I’m sorry to say that gamification (a verbing in -ify from the noun game) is not some twisted invention of Scott Adams’s. And then there’s the question of what counts as garbage.
For some purposes, you can function fairly well with material in another language, so long as the topic stays within domains that are familiar to you — like linguistics, say. But when you wander into other domains, especially those that are closely tied to sociocultural conventions, things get messy, even if you stick to nouns; there’s just so much to know about cultural artifacts and customs, for example, and a huge vocabulary to acquire in these areas, in the names of animals and plants, etc.
I can deal pretty well with technical material in French, for example, but I’m easily stumped when it comes to artifacts, animals, plants, and the like. By way of illustration: my daughter gave me a big box of postcards on The Art of Instruction, with images of school materials from the 1950s, from mostly French but also some German sources. The German items have no text, but the French material (from Éditions Rossignol — the name is great; rossignol means ‘nightingale’) is heavy with text. For animals and plants, much of the vocabulary is technical teminology from zoology, anatomy, or botany, and that’s fascinating, but I can’t be expected to know these expressions. However, there are also the common names for animals and plants, and they contain many surprises.
That brings me to the tadpole.
In the letters section of the May 20th New Yorker, this piece:
NEW YORKIANS
In “Draft No. 4,” [April 29th], John McPhee writes that a copy editor sometimes provides a writer with a word like “a rare gold coin.” He recalls how Mary Norris, copy editing one of his pieces, suggested “Mancunians” for “Manchestrians.” McPhee goes on to rank it on a selective list of names for residents of specific locales. Readers wrote in with their own demonyms:
In my e-mail a little while ago, a Princeton University Store ad offering Princeton pinnies — one illustrated here:
The weather is finally starting to warm up and we have the perfect lightweight summer staple for Tigers everywhere – the Princeton pinnie! With a nice loose fit and 2-ply mesh these are sure to keep you cool in all senses of the word! Did we mention, they’re all REVERSIBLE and available in several different styles?!
The term pinnie for such a garment was new to me. But it’s been around for a while, though primarily in British usage.
From an article in Details magazine for April 2013, p. 64, a quote given here without context:
“The house doesn’t even have a complete back. We had to be careful about the budget and determined that we could add the top of the roof in post.”
Add … in post is baffling without the context. Things get a bit clearer when I tell you that the house in question is the ominous Victorian house next to the motel on the set of the new A&E tv series Bates Motel (a prequel to the movie Psycho), and the speaker is Mark Freeborn, the production designer for the series. But that gets you only part of the way; you also have to work out that post is a clipping of post-production in the jargon of filmmaking and video production. And of course you need to know what post-production refers to as a technical term in this world.
Paul Krugman (“After the Flimflam”, about Paul Ryan’s budget proposals) on the 15th in the NYT:
Way back in 2010, when everybody in Washington seemed determined to anoint Representative Paul Ryan as the ultimate Serious, Honest Conservative, I pronounced him a flimflam man.
… Since then, his budgets have gotten even flimflammier.
Some nice morphology.
Yesterday’s F Minus cartoon, sent to me by Jan Freeman:
The food name baguette, in English and French, looks like a straightforward diminutive, derived from a base bague, which would then refer to a larger form of French bread (as in the cartoon). But in fact there’s no French food name bague (and so no English one either). English got foodie baguette from French, yes, but its history in French involved no base bague.
Your typical eggcorn arises when someone unintentionally reinterprets the composition of an opaque expression so that the expression makes more sense, either as a whole (as in eggcorn itself) or at least in part (in reshapings that are “demi-eggorns” for some, like b-line for bee-line); the new expression can then spread to other speakers. But such reshapings can also be done intentionally, deliberately, for any of a variety of purposes.
Here, for example, is a reshaping of tisane ‘herbal tea’ to teasan, by way of expressing a connection to (unmodified) tea while maintaining a distinction between the prototypical tea drunk as a beverage and herbal teas: from the Numi company in Oakland CA:
Are You Numi-fied?
HERBAL TEASAN: Herbal “teasan” is the term we use to describe plants that are steeped like tea, but are made from plants other than the camellia sinensis. Numi works directly with farmers to provide 100% organic herbs, fruits and flowers from around the world for our line of traditional teasans. Naturally caffeine free, these can be enjoyed at any time of day for a burst of flavor and reviving treat. (link)
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.
Notes on my Friday and Saturday, doing things, with the help of Elizabeth Traugott, to get ready for surgery on Wednesday. Friday afternoon at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (family practice and physical therapy), Saturday morning at the Stanford University Medical Center and the Footwear Etc. store in Palo Alto. (Otherwise, a lot of exhausted sleep.) With some linguistic observations along the way.
