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.
Posted by Jonathan Stover on Facebook:
Well, it might or might not be genuine, but it’s entertaining. And notice that it has a characteristic feature of many notices prohibiting acts: its indirection. It dosn’t say “Don’t masturbate in the showers”; it tells you instead that doing so violates a code. And then it tells you to masturbate in your own room, meaning, instead of in the showers — you’re supposed to work that out from the context — but it doesn’t say that, so it can be understood as an instruction to go and masturbate in your own room. Now.
I haven’t found anything on the UMass Housing Code, outside of this notice. And I’m dubious about the semen buildup in the drains. I do like the instruction to see your RA with any questions you might have. Do RAs give advice about jacking off?
Today’s Zippy:
So the strip is “about” hair(s), but it’s also “about” How ’bout them Cubbies?
(On a personal hair and holiday note: I’m watching Hairspray for Mothers Day.)
Today’s Dilbert:
There are many cartoons on men not listening to their female partners or kids not listening to their parents, in the root sense of listen; from NOAD2:
give one’s attention to a sound: evidently he was not listening | sit and listen to the radio.
But there’s a specialized sense, in (for instance) a mother’s complaint that her kids just won’t listen, meaning they won’t obey. From NOAD2 again:
take notice of and act on what someone says; respond to advice or a request: I told her over and over again, but she wouldn’t listen.
The boss in the Dilbert strip sticks resolutely to the root sense, and disregards the suggestion in Alice’s plaint that he should act on what she says.
Yesterday’s Dinosaur Comics:
T. Rex maintains he just wants to warn people about doors hitting them — this strikes me as dubious indeed — so he has to rephrase an expression that has been lexicalized as “sassy/sarcastic” (conveying ‘Get out of here!’ or something of the sort) by one that has only the literal meaning he intends. Similarly for “What do you want me to do about it?” (conveying unwillingness to do anything about it) and “Welcome to the real world!” (conveying that things are generally tough in life, so you should stop complaining). Not a fully successful strategy.
On Facebook, Jeff Runner took great pleasure in the strip, noting that he especially liked “the part about words being filed under “sassy molassy” in the lexicon!”
From Lynne Murphy on Facebook, this Cul de Sac cartoon, which reminded her of her daughter Grover:
The child in the cartoon, Alice, is 4; she’s at the stage of bargaining about the exact choice of words.
Lane Greene, on the Economist blog:
Ben Yagoda at Lingua Franca doesn’t like the “historical present”: the tendency to use the present tense to describe past (and literary) events
… Mr Yagoda concludes that describing the past this way is a crutch: “it’s essentially a novelty item. It’s tacky. Give it a rest.” I don’t quite agree, but his description of the historical present prompted this digression on another use of the present tense that he points out: jokes. (More specifically, jokes in the form of a funny story.)
… But that’s not how all languages work. In looking around at joke websites, I found that conventions vary a bit.
(Following up on an account of the gay porn flick Close Up on AZBlogX, a posting about the first scene of the film, involving Trenton Ducati and Jessy Ares — in part about the use of language in this encounter and in part about the the assignment of roles — what I’ve called b vs. t — in this encounter. This is a close call: usually my postings analyzing the action in porn flicks go on AZBlogX, but in this case I thought there might be enough language-related stuff to put it on this blog. You should understand that there’s a lot of plainly described gay sex in this posting, though no photos — they’re already on AZBlogX — so you might want to pass.)
