Pub(l)ic notice

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?

How ’bout them Cubbies?

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.)

Sarcastic and literal

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!”

 

Three musicians walk into La Côte Basque…

(Only a little bit of language in this one.)

Long obituaries for Elliott Carter this week, celebrating a very long career — he was still composing almost up to his death at 103 — characterized by, among other things, great independence of mind. The New York Times gave Allan Kozinn a huge amount of space to reflect on Carter’s life and works (“Elliott Carter, Composer Who Decisively Snapped Tradition, Dies at 103″), including some anecdotes (it’s easy to catalogue the Pulitzer Prizes and other awards, not so easy to give a feel for what someone was like and what moved them).

Which brings me to a story that was in the print version of the obit but was snipped out of the on-line version. Carter and Igor Stravinsky are joined by a third man…

Calvin x 3

From the Best of Calvin and Hobbes site, three strips: on inattention and question-answering; on phone answering as a linguistic routine; and on indirect speech acts.

Rhetorical questions as openers

Today’s Zippy:

You know what X? is a scheme for opening a conversation, or a new segment of a conversation:

You know what I hate / think? You know what I’m thinking / gonna do? You know what scares / annoys me? You know what pisses me off?

Framed as a question, but not seeking information; after all, how could the addressee know what’s in the speaker’s mind?. The speaker is going to answer the question, in any case, and the most that’s expected of the addressee is an encouragement for the speaker to go on: No, what? or something of the sort.

And then there’s the bonding of men through mutual insult and contention, giving in this case “new best friends”, as the strip’s title says.

As for Lippy, the Zippy site tells us that he’s

Zippy’s twin, yet diametrically opposite, brother. Lippy dresses in black and thrives on misery– his own as well as others. He only enters Zippy’s life for one purpose: to try and make him unhappy. Good luck, Lippy.

Here he’s out on his own, where he comes across the sociopathic Mr. the Toad.

 

 

Apologizing

A letter to the NYT on the 28th, under the heading “Church Abuse Sentencing”:

Re “Church Official in Philadelphia Gets Prison in Abuse Case” (news article, July 25):

At his sentencing for child endangerment, Msgr. William J. Lynn said to relatives of an abuse victim, “I hope someday that you will accept my apology.”

I hope that the victims wait for an actual statement of apology before they consider whether to accept it.

WINNIE BOAL 
Charlevoix, Mich., July 25, 2012

Quite likely, Msgr. Lynn thinks that what he said was in fact an apology. Winnie Boal doesn’t think so.

Knowing

In a comment on my recent Pogo posting, Bob Richmond gave a link to a posting of his (“Hum a few bars and I’ll fake it”) on the joke template that begins with the question “Do you know X?” and has some variant of the “Hum a few bars” reply as the punch line. (Several of these are from comic strips.) The joke turns on the ambiguity of the verb know, a use-mention ambiguity, and the speech-act ambiguity of Do you know? questions.

Ask AZ: I want to wish you a Merry Christmas

From Jim Drew, this query from (oh, alas) 2009:

It’s April, so naturally my boyfriend started singing Christmas songs.  (Who doesn’t?  <grin>)  He was singing “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas” — Julio Iglesias, I think? [almost surely José Feliciano] — and I kept responding “But what?!”  The line seems to demand a followup (other than “From the bottom of my heart”), something like “I  want to wish you a Merry Christmas, but it’s April, so I can’t” or “I  want to wish you a Merry Christmas, and I’m going to do so now” or “I  want to wish you a Merry Christmas, so forgive the repetition in this song.”

It’s fine as it stands. But it’s indirect, conveying a speech act indirectly by saying that you want to perform it (or would like to perform it), and thereby softening the bald performance somewhat.

Dilbert 1: managerspeak

The first of two old Dilberts I’ve recently come across. This one (from 11/14/93) about Dilbert’s response to the annual performance review:

Dilbert wields managerspeak like a pro here, and takes a bow for his, um, performance. As far as I can see, none of the managerspeak is necessary, and much of it is merely ornamental.

In the last panel, Dilbert responds, not directly to the question his boss asks (which is a straightforward yes-no question), but to a presupposition of the question, which is that the boss doesn’t know whether Dilbert’s performance was sarcastic in intent.