Three penultimate comments

Comments on my posting on penultimate (in penultimate Frisbee) took three directions: a comic association with antepenultimate; complaints about a relatively recent non-standard use of penultimate (to mean ‘absolutely final, absolutely the best’); and complaints about using ultimate and unique and other so-called “non-gradable” adjectives as gradables (modifiable by degree adverbials).

Passions

Today’s Dilbert:

Wally is conflating passion ‘enthusiasm, zeal’ (as in “passion is necessary for success”) and passion ‘love or desire’ — probably with malice aforethought.

Define “garbage”

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.

A multiplicity of uses

… for the verb look, especially in combination with the particle up, in yesterday’s Zippy:

 

Nick Danger: an appreciation

My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed full of playfulness, silliness, and absurdity, much of it linguistic.

Telling jokes

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.

Manliness and money

Among today’s cartoons, a Zippy on manliness and a Bizarro on slang for money:

nothing special

Today’s Zippy:

A flood of synonyms: mundane, quotidian, ordinary, normal, neutral, commonplace, typical, middling, average, and in the title, okay (conveying ‘just okay, nothing special’). You can only get so much into a three-panel strip, but there are a number of other possibilities.

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).

Another split antecedent dangler

Back in January I looked at a racy dangler in final position in its clause, where the referent for the missing subject was picked up from a combination of the subject of the clause and an oblique object in the clause; the antecedent was split between two different elements in the clause. Now this morning in a KQED Perspectives column by Steven Moss (“Transformation”), another split-antecedent dangler, less racy and now in clause-initial position.