Joe Clark has forwarded this item to me several times, in the Christmas season, but I seem not to have afflicted my readers with it yet. It’s an exercise in singing the tune to “Jingle Bell Rock” (already an annoying “holiday song”) using only the words jingle, bell, and rock (plus some spoonerisms). This is something of a challenge, even if you have the words in front of you.
Here’s a rendition of “Jingle Rock Bell” on Joe’s personal blog, along with a transcription. Happy holiday singing.
From Will Leben, via the Stanford linguistics department newsletter (on November 6), a pointer to the entertaining site Cheese or Font?, where you are given proper nouns and asked to decide whether they refer to cheeses or to fonts. Something of a challenge.
Lots of people have noticed that names of diseases and names of plants are often very similar, but I don’t know if anyone has put together a Plant or Disease? test.
For visual material, there are several X or Y? tests and games out there. For several years, various versions of Gay or Eurotrash? have been available on the net, often billed as a test of gaydar. The player is offered a set of photos (usually of young men) and asked to decide whether the person in the picture is gay or Eurotrash.
(In case you’re not familiar with Eurotrash, or eurotrash, according to the March 2009 draft revision of the OED’s Euro- entry, the term is originally and chiefly U.S., is “depreciative”, and refers to “rich European socialites collectively, esp. those living or working in the U.S.” The deprecatory tone comes from a suggestion that these socialites are living an idle and dissipated life. The OED has cites from 1980 on.)
Then there’s the series of X Face or O-Face? tests in Details magazine a few years ago, reported on in a Language Log posting here. The player is given a display of faces, some of them of people in a moment of exertion or great emotion (for instance, athletes, American Idol contestants, guitarists), some of them of people at the moment of sexual climax. The player’s task is to decide which photos show X Face (Game Face, Idol Face, Guitar Face) and which O-Face.
(Why, you might be wondering, did the topic come up on Language Log? Because of the term O-face, which seems to be a relatively recently coined, or at least recently popular, alternative to the older term come face. Details on Language Log.)
This is very old news, but I just came across the topic for the first time in the pages of Funny Times (October 2009), in Chuck Shepherd’s “News of the Weird”:
Donaldism — Donald Duck may be a lovable icon of comic mishap to American youngsters, but in Germany, he is wise and complicated and retains followers well past their childhoods. Using licensed Disney storyline and art, the legendary translator Erika Fuchs created an erudite Donald, who often “quotes from German literature, speaks in grammatically complex sentences, and is prone to philosophical musings,” according to a Wall Street Journal dispatch.
Not just Germany (see the detailed Wikipedia page), though the 32nd annual convention of the German Organization for Non-Commercial Followers of Pure Donaldism (the German name has the acronym DONALD) was held recently in Stuttgart.
The roots of donaldism are in Norway (Jon Gisle’s 1973 book Donaldismen), but it has spread, mostly to northern European countries; there are donaldist fanzines in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden, plus the U.S.
Coverville is a regular podcast by Brian Ibbott (also available on KYCY in San Francisco, 1550 AM) that features cover versions of songs, usually in a thematic set. Program 576, back in May, was “Grammarville”, with songs whose titles seemed to Ibbott to offend the rules of English grammar.
This is Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. — an occasion for picnics and cookouts and the like. Here’s a Barsotti cartoon (from the New Yorker archives) for the holiday:
There isn’t a lot of linguistic content here, but there is some. Understanding language involves not just comprehending literal meanings, but an enormous amount of other work, having to do with cultural setting, knowledge of the world, assessment of other’s people’s intentions, figuring out consequences of the literal meaning, and so on. In this cartoon, the wiener has failed to put together all the relevant pieces and so seems not to appreciate that the function of a wiener at a cookout is to be grilled and consumed as food.
Zippy comes across what he takes to be an oddity in San Francisco (16th and Folsom, in the Mission neighborhood):
The sign around the corner says:
J. GEORGIE’S
DONUTS
TERIYAKI & HAMBURGER
So, not just donuts and Chinese food, but teriyaki and burgers as well!
Donut and Chinese food restaurants seem to be mostly a SoCal thing: in Los Angeles itself (7 Star, Honey, Town), in L.A. County (Jimmy’s in South El Monte, Lys Fresh in Paramount, L&H in Santa Fe Springs), or nearby (Pam’s in Temecula, Riverside County; K D’s in Foothill Ranch, Orange County), plus Savy (two locations) in Victorville (San Bernardino County), and further north (Judy’s in Clovis, Fresno County), and much further north (Galt in Galt, Sacramento County). The one outlier in the first 40 pages I googled up is Kaufman Donuts & Chinese Food in Kaufman, Texas.
J. Georgie’s seems to have started as Jim Georgie’s Donuts and then added stuff. They do breakfasts (sausage, pancakes, muffins, croissants, bagels, and more) and do serve some Chinese food (like sweet and sour chicken). There’s another location in the Portola neighborhood.
I haven’t had the D&CF experience myself, so I can’t report on it.
Yes, this is just silliness on a Saturday morning, with no significant linguistic content.
This is just silliness, with very little linguistic content. You’ve been warned.
In the New York Times of 11 April, Gail Collins (p. A15) refers in passing to Winfield, Missouri’s “devastating 2008 flood, when a levee breach caused by a burrowing muskrat damaged about 100 homes.” (She mentions the town because it recently re-elected someone to a fourth term as mayor, even though he’d been dead a month.) The newspaper headlines, in a whole collection of papers, went: Burrowing Muskrat Causes Levee To Fail In Missouri.
The word muskrat by itself tickles me, and somehow burrowing muskrat is even better. Then the creature manages to cause a disaster. Disasters are not, of course, in themselves funny, but when they arise from inconsequential events that cascade, they can seem risible. Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents has a complex set piece about a Louisiana salt dome disaster that runs through several acts; unless you were there, it’s achingly funny. On a smaller scale, I have any number of tales of squirrels who shut down the electrical supply by gnawing on cables — frying themselves in the process, of course.
[Ok, a little bit of linguistics. Burrowing muskrat has at least two very different senses: one in which it refers to a type of creature (known -- whether accurately or not, whether it is actually a muskrat or not -- for its propensity to burrow), another in which the PRP burrowing is understood as conveying the progressive aspect of burrow: 'a muskrat that was burrowing [at the time referred to]‘. So far as I know, there is no creature conventionally known as a “burrowing muskrat”, so we go with the progressive reading.]
Nico Muhly’s latest posting on his blog is mostly about language, but it also supplies a weird YouTube clip, “She’s a Talker”. Students of English dialect phonetics might also enjoy the variety of realizations of the accented vowel in talker.
(Hat tip to Ned Deily.)
Misoyaki Mahi Mahi:
Tetrametrical
Trochaicity
The first line is the name of a simple fish dish (mahi mahi with a miso sauce) associated with Hawaii; googling on the name will get you recipes (one pointing out that you can use the sauce with any white fish or chicken or pork) and also references to restaurants on Oahu and Kauai (and Edmonton, Alberta, and Kwajalein) offering the dish. I came across it on the “Aloha Friday” menu of the Gordon Biersch restaurant in Palo Alto.
“Misoyaki Mahi Mahi” is a line of perfect trochaic tetrameter (and it has that nice near-rhyme between yaki and mahi, plus the repetition of mahi), and it sticks in your mind like the Pachelbel Canon. SW SW SW SW (S for strong, W for weak) is succeeded by two lines of SW SWW, with a dactylic tinge to then (and a bit of alliteration).
[The Hawaiian name of the dolphin-fish -- a fish, not the mammalian dolphin -- is variously spelled hyphenated (mahi-mahi), solid (mahimahi), or separated (mahi mahi).]
It’s pure silliness, this lolcat composition, and it has nothing really to do with linguistics, but I thought the day could use some amusement (and I could use a break from posting to ADS-L):
(Hat tip to Victor Steinbok, who labeled the photo “monstrous”.)
I have a couple photos of guys with their penises presented in hotdog buns — I know, that’s a really obvious idea — but they’re even more distant from linguistics than a cat in a taco.
