Not dead, but…

A postcard from Chris Ambidge, with a lovely quotation from a May 31, 1811 letter of Jane Austen’s:

Letting her correspondent down gently: rather than asserting baldly that the mulberry trees are not alive (or even more baldy, that they are dead), Austen merely appears to be reporting her mental state about the matter, her fears. Nevertheless, afraid with a complement clause is often used to convey the content of the complement clause; the hedging with afraid in such cases is a matter of politeness, rather than truth value. Which understanding is intended is something you have to work out from the context.

investigational

Heard in television ads for cancer treatment centers, the phrase investigational drugs. From an FDA site on “Access to Investigational Drugs”:

Investigational or experimental drugs are new drugs that have not yet been approved by the FDA or approved drugs that have not yet been approved for a new use, and are in the process of being tested for safety and effectiveness.

This passage treats investigational and experimental as synonyms in the drug context — but then the site goes on to use investigational exclusively. This specialized use of investigational (as opposed to the transparent general use ‘of or relating to investigations’) seems to be fairly recent — recent enough that it’s not in the dictionaries I’ve consulted. It seems to have replaced experimental as the appropriate technical term for drugs undergoing testing, perhaps because some people in the relevant community had come to feel that experimental no longer sounded sufficiently technical, but had become part of ordinary language.

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).

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?

NPR team and the perils of transcription

Yesterday on NPR’s Morning Edition, a piece announcing a new NPR feature:

NPR Team Covers Race, Ethnicity And Culture (by David Greene and Gene Demby)

NPR this week is introducing a new team that will cover race, ethnicity and culture. Code Switch is the name of the new blog. Code-switching is the practice of shifting between different languages or different ways of expressing yourself in conversations.

Greene and Demby chat for a while about code-switching, with examples, bringing in linguist Tyler Schnoebelen as a consultant at one point. But if you read the transcript rather than listening to the segment, you might be puzzled.

Context, jargon, and clipping

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.

Snowboard Zippy

In Today’s Zippy, our pinhead reverts to adolescence on a snowboard:

The slang in the body of the strip — airdog, boned out, shred, shred the gnar, pop, nollie, pow-wow — is all genuine snowboarder slang, listed in the enormous collection of snowboarding terms here. The title, “Shagnasty”, is slang, but apparently not slang specific to snowboarding.

Commercial categories: gay sex toys

[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much information, as the saying goes. As a general observation, I’m willing to go almost anywhere in my postings, including some places that some readers don’t want to go.]

A while ago I came across the section of the TLA Video on-line catalogue devoted to gay (male) sex toys, which is quite extensive. It’s organized as a taxonomy with two levels of categories, each level arranged (more or less) alphabetically by category label. From the content of the entries, it’s possible to discover some further structure in the system.

Walking in the rain

Today’s Zits, with Sarah and Jeremy coming in out of the rain:

Though the relevant scene in Singin’ in the Rain has a substantial downpour, walking in the rain tends to conjure up very light, even misty, warm rain. But my interest here is in Jeremy’s comment, “Songwriters are often liars.”

Urban areas

My posting on micropolitans, or micropolitan areas, touched on the more familiar technical term metropolitan area; both are defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Then I reflected on ordinary-language use for reference to urban areas. There are several alternatives, including semi-technical alternatives to X metropolitan area (in particular, Greater X). And sometimes they pile up.