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).

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.

Arcane taboo avoidance

… in the NYT (again). This was one where I wasn’t entirely sure what taboo item was being concealed by the euphemized pudendum boy.

tree nuts

In the NYT Science Times on 4/9/13: “Walnuts for Diabetes” by Nicholas Bakalar:

Eating walnuts may reduce the risk for Type 2 diabetes in women, a large new study concludes.

Previous studies have suggested an inverse relationship between tree nut consumption and diabetes. Though the findings are correlational, walnuts are uniquely high in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, which may be of particular value in Type 2 diabetes prevention.

Tree nut turns out to be a culinary rather than botanical term, though its function is to distinguish (culinary) nuts that grow on trees — “true” (culinary) nuts — from peanuts, the fruits of which mature underground. This despite the fact that there’s a lot of allergy crossover between the two types, to the extent that many sites refer to “PN/TN allergies”, for ‘peanut/tree nut allergies’.

bullying

An NYT op-ed piece yesterday by Emily Bazelon, “Defining Bullying Down”, about what should and should not count as bullying. Bazelon:

… “bullying” isn’t the same as garden-variety teasing or a two-way conflict. The word is being overused — expanding, accordionlike, to encompass both appalling violence or harassment and a few mean words.

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.

boys

Back on December 31st, I posted on male photographer David Arnot and his Boy Next Door calendars (for 2012 and 2013), with a full set of the images from the 2012 calendar. On Facebook, Michael Newman then inquired:

On a language point, doesn’t “boys next door,” imply a kind of (pseudo)unposed twinkish look? If so, these guys may be hot, but not in a boy-next-door way.

Michael is both a card-carrying linguist and a gay man, so brings two kinds of inside information to the discussion, both relevant, and, in this case, his critique is right on. These  guys might or might not be hot — that’s a matter of taste — but they’re not boys next door, in modern American English, at any rate

Define “living room”

(About my life, but with a linguistic hook.)

Back on December 30th I recovered my living room. For four months, my (nominal) living room had functioned as my bedroom: I slept, sitting up, in a chair (a recliner), and the coffee table next to it served as my bedside table, covered with all the things that would normally have been kept in my bedroom; meanwhile, my (nominal) bedroom served as a kind of storage room for stuff that had to be moved out of the rest of the house (to accommodate the family and friends who were helping to care for me).

Though there were places for a few people to sit in the room I was sleeping in, the function of the room was clear to visitors, who were a bit disconcerted by the arrangement. (By the way, for a considerable part of this time I was living in my bathrobe, or just a t-shirt and sweatpants, which functioned like pajamas, so I looked a lot like a man in his bedroom, whichever room I was in.) I’ll go through some of the history in another posting, but my immediate interest here is how to talk about these things. What goes along with the labels living room and bedroom?

Twigs, grahams, and puffs

An experiment in earnestly healthful food: Kashi® GOLEAN® cereal (from “Kashi: The Seven Whole Grain Company”). From the back of the box:

the perfect choice to help you achieve your healthy lifestyle goals. Just one serving supplies 40% of your daily fiber needs ad 20% of your daily protein needs.

… All natural GOLEAN cereal is a lightly sweetened mix of honey toasted whole grain puffs, crispy soy protein grahams and crunchy fiber twigs.

Puffs, grahams, and twigs. On the front of the box:

Naturally Sweetened Fiber Twigs, Soy Protein Grahams and Honey Puff Cereal

Twigs, grahams, and puff cereal, the last being a variant of puffed cereal, aka puffs. All three terms are “semi-technical terms” from the world of advertising, not terms of ordinary language; twigs seems to be an outright invention in the food context, a metaphorical extension of the arboreal term. In any case, the choice of labels provides a serious tone to go along with the nutritional earnestness of the product.

Coming back to life

[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 series of postings on coping with medical conditions and the treatments for them: (1) on the disruptions they cause in the usual patterns of life; (2) on the side consequences of the condition and the treatments; and (3) on existing conditions that continue to need attention while you cope with the very pressing one. Plus a more specific piece of (1), on sex and disability. Several of these postings will talk about sex in plain terms, with personal details, so if that bothers you, tread carefully in what you choose to read.

For me right now, the pressing condition is crippling osteoarthritis, the treatment is complete replacement of my right hip. Yesterday it was three weeks since I came home from the hospital, and things have been moving very smoothly since then. I’m walking at least 6 blocks a day, doing assorted exercises (and a lot of housework), and generally feeling great. Yesterday I picked up a four-legged cane, or quad cane as the things seem to be called in the assistive literature, so I now lope around indoors with my interrogative friend:

On the intimate front, however, the big news is that my dick is back to life (meaning, really, that my mind is back in its familiar groove of affording me a satisfying sex life, from keen desire on to happy endings). It was like a switch flipped four days ago and we went back to business at the old location, after months of hiatus (serious crippling pain is tremendously anerotic).