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The holiday ball
It could just be a card from one baseball fan to another, one of those topical greetings that the card companies specialize it: But in fact it’s from my New York Times carrier to me (a gentle Christmas...
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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...
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Crowdsourced lexicography
In the NYT on May 21st, a front-page story by Leslie Kaufman, “For the Word on the Street, Courts Call Up an Online Witness”, beginning: The wheels of justice move slowly sometimes, but not,...
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Gestures and symbols
From many sources, in e-mail and on Facebook, this ad from the Family Research Council: (#1) “Oral Sex and Doggie Style! Family Research Council: Call 2 Fall Is Call 2 FAIL!” by Lisa Derrick 6/27/13:...
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Context
Yesterday’s Dilbert: The relevant sense of context here, from NOAD2: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and...
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Metatext in the comics
Another topic arising from the Stanford comics seminar, again from a proposal for a student paper (which I won’t cite here because the topic might change and in any case is still the student’s work,...
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Title or slogan?
The Bizarro of 3/20/14, which I seem to have missed when it came up in March, but caught yesterday reproduced in the July issue of Funny Times: An ambiguity — Miss France as a (NP) title in a beauty...
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More cheese, and conversion by truncation
A comment (of 8/23) by Andy Sleeper on my haloumi posting: At a hotel in Chicago recently, at the breakfast buffet, they were serving some dish with egg, meat, and cheese, with a little sign saying...
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Hypothetical indirection
Today’s (re-run) Calvin and Hobbes: Hobbes poses a hypothetical question to Calvin: suppose you knew …, then what would you do? Stated as a question, but functioning (indirectly) as a threatening...
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Once more on background knowledge in the comics
Two of today’s cartoons — a Bizarro and a Zippy — bring us back to recurring questions on this blog: what do need to know to make sense out of what’s going on in a cartoon, and then what do you need to...
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Familiarity
Yesterday’s One Big Happy, in which Ruthie goes (as usual) with the familiar over the novel: (#1) Stovepipe hat (an unfamiliar expression for Ruthie) is transformed in Ruthie’s ears into Stove Top...
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Putrid in context
Back on the 15th, I posted about the appearance of the adjective putrid in a NYT feature story. From that posting: Natto for breakfast. From the NYT Magazine on the 12th, in “Rise and Shine: What kids...
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higher
Yesterday, we had One Big Happy‘s Ruthie and James at cross-purposes on the meaning of bigger (Ruthie was bent on teaching arithmetic, while James wandered into other territory). Another exchange...
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Taking offense: three stories
Three stories (two of them recent) about taking offense: on spear phishing; Illegal Pete’s; and frape. First, some background on taking offense. A non-linguistic example: taking offense at displays of...
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NEG + because
From yesterday’s NYT: [Philadelphia police commissioner Charles H.] Ramsey has emerged recently as a national figure in the policing debate. He leads President Barack Obama’s policing task force, which...
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The hunted 95 per cent?
Let’s start with: (1) Hunted for its horns, 95 percent of the population disappeared This looks like a classic “dangling modifier”. We have a SPAR hunted for its horns (a Subjectless Predicative...
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“beat a urine”
At first glance this looks like word salad, and things aren’t helped much if I tell you that it’s a VP, that it’s attested, and that it wasn’t an inadvertent error. Context, we need context. From Steve...
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30 twats in a field
Passed along by Mike Pope, this supremely annoying video clip in which a man poses what sounds like a question riddle to a woman, who can’t interpret the question, and the man, chuckling offensively,...
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Semantic specialization and extension
First case: An NPR announcer warns the audience, (1) Spoiler alert! Second case: a site for tourists in Ghent, Belgium (linked to in a comment on my recent posting on the city), that tells us, (2)...
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Context context context; and variation
Back in March, Luc Vartan Baronian posted on Facebook this semantics argument between his two children: Daughter (4): I love my piggy bank. Son (7): You mean your froggy bank? Daughter: No! My piggy...
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