Archive for the ‘Such Language!’ Category
Adverbial Excitement
For reasons that need not be detailed, I came across an exciting new adverb in this patent description of a "Portable Baby Seat": Accordingly, a portable baby seat is provided having a front member, a back member and a seat. The seat is hingedly coupled at its back edge into an interior bottom surface of […]
In: All, Laughing Matters, Such Language!
Undo Influence
I don't want to mock Mr. Law's sentiment in the following little excerpt, since I find his point agreeable. However, I could not pass by his typo / eggcorn without giving it due regard. (Do regard?) Besides, this coinage seems unusually appropriate. What is wrong with this country is a lot more than a badly […]
So Out of Tuna
Perhaps because my mind has been on other things, but also perhaps because we were out this afternoon and I did a bit of remaindered cookbook shopping at Daedalus Books (drag a remaindered cookbook in front of me–like catnip), when I read this headline* on one of Andrew Sullivan's posts, what I thought he wrote […]
In: All, Laughing Matters, Such Language!
Definitely Finite
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration now acknowledges it is trying to recover nearly $500 million from people who improperly received federal aid money intended to help victims of two deadly hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, along the Gulf Coast two years ago. It said the amount may increase further. “This is a moving target and not […]
In: All, Splenetics, Such Language!
To Listen More Hearingly
The New York Times (here) said that Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is one of its ten best books of the year. It's his history of the century past as heard through the century's "classical" music. I have no complaint, by the way–I like Alex Ross' writing and the […]
In: All, Books, Common-Place Book, Such Language!
Less Successul at English
From the fractured English file: I'm a pretty successful young man, as are most of my girlfriends. [Tony Alcindor, "PSA: The Numbers You Must Have", Huffington Post, 2 November 2007.]
In: All, Briefly Noted, Such Language!
Feeling Subdude
Isaac reported recently on an amusing spelling error that he spotted the other day: someone reported feeling a little "subdude". This seemed to me a very useful word, particularly as I found myself feeling a little subdude today. The word seems to me roughly as versatile as that coinage from over a decade ago — […]
In: All, Briefly Noted, Such Language!
Encaptionating
Thanks again to Maud Newton* comes this fun idea that blends language and not-always-so-helpful modern technology. She reports that A reader who calls himself Angry Young Man has figured out a way to automate New Yorker cartoon captions — using New Yorker short stories. It seems that Angry Young Man discovered that applying Microsoft Word's […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Such Language!
Plutoing Around
I don't usually approve of verbing nouns, but sometimes it's amusing enough.* I was interested to follow several pointers to the announcement by the American Dialect Society that they had chosen "plutoed" as their word of the year. NB, the word "plutoed" is intended as the past-tense form of the verb "to pluto", meaning to […]
Greyhound Tai Chi
The novel that I'm reading right now is Exiles in America, by Christopher Bram. It appears (from halfway through) to be a story about 2 couples composed of 3 men and 1 women, and how they all react when the two men who were not originally a couple have an affair with each other. Both […]
In: All, Books, Such Language!, Writing
Conceptio Immaculatis
Just in time for Xmas consideration, this entry from Bob Park's What's New: 1. IMMACULATE CONCEPTION: NATURE FINDS A WAY TO GET THE JOB DONE. In the quaint euphemism of the Authorized Version of the Bible, no male had "known" Flora, a female Komodo dragon, before she laid her clutch of 8 eggs at the […]
In: All, Music & Art, Such Language!
Mind Groans
Last week I wrote about "ear accidents", the occasional problem I have in which my mind scrambles to make sense of something it mishears, thereby scrambling the meaning of what was said. Although "ear accidents" is a useful phrase, it struck me as more a description than a name for the phenomenon. Now I'd like […]
Procupines & Ear Accidents
Mark Liberman, in a piece* at Language Log, wrote with the title "Ear Accidents" about a visit to England and a discussion with one Jock McNaught, who kept talking about "Ear Accidents". Liberman wondered whether McNaught might be referring to something like ear piercings gone bad or some such, when he discovered that it was […]
In: All, Reflections, Such Language!
Worse than Illegal
Geoffrey Pullum was discussing* the possibility that soon-to-be former-Senator George Allen, a Republican of Virginia, may well have lost his re-election bid on the strength of his use of a racist slur during the campaign (the infamous "macaca" episode) — or perhaps on the strength of what the electorate saw through the curtain drawn over […]
Can't Win, Can't Lose
Fascinating. Don Rumsfeld says "You've got a situation [in Iraq] where it's not possible to lose militarily," Rumsfeld said. "It's also going to require more than military power to prevail." These things strike me as interesting about this assessment: NB: He's not saying it is impossible not to win, only that we cannot lose; He's […]
A Finger in the Dyke
Demonstrating the extent to which The Gay Agenda has, um, penetrated the American Psyche, Alec Baldwin wrote* in a blog piece: Gore has been standing there with his finger in the dyke for some time now, patiently and insistently exhorting us to come to the aid of the ailing planet. One suspects, of course, that […]
In: All, Laughing Matters, Such Language!
Glitches in Normality
In an email I received from my father today, he used the following phrase, which I think I can put to very good use to describe some events in my life from the last few years: I've had some glitches in my normality lately.
Earworms in Literature I
An earworm* appears in Ian Rankin's Fleshmarket Alley (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004) p. 82: This morning, [Detective] Rebus looked innocent enough: sleepy eyes and a patch of gray bristle on his throat which the razor had missed. He wore a tie the way some schoolkids did — on sufferance. Each morning, he […]
In: All, Crime Fiction, Such Language!
Googlettes
Continuing my morbid fascination with the search strings that people use to arrive at this blog, I feel that a word is needed for these often spectacularly odd phrases. I'm toying with "googlettes", but I'm not committed. There are, of course, a couple more odd googlettes to mention today. Strikingly, both appeared on the same […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Such Language!
Social Neanderthalism
Herewith a lovely new phrase — so useful in these days of thoughtless social conservatism — brought to my attention by Pam.* The story itself was interesting enough, about how the conservative Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has told his party's MPs not to talk about those two gay Mounties who are planning to get […]