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On the doo-wop gender train from the past
Going the Facebook rounds: the song that was number 1 on your 14th birthday defines your life (pretty clearly intended: #1 in the US — though you could certainly carp about that) Hey nonny ding dong:...
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Lilo & Stitch
Today’s morning name. I really have no idea why. I haven’t even seen the movie and was only vaguely aware of its theme. Maybe the sound-symbolic values of the names, the contrast between the /l/s of...
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Revisiting 27: Lilo, Stitch, Bouba, and Kiki
Mike Pope on Facebook, following up on my posting of the 25th “Lilo & Stitch”, with a question about the naming of the characters in the movie: (#1) Stitch and Lilo MP: Do you think the animators...
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Blue and black at the Gamble Garden
In anticipation of a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden with motss.conners on Saturday, two items from my last visit to the garden (on 7/31): blue flax-lilies, which are neither flax nor lily plants,...
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Guy gear
(Sex toys and all they bring with them, so not for kids or the sexually modest.) Today, a leek (for St. David’s Day, March 1st), but yesterday (the intercalary day February 29th) a leap. The mail...
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While you’re up
The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from yesterday, on running evolutionary errands: (#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.) Venture...
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No offense (intended)
From the American tv series Emergency! S7 E11 “The Convention” (from 7/3/79), a tv movie following the regular series. Two women end up serving as a paramedic team together — female paramedics were a...
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Tell me that you love me
Two very different occurrences from my experience. The Fillmore plea. From the late 1960s, Chuck (Charles J.) Fillmore, tapped (as senior member of the linguistics department at Ohio State) to serve as...
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Death Strikes the Adorable
One is a hardboiled, coke-addled Fed from the mean streets of the City, the other a sleek lutrine kid from the pristine snow slopes of Otter, Montana. They both have literary pretensions but sadly...
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Half-assing things
(It’s all about some English expressions using the bodypart-term ass, but without any reference to human buttocks. The verb fuck (up), figuratively ‘mishandle, damage, ruin’, puts in a cameo appearance...
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The effeminate elephant
Effeminacy in the animal world, first in yesterday’s (3/28) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro: (#1) Not only elephant effeminacy, but also a cosmetic anagram, a rouge and peasant salve (If you’re puzzled by the odd...
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Three cartoons for 4/12/22
(Warning: as is my way, a soupçon of smart-ass street talk.) Two on gendered topics, plus another cartoon that’s incomprehensible unless you recognize one of its elements (and only incidentally has a...
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A masculinity meze: face men
(This has turned out to be quite a large meze, but it’s only about one idiomatic slang expression. Well, men and masculinity come into the thing, and you know what can happen then.) Reflecting a couple...
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Vote for me!
From yesterday’s posting “Three responsibilities”: I voted today in Palo Alto — in the primary election whose official date is 6/7; official results are to be reported by 7/15, and then the top two...
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A physician writes to the NYT Magazine‘s ethicist about a patient who used a racist slur (the N-word) to his Black nursing staff and a homophobic slur (probably the queer F-word, but maybe the queer...
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Briefly: exocentric V + N
(Warning: a vulgar term for the primary female sexual anatomy will end up playing a big role in this posting.) Where this is going: to an alternative name for an American President (#45, aka TFG); and...
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Maternal shrillness on Zits
Today’s Zits strip manages to assemble three disparate bits of assumption about cognition into a joke about maternal shrillness: (#1) So shrill — in particular, so high-pitched — that it takes a ladder...
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Barthropods seeking silverfish
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a complex composition in which two centipedes look for bar snacks: (#1) First bit of language play: the portmanteau barthropod = bar + arthropod, centipedes being...
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Received in e-mail this morning, from Dave Sayers on the Variationist mailing list: We are delighted to announce the next in the 2023-24 series of online guest seminars here in the English section at...
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Green grow the pickles, O
This remarkable photo left me dumbstruck yesterday when Monica Macaulay passed it along on Facebook, having gotten it from the Art Deco FB group on 10/10: The Pickle Sisters, a vaudeville group from...
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