The title of an abstract of mine for the 20th Stanford SemFest (Semantics Festival), to take place on March 15th and 16th (the Ides of March and National Panda Day, respectively). The SemFests feature reports (primarily 20-minute presentations, plus 10-minute question periods)

on recent work on any topic touching on meaning broadly construed, ranging from traditional topics in semantics and pragmatics to social meaning to natural language understanding and beyond

This posting is primarily about my snowclone paper, but there will also be some very personal reflections on the conference and its significance in my academic life.

The abstract:

(#1)

The first snowclone discussions on Language Log:

GP, 10/27/03, in ” Phrases for lazy writers in kit form”

GP, 1/16/04, in “Snowclones: lexicographic dating to the second”

The references in the final paragraph are to two recent postings of mine:

on 7/21/18, “Swiss America”

on 12/27/18, “The family of Word Inclusion snowclones”

(both about phenomena with a long history on Language Log and my blog).

In between these come a huge number of postings — which I’ve now inventoried in a Page on this blog. Snowclonelet composites (aka snowclonelets) are separately inventoried  here. And the big inventory cites relevant entries on Erin Stevenson O’Connor’s Snowclone Database site.

(#2) The scdb logo

Background from the Wikipedia page:

A snowclone is a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants. The term was coined as a neologism in 2004, derived from journalistic clichés that referred to the number of Eskimo words for snow.

The linguistic phenomenon of “a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants” was originally described by linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum in 2003. Pullum later described snowclones as “some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists”.

In an October 2003 post on Language Log, a collaborative blog by several linguistics professors, Pullum solicited ideas for what the then-unnamed phenomenon should be called. In response to the request, the word “snowclone” was coined by economics professor Glen Whitman on January 15, 2004, and Pullum endorsed it as a term of art the next day. The term was derived by Whitman from journalistic clichés referring to the number of Eskimo words for snow and incorporates a pun on the snow cone (a paper cone of shaved ice flavored with syrup) [in the element clone‘an organism or cell, or group of organisms or cells, produced asexually from one ancestor or stock, to which they are genetically identical; a person or thing regarded as identical to another’ (NOAD)].

The term “snowclone” has since been adopted by other linguists, journalists, and authors.

Snowclones are related to both memes and clichés, according to the Los Angeles Times‘s David Sarno: “Snowclones are memechés, if you will: meme-ified clichés with the operative words removed, leaving spaces for you or the masses to Mad Lib their own versions.”

“Leaving spaces” might work in a fluffy piece in the LA Times, but the work of stipulating the semantics, pragmatics, and social contexts of snowclones is a tough slog — in fact, the same as this task for any syntactic construction.

Personal SemFest notes. This section is very personal and kind of sad, so you might want to skip it. I begin with an account of my involvement with the conference, year by year.

2000: no SemFest paper. But two other papers at Stanford. The handout for my 2000 BLS talk (in the version presented later at Stanford) on “Describing syncretism: Rules of referral after fifteen years”. The handout for a Stanford Syntax Workshop in May 2000, “A-verb-in’ we will go”, on the syntax of a-prefixing of verbs in various Southern varieties of English.

2001: The handout for my 2001 SemFest talk on “Counting Chad”, on the count/mass distinction in English, with special reference to chad, e-mail/email, and ice plant.

2002: The handout for my 2002 SemFest talk on “The said and the unsaid”, about material in the Atherton (CA) police blotter. Also at Stanford that year: The handout for my 2002 NWAV talk at Stanford on “Seeds of variation and change”. The handout for a 2002 Stanford talk, “Just how interesting a construction is this? Explorations in the matching of internal and external syntax”.

2003: no paper: the SemFest came during the final months of my man Jacques’ dying. But later in the year, in other venues, including two at Stanford: The handout for my presentation at the 2003 Stanford IsisFest, on “double is” in English. The handout for a 2003 Stanford talk, “Some foundational issues for construction grammar: Mutual definition and cluster concepts”.

2004: The handout for my 2004 SemFest talk, “Isolated NPs”.

2005: The handout for my presentation “Ideal types: peacocks, chameleons, and centaurs” at the March 2005 SemFest (on categorization in general, and categorization of gay men in particular).

2006: no paper (I was at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2005-06, where I presented a paper. The handout for my November 2005 presentation on dangling modifiers at the Stanford Humanities Center.)

2007: two SemFest papers, to make up for no SemFest paper in 2006. The handout for my 2007 SemFest talk, “Extris, extris”, on “extra is” constructions in English. The handout for a 2007 SemFest talk by AMZ and Douglas Kenter, “Avoid vagueness? The case of sentence-initial linking however”

2008: The handout for a 2008 SemFest talk, What to blame it on: Diathesis alternations, usage advice, “confusion”, and pattern extension.

2009: The handout for my 2009 SemFest talk, “V + P~Ø” on transitive/intransitive alternations.

2010: The handout for my 2010 SemFest talk, “Brevity plus” on morphological conversions favoring semantic/pragmatic specificity and social specificity as well as brevity.

2011: The handout for my 2011 SemFest talk, “Categories and Labels: LGBPPTQQQEIOAAAF2/SGL …”, on labels in the domain of sexuality / sexual orientation, gender / sexual identity, and sexual practices, as used to construct an initialism for the entire domain.

2012: The handout (a posting to this blog) for my 2012 SemFest talk, “Parts of the body” (on categorization and labeling, again).

2013: The handout for my 2013 SemFest talk, “In a syntactic quandary”, about alternatives in expressing the possessive of certain coordinate NPs (1sg + 3sg: I and Kim, Kim and I).

2014: The handout (a posting to this blog) for my 2014 SemFest talk, “Metatext in the comics”, on the use of material outside the drawings and texts in cartoons (titles, captions, mouseovers, etc.) to enrich the semantic/pragmatic content of these and to provide extra content. (reporting on joint work with Elizabeth Closs Traugott)

At that point I buckled under an array of medical conditions and several years of depression. The 2014 SemFest paper was the last presentation I made before an audience (in a classroom or at a conference), so I’m more than a bit trepidatious about giving a talk next month; I’ve been away for five years. In addition, for a complex of reasons (mostly medical and financial) I haven’t been able to get to events at my Stanford department for 15 months; my academic life has been carried out on-line, from home.

Meanwhile, the SemFests have played an outsize role in my academic life, since it’s been 15+ years since I’ve been able to get an abstract accepted at the conferences I consider to be the natural outlets for reports on my work: Linguistic Society of America, American Dialect Society, New Ways of Analyzing Variation. Plenty of rejections, except from the SemFests; either I began to wither intellectually starting about 20 years ago, or my work became just too quirky and unfashionable for most people then. Or, of course, both. (The issue is now largely moot, since, for medical and financial reasons, the Stanford SemFests are pretty much the only conferences I’m able to get to these days.)

Once again, Ruthie grapples with ABC order, in the January 6th One Big Happy:

(#1)

The larger context: test tasks for kids, and what they’re for. Eventually this will take us to queens.

Not long ago, in another, very different, confrontation between Ruthie and ABC order: from my 12/29/18 posting “Ruthie x 3”:

(#2)

The conventional name in English is alphabetical order (or, rarely, alphabetic order). But the pentasyllabic alphabetical is a hell of a mouthful for kids in the early grades, so some teachers have hit on the idea of using something the children already know: the letters of the alphabet in sequence. Hence, ABC order (not in OED3 (Dec. 2011), but obviously useful).

At some point I must have been told why we were learning how to alphabetize lists of words and how to search alphabetized lists. The task is, after all, complex: you need to have the fixed order of the letters of the alphabet routinized for quick access, and then you need to apply this order recursively from left to right. The crucial point is that this order is independent of the interests of any particular person; it’s the same for everybody, so everybody can use it equally. And all you need is the spelling of the word; you don’t need any other information about the word (such as when you first encountered it) or about the word’s referent (such as whether it refers to something large or something small) or about your relationship to the referent of the word (such as whether this referent is important to you or not).

But for what purpose? To allow for quick search through long lists of words (or longer expressions), to find out whether something you’re looking for is on it. We use alphabetized lists of people’s names (in class lists, for example), of expressions in dictionaries and encyclopedias, and so on. Without alphabetization, searching for certain kinds of information would be tedious and difficult.

Now, if we’re going to expect kids to develop skills in creating and using alphabetized lists, they’ll need to see some point in the exercise; otherwise, they’ll just fall back on their own idiosyncratic schemes for ordering things, and they won’t become at all skillful with alphabetization (which is, like it or not, important in alphabet-using cultures in the modern world).  Even Ruthie in #1, who says that she understands the correct alphabetical order of the three words, chooses to use in this particular case an ordering relationship based on a different principle — namely, that supremely important principle of kid culture, fairness.

Why learn it? Learning to deal with alphabetization requires a significant outlay of time and effort, but the rationale for that looks pretty clear. It’s not always clear, to me at least, why certain other things are taught and tested. From my 11/21/18 posting “OBH analyses”:

Opposites for kids. At some point in the history of education in the United States (and probably elsewhere) mastering the vocabulary of opposites — being able to supply an “opposite” word for some given word — came to be seen as a significant goal in childhood education. I know nothing about the history or about the rationale for pursuing this particular task, but I do know that the usual reason given from drilling preschoolers in this task — that they need to learn the vocabulary — is utterly preposterous, since all the words in question are ones the children already know and use, like big and little.

So the exercise must in some way be about conceptual relationships — contrariety, contradiction, and (as we shall see) more, much more — in the belief that internalizing knowledge about these will benefit small children in some way. So, mostly, it’s not about words at all (though the testing materials, like the worksheet Joe is agonizing over in #2 [in that posting], generally do seem to assume that there is only one correct opposite word for any given word), but about more abstract relationships.

… In the big list [of opposites in materials for children], contrary adjectives are clearly the central examples, and they are the ones these materials start with and then diverge from; they form the basis on which kids are to (tacitly) induce what opposite means. But the pairs are all over the map: some are contradictories (man – woman), some are semantic converses (give – get / receive), some have a reversative (fix – break), and so on through quite a variety of contrastive pairings (hello – goodbye? sour – sweet?). I really don’t know what kids are supposed to make of this. Or why they should be enaging in the task.

Queens. And then we get to nuggets of specific information that kids are tested on. These I often find deeply mystifying, for a variety of reasons.

First, there’s the difference between information-seeking questions and test questions, a tricky business that takes kids a while to cotton to; some discussion of infoseek vs. test questions in my 8/21/18 posting “Asking questions and giving commands”.

Then there are conventionally expected answers to particular test questions, which kids are expected to induce from their classroom experience; see my Language Log posting of 12/2/09, “What is this question about?”, about the range of expected answers to the test question, “What color is a banana?” (note: WHITE is a wrong answer, even though the edible part of standard bananas is white; and RED is a wrong answer, even though the standard bananas in many parts of the world have reddish skins).

Finally, there’s the raw choice of test questions, which often look they’re just pulled out of a hat; we ask this question because we can. (Kids are supposed to know things, so let’s test some stuff.) In this vein is a test question — with a really clever answer marked wrong (as a general rule, truly clever answers are wrong, from the point of view of the devisers of tests) —  that’s been making the rounds of the net as an image of an actual test item. Surely invented, but a good joke, and not far from examples you can collect from real life:

Name one popular queen.  Freddy Mercury  ✘

A wonderful answer: Mercury was the lead singer of the rock band Queen, and his performance persona was wildly flamboyant, worthy of the label queen. But not, of course, in the ‘female monarch’ sense the test question intends to ask about. RuPaul is certainly a popular queen, but again not in the sense the test question intends to ask about  (and RuPaul wouldn’t have been as clever a wrong answer as Freddy Mercury). Andrew McQueen — also a queen, in the flamboyant sense, but nowhere near as popular as Freddy Mercury and RuPaul — would have been a cute answer, if only for the contrast with butch / macho Steve McQueen. Then there’s Queen Latifah, the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen, the Queen of Darkness, Dairy Queen, and Speed Queen, plus prom queens, welfare queens, drama queens, opera queens and rice queens (see my 12/19/15 posting “X queen” on the snowclonelet pattern).

In an English-speaking context, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, and Queen Elizabeth II would be correct answers, and possibly the only acceptable correct answers; it all depends on what’s intended by popular. I assume Queen Juliana and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands (and other comparable modern European female monarchs) were insufficiently popular in English-speaking lands, that Catherine the Great of Russia and Queen Isabella of Aragon were powerful but not popular, that Mary Queen of Scots was too unsympathetic to be popular, and that Queen Anne and the Queen Mary of Williamanmary were more sympathetic but still a bit short in popularity on the street. Leaving three prime answers.

Maybe the question should have asked about famous queens of England. Certainly the question seems designed to tap high cultural currency or something similar — so it really is a lot like the banana-color question, a probe about mass enculturation.

So, I ask again, why ask this particular question? What do we expect kids to know, and why?

On the Language Nerd Facebook page yesterday, this playfully framed, but seriously intended, flowchart, “Your guide to being polite in French”, for choosing between the 2sg pronouns tu (‘familiar’) and vous (‘polite’) in current French — a bow to the treatment of T and V pronouns in Brown & Gilman 1960:

(#1)

Comments on the substance of this flowchart (and its background) to come below. But first some angry complaints.

First angry rant: the Facebook page gives not a clue as to the source of the flowchart, though it’s obviously the creation of a specific person with their own very distinctive ways of thinking and talking, someone WHO DESERVES CREDIT FOR THEIR WORK. Sure, sure, whoever put it on the Facebook page — someone hiding in cowardly anonymity — just found it somewhere and passed it on — without a moment’s thought that doing so was a fucking insult and also potential grounds for a lawsuit. This craven poster’s monumental cluelessness moved me to SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS, which I almost never do.

With a little searching, I was led to a posting of the chart with this attribution appended:

(#2)

(Yes, somewhere along the line, some asshole went to the trouble to REMOVE THE CREDIT LINE!)

Alexander’s book, which sounds entertaining:

(#3)

Second angry rant, about the FB group Language Nerds. Here’s the complete characterization of the group:

(#4) The group’s logo

The Language Nerds was founded to host and connect together people who are passionate about language and linguistics. It’s a place for fun and for knowledge. We are so glad we have you here with us. Please make yourself at home.

Not a single person involved with the group is named, anywhere (including in the postings), and virtually all of the postings are unsourced: language-related things that somehow floated through the ether of the web onto this landing site. Some of the stuff is complete bullshit, some of it is naive burbling about language, some pieces are thoughtful, but since none of it has any context or evaluation, none of it can be trusted as a source of information. The group is an irresponsible trash heap.

But French 2sg pronouns. The chart in #1 in jaunty and jokey, but Alexander meant it as a serious description of the main conditions on the use of tu and vous for many current French speakers.

The intellectual background for the enterprise (which concerns the choice of address terms as well as pronouns):

Roger Brown & Marilyn Ford, Address in American English. J. Abnorm. Soc. Psych. 62.375-85 (1961). Reprinted in Laver & Hutcheson 1972:128-45.

Roger Brown & Albert Gilman, The pronouns of power and solidarity. In Sebeok 1960:253-76. Reprinted in Laver & Hutcheson 1972:103-27.

[John Laver & Sandy Hutcheson (eds.), Communication in Face to Face Interaction. Penguin Books (1972).]

[Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language. MIT Press (1960).]

Arnold M. Zwicky, “Hey, whatsyourname!”  [on vocatives in English]. Chicago Linguistic Society (1974).

(Address terms come up frequently on this blog; there’s a Page here inventorying these postings.)

The central insight of Brown & Gilman was to abandon the idea of T and V pronouns (not just in French, but in many languages — German T pronoun du, V pronoun Sie, for instance) as a simple binary contrast, and instead to see T and V as representing two separate cross-cutting domains of social relationship: respectively solidarity (social closeness, intimacy) and power (social dominance, distance). At the extreme, a T pronoun connotes both high solidarity (closeness) and low power (subordination); a V pronoun connotes both low solidarity (distance) and high power (dominance). Clearly, the two considerations will often conflict to some degree, so that people have to learn the details of how they are balanced in many particular social situations. Hence the charts.

Provisos: these details are variable, across different social groups, in different regions, at different times. Moreover, in some circumstances, both pronouns are acceptable; and in some circumstances, neither will quite do. And in a further complication, the pronouns can be deployed strategically, flouting the usual conditions on their use: you can, for instance, show disapproval by using V where T would ordinarily be called for, or contempt by using T instead of expected V.

Any particular chart is a snapshot of one system among a great many. The charts often represent the usage of the social group to which the investigator belongs, typically the educated urban middle class of a politically dominant region: it’s always easiest to study your the practices of a group that’s familiar to you, at least as a first stab at a description. (Getting a reliable account of the actual practices of some group is another matter: doing good sociolinguistics ain’t easy.)

The comments on Alexander’s chart in #1 in the Language Nerd group are mostly thoughtful, but two try to undo Brown & Gilman’s conceptual work, by insisting that there’s only one criterion for choosing T or V:

– Matt Voghel:

Do you know this person? No? Vous.
There, it’s simple.

– Thierry Chapaud:

I have a personal approach of the “tu” and the “vous” thingy.
I’m French. I’m a little different from other French people.
When I like or love someone, I use the “tu” form.
When I dislike a person, I use the “vous” form in order to keep some distance from that person

(These proposals might, of course, be meant as jokes. Or, possibly, the commenters might have honestly packed a whole lot into how they use the verbs know and like, respectively.)

The dimensions of power and solidarity also play a significant role in how people choose address terms (where the universe of choice is significantly larger than with 2sg pronouns).

Finally, even in the choice of a name for yourself. From my 7/15/13 posting “Remarkable names”:

There’s a choice, in porn as well as in real life, between full names (like Michael) and nicknames (like Mike). Roughly speaking, the choice is between a name of power (with gravitas, often connoting distance) and a name of solidarity (connoting closeness) — to adapt the terminology of Roger Brown and Albert Gilman in their famous (and influential) “Pronouns of Power and Solidarity” (1960).

Pornstar names lean heavily towards nicknames — Rick, Rich, Dick, Ricky, or Richie, rather than Richard; T(h)om or Tommy rather than Thomas, etc. — for obvious reasons. That takes Michael Hunt to Mike Hunt.

Yes, a porn name that’s a play on my cunt. Details in that 2013 posting.

From a mail pointer to a 1/30/19 article in the journal Psychological Science, “Similarity Grouping as Feature-Based Selection” by Dian Yu, Xiao Xiao, Douglas K. Bemis, & Steven L. Franconeri:

Individuals perceive objects with similar features (i.e., color, orientation, shape) as a group even when those objects are not grouped in space.

Point at issue: individuals rather than people, a mark of a consciously formal, “scientific” way of writing, appropriate (some believe) for reporting on research in psychology.

And a model for this usage, from the trade bible, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition, contents page:

Chapter 3: Writing Clearly and Concisely

Chapter 3 offers basic guidance on planning and writing the article. It advises readers on how to organize their thoughts, choose effective words, and describe individuals with accuracy and sensitivity.

And more models, from administrative contexts (including legal usage), as in this name for a piece of legislation:

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a four-part … piece of American legislation that ensures students with a disability are provided with Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) that is tailored to their individual needs. IDEA was previously known as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) from 1975 to 1990. In 1990, the United States Congress reauthorized EHA and changed the title to IDEA (Public Law No. 94-142). Overall, the goal of IDEA is to provide children with disabilities the same opportunity for education as those students who do not have a disability. (Wikipedia link)

Individuals is a 4- or 5-syllable word that sounds, in these contexts, like an item from the technical register of English; it sounds serious, elevated. People, in contrast, is a 2-syllable word from everyday speech — not slangy, or even particularly informal, but just an all-purpose ordinary plural.

If you have a preference (as I do) for a plain style in writing (and speaking), then other things being equal, you’ll go for people here rather than individuals, and (also as I do) you’ll probably find individuals to be uncomfortably stiff and pretentious. So for decades I’ve been at odds with students who use individuals this way — they say they’ve been taught that this is the only acceptable usage for scientific writing — and with editors who want to turn my uses of people into individuals, maintaining that people is far too informal, too “chatty”, for technical and legal writing.

Now, some facts from psychology. As far as I can tell, the APA’s Publication Manual nowhere directs writers to use individuals rather than people, though its own practice seems to incline towards individuals, as above — except, strikingly, in one context (I’ll get to it in a moment) where it recommends people as a means of avoiding a usage it finds unacceptable on other grounds.

The publisher of the journal Psychological Science (where this posting started), the Association for Psychological Science — less corporate and generally more user-friendly than the APA (I’m biased: I’m an APS Fellow) — takes no position on individuals vs. people, and people (referring to human beings in general, or to particular groups of them) appears fairly often in its publications. From the very same mailing as the similarity-grouping item above, there’s this mail pointer to a 1/29/19 article in Psychological Science, “Perspective Taking and Self-Persuasion: Why “Putting Yourself in Their Shoes” Reduces Openness to Attitude Change” by Rhia Catapano, Zakary L. Tormala, & Derek D. Rucker:

Contrary to a commonly held assumption, people might be more receptive to others’ views when they do not “put themselves in their shoes,” this study suggests.

Now, a note on the place where the APA actually recommends people — in discussions of bias-free language, where they explicitly suggest locutions like

people with disabilities, transgender and gender nonconforming people, people with AIDS

instead of things like

the disabled, the transgendered and gender nonconformists, AIDS sufferers

on the grounds that the latter, shorter expressions are essentializing and demeaning to the people they refer to. From my 12/4/16 posting “International Day of Persons with Disabilities” (December 3rd, “using the rather awkward name recommended by the UN“), about:

objections to disabled (as a predicate Adj, as in They are disabled; as a prenominal Adj, as in disabled people, or, especially, in the elliptical nouning the disabled ‘disabled people (as a group)’)  — objections that are based, so far as I can tell, not on unpleasant tinges in actual usage, but on theoretical objections to Adjs (predicate, prenominal, or especially nouned) for reference to people. The idea seems to be that such uses are essentializing, attributing a definitional property to people, rather than referring merely to a concomitant state. For conditions that limit or restrict people’s ability to function, the mantra is:

The disability is not the person.

So I should not say I’m disabled, or I’m a disabled person, or I’m one of the disabled. Instead, I should say I have a disability, or I’m someone (or a person, or a man) with a disability. (The proscription and prescription would apply equally to I’m crippled and I’m handicapped, even if there were no other objections to them.)

This position turns a connotational subtlety (of little or no relevance in many contexts) into a rigid claim about the semantics of adjectival constructions, a claim that I believe to be simply false. But the position has been so widely disseminated that many now see things like I’m disabled — I usually say I’m significantly disabled, to convey the importance of my disabilities in the context of the conversation — as offensive, in fact necessarily so. I must not say that; it’s a slur on people with disabilities.

The APA suggests constructions with people, but (as you can see above), there are those who use individuals instead, and (yet another variable in the mix) those who use persons instead of people (a usage point with a long and tangled history).

individuals vs. people. Above, preferences for individuals over people (or the reverse) on the basis of register / style. But there are also people who prefer individuals to people on the basis of their semantic connotations. For this, we need to look at the range of uses of individual and people. From NOAD:

C[ount] noun individual: [a] a single human being as distinct from a group, class, or family: boat trips for parties and individuals [the sense under discussion here]. [b] a single member of a class: they live in a group or as individuals, depending on the species. [c] [with adjective] informal a person of a specified kind: the most selfish, egotistical individual I have ever met. [d] a distinctive or original person.

PL noun people: 1 [a] human beings in general or considered collectively: the earthquake killed 30,000 people [the sense under discussion here]. [b] (the people) the citizens of a country, especially when considered in relation to those who govern them: his economic reforms no longer have the support of the people. [c] (the people) those without special rank or position in society; the populace: he is very much a man of the people. [d] (the People) US the state prosecution in a trial: pretrial statements made by the People’s witnesses.

C noun people: 2 (plural peoples) [treated as singular or plural] the men, women, and children of a particular nation, community, or ethnic group: the native peoples of Canada.

PL noun people: 3 (one’s people) [a] the supporters or employees of a person in a position of power or authority: I’ve had my people watching the house for some time now. [b] dated a person’s parents or relatives: my people live in West Virginia.

The very brief take-away: using individuals might suggest that you’re treating some group from the point of view of its members; while using people might suggest that you’re treating it from the point of view of the collectivity as a whole (which just happens to have parts) — an idea that’s encouraged by the fact that people doesn’t look PL (having no plural marker, it looks like a M[ass] noun).

[Digression: people really really acts like a PL C noun, not a SG M one:

– It takes PL-selected determiners: ✓many/those people, *much/that people

– It takes PL verb agreement: ✓People are funny, *People is funny

– It takes PL anaphors: People_i stood up, and ✓they_i / *it_i  applauded ]

In any case, given this semantic subtlety, you might choose to write individuals with disabilities rather than people with disabilities, and to make similar choices in writing up research.

people vs. persons.  people is a PL-only noun, but other nouns and pronouns can be pressed into service to fill the role of the corresponding SG. Prime among these is the noun person (which has its own PL, persons). As a result, both people and persons are available to serve as a PL for person. These two noun forms are by no means interchangeable —  ✓People are funny, *Persons are funny — largely in line with the individualistic semantics of persons and the collectivity semantics of people — but in general people is available as an alternative PL to persons.

Or was, until usage authorities began to intervene in the matter. MWDEU‘s                                                  wonderful entry on people, persons begins:

The questioning of the use of people to mean persons began in the middl of the 19th century. Alford 1866 mentions a correspondent who wrote in to object to the expression several people; he said it ought always to be several persons. (p. 723)

And then we were off to the races. Controversy raged, through the 1980s. Ultimately:

It is reassurimg to know that recent handbooks and style books will now allow you to use people as Chaucer did nearly 600 years ago or as Dickens did a century or more ago.

Meanwhile, we find persons appearing where people would always have been acceptable: persons with disabilities instead of people with disabilities. This usage seems not to have made its way into scientific and technical writing, however; instead, individuals fills its slot.

The usage literature on individual. It’s enormous, tangled, and entertaining — another wonderful MWDEU entry (pp. 538-40). But it has nothing to do with individuals vs. people (a topic that appears to get no MWDEU attention at all); instead, it’s about SG individual ‘person, human being’, surviving these days contrasting a single referent to a larger group, as in this NOAD subentry (repeated from above):

[c] [with adjective] informal a person of a specified kind: the most selfish, egotistical individual I have ever met.

This usage (in older writing, often facetious or disparaging in tone) was a journalistic mannerism of late Victorian times and consequently excited the ire of usage authorities for some time. Now it’s standard, but informal and a bit old-fashioned — I’d use person instead —  while the form individuals in scientific and technical uses is (hyper)formal.

Context, context, context.

What someone doesn’t say can be as significant as what they do say; more generally, a topic that someone doesn’t talk about can be as significant as the topics that they do.

So I don’t know quite what to make of a passage from a NYT op-ed column by Thomas T. Cullen (U.S. attormey for the Western District of Virginia), on-line yesterday under the title “The Grave Threats of White Supremacy and Far-Right Extremism: Hate crimes are on the rise. Police and prosecutors need better tools to fight back.” and in print today under the title “Rising Far-Right Extremism in America: Police and prosecutors need better tools to fight back”, about the case of Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Hasson, arrested last week and accused of plotting to assassinate Democratic members of Congress, prominent television journalists, and others. The passage:

In 2009, Congress took an important step in arming federal investigators to deal with hate crimes by passing the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act. This law makes it possible to prosecute as hate crimes violent acts committed against victims because of their race, color, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity or disability. The law provides stringent maximum penalties, including life imprisonment, if someone is killed during a hate crime.

The omission in the bold-faced clause is sexual orientation, which is specifically listed in the Shepard/Byrd law — as a result of the savage murder of Shepard in 1998 because of his sexual orientation.

Neither sexuality nor sexual orientation occurs in Cullen’s text. In fact, Shepard/Byrd is the only relevant federal legislation that mentions this status; otherwise, hate crimes laws in the domain of  sexuality are a state (or local) matter. So its omission in a paragraph on Shepard/Byrd is startling.

That could be an inadvertent error on the part of Cullen, his staff, and the relevant NYT staff; somehow, it got past all of them. The things that are new in Shepard/Byrd are the qualifiers actual or perceived on gender, plus sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability; somehow, gender identity survived in the NYT text, but sexual orientation did not.

But it could be that sexual orientation was omitted from the NYT text on purpose, to draw attention away from homosexuality, which might be seen as a red flag for many and a distraction from the main topic of Cullen’s piece. That wouldn’t be entirely astonishing: after all, it looks like Byrd was included in the name of the Shepard/Byrd act to gain support for the act, support unlikely to be extended to a piece of legislation framed primarily in terms of sexual orientation — even though Byrd, as a black man (also savagely murdered in 1998) was already covered under the race and color categories in earlier federal hate crimes legislation (specifically, the 1968 Civil Rights Act).

(Cullen’s stance in the matter of hate crimes categories is unclear. For what it’s worth, he was put forward for his current position by Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine (both Democrats) and then appointed by President [REDACTED].)

The victims. Lest we forget.

(Warning: I find these brief descriptions and images painful to take, and you might not want to subject yourself to them.)

From the Wikipedia entry on Shepard, a young gay man:

On the night of October 6, 1998, Shepard was approached by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson at the Fireside Lounge in Laramie [Wyoming]; all three men were in their early 20s. McKinney and Henderson decided to give Shepard a ride home.

They subsequently drove to a remote, rural area, and proceeded to rob, pistol-whip, and torture Shepard, tie him to a fence, set him afire and left him to die.

Shephard hanging on the fence, in Richard Taddei’s “Morning in America – The death of Matthew Shepard”, gouache on paper, 1998:

(#1)

And a capsule account of the incomprehensibly vicious murder of James Byrd, Jr.:

(#2)

(with links to abstracts)

For enthusiasts of semantics/pragmatics in all their variety; the public is welcome

All sessions take place in the Barwise Room, CSLI (Panama St. at Campus Dr.)

Friday March 15, 2019

9:00-9:30: Coffee and welcome

9:30-10:00 John Beavers & Andrew Koontz-Garboden, “Two Types of Roots for Internally Caused Change-of-State Verbs”

10:00-10:30 Shiao Wei Tham, “Structural and Contextual Factors in Result Interpretations of Mandarin Locative Compounds”

10:30-11:00 Helena Aparicio, Roger Levy & Elizabeth Coppock, “How to Find the rabbit in the big(ger) box: Reasoning About Contextual Parameters for Gradable Adjectives Under Embedding”

11:00-11:30 BREAK

11:30-12:00 Gregory Scontras, Asya Achimova, Christian Stegemann & Martin Butz, “The Added Informativity of Ambiguous Language”

12:00-12:30 Eric Acton & Heather Burnett, “Markedness, ‘Truth’, and Rationality in Social Meaning Games”

12:30-2:00 LUNCH (and mentoring event w/lunch for grad students and some participants)

2:00-2:30 Arnold Zwicky,“A Natural History of Snowclones”

2:30-3:00 Tatiana Nikitina, “Semantic Maps in a Typologist’s Toolbox: The Challenge of Semi-lexical Networks”

3:00-3:30 BREAK

3:30-4:00 Sunwoo Jeong & James Collins, “Updating Alternatives in Pragmatic Competition”

4:00-4:30 Sebastian Schuster & Judith Degen, “Adaption to Variable Use of Expressions of Uncertainty”

4:30-4:45 BREAK

4:45-5:30 David Beaver, TBA

5:30 Drinks
6:00 Dinner (provided)
7:00-9:00 Party/band

Saturday, March 16, 2019

9:30-10:00 Coffee/breakfast

10:00-10:30 Ashwini Deo, “Identifying the Strongest True Alternative: Marathi =c and its Counterparts”

10:30-11:00 Stefan Kaufmann, “Worlds Are Not Enough”

11:00-11:30 BREAK

11:30-12:00 Sven Lauer & Prerna Nadathur, “Sufficiency Causatives”

12:00-12:30 Yingying Wang & Frank Veltman, “Varieties of Modal Predicates and their Semantic Interpretation”

12:30-1:45 LUNCH (provided)

1:45-2:15 Lelia Glass, “Experimental Evidence that Verbs Describing Routines Facilitate Implicit Objects”

2:15-2:45 Itamar Francez, “Markedness and the Morphosemantics of Number”

2:45-3:00 BREAK

3:00-3:30 Ciyang Qing, “Zero or Minimum Degree? Rethinking Minimum-standard Gradable Adjectives”

3:30-4:00 Judith Tonhauser & Judith Degen, “An Empirical Challenge to the Categorical Notion of Factivity”

4:00 Closing remarks

From linguist Avery Andrews on Facebook:

(#1) Avery: “My first reading of this was ‘Cthulhu Towers’, indicating that whatever the top-down constraints on my linguistic processing may be, real world plausibility has at best a delayed effect”

To judge from my own misreadings — some of them reported on in the Page on this blog with misreading postings — real-world plausibility has virtually no role in initial misreadings; we tend to notice these misreadings, in fact, because they are so bizarre.

On the other hand, they sometimes clearly reflect material currently or persistently on the hearer’s mind — if you’ve been thinking about cooking some pasta for dinner, Italian pasta names are likely to insert themselves into your peceptions; if you’re a gardener, plant names will come readily to mind, even if they’re preposterous; and of course it’s common to see sexual vocabulary where none was intended —  but often they look like the welling-up of material from some deep chthonic place in memory, inexplicably in the context.

Knowledge and experience. But of course you can’t pull up stuff that isn’t there. No one completely innocent of the Lovecraftian world — see below — could possibly come up with Cthulhu for Chillin in Chillin Towel. (At the very least, you must have seen the name some place and remembered it, if only dimly.)

On the other hand, ignorance of or inexperience with an expression in material you’re reading can trigger an excavation into memory that might pull up all sorts of things. I myself, unaware that there was something called a Chillin Towel and having at first no idea what one might be, initially read the expression as Chillun Towel ‘a towel for (US Southern or Black) children’. Kind of silly, but explicable. And then I thought of linguist Chilin Shih at UIUC, though what she might have to do with towels I couldn’t imagine (I did manage to read Towel correctly (while Avery slipped into Towers, for some reason).

Turns out Chillin Towels are an Australian thing; Avery, though born in Pennsylvania and educated in the US, is now an Australian, and might well know about Chillin Towels, but even so, he misread the sign. Meanwhile, he obviously knows about Cthuhu.

Chillin Towels. From the Books & Gifts Direct site (in Australia)

(#2) Keeping her neck cool

The Chillin Towel is a chemical-free cooling towel that comes in [its] own easy carry bottle with a convenient clip right on the top.

… Activating the towel is easy – just wet it, squeeze out the excess moisture and whip or wave the towel to circulate air-flow.

The cutting edge towel will keep cool for hours at a time once wet. To re-activate, all you’ve got to do is wet and whip or wave the towel to provide air-circulation and enjoy the cooling effect!

(One more time: just wet and whip or wave.)

Cthulhu. From Wikipedia:

(#3) One out of thousands of imagined tentacular Cthulhus, by Jason Juta

Cthulhu … is a fictional cosmic entity created by writer H. P. Lovecraft and first introduced in the short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, published in the American pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. Considered a Great Old One within the pantheon of Lovecraftian cosmic entities, the creature has since been featured in numerous popular culture references. Lovecraft depicts Cthulhu as a gigantic entity worshipped by cultists. Cthulhu’s appearance is described as looking like an octopus, a dragon, and a caricature of human form. Its name was given to the Lovecraft-inspired universe where it and its fellow entities existed, the Cthulhu Mythos.

Though invented by Lovecraft in 1928, the name Cthulhu is probably derived from the word chthonic, derived from Classical Greek, meaning “subterranean”, as apparently suggested by Lovecraft himself at the end of his 1923 tale “The Rats in the Walls”.

… In “The Call of Cthulhu”, H. P. Lovecraft describes a statue of Cthulhu as “A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.” Cthulhu has been described in appearance as resembling an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature, hundreds of meters tall, with webbed human-looking arms and legs and a pair of rudimentary wings on its back. Cthulhu’s head is depicted as similar to the entirety of a gigantic octopus, with an unknown number of tentacles surrounding its supposed mouth.

Cthulhu is ghastly and fearsome. But it has a more genial noodly-appendaged cousin, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. See my 7/31/11 posting “Critical thinking”, on the FSM and the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. The idea of Cthulhu and the FSM getting together has attracted several artists, as here:

(#4) On their hook-up, tentacles tentatively entwined, as imagined by Ray Van Tilburg in a t-shirt design for OffWorld Designs

A long long day getting this handout together; my paper is on Friday afternoon. Ides of March. But first, the doctor is in:

Matt LeBlanc, playing Joey Tribbiani on Friends, playing Dr. Drake Ramoray on Days of Our Lives

(No doubt there are typos. There are always typos.)

In yesterday’s Zippy, the Walking Man — Zippy knows him as Ed Ped — returns to Zippytopia:

(#1)

First theme: Ed used to be otherwise, but now he’s naked, amanous, and apodous: Deal with it! Get over it! Get used to it! We are everywhere.

Second theme: Zippy moves the focus to France, causing Ed to morph into a stereotypical Frenchman (with beret and cigarette, probably Gauloises), who announces Je suis partout ‘I am all over, I am everywhere’.

Side effect:  French Ed evokes, in Zippy’s mind, Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. (Zippy is a wildly associative thinker.)

The We Are Everywhere subtheme. We are everywhere is a hyperbolic expression, but it’s the general hyperbole of universal expressions, which are commonly used to convey (merely) a high degree. Dandelions are everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they’re in Antarctica, or on my patio in Palo Alto (though there are some just around the corner).

Still, NOAD thought the ‘many’ understanding was significant enough to merit a subsense:

adv. everywhere: [a] in or to all places: I’ve looked everywhere | everywhere she went she was feted. [b] in many places; common or widely distributed: sandwich bars are everywhere.

Beyond that, though we are everywhere can be understood as a simple assertion of common occurrence, it’s likely to be heard as something more than that: through conversational implicature, it can serve as a boast, warning, or threat (depending on the context). Indeed, any assertion of wide presence, however expressed in words, can carry this implicature. From the tv tropes site on We Are Everywhere (as an idea, not necessarily as expressed in a specific catchphrase or slogan):

“Hi! You’re going to call off your rigorous investigation. You’re going to publicly state that there is no underground group. Or we are going to take your balls. Look. The people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. [pause] Do not fuck with us.” — Tyler Durden, Fight Club

When a malicious group is investigated and busted, a member brags how the group is everywhere. The group member will further claim that their movement is growing, and will rule supreme someday, leaving the heroes concerned that there will be more trouble in the future.

The most common associations are with right-wing militia movements, which became a trope of their own following the militia scare in the media after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Note also that the same claim may be made by the heroes when they are the resistance to a despotic regime. Naturally, the message is inverted this way.

Meanwhile, the specific wording we are everywhere has become something of a formula, understood as asserting widespread occurrence and conveying a boast or warning, and more easily available to the user than other expressions with this content, like we are all over (the place), you can find us everywhere, etc. It’s a catchphrase or slogan, and it’s historically been used by certain groups — lgbt people, in particular — to proclaim the strength of their group identity. In that context, it’s part of the verbal armamentarium of being publicly gay. From my 7/25/10 posting “A few words from Sir Ian”, about Ian McKellen and his slogan t-shirt:

the slogan [Some People Are Gay. Get Over It.] comes in two parts, together replacing the gay pride slogan of my youth (a few years ago):

We’re here / We’re queer / Get used to it

The in-your-face first part of the older slogan has been replaced by a simple statement of fact (and modest, too, making an existential claim well short of the universal We Are Everywhere), the second part by a more currently fashionable exhortation

So the combination of deal with it and je suis partout in #1 led me to the queer world (probably not Bill Griffith’s intention — but I make my own conceptual associations) and so to entertain the idea that Ed Ped is in fact Ed Pédé ‘Ed the Fag’. If that familiar character Ed Ped  is queer, then truly We Are Everywhere.

Digression: a related catchphrase. Another way of conveying that we are many, and everywhere: my name is Legion, our name is legion; I/we are legion. From Wikipedia:

The Christian New Testament gospels of Matthew (8:28-34), Mark and Luke describe an incident in which Jesus meets a man, or in Matthew two men, possessed by demons who, in the Mark and Luke versions, when asked what their name is, respond: “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

And from NOAD:

adj. legion: great in number: her fans are legion. ORIGIN The adjective dates from the late 17th century, in early use often in the phrase my, their, etc. name is legion, i.e. ‘we, they, etc. are many’ (Mark 5:9).

Zippy and Ed Ped, together before. In my 7/16/15 posting “Zippy and the Icon at the Bluebonnet”, a strip entitled “Ed Ped dead ahead”,

(#2)

showing Zippy at the Bluebonnet Diner in Northampton MA, trading warning signs at the counter with an icon representing a (generic) person:

(#3) Ed Ped, the Walking Man (naked, handless, and footless)

Digression: Ed the Ped. Apparently quite separately from Bill Griffith, author Jim Belmessieri, selling his short stories (33 so far) on Amazon for Kindles (at 99 cents each), hit on the name Ed the Ped for a children’s story about pedestrian safety, “Ed the Ped” (2013):

(#4) In the story Ed is a person, a kid — not a symbol, as elsewhere

The charming tale of Ed, who is, quite simply, a Ped – that is, a pedestrian. Ed is a happy and independent little boy who likes to take afternoon walks. However, a pedestrian crossing (or, a Ped Xing) the street can be a tricky business, what with cars and trucks and Men Working. Ed the Ped must learn to recognize and obey the various traffic safety signs he finds along his way to know where he should walk along a busy street. And where he shouldn’t.
Best if read aloud to your child. Children’s Safety. 1080 words, in verse.

Ed and his family. In panel 2 of #1, we see the symbolic entity, or symbent), Ed as a boy, when he still had hands and feet and wore clothes. Here he is as a teenager:

(#5) From the Clipart Library #2187124

When the time came for his metamorphosis, he was denuded, demanuated, and depodiated, had his head circulified, and so became a full Ped, fiercely proud of the service he provides to people on the streets and sidewalks.

Other branches of the Trafficae family of symbents take quite different forms. The Aupeds of Australia, for instance, are disembodied lower extremities: legs from the knees down, with trousers and shoes:

(#6) Pedestrian crossing sign from Global Spill Control: Australian spill and safety equipment

There are several subfamilies of luminescent Trafficae. The American Lights WALK and WALK:

(#7)

(#8)

And their British Light counterparts, known colloquially as Green Man and Red Man:

(#9)

In recent years there have been many experiments in breeding new hybrid forms of luminescent Trafficae. For instance, the London Pride Lights, introduced in 2016:

(#10) Transport For London replaced the traditional GO sign with same-sex symbols in 50 traffic lights in June 2016 around the Trafalgar Square area to recognize those taking part in London Pride

Odds and ends. Bill Griffith is never content to make some point, but nearly always embroiders things with playful routines and allusions and chains of conceptual associations.

In the first panel of #1, Zippy doesn’t just greed Ed Ped, but breaks out in doggerel:

Ed Ped! You fill me with dread! Sometimes I wish you were dead!

If you say this with strong accents on the two syllables of sometimes (parallel to the two syllables of Ed Ped), you get a little bit of highly metrical verse, two tetrasyllabic lines of S S  WS WWS (plus four /ɛd/ rhymes).

Then there’s the mention of France that leads to Jerry Lewis, an allusion to French appreciation of Lewis as an auteur — and then to the film generally recognized as his finest work, The Nutty Professor (1963).

Addendum: We Are Everywhere on this blog. The catchphrase has been generalized to what looks like a snowclone X is Everywhere, as in my 7/25/11 posting “We are everywhere”, with a Zippy strip “Pinheads are everywhere!”

Meanwhile, I’ve used we are everywhere to refer to various groups, not only lgbt people but also (playfully) Zwickys and mammoths.

Queer uses:

— on 3/23/18 in “Gayupid’s Arrow: We are everywhere, and now you are too”, on fanciful means for turning men gay

— on 6/5/18 in “We are everywhere, and we have penguins”, on a Pride event in Antarctica

Other uses:

— on 7/15/16 in “Time to refuel”: “as for Zwickys, We Are Everywhere.– out of Switzerland, to cover the world — We Can Do Anything, and We Deliver [fuel]”

— on 7/16/16 in “To be floral, bearded, and young”: again, “as for Zwickys, We Are Everywhere, We Can Do Anything, and We Deliver [rock music]”

— on 9/5/18 in “Attack of the mammoth penguins”: “Mammoths. We Are Everywhere”

From my 1/25/19 posting “Pythonic curtain line in the Economist”:

The Economist is ridiculously fond of this sort of jokiness, dropping allusions left and right (unattributed of course), to both high and low culture, to idioms, proverbs and sayings, and so on. In the Vaccine X story, the sting is in the tail

— in the very last sentence: “All this may then eliminate the fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency of unexpected viruses”, a variant of a quotation from the Monty Python “Spanish Inquisition” sketch.

If you catch the quotation — not every reader will — that doesn’t contribute substantively to your understanding, but it does provide a kind of side pleasure, not unlike that afforded by Easter eggs in video games and the like. So I’ll refer to them as Easter egg quotations.

Then in the 4/6/19 Economist, a particularly subtle Easter egg quotation. In a “Liberation biology” — note play on liberation theology — story, in the magazine’s Technology Quarterly section on synthetic biology (p. 12):

At a “Build-a-Cell” workshop in San Diego this February the assembled researchers noted how hard it was to communicate to the public the remarkable scope of their ambitions: creating genomes and the cells to house them from almost first principles.

(#1) On the engineering of living organisms

If you appreciate the conceptual bravura of an organism with no ancestors, or that even discussing such a thing would have seemed insane just 25 years ago, this is staggering. If you do not, such synthetic life seems just to be, well, more life. And life is both already a miracle and the most everyday one. Cell is a cell is a cell.

If that last sentence had been A cell is a cell is a cell, it would just have been an instance of the 3X BE snowclone (see below), but instead the sentence is a playful variation of the exact original from Gertrude Stein, Rose is a rose is a rose (again, see below), and the reader who recognizes that has found a pretty Easter egg.

Prosaic vs. ludic formulations. Go back to the Vaccine X story. Its last sentence could have been something like “All this may then eliminate the terror and great dangers of novel viruses” — straightforward but prosaic. The ludic formulation “All this may then eliminate the fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency of unexpected viruses” provides no further literal content, but, if you get the allusion, does evoke something like this picture and its text:

(#2) “Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency (… and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope)”

The quotation gives you an extra, a bonus, a pretty surprise. Analogous to the Easter eggs of the computer world. From Wikipedia:

In computer software and media, an Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, hidden message or image, or secret feature of a work. It is usually found in a computer program, video game, or DVD/Blu-ray Disc menu screen. The name is used to evoke the idea of a traditional Easter egg hunt. The term was coined to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure that encouraged the player to find further hidden messages in later games, leading them on a ‘hunt’.

The deployment of quotations. Quotations are routinely used more or less literally, the proviso being that their literal meaning is understood to be somehow relevant to the context of their use. So with, for example, Malthus’s assertion (An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798):

Population, when unchecked, increases in geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in arithmetical ratio.

(as used, say, in a discussion of government policies affecting population growth or food supplies).

But that proviso is nothing more than Gricean Relevance, applicable to all sorts of cooperative conversation. Quotations are merely particularly striking or compact ways of formulating some content.

Easter egg quotations are quotations deployed merely as shiny things.

And then there’s the very common use of quotations as proverbs, expressions used conventionally to convey content indirectly, often as advice.

A typical proverb:

All cats are gray/grey in the dark.
At night all cats are gray/grey.

conveying, conventionally, that in certain circumstances people are indistinguishable.

Quotations can generally be used proverbially. For instance, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities) can be used conventionally to convey that some period was or is full of both great joy and great sorrow — or merely a mixed bag, as they say. Similarly, the (mis)quotation “A rose is a rose is a rose” can be used to convey conventionally that things of some type are all pretty much alike.

A quotation used proverbially then can serve as the basis for a snowclone. So, from “A rose is a rose is a rose” we get a generalization to the 3X BE snowclone (An X is an X is an X, in one of its forms), conveying that Xs are all pretty much alike: A cell is a cell is a cell. As far as I can see, the 3X BE snowclone hasn’t been discussed in the literature, but it’s easy to find examples:

A lie, is a lie, is a lie. (link — newsman Dan Rather about the Wall Street Journal‘s disinclination to label 45’s fallacious statements as lies)

A Jew is a Jew is a Jew. (link — a plea for all Jews to be treated alike)

A Dog Is a Dog Is a Dog (link — an episode of Gomer Pyle: USMC, conveying ‘all dogs are/look alike”)

the fact that morons are morons are morons (link — in a story about stupid criminals)

Gertrude Stein. The actual history of roses and the 3X BE snowclone isn’t straightforward. From Wikipedia:

The sentence “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” was written by Gertrude Stein as part of the 1913 poem “Sacred Emily”, which appeared in the 1922 book Geography and Plays. In that poem, the first “Rose” is the name of a person. Stein later used variations on the sentence in other writings, and “A rose is a rose is a rose” is among her most famous quotations, often interpreted as meaning “things are what they are”, a statement of the law of identity, “A is A”. In Stein’s view, the sentence expresses the fact that simply using the name of a thing already invokes the imagery and emotions associated with it, an idea also intensively discussed in the problem of universals debate where Peter Abelard and others used the rose as an example concept. As the quotation diffused through her own writing, and the culture at large, Stein once remarked, “Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a … is a … is a …’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.” (Four in America).

Whatever her original (or later) intentions, Stein’s writings seem to have established “A rose is a rose is a rose” as a quotation of English that could be used proverbially, and then serve as the basis for snowcloning (so that someone could now perfectly easily write “A Jew is a Jew is a Jew” without any knowledge of its Steinian antecedents).

Then: what’s so subtle about the Economist‘s “Cell is a cell is a cell” is that it uses Stein’s original quotation (rather than its later form), while playfully varying it by substituting Cell/cell for Rose/rose.

Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to Littleton (NH, not the more famous CO — or, for that matter, IL, IA, KY, ME, MA, NC, or WV), where our Pinhead falls into an identity crisis:

(#1)

Everybody, including the counterman, is Zippy, or at least a Zippy. And the strip begins with a stretch that is both two panels, each with a Zippy in it, and one full-diner-view panel, with two Zippys in it. We’re in the nightmare world of clones — who am I?

Then there’s the observation in the last panel: No one brings small problems into a diner. Certainly, an interpretation of what happened in the strip before this, though as that it’s crucially ambiguous. But maybe also a moral that we should take away from those events, a piece of advice about what we should or should not do.

The diner. I’ll start with the setting. Of course, a real diner. On its website:

(#2)

Built in Merrimack, MA in 1928 and transported to Littleton, NH – where it opened in 1930. In 1940 a new Sterling Diner was constructed on the original site, where the Littleton Diner has been an integral part of the community since.

Littleton Diner History: On January 16, 1930 the Littleton Courier newspaper reported that workmen for the Stone Brothers of Bethlehem Junction had begun to put in the foundation for a modern parlor car diner in Littleton next to the Masonic Temple. Today, many can still remember the excitement as the diner arrived by rail and was transported to the site. Eugene Stone and his wife Stella opened the Diner in mid-1930. The history of the Littleton Diner had begun. The new restaurant had a seating capacity of 25 and an open kitchen in the dining room just behind the counter. It was an instant success.

In 1940, the Stones purchased a new Sterling Diner and erected it on the original location after selling their first “parlor car”.

And on Littleton itself, from Wikipedia:

(#3) Littleton within NH; QC to the north, NY to the west, MA to the south, ME to the east

Littleton is a town in Grafton County, New Hampshire… The population was 5,928 at the 2010 census. Situated at the northern edge of the White Mountains, Littleton is bounded on the northwest by the Connecticut River.

… History: Called “Chiswick” (Saxon for “Cheese Farm”) in 1764, the area was settled in 1769. The town was part of Lisbon until 1770, when it was granted as “Apthorp” in honor of George Apthorp, head of one of the wealthiest mercantile establishments in Boston, Massachusetts. The land was later passed to the Apthorp family’s associates from Newburyport, Massachusetts, headed by Colonel Moses Little. Colonel Little held the post of Surveyor of the King’s Woods, and the town was named in his honor when it was incorporated in 1784, the same year New Hampshire became a state.

No one brings small problems into a diner. The question is what’s in focus in this sentence from Observer Zippy (OZ), small problems or just small:

(a) ‘people might bring all sorts of things into a diner, but not small problems’ (implicates bringing no problems at all)

(b) ‘people might bring all sorts of problems into a diner, but not small ones’

If OZ is making the first observation, he’s noting that people are in fact bringing problems into the diner, by arguing over who’s Zippy and who’s not, and he’s expressing disapproval of the practive.

If OZ is making the second observation, he’s noting that people are bringing problems into the diner and he’s accepting that practice, concluding that since people brought these problems into the diner, they must not be small or trivial, but large and significant.

Now, Bill Griffith might well have intended OZ to be conveying just one of these thoughts, or he might have deliberately introduced uncertainty (that would certainly be in character), but when I got to the end of the strip I found my mind flicking back and forth between (a) and (b).

Will the real? The title of this posting is a play on the title of a classic tv quiz show, which has lived on in syndication and new incarnations since 1956. From Wikipedia:

To Tell the Truth is an American television panel game show in which four celebrity panelists are presented with three contestants (the “team of challengers”, each an individual or pair) and must identify which is the “central character” whose unusual occupation or experience has been read out by the show’s moderator/host. When the panelists question the contestants, the two “impostors” may lie whereas the “central character” must tell the truth. The setup adds the “impostor” element to the format of What’s My Line? and I’ve Got a Secret.

The show was created by Bob Stewart and originally produced by Mark Goodson–Bill Todman Productions. It aired, on networks and in syndication, continuously from 1956 to 1978 and intermittently since then, reaching a total of 28 seasons in 2018.

… Three challengers are introduced, all claiming to be the central character. The announcer typically asks the challengers, who stand side by side, “What is your name, please?” Each challenger then states, “My name is [central character’s name].” … The panelists are each given a period of time to question the challengers. … After questioning is complete, each member of the panel votes on which of the challengers they believe to be the central character … Once the votes are in, the host asks, “Will the real [person’s name] please stand up?” The central character then stands, often after some brief playful feinting and false starts among all three challengers.

Two shows available on YouTube:

(#4) from 4/28/58 with Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

(#5) from 2/18/63 with Polish spy Pawel Monat, who defected to the US in 1958, with a surprise ending

On the show, as in the Zippy in #1, there are competitors claiming to be X, where X is a contextually unique individual picked out by a proper name: Zippy, Ted Geisel, Pawel Monat. Somewhat more generally, in Will the real X please stand up?, X can be picked out by a definite description, as in the title of this episode from The Twilight Zone, from Wikipedia:

“Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” is episode 64 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on May 26, 1961 on CBS.

… Plot: Two state troopers, investigating a report about a UFO, find evidence something has crashed in a frozen pond: footprints in the snow from the pond lead to a nearby, isolated late-night diner called the Hi-Way. Upon arriving, the troopers find a bus parked outside the Hi-Way Cafe. Inside the Hi-Way, the troopers find a cook …, a bus driver, and his passengers.

The troopers … announce a suspected alien from a nearby crashed UFO may be among them, and asks for everyone to identify themselves. … The bus driver counted *six* passengers. The company gave him six, and he’s supposed to deliver six. The troopers make a quick count, and there are *seven* passengers…

These, and some others you can find, are playful variations on the signature phrase of the tv show, asking who the real X is and instructing them to show themselves. Several things to note:

Note 1. Though disputed identities are a staple of imaginative fictions of all kinds, the situation is rare in real life, especially for disputes over the bearer of a proper name; disputes over the referent of a definite description are somewhat more common (as of this writing, 4/20/19, there are two competitors for the referent of the president of Venezuela). But these situations are so unusual that they would hardly seem to merit having a formula for a procedure to resolve such disputes.

Note 2. In real life, the resolution procedure in To Tell the Truth is utterly unworkable: the typical disputant believes in their claim, so they won’t accede to someone else’s; and even if they’re dissembling, they’re unlikely to recognize an authority who directs resolution of the claims. If some non-Zippy character — say, Griffy — were to enter the scene in #1 and ask Will the real Zippy please stand up?, that would only deepen the chaos of the scene; it could only end badly.

The resolution formula worked in the tv show because the show set up a miniature social world whose inhabitants agreed to abide by a specific set of social conventions, including submitting to (certain) directives from the announcer.

Note 3. At some point, for some people, the formula becomes detached from its tv show origins; for these people it’s just a bit of formulaic language — who knows, or cares, where it came from? — that you can use for playful purposes.

At this point it can develop into a snowclone, but no longer asking about actual identity (as I noted above, for that purpose it’s stupid), instead asking about personas, or presentations of self: which aspect of the person you project yourself as being is the most authentic, which is the true you? I’d deny that there is such a thing, and maintain that we’re all assemblages, congresses of personas, deployed according to context. But most people hold to an ideology of the authentic self, so that it makes sense (to them) to ask which of your presentations is the real one.

Which brings us to snowclonic instances of the formula. As here:

(#6) Which presentation (in different tv contexts) of Mitt Romney is the real one?

And here:

(#7) Which version of the rapper Eminem’s (Marshall Bruce Mathers III) Slim Shady character is the real one? (A sly question: how can you tell them apart?)

(Men’s bodies, clicks, mansex, dactyls, homowear, eggcorns, street talk, and more. Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

The Daily Jocks mailing of the 15th, with a studiedly homo-smouldering ad for crop tops from the fetish-wear company Barcode Berlin. Plus a foul derangement of (heavily enjambed) dactyls as a caption.

(#1)

Kiko the crop-top kid,
Impudent pussy boy,
Butch faggy target for
Amorous arrows — a

mazing for festivals,
Parties with gangbangers,
Mid-drifting kikis with
Quatrains of dactyls

The ad copy (slightly edited):

It’s time to make a statement in one of the latest crop tees from Barcode Berlin.

The mid-drift crop sits at the perfect length and suits multiple body types. The sporty raglan sleeve paired with the lightweight polyester fabric will keep you looking good and feeling great throughout the whole day/night.

Amazing for festivals or parties!

Kiko has fully embraced the Barcode life of butch faggotry, as a crop-top kid. From the alternatives (which I’ll enumerate below), he’s chosen the party-boy Kiki target as his own emblem and identity: he is the target, the possessor of the bullseye ◎ that the arrow of desire seeks to penetrate.

Kiko’s world: crop tops. From postings on this blog:

— on 8/2/18 in “Male crop tops!”, an overview of crop tops, with a note on the expressions crop/cropped top/tee

— on 8/14/18 in “Butch fagginess” (in Barcode Berlin’s clothes)

(#2) A shirt that conveys both ‘I’m a real man’ and ‘I’m a total slut’

Printed on the crop tops:

Shady Bitch, Kiki, #CANDY, This Boy Is A Bottom, [two unicorns with a rainbow, no words], Get Naked, Cheap & Easy, Bitch, Bear, Fetish, Bitch I’m Fabulous, Love Boys

Linguistic note: mid-drift, mid-rift. From the ad copy above: “The mid-drift crop sits at the perfect length”. The word midriff is an old word with a now-obsolete second part:

noun midriff: the region of the front of the body between the chest and the waist. ORIGIN Old English midhrif, from mid-1 + hrif ‘belly’. (NOAD)

So mid-drift is an eggcorn, an attempt to make some sense out of a word that appears to have the prefix mid– in it. From the Eggcorn Forum (on the Eggcorn Database site), entry 665 Commentary by Lara Hopkins , 9/27/05:

“Mid-drift top” for “midriff top”. I spotted this on a mailing list just now. Maybe the speaker is imagining the hem to be progressively drifting upwards on the torso. “Midriff” in isolation is more or less obsolete nowadays.

Google confirms nearly 6000 examples, including a number of dress code handbooks:

“Thongs, “baggy” pants, mid-drift tops, “spaghetti strap tops”, etc. are not considered safe for school”…

“please forgo any mid-drift tops, tennis shoes, torn jeans, etc.”…

“#3 NO halter, tank or mid-drift tops.”…

“Matching bra or mid-drift tops are available, but are VERY small. ”…

And from Urban Dictionary:

mid-drift: A midriff/belly that is unintentionally visible due to the owner of the midriff’s shirt riding (drifting) up during use. That chick’s rocking some SERIOUS mid-drift. — by Wildbluesun 5/20/14

(Note that both report an attempt to rationalize drift as the second element in the word.)

If not drift, then maybe rift. From the Eggcorn Database on midriff » midrift, entered by me on 8/13/07:

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion

Analyzed or reported by: Hilary Robinson (link), Paul Brians (link), Peter Forster, calamityjane01 (link)

Suggested to me by Rachel Cristy, 13 August 2007. Earlier reports above.

Brians: “Midriff” derives from “mid-” and a very old word for the belly. Fashions which bare the belly expose the midriff. People think of the gap being created by scanty tops and bottoms as a rift, and mistakenly call it a “midrift” instead. In earlier centuries, before belly-baring was in, the midriff was also the piece of cloth which covered the area.

AMZ: It’s possible that this interpretation is encouraged by viewing the “midriff” pronunciation as the product of final t-deletion.

Kiko’s world: the (squatting-kneeling) posture. Kiko’s posture, kneeling with his legs spread, heels raised, and body vertical, but one leg raised as in squatting or crouching, is designed to thrust his crotch forward as much as possible and to display his muscular thighs (as the bare midriff displays his muscular abdominals).

Kiko’s world: facial expressions and pussies. Kiko’s facial expression in #1 combines an element of impertinence or impudence with one of seductiveness or sexiness. But it’s fairly restrained. Here’s George Michael going all out on these dimensions:

(#3)

The word impudent, all on its own, moves us towards sex. From NOAD:

adj. impudent: not showing due respect for another person; impertinent: he could have strangled this impudent upstart.  ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense ‘immodest, indelicate’): from Latin impudent-, from in- ‘not’+ pudent- ‘ashamed, modest’ (from pudere ‘be ashamed’).

noun pudendum (plural pudenda: (often pudenda) a person’s external genitals, especially a woman’s. ORIGIN mid 17th century: from Latin pudenda (membra) ‘(parts) to be ashamed of’, neuter plural of the gerundive of pudere ‘be ashamed’.

In fact, Kiko is not only impudent, he’s a pussy:

noun pussy: 1 informal (also pussycat) a cat. 2 vulgar slang [a] a woman’s genitals [that is, her pudenda]. [b] women in general, considered sexually. [c] North American informal a weak, cowardly, or effeminate man. (NOAD)

pussyboy / pussy-boy / pussy boy ‘passive male homosexual, catamite, bottom boy’ (from several sources)

Kiko’s world: let’s have a kiki. Kiko’s shirt in #1 is embazoned KIKI. From my 3/19/17 posting “Sexting with emoji”, about Grindr gaymoji, including this one:

(#4)

With this explanation:

From Wikipedia:

A “kiki” (alternately kiking or a ki) is a term which grew out of Queer Black /Latino social culture – loosely defined as an expression of laughter or onomatopoeia for laughing, which extended to mean a gathering of friends for the purpose of gossiping and chit-chat, and later made more widely known in the song “Let’s Have a Kiki” by the Scissor Sisters. [2012] [Scissor Sisters videos can be viewed here and here]

(#5)

The Kiki world is extravagantly gay, also full of drag displays and general genderfuck.

Kiko’s world: targets and bullseyes. Kiko’s shirt in #1 has KIKI superimposed on a target. A target with its bullseye center. From NOAD:

noun bullseye: 1 [a] the center of the target in sports such as archery, shooting, and darts. [b] a shot that hits the center of a target in archery, shooting, and darts. [c] used to refer to something that achieves exactly the intended effect: the silence told him he’d scored a bullseye.

An archery target with an arrow penetrating the center of its bullseye:

(#6)

A bullseye is open to many symbolic interpretations — in particular, as an eye, so metaphorically a sign of focus or concentration, as in a mandala, and as an eyelike bodily cavity: the mouth, the vagina, or (as surely intended in #1) the anus (Kiko is a pussy boy).

A linguistic bonus: a version of the bullseye in now Unicode symbol U+0298, used to represent a bilabial click (the sound of a lip smack or kissing gesture)  — in a simple variant here:

(#7)

and in Times New Roman here:

(#8)

Once again, Ruthie grapples with ABC order, in the January 6th One Big Happy:

(#1)

The larger context: test tasks for kids, and what they’re for. Eventually this will take us to queens.

Not long ago, in another, very different, confrontation between Ruthie and ABC order: from my 12/29/18 posting “Ruthie x 3”:

(#2)

The conventional name in English is alphabetical order (or, rarely, alphabetic order). But the pentasyllabic alphabetical is a hell of a mouthful for kids in the early grades, so some teachers have hit on the idea of using something the children already know: the letters of the alphabet in sequence. Hence, ABC order (not in OED3 (Dec. 2011), but obviously useful).

At some point I must have been told why we were learning how to alphabetize lists of words and how to search alphabetized lists. The task is, after all, complex: you need to have the fixed order of the letters of the alphabet routinized for quick access, and then you need to apply this order recursively from left to right. The crucial point is that this order is independent of the interests of any particular person; it’s the same for everybody, so everybody can use it equally. And all you need is the spelling of the word; you don’t need any other information about the word (such as when you first encountered it) or about the word’s referent (such as whether it refers to something large or something small) or about your relationship to the referent of the word (such as whether this referent is important to you or not).

But for what purpose? To allow for quick search through long lists of words (or longer expressions), to find out whether something you’re looking for is on it. We use alphabetized lists of people’s names (in class lists, for example), of expressions in dictionaries and encyclopedias, and so on. Without alphabetization, searching for certain kinds of information would be tedious and difficult.

Now, if we’re going to expect kids to develop skills in creating and using alphabetized lists, they’ll need to see some point in the exercise; otherwise, they’ll just fall back on their own idiosyncratic schemes for ordering things, and they won’t become at all skillful with alphabetization (which is, like it or not, important in alphabet-using cultures in the modern world).  Even Ruthie in #1, who says that she understands the correct alphabetical order of the three words, chooses to use in this particular case an ordering relationship based on a different principle — namely, that supremely important principle of kid culture, fairness.

Why learn it? Learning to deal with alphabetization requires a significant outlay of time and effort, but the rationale for that looks pretty clear. It’s not always clear, to me at least, why certain other things are taught and tested. From my 11/21/18 posting “OBH analyses”:

Opposites for kids. At some point in the history of education in the United States (and probably elsewhere) mastering the vocabulary of opposites — being able to supply an “opposite” word for some given word — came to be seen as a significant goal in childhood education. I know nothing about the history or about the rationale for pursuing this particular task, but I do know that the usual reason given from drilling preschoolers in this task — that they need to learn the vocabulary — is utterly preposterous, since all the words in question are ones the children already know and use, like big and little.

So the exercise must in some way be about conceptual relationships — contrariety, contradiction, and (as we shall see) more, much more — in the belief that internalizing knowledge about these will benefit small children in some way. So, mostly, it’s not about words at all (though the testing materials, like the worksheet Joe is agonizing over in #2 [in that posting], generally do seem to assume that there is only one correct opposite word for any given word), but about more abstract relationships.

… In the big list [of opposites in materials for children], contrary adjectives are clearly the central examples, and they are the ones these materials start with and then diverge from; they form the basis on which kids are to (tacitly) induce what opposite means. But the pairs are all over the map: some are contradictories (man – woman), some are semantic converses (give – get / receive), some have a reversative (fix – break), and so on through quite a variety of contrastive pairings (hello – goodbye? sour – sweet?). I really don’t know what kids are supposed to make of this. Or why they should be enaging in the task.

Queens. And then we get to nuggets of specific information that kids are tested on. These I often find deeply mystifying, for a variety of reasons.

First, there’s the difference between information-seeking questions and test questions, a tricky business that takes kids a while to cotton to; some discussion of infoseek vs. test questions in my 8/21/18 posting “Asking questions and giving commands”.

Then there are conventionally expected answers to particular test questions, which kids are expected to induce from their classroom experience; see my Language Log posting of 12/2/09, “What is this question about?”, about the range of expected answers to the test question, “What color is a banana?” (note: WHITE is a wrong answer, even though the edible part of standard bananas is white; and RED is a wrong answer, even though the standard bananas in many parts of the world have reddish skins).

Finally, there’s the raw choice of test questions, which often look they’re just pulled out of a hat; we ask this question because we can. (Kids are supposed to know things, so let’s test some stuff.) In this vein is a test question — with a really clever answer marked wrong (as a general rule, truly clever answers are wrong, from the point of view of the devisers of tests) —  that’s been making the rounds of the net as an image of an actual test item. Surely invented, but a good joke, and not far from examples you can collect from real life:

Name one popular queen.  Freddy Mercury  ✘

A wonderful answer: Mercury was the lead singer of the rock band Queen, and his performance persona was wildly flamboyant, worthy of the label queen. But not, of course, in the ‘female monarch’ sense the test question intends to ask about. RuPaul is certainly a popular queen, but again not in the sense the test question intends to ask about  (and RuPaul wouldn’t have been as clever a wrong answer as Freddy Mercury). Andrew McQueen — also a queen, in the flamboyant sense, but nowhere near as popular as Freddy Mercury and RuPaul — would have been a cute answer, if only for the contrast with butch / macho Steve McQueen. Then there’s Queen Latifah, the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen, the Queen of Darkness, Dairy Queen, and Speed Queen, plus prom queens, welfare queens, drama queens, opera queens and rice queens (see my 12/19/15 posting “X queen” on the snowclonelet pattern).

In an English-speaking context, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, and Queen Elizabeth II would be correct answers, and possibly the only acceptable correct answers; it all depends on what’s intended by popular. I assume Queen Juliana and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands (and other comparable modern European female monarchs) were insufficiently popular in English-speaking lands, that Catherine the Great of Russia and Queen Isabella of Aragon were powerful but not popular, that Mary Queen of Scots was too unsympathetic to be popular, and that Queen Anne and the Queen Mary of Williamanmary were more sympathetic but still a bit short in popularity on the street. Leaving three prime answers.

Maybe the question should have asked about famous queens of England. Certainly the question seems designed to tap high cultural currency or something similar — so it really is a lot like the banana-color question, a probe about mass enculturation.

So, I ask again, why ask this particular question? What do we expect kids to know, and why?

(OPAs, for short.) The contrast is to inconspicuously playful allusions, what I’ve called Easter egg quotations on this blog. With three OPAs from the 4/20/19 Economist, illustrating three levels of closeness between the content of the OPA and the topic of the article: no substantive relationship between the two (the Nock, Nock case), tangential relationship (the Sunset brouhaha case), and tight relationship (the defecate in the woods case).

The three cases also illustrate three degrees of paronomasia: the Nock, Nock case involves a (phonologically) perfect pun; the Sunset brouhaha case an imperfect pun; and the defecate in the woods case no pun at all, but whole-word substitutions.

I’ll start in the middle, with Sunset brouhaha. But first, some background. Which will incorporate flaming saganaki; be prepared.

Background: EEQs and OPAs. From my 4/13/19 posting “Easter egg quotations”

If you catch the quotation [from Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, about fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency] — not every reader will — that doesn’t contribute substantively to your understanding, but it does provide a kind of side pleasure, not unlike that afforded by Easter eggs in video games and the like. So I’ll refer to them as Easter egg quotations.

For the most part, the Economist deploys allusions ostentatiously, as jokes that are meant to be seen as jokes. The Vaccine X allusion to Monty Python, however, can be read straightforwardly and literally, merely asserting that unexpected viruses elicit fear and surprise and are ruthlessly efficient.

The contrast is between the publication’s usual practice, which is deep in OPAs, and its occasional inconspicuous deployment of quotations as a small gift to appropriately plugged-in readers, in the form of Easter egg quotations, or EEQs (pronounced like eeks) for short.

Digression: the placement of playful allusions. Playful allusions (of both types) are not sprinkled through articles, but occur mostly in just three places of prominence: in the framing of a story, in a head(line); at the beginning of a story (or a substory framed by a title), in its first paragraph; and at the end of a story or substory, in its last paragraph.

Kicker heads. From the Merriam-Webster site:

[noun kicker-1:] a line of newspaper type set above a headline usually in a different typeface and intended to provoke interest in, editorialize about, or provide orientation for the matter in the copy heads [I’ll call them kicker heads.]

The prime location for playful allusions in the Economist. All three of the OPAs featured in this posting are in this position.

On p. 28, Sunset brouhaha, here in all of its glory because of the photo placement, on-line:

(#1) Kicker head + main head (in print: “Worried by declining salaries, Hollywood’s writers sack their agents”) + subhead

On p. 31, Nock, Nock, in print and on-line:

Nock, Nock
Republican state legislatures are overturning ballot initiatives

And on p. 71, defecate in the woods:

Do tapirs defecate in the woods?
[in print] It seems they prefer burned-out scrub. And that may help regenerate forests.
[on-line] They prefer burnt-out scrub. And that may help to regenerate forests

Opening lines. In the lead sentence, or at least in the lead paragraph. From my 4/7/15 posting “Allusion in the Economist”

in a report on Peru: “A jarring defeat: The loneliness of Ollanta Humala”, the story leads with:

To lose one prime minister might be considered a misfortune, but to lose six in less than four years in office, as Peru’s president, Ollanta Humala, has done, must be seen as carelessness.

Referring to losing six prime ministers, and then to these frequent changes of government as carelessness, is preposterous, but then we hear Lady Bracknell’s voice and realize it’s a playful allusion, in fact an ostentatious one.

Closing lines. The EEQ from the Spanish Inquisition sketch came in fact at the very end of the Economist‘s story; my original 1/25/19 report of the example was entitled “Pythonic curtain line in the Economist”. As it happens, there’s now journalist lingo for remarkable curtain lines. Alas, that term is kicker, so there’s an ambiguity avoidance problem (which is why I labeled the earlier use kicker-1 and suggested the usage kicker head). From the Merriam-Webster site again:

Recently, another meaning for kicker has emerged [kicker-2], referring to a surprising or poignant revelation that concludes an article. It’s an example of the inside language of editing and journalism that is used even when intended for a broader readership. [I’ll call them punch-line kickers]

This journalistic use of kicker in a ‘surprise’ sense is just a special case of a wider ‘surprise’ use  recorded in both NOAD:

noun kicker: 2 North American informal an unexpected and often unpleasant discovery or turn of events: the kicker was you couldn’t get a permit.

and AHD5:

noun kicker: 2 Informal a. A sudden, surprising turn of events or ending; a twist.

(neither of which requires that the kick come at the end of something).

[Further kicker notes. AHD5 has another extended sense:

b. A tricky or concealed condition; a pitfall: “The kicker is that the relationship of guide and seeker gets all mixed up with a confusing male-female attachment” (Gail Sheehy)

None of this is (yet) in the OED. And none of these sources has the extended sense ‘ingredient or component that provides the kick to something’, where kick is as in NOAD here:

noun kick: 3 informal [a] [in singular] the sharp stimulant effect of something, especially alcohol. [b] a thrill of pleasurable, often reckless excitement: rich kids turning to crime just for kicks | I get such a kick out of driving a race car.

As in this comment on the Top Secret Recipes‘ “Roy’s Hawaiian Martini”:

(#2) “do be careful of the pineapple. It’s the kicker in the cocktail.”]

Digression on OPA. Further into the weeds. The acronym OPA, pronounced /ópǝ/, evokes two homonyms (and any number of initialistic abbreviations, for example OPA the US Office of Price Administration).

First, there’s German Opa ‘Grandpa’, the counterpart to Oma ‘Grandma’. Affectionate names, as in this folksy company name:

(#3) Opa’s Smoked Meats in Fredericksburg TX: “Traditional German Recipes Since 1947”

Then there’s the (Modern) Greek exclamation Opa! (which I’m very fond of). From Wikipedia:

(#4)

“Opa!” (Greek: Ώπα) is a common Greek emotional expression. It is frequently used during celebrations such as weddings or traditional dancing. In Greek culture, the expression sometimes accompanies purposeful or accidental plate smashing. It can also be used to express shock or surprise, especially when having just made a mistake. Opa is also used in Italy (similarly to mazel tov in Jewish culture), by some of the South slavic nations, like Serbians, (to express shock or surprise), by Israelis and by Arabs in the Eastern Mediterranean, who sometimes pronounce it as “obah”, especially when picking up or playing with children. In Russian culture it is used during the short phase of concentration on a action, the expectation of successful process during the action and the subsequent completion of it, for example, when throwing a basketball into the basket, getting off the bike or picking up a child. It is used in Russia also in enthusiastic atmosphere and surprising moments. It’s also an expression in Brazilian Portuguese.

The expression was popularized in American culture by the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

And it fits ostentatiously playful allusions very well:

Sunset brouhaha … opa!

But wait! There’s more! Consider the Greek fried cheese dish saganaki. From Wikipedia:

In Greek cuisine, saganaki (Greek σαγανάκι) is any one of a variety of dishes prepared in a small frying pan, the best-known being an appetizer of fried cheese [using a salty Mediterranean cheese].

The dishes are named for the frying pan in which they are prepared, called a saganaki, which is a diminutive of sagani, a frying pan with two handles [cf. paella, similarly named for the pan it is cooked in, which resembles a patella (Lat. ‘kneecap’)]

… The cheese is melted in a small frying pan until it is bubbling and generally served with lemon juice and pepper. It is eaten with bread.

Now the local variant:

(#5) Flaming saganaki in preparation

In many United States and Canadian restaurants, after being fried, the saganaki cheese is flambéed at the table (sometimes with a shout of “opa!”), and the flames then usually extinguished with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. This is called “flaming saganaki” and apparently originated in 1968 at The Parthenon restaurant in Chicago’s Greektown, based on the suggestion of a customer to owner Chris Liakouras.

Back in the mists of time, at some Chicago Linguistic Society event at UICC (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Circle), Jim McCawley led an expedition to The Parthenon so that we could all experience the original flaming saganaki (and grilled calamari, taramosalata, dolmades, pastitsio, souvlaki, etc. — there were a lot of us, so we passed bits of stuff around; meals with Jim were always tremendous fun.).

The Partenon has a short YouTube clip with flaming saganaki + opa!, but this video from Joe Feta’s Greek Village in St. Catherines ON is better:

(#6) Saganaki cheese on fire! Opa!

Maintenant, revenons à nos moutons:

The three 4/20 OPAs. I’ll start in the middle.

— Sunset brouhaha, shown in #1 above, involves an extremely imperfect phonological relationship (source) boulevard / (pun) brouhaha — the sort of distant pun you can get away with only if the full source expression is very familiar, as Sunset Boulevard is, especially if it’s also visually signaled, as it is by the photo in #1 of Gloria Swanson and William Holden in the movie Sunset Boulevard. (Of course you have to recognize the photo to get the relationship.)

This one is also mid-scale with respect to the relationship between the content of the OPA and the topic of the article. The article is about a pay conflict — loosely, a brouhaha — between Los Angeles movie writers and their agents; and the thoroughfare Sunset Boulevard, which cuts through Hollywood, serves as a common metonym for the L.A. movie industry. See my 3/26/17 posting “On the boulevard of broken dreams with Kip Noll” for its section on Sunset Boulevard. The association between the movies and the boulevard was firmly fixed by the movie. From Wikipedia:

Sunset Boulevard… is a 1950 American film noir directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, and produced and co-written by Charles Brackett. It was named after the thoroughfare with the same name that runs through [Hollywood] and Beverly Hills, California.

The film stars William Holden as Joe Gillis, an unsuccessful screenwriter, and Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a faded silent-film star who draws him into her fantasy world, where she dreams of making a triumphant return to the screen

A side note: on brouhaha and its variants, see my 4/26/16 posting “Brew-ha-ha”.

— Nock, Nock. Phonologically, this one is perfect. The source is the noun knock in knock-knock joke, and the pun has the proper name Nock, both AmE /nak/.

On the other hand, the article is about Republican state legislatures overturning ballot initiatives, out of a distrust for the instincts of the masses, a topic utterly unconnected to knock-knock jokes. The only thing that unites them is the /nak/ of political writer Albert Jay Nock’s name.

About the source expression, from Wikipedia:

(#7) Four knock-knocks from the Language of Desires site’s 100 knock-knock jokes

The knock-knock joke is a question-and-answer joke, typically ending with a pun. Knock-knock jokes are primarily seen as children’s jokes, though there are exceptions.

The scenario is of a person knocking on the front door to a house. The teller of the joke says, “Knock, knock!”; the recipient responds, “Who’s there?” The teller gives a name (such as “Noah”) or a description (such as “Police”) or something that purports to be a name (such as “Needle”). The other person then responds by asking the caller’s surname (“Noah who?” “Police who?” “Needle who?”), to which the joke-teller delivers a pun involving the name (“Noah place I can spend the night?” “Police let me in—it’s cold out here!” “Needle little help with the groceries!”).

And the Economist article featuring Nock:

In his autobiography, “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man”, Albert Jay Nock had this to say about America’s system of self-government: “I could see how ‘democracy’ might do very well in a society of saints and sages led by an Alfred or an Antoninus Pius. Short of that, I was unable to see how it could come to anything but an ochlocracy of mass-men led by a sagacious knave.” Nock was among the first writers to call himself a libertarian and, via William F. Buckley and the National Review, exercised significant influence on American conservatism. Given that the Republican Party, the closest thing to a vehicle for the promotion of conservative ideas, is in the business of gathering votes, the equivocal feelings of some conservatives about the demos are usually kept quiet. Occasionally, though, they break cover.

This is what seems to be happening around the country in state legislatures with Republican majorities.

— defecate in the woods. The full kicker head:

Do tapirs defecate in the woods?

This one is no kind of pun, but  a version of the conventional speech-act idiom

Does a bear shit in the woods?

(used to convey assent or affirmation). The formal relationship between source and playful variant is one of lexical and syntactic replacement: words substituting for semantically related words, and syntactic structures altered to fit.

On the other hand, the Economist article is actually about tapirs and their defecatory habits, though the topic is not whether tapirs defecate in the woods — of course they do — but what kind of woods they defecate in (burned-out woods vs. undamaged woods). So the content relationship is certainly tight, but not perfect.

On the speech-act idiom and the family it belongs to, from GDoS:

does a bear shit in the woods? Is the pope (a) Catholic? phr. (also do beavers piss on flat rocks? does a bird have wings? does a chicken have lips? do I know my grandmother? do sheep wear sweaters? has a dog a nose? is the pope a guinea/polack?) [see Maledicta I:1 (Summer 1977) pp.77–82 for discussion of these ‘sarcastic interrogative affirmatives and negatives’] (orig. US) a rhetorical phr. of which the implication is, ‘Don’t ask me stupid questions. Of course… .’ [or: ‘Of course not.’]

Specifically for shitting bears, the example:

1970 G.V. Higgins Friends of Eddie Coyle… ‘Is it going to be hot?’ ‘Does a bear shit in the woods?’ [conveying ‘yes; of course’]

(In principle, any yes-no question whose answer is blazingly obvious could fulfill this function, but a small number of these have become conventionalized; hearers no longer need to work out the implicatures involved in understanding these. The first two listed in the GDoS entry — both providing a positive response — are certainly of this type. I would suggest that Do chickens have lips? has been conventionalized as a negative response. For most of the rest I’m not so sure, and it’s not easy to see how such judgments can be tested.)

Then, a brief note on tapirs, from the Wikipedia entry:

(#8) Illustration from the Economist

A tapir (/ˈteɪpər/ TAY-pər, /ˈteɪpɪər/ TAY-peer or /təˈpɪər/ tə-PEER, /ˈteɪpiːər/ TAY-pee-ər) [AZ: the last is my preferred pronunciation, but I have no idea where I got it from] is a large, herbivorous mammal, similar in shape to a pig, with a short, prehensile nose trunk. Tapirs inhabit jungle and forest regions of South America, Central America, and Southeast Asia. The five extant species of tapirs, all of the family Tapiridae and the genus Tapirus, are the Brazilian tapir, the Malayan tapir, the Baird’s tapir, the kabomani tapir and the mountain tapir. … The closest extant relatives of the tapirs are the other odd-toed ungulates, which include horses, donkeys, zebras and rhinoceroses.

And then from the fascinating Economist article:

An obvious response to deforestation is to plant more trees. But this is no easy task. Sowing the right mix of seeds and ensuring that saplings survive long enough to establish themselves is complicated, time-consuming and expensive. Things can, however, be simplified to some extent by recruiting the local wildlife. And in a South American context, according to a study published in Biotropica by Lucas Paolucci of the Amazon Institute of Environmental Research, in Brazil, that means looking after the local tapirs.

The role of bats and birds in reseeding damaged areas is well known. These flying animals often defecate pips and stones from fruit they have eaten in places distant from where the food were consumed. Much research has therefore been devoted to luring them into damaged areas — sometimes with success. There is a limit, however, to the size of seed that a bat or a bird can carry, and that constrains which plants can be regenerated in this manner.

Lowland tapirs suffer no such constraint. They are the region’s biggest herbivores and swallow lots of large seeds. Dr Paolucci thus wondered to what extent tapirs were transporting seeds from pristine to damaged areas. To try to find out he and a team of colleagues set up a study of tapirs’ defecatory habits. [Details of the experimental set-up omitted here.]

…  Dr Paolucci calculated that tapirs pass an average of 9,822 seeds per hectare per year in degraded rainforest, compared with 2,950 in pristine forest.

The camera-trap data suggested that this might be because the animals preferred to spend time in the burned areas, rather than because they actually preferred to defecate there.

… Why tapirs would gravitate towards disturbed zones is [still] a mystery.

Going the social media rounds, this joke, an ostentatiously playful allusion (OPA) to a bit of popular culture, presented as a texty — a cartoon that’s primarily a printed text, though texties often come with a visual backdrop, which sometimes contributes crucially to an understanding of the joke, as here:

(#1) A texty that lives in two worlds: American political culture of recent years (a reference conveyed visually, through the photo of Paul Ryan); and an ad campaign for an American breakfast cereal marketed to children (a reference conveyed verbally, by the ostentatious play on the ad slogan “Silly rabbit / Trix is for kids!”)

(Hat tip to Mike Pope.)

(Background on texties. There’s a Page on this blog on ecards and other texty creations. From the postings listed there, from 2/1/16, “Only YOU”:

[#1 in that posting is] a composition that resembles a cartoon, but in which the text (rather than the image) is central. What I called, in a 5/30/14 posting, “What are they?”, texty creations (or texties for short): art works in which texts are central (Jenny Holzer, Ed Ruscha); ecards; illustrated or decoratively framed quotations; words-only cartoons, or ”slogans presented as cartoons”; captioning of existing images; webcomics that can be seen as very long captions for minimal images; Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts (in which the images are largely irrelevant).)

(Note on sources. The texty above has been passed around on Twitter and Facebook — and, no doubt, other sites as well — without attribution. I’d hoped that the credit to PunditKitchen.com, in the lower left corner of #1, would lead to an actual source, but the CHEEZburger site reported that PunditKitchen.com, an assemblage of political memes, was closing on 11/30 (of some year not specified, but maybe 2016); its domain name is now, in 2019, up for sale. None of the sites offering collections of memes seem to cite sources for their examples; the examples are the net counterparts of jokes passed around by word of mouth and then assembled into jokebooks.)

The formal part: the OPA. Distilled here, with the allusive example on the top line, the (formulaic) model for it on the bottom line:

(#2) The allusion substitutes a nominal for the head (A) of the vocative silly rabbit in the model; substitutes a one-word sg. NP subject (B) for the subject of the sentence Trix is for kids in the model; and substitutes a one-word pl. NP for the object NP (C) in the PP predicative for kids in that sentence of the model

The content part: the allusion, with Paul Ryan. From Wikipedia, with the crucial passage boldfaced:

Paul Davis Ryan (born January 29, 1970) is an American politician who served as the 54th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from October 2015 to January 2019. He was also the 2012 vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party, running unsuccessfully alongside Mitt Romney.

… Ryan subscribes to supply-side economics and supports tax cuts including eliminating the capital gains tax, the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the Alternative Minimum Tax. Ryan supports deregulation, including the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed some financial regulation of banks from the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933. During the economic recovery from the Great Recession of the late 2000s, Ryan supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which authorized the Treasury to purchase toxic assets from banks and other financial institutions, and the auto industry bailout

The point being that Ryan supported help for banks (and tax cuts benefiting the rich), but did not support programs benefiting the poor. If you don’t recognize Paul Ryan in a photo and don’t know his political positions at least in vague outline, you can’t understand the OPA in #1.

The content part: the model, with the fruity shapes of Trix. Obviously, to understand the OPA in #1, you need to know what Trix is. See my 11/1/18 posting “Sweet stuff” on classic Trix, an extremely sweet breakfast cereal marketed to children, which comes in “fruity shapes”.

Beyond that, you need to know about the years of advertising the cereal by means of the Trix rabbit and the catchphrase “Silly rabbit, Trix is for kids!”.

(#3) A 1970s “silly rabbit” tv commercial, with the rabbit disguised as a milkman

(#4) A print ad from the period, with the rabbit as a miner

On the history of the ads, from Wikipedia:

By 1955, just one year after Trix’s market debut, General Mills was experimenting with a rabbit puppet as a potential Trix mascot. However, it was Joe Harris, a copywriter and illustrator at the Dancer Fitzgerald Sample advertising agency, who created the trademark animated Trix rabbit, who debuted in a 1959 television commercial. Harris also wrote the iconic Trix tagline, “Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids”, which is still used in General Mills’ commercial campaigns.

Chet Stover, the creative director of Dancer Fitzgerald Sample’s Trix account, fully credited Harris with the creation of the Trix rabbit after viewing the new character in its 1959 television commercial. In an internal memo to Dancer Fitzgerald Sample employees, Stover wrote, “In a business where the only thing we have to sell are ideas, it is of first importance the credit is given where credit belongs — and Joe gets all the credit for this one.”

Tricks, the Trix Rabbit — voiced by Mort Marshall, and later by Bret Iwan — an anthropomorphic cartoon rabbit who finds children and wants to trick the children into giving him a bowl of cereal. He would burst with enthusiasm but he would be discovered every time; and the kids would always reprimand him with the signature phrase “Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids!”.

… In commercials from 1967, the 70s and 80s as well as today, the rabbit was known to disguise himself to get the cereal, employing costumes as diverse as a balloon vendor, a painter and a Native American.

The world of playful allusions. Let’s start with formulas.

A formula is any bit of language that’s fixed in form and understood significantly via memory rather than by composition from its parts, including: idioms (including those with open parts), small constructions, conversational routines (politeness formulas, greetings and leave-takings, etc.), clichés, striking quotations, proverbs, sayings, adages, catchphrases, slogans, memorable proper names, titles (of books, songs, poems, artwork, whatever), and more.

We hold in our memories vast amounts of material that’s, speaking strictly, knowledge of language: individual lexical items, larger idioms, the patterns of constructions. But also vast amounts of knowledge about the roles that bits of language play in cultural practices. All this material is available as possible models for language play of many kinds — language play that then alludes to the models, evokes them.

Such allusions are themselves a cultural practice, which can be employed for many purposes: playfulness (specifically, joking for entertainment, demonstration of linguistic prowess, cultural criticism), poetic indirection, giving advice, communicating a subtext, polite deflection, establishing and maintaining a common group identity. In some of these deployments, allusions are ostentatious, meant to stand out and be appreciated; in many deployments, they are subtle.

In my earlier postings on playful allusions (especially in stories in the Economist), I made a lot of the ostentatious vs. subtle distinction, as OPAs vs. EEQs (Easter egg quotations); see my 5/18/19 posting “Ostentatiously playful allusions”, where I go on to distinguish among playful allusions on two other dimensions: the formal relationship between allusion and model, and the content relationship between the two.

— formal relationships between allusion and model. In the simplest cases, we have a substitution of an expression X′ for some expression X in the model. In the simplest type of such substitutions, X′ and X are homophones; they are phonologically identical. So, from the Economist of 5/25/19, this head for a story (p. 41):

Full of beans: In a nation [China] of tea-drinkers, coffee is talking over

This turns on a perfect pun based on the idiom full of beans (‘informal lively; in high spirits’ (NOAD)), punning on bean as in coffee bean).

Quite often, the pun is imperfect (with varying degrees of phonological distance between allusion and model). From the same issue of the Economist, p. 41:

Aporkalypse now: African swine fever hits the home of half the world’s pigs [China again]

The allusion has pork /pɔrk/ (referring to meat from pigs) substituted for the poc /pak/ of Apocalypse — phonologically similar, but not identical.

In somewhat more complex allusions, there are substitutions in two or more positions. So, in this wonderful joke allusion (from A.M. Zwicky & E.D. Zwicky, “Imperfect puns, markedness, and phonological similarity” (Folia Linguistica 20, 1989)):

With fronds like these, who needs anemones?

(an allusion to the model formula With friends like these, who needs enemies?), there are imperfect-pun substitutions at two positions.

But then, the substitution of X′ for X need not involve expressions that are at all phonologically related. From my 5/18/19 OPA posting, this allusion:

Do tapirs defecate in the woods?

to the formulaic

Does a bear shit in the woods?

with substitutions at two positions — tapirs for a bear, and defecate for shit — neither of them phonologically motivated at all. (Instead, they are semantically motivated.)

Similarly, in general for transposition (or exchange, or Spooneristic) allusions, as in this allusive quip, attributed to Oscar Wilde (probably correctly, according to the Quote Investigator site):

Work is the curse of the drinking class

as a variant of the quotation:

Drink is the curse of the working class

(widely attributed to Karl Marx, though I haven’t seen this verified). The relationship between drink and work is semantic, not phonological.

So it is with the allusive substitutions in the texty in #1, outlined in detail in #2: poor people for rabbit in position A, help for Trix in position B, and banks for kids in position C. All without phonological motivation.

— content relationships between allusion and model. In my 5/18/19 OPA posting, examples from the Economist varied along this dimension as well as on the dimension of phonological relationship. At one end, there was an allusion to the knock, knock joke formula that involved a perfect pun (on the family name Nock), but had no relationship whatsoever to the topic of the article it was in. At the other end, there was the tapir story, with no phonological relationship involved, but a considerable content relationship: it was actually important to the story that tapirs do in fact defecate in the woods.

For the Economist‘s Aporkalypse now allusion, there’s clear content relevance (as well as a phonological relationship): the model for the allusion is the title Apocalypse Now, for an epic Francis Ford Coppola film about the Vietnam War, loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, about colonial war in the 19th-century Congo. The Chinese swine fever epidemic is in fact an apocalypse, in the sense ‘an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale’ (NOAD) — just like the Vietnam War in Coppola’s view, and like the colonial intrusions in the Congo in Conrad’s view.

Finally, in the case of Paul Ryan (involving poor people, government assistance, and banks) in relationship to Trix (involving the Trix rabbit, the fruity cereal, and kids), the allusion in #1 is intended as a political critique framed as a close analogy to the ad’s model: just as the rabbit is denied the cereal, which is instead for kids, so poor people are denied government assistance, which is instead for banks. No phonological relationship, high content relationship. (Similar to the Economist tapir example, but with even more moving parts.)

Pragmatic note. An important piece in understanding #1 comes in appreciating that Trix is for kids conveys (but does not entail) that Trix is only for kids, so is not for rabbits (or adults). And, analogically, that Help is for banks similarly conveys (but does not entail) that help is only for banks, so is not for poor people.

To see that Trix is for kids does not actually entail that Trix is only for kids and not for rabbits (or adults) it’s enough to note that there’s nothing contradictory in proclaiming:

Trix is for kids, for adults, and for hungry animals too; Trix is for everyone.

The effect of restricting Trix to kids only is a matter of (conversational) implicature: in the context — where the rabbit is derided (Silly rabbit!) for supposing he could have some Trix, and where the Trix is forcibly taken from him — the kids are laying exclusive claim to the cereal. (Their claim is reinforced by a focal accent on (for) kids in the tv commercials.)

Following on my 7/7 posting “GN/BN”, about the Good News Bad News joke routine, which the hounds of ADS-L traced back to the early 19th century (at least). Other commenters offered formuations of the idea that there’s a good side and a bad side to everything, the bad comes withthe good, and lots of other things that, however interesting, are not instances of the joke formula (in any of its variants). But then on 7/16, Bill Mullins posted about an entirely different joke formula hinging on the opposition of good and bad.

Bill wrote:

Are you familiar with Archie Campbell’s “That’s Good/That’s Bad” routines? He used to do them on Hee Haw.

And we’re off!

Background: Hee Haw. From Wikipedia:

(#1) Hosts Buck Owens and Roy Clark

Hee Haw was an American television variety show featuring country music and humor with the fictional rural “Kornfield Kounty” as a backdrop. It aired first-run on CBS from 1969 to 1971, in syndication from 1971 to 1993, and on TNN from 1996 to 1997. RFD-TV began airing reruns in 2008, where it currently remains.

The show was inspired by Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, the major difference being that Hee Haw was far less topical, and was centered on country music and rural culture. Hosted by country music artists Buck Owens and Roy Clark for most of its run, the show was equally well known for its voluptuous, scantily clad women in stereotypical farmer’s daughter outfits and country-style minidresses (a group that came to be known as the “Hee Haw Honeys”), and its corn pone humor.

And about Campbell, with descriptions of three of the routines that he was famous for:

(#2)

Archie Campbell (November 7, 1914 – August 29, 1987) was an American comedian, writer, and star of Hee Haw, a country-flavored network television variety show. He was also a recording artist with several hits on the RCA label in the 1960s.

… [Routine A] One of his most well-known segments was “PFFT! You Was Gone”, in which he would perform a short verse of original comedy followed by the standard “Where oh where are you tonight” chorus which would conclude with him and a singing partner, often Gordie Tapp, blowing a raspberry at one another or at the camera.

… [Routine B] One of Campbell’s ‘signature’ routines was to tell stories in “Spoonerism” form, with the first letters of words in some phrases intentionally switched for comic effect. The best-known of these stories was “RinderCella,” his re-telling of the fairy tale “Cinderella,” about the girl who “slopped her dripper” (dropped her slipper). Campbell once told the “RinderCella” story on an episode of the game show Juvenile Jury. At the conclusion of the story, host Jack Barry said “That’s one of the funniest stories Carchie Ampbell tells.” All of Campbell’s spoonerism routines borrowed heavily from comedy routines performed by Colonel Stoopnagle on the radio show Stoopnagle and Budd in the 1930s. (“Colonel Stoopnagle” was the stage name of F. Chase Taylor, 1897–1950.)

… [Routine C] Campbell also performed a routine with various partners generally known as “That’s Bad/That’s Good.” Campbell would state a troublesome occurrence; when the partner would sympathize by saying, “Oh that’s bad,” Campbell would quickly counter, “No, that’s good!”, and then state a good result from the previous occurrence. When the partner would say, “Oh that’s good!”, Campbell would immediately counter with “No, that’s bad!” and tell the new result, and so on.

Routine A, “PFFT!”, is basically just a fart-joke punch line, turning on the raspberry / razzberry / Bronx cheer (a voiceless linguolabial trill imitating the sound of flatulence). See my 6/4/13 posting “whoopee cushion” — there’s a device for that! (A side note: raspberry is Cockney rhyming slang; raspberry < raspberry tart, for fart.)

Routine B, “RinderCella” and similar re-tellings of familiar stories, is a piece of pure language play. The craft lies in being able to produce the Spoonerized / transposed / exchanged text  so that it sounds like you’re just reading an ordinary story. Campbell was a master at this:

(#3) Campbell as the barber, Clark as the customer

And then Routine C, “Oh That’s Good”, which is narratively and pragmatically complex; the viewer is whipsawed between optimistic and pessimistic views of unfolding events, until the story is finally resolved. As here:

(#4) Campbell and Clark again

On Campbell’s frequent straight man in these routines, from Wikipedia:

Roy Linwood Clark (April 15, 1933 – November 15, 2018) was an American singer and musician. He is best known for having hosted Hee Haw, a nationally televised country variety show, from 1969 to 1997. Clark was an important and influential figure in country music, both as a performer and in helping to popularize the genre.

During the 1970s, Clark frequently guest-hosted for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and enjoyed a 30-million viewership for Hee Haw. Clark was highly regarded and renowned as a guitarist, banjo player, and fiddler. He was skilled in the traditions of many genres, including classical guitar, country music, Latin music, bluegrass, and pop. He had hit songs as a pop vocalist (e.g., “Yesterday, When I Was Young” and “Thank God and Greyhound”), and his instrumental skill had an enormous effect on generations of bluegrass and country musicians.

All this, and more, in two recent One Big Happy cartoons, from 7/2 (I broke a finger — the determiner cartoon) and 7/4 (Where was the Declaration of Independence signed? — the locative cartoon). Both featuring Ruthie’s brother Joe.  I’ll start with the locatives.

The locative cartoon:

(#1)

The question in the second panel is ambiguous, as between two understandings of locative where: where within the document is the signature located? vs. where did the event of document-signing take place? What I’ll call, faute de mieux, position location (within some domain) vs. event location.

The distinction is a metaphorical extension of a semantic distinction I’ve discussed in a series of postings on this blog, involving location on the body — an especially concrete and immediately available sort of position location — vs. location of an event, as in the ambiguous Where did you hurt yourself?

On this special, central kind of position location, five postings on this blog:

— a 2/27/19 posting “Body-location, event-location”, with its #2 I broke my arm in two places, exemplifying the locative ambiguity

— a 3/5/19 posting “Another 100k spams”

— a 3/8/16 posting “Where?”

— a 4/5/19 posting “Science, charity, and adverbial ambiguity”

— a 4/16/19 posting “She got pinched in the As … tor Bar”

Several of these postings relate the locative ambiguity to (in)alienable possession and to attachment ambiguities. More on alienability (and its relevance to determiner selection in English) to come below, but first a digression on another facet of #1, having to do with the pragmatics of the where question in it. In which it becomes important that the question-asker in #1 is the announcer on a tv quiz show and that the question-answerer is a kid, Ruthie’s brother Joe

Asking questions and giving answers. The title of a 8/21/18 posting of mine, which I’ll now quote from extensively; it was about

a significant ambiguity in the use of interrogative sentences: between information-seeking interrogatives (infoseek questions, I’ll call them), … and examination interrogatives (test questions, I’ll call them; they’re also known as quiz questions)

… Infoseek questions are the pragmatically prototypical interrogatives, acquired first and statistically dominant in conversation and texts. In its simplest variant, the speaker lacks some piece of information I (or is unsure about it), wants to acquire I, believes the addressee might be able to supply I, and is requesting the addressee to do so. Infoseek questions are a basic tool in coping with ignorance about things in the world; we are all ignorant of a great many things, small children especially so — so once they have the linguistic resources, they ask an enormous number of infoseek questions.

In test questions, the speaker has the relevant knowledge about I and is asking the addressee to perform by displaying the extent of their knowledge. This performance might be intended as part of a learning routine (the assumption being that the addressee should have I and so needs practice and correction), as an evaluation exercise (about the addressee’s knowledge), as part of a competition, whatever.

Infoseek questions can be directed at a wide range of addressees, but test questions are heavily loaded socioculturally: only certain speakers can direct them at only certain addressees, and only in certain contexts. One of the burdens of being a child in our culture is that all sorts of adults subject you to barrages of test questions, to which you are expected to respond cooperatively. (Similarly for people in an assortment of interview circumstances — for jobs, for school admission, to receive awards, in medical evaluations, etc. — where infoseek questions and test questions are likely to be mixed together.)

… Learning to cope with test questions involves a great deal of (quite culture-specific) learning about what, precisely, the questions are asking about and what, precisely, would count as an answer.

Joe is supposed to understand that the test question on the tv show requires an event location answer, not the position location answer he comes up with. His answer is deficient because it requires no specialized knowledge (beyond the knowledge that documents are customarily signed at the bottom). Indeed, his answer can’t be the right one because it takes the announcer’s question to be insufficiently challenging; test questions are supposed to be tough.

Just as some offers are too good to be true, some answers are too easy to be right.

It’s not easy being a kid.

The determiner cartoon:

(#2)

The indefinite article a in panel 2 by default conveys inalienable possession (on alienable vs. inalienable possession, see my 7/27/18 posting “Are you my bottom?”): we expect Joe to be talking about his finger (I broke a finger here conveys ‘I broke my finger, one of my fingers’), though an alienable reading (referring to a finger Joe merely has in his possession or has some relation to) is available, and Joe takes advantage of that possibility in an attempt to distance himself from responsibility in finger-breaking.

(I broke my finger would also be taken by default to convey inalienable possession, though it could be understood inalienably, to refer to, say, a mummified finger that you display in a vitrine. But not to a finger as someone else’s bodypart.)

In English, articles with bodypart names — indefinite, as above, or definite, as in He hit me on the shoulder — are conventionally available to convey inalienable possession, as alternatives to explicit possessive determiners (He hit me on my shoulder). The patterns of usage are complex, but they’re not my topic here. It’s enough to note the connections with body-location constructions (which involve inalienable possession) vs. event-location constructions.

And that these alienability facts extend to position-location constructions in general: back in #1, Joe could have answered in panel 4, At its bottom, as an alternative to At the bottom.

In an advertising poster, for actual apples:

(#1)

and on a tongue-in-cheek sticker, reproducing a gloat:

(#2)

Both incorporate phonological reductions of casual speech — ’bout for about, d’ya  ([djǝ] or [ǰǝ]) for do you — and also one feature of “demotic American” (a collection of linguistic features widespread in working class speech): determiner them (in place of standard those). But even without the phonological reductions we’re left with two formulaic expressions —

How about them apples? What do you think about them apples?

that are available for English speakers in general (not just working class speakers), not as opinion-seeking questions like

How about those apples? What do you think about those apples?

but as conveying one or the other of two types of gloats (directed by the speaker against the addressee).

Assembled from material on the Free Dictionary site, on the idiomatic expressions How do you / d’ya like them apples? and How about / ’bout them apples?

(a) A phrase used to draw attention to one’s cleverness or superiority to the one being addressed, especially after a recent triumph. You remember how you said I would never get into law school? Well now I’m valedictorian. How do you like them apples? [similarly, What do you think about them apples?]

(b) Used after telling somebody an unpleasant fact or truth, to say that they should accept it: Either you deliver the dresses for the price we agreed on, or I’m going to go someplace else. How do you like them apples? [similarly, What do you think about them apples?]

From NOAD:

verb gloat: [no object] contemplate or dwell on one’s own success or another’s misfortune with smugness or malignant pleasure.

noun gloat: [in singular] informal an act of gloating.

Ordinary opinion-seeking wh questions can be pressed into service as indirect gloats — How about that? What do you think about that?, or How do you feel about that?, What are you going to do about that?, and so on. But with the idiomatic direct object apples in combination with the determiner them instead of those, the expressions can be imported from working class speech (where they’re ambiguous between opinion-seeking questions about apples, on the one hand, and gloats, on the other) as a kind of quotation in standard speech, interpretable there only as gloats. That’s the way they work for me.

Use (a) is straightforwardly gloating. Use (b) is somewhat more complex: the speaker presents the addressee with some observation the addressee will find unpleasant and then rubs it in, insisting that the addressee accept it. Conventionalized Schadenfreude.

History of the two gloats. This seems to be quite murky, and tracking phrase origins and histories is not my thing, so for the moment, this 10/27/08 posting from the Phrase Finder site is the best I can dredge up:

[query from reader:] Does anyone know the origin of the phrase “how do you like them apples?”. I saw (or rather heard) the phrase in the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’ and while I understood the sentiment that was conveyed, the actual meaning eluded me…

(#3) Clip from Good Will Hunting

[Phrase Finder response:] I cannot find an authoritative source, but various sites on the web have it that the original “apple” was a mortar-fired bomb used during WW I…

The 1959 Howard Hawks film “Rio Bravo” is said to have a scene where the character “Stumpy” (played by Walter Brennan) lobs a stick of dynamite and says the phrase in question.

This came up before — also from someone watching Good Will Hunting. All I could find was that the phrase has been used since the 1920s.

[Added 8/7/19: See the comments section for some explorations into the history, in which the catchphrases appear to have their root in them apples being used as a conventional example of grammatical error (because of determiner them).]

Demotic American. Putting aside phenomena of casual speech that are widespread for English speakers generally, there are tons of sociolectal features, features distributed in particular varieties of English according to region, social class, sex, race/ethnicity, age, and so on — and then some features that are widespread for North American working class speakers, tending to run across region and other social factors. A brief inventory of some of these:

negative concord (aka multiple negation): I didn’t see nobody nowhere

specific verb forms: PRS 3 sg don’t (She don’t like it); PRS 1 sg says (So I says to them...); PST seen (I seen them do it), done (She done it); auxiliary verb ain’t

PSP identical to PST: I have ran

anyways for standard anyway

pronouns: determiner them (for deictic those); AccConjSubj (Him and me went together)

A working class speaker won’t necessarily have all of these, but there’s a strong tendency for them to co-occur.

(Regularly skirting or confronting sexual matters, so perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)

Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes us back to the Garden of Eden:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

The bit of formulaic language for this situation is a catchphrase, a slogan with near-proverbial status (YDK, for short):

YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE IT’S BEEN

The leaves are conventionally associated with modesty, through their having been used to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve in the Garden — a use that then associates the leaves with the genitals, from which the psychological contamination spreads to the entire plant, including the fruits. You don’t know where that fig has been.

From the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs, 2002:

You don’t know where it’s been: Do not touch something or put it in your mouth, because you do not know where it has been and what kind of dirt it has picked up. (Most often said to children.) Mother: Don’t put that money in your mouth. You don’t know where it’s been. Bill: Okay. Take that stick out of your mouth. You don’t know where it’s been.

YDK is the second part of a two-part speech act, crucially involving a taboo object. The first, set-up, part is an injunction — typically an admonition against doing something with the taboo object (not to touch it or, worse, put it in your mouth or, still worse, take it into a sexcavity) — but it could be an instruction to stop doing something with the taboo object (put it down, let go of it, spit it out of your mouth).

The second part is the pay-off, some version of YDK, which provides a conventional reason for the injunction, appealing to contamination by association: the taboo object is unclean (hence dangerous), by virtue of a history involving its association with something that is conventionally unclean (dirt, unwashed hands, genitals, bodily fluids, excrement, and so on).

A whimsical version in an ecard:

(#2) The relay race; the baton has of course been in many other hands, most of them sweaty

The penis as taboo object. The penis is conventionally unclean, dirty, so it is the object of YDK warnings: you probably don’t know where that penis has been before it comes to you — to be stroked, sucked, or taken into a sexcavity — so you might be contaminated by it. (In this case, The News for Penises might not be good.)

That makes it fodder for YDK jokes. As in this chirpy ukulele song written by actor William H. Macy:

(#3) Macy at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, performing “You Don’t Know Where That Dick Has Been”; the words are very hard to make out (I haven’t found any site with the lyrics), but the chorus is clear

Notice that in a sufficiently rich context, YDK could stand by itself, leaving the hearer to reconstruct an injunction by implicature. As a result, You don’t know where that dick has been can be understood on its own as a warning not to have anything to do with it. In fact, Do you know where that dick has been? can be read as implicating that you don’t know (a separate implicature from the YDK one, seen in examples like Do you know that your hair is on fire?, implicating that you don’t know, and informing the addressee of that fact), which in turn can be read as a warning not to engage with it.

The wider field of cultural contamination. YDK is just one item in a much larger field of contamination by association. From my 2/11/11 posting “Cultural contamination”, starting with a woman who said

that after she read that the “Ode to Joy” was Hitler’s favorite piece of music, the work lost all of its attraction for her.

It had become contaminated by the association with Hitler.

This is an extreme version of the mechanism by which some people are put off artistic creations (art, literature, music, film) because of the character, personal beliefs, behavior, or actions of their creators…

An example of cultural contamination from a different domain. Some years ago I was shopping in at hardware store at the same time as a woman with a young son, maybe 4. The child was examining, touching, and picking up various objects, including some housewares. No problem until he picked up a toilet brush — at which his mother shrieked at him to put it down, it was dirty!

Mind you, this was brand-new, unused toilet brush, objectively as clean as anything else the child had touched. But its cultural function was to brush out excrement, and that function contaminated it.

(In a similar vein, some people are disgusted when others use toilet paper — perfectly clean toilet paper, fresh off the roll — to blow their noses.)

In still another domain, many have noted that the intense distaste that some people have for same-sex sexual relations (especially between men, especially anal sex) contaminates everything associated with homosexuality: people who have come out as gay (and so are to be avoided), displays of same-sex affection (even just holding hands), pride events and lgbt organizations, symbols like the rainbow flag and the pink triangle, all of it. To the point where I have seen complaints about the flying of a rainbow flag in a neighborhood where children could see it (and so, in the minds of the complainants, be exposed to same-sex sexual acts).

The fig leaf chronicles. Returning to fig leaves and figs in #1, there’s a wide-ranging treatment of the topic in my 5/20/15 posting “Fig time”. The relevant bit of Genesis 3 (in the KJV):

¹ Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LordGod had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

² And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

³ But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

⁴ And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

⁵ For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

⁶ And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

⁷ And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

And inside those aprons, the offending bodyparts.

My 7/22 posting “Oh that’s good” looked at Archie Campbell’s That’s Good / That’s Bad joke routine from the tv show Hee Haw. Now Tim Evanson points out a somewhat later appearance of the routine, in an episode of The Simpsons.

(#1) From “Treehouse of Horror III”, The Simpsons S4 E5 (first aired 10/29/92)

At the House of Evil “YOUR ONE STOP EVIL SHOP”, the set-up for the routine:

Homer: Do you sell toys?

Owner: We sell forbidden objects from places men fear to tread. We also sell frozen yogurt, which I call “Frogurt”.

And then the routine:

Owner: Take this object [a Krusty the Clown doll], but beware it carries a terrible curse…

Homer: [worried] Ooooh, that’s bad.

Owner: But it comes with a free Frogurt!

Homer: [relieved] That’s good.

Owner: The Frogurt is also cursed.

Homer: [worried] That’s bad.

Owner: But you get your choice of topping!

Homer: [relieved] That’s good.

Owner: The toppings contains [the food preservative] potassium benzoate. [Homer stares, confused] That’s bad.

Homer: [worried] Can I go now?

In a flickr illustration:

(#2)

The joke routine has then been popularized twice so far in American popular culture. It almost surely had some history in the US before Archie Campbell, probably in vaudeville, but I don’t know anything about it. Nor do I know anything about appearances of the routine (or close analogues of it) in other English-speaking cultures, or in other languages. (Just to remind you that this routine is distinct from the Good News / Bad News routine.)

Bonus: the wily Chinese ancient. A complex stereotype, realized in popular culture in many forms — Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, in particular. And now the wily and ominous House of Evil shopkeeper:

(#3)

Some features to note: long hair, drooping mustache, pointed beard, and bushy eyebrows, all white with age; yellow eyes; nearly toothless (only a few yellowed teeth remaining); long pointed fingernails, like claws; a noble hat resembling Qing Dynasty headgear, with a gold button on top; traditional jacket and trousers, in Chinese red; socks and sandals. Missing from this image: the long pipe — presumably an opium pipe — that the shopkeeper is smoking in the video clip.

As for the pale blue skin tone, I don’t know — maybe a signal that he’s a cartoon character and not a representation of a real person. Like having four cartoon fingers on each hand instead of five.