A Peanuts strip, featuring Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty:

(#1) But wait! Patty’s Don’t ask! is not a request for Charlie not to ask about her feelings (which would directly contradict her requesting Charlie to ask about her feelings); instead, it’s an exclamation (in Yiddish English) conveying Patty’s dismay at feeling really crappy

We have been through this use of Don’t ask! previously on this blog, in the aptly named posting of 1/31/21, “Don’t ask!”:

Today’s morning name, but it comes with crucial context. The Don’t ask! in question is not the neutral use of the negative imperative, advising the addressee not to ask someone about something (Don’t ask them about the ducks in the kitchen; that just makes them crazy), but instead is a formula of Yiddish-influenced English, normally used only by (American) Jews (or gentiles culturally close to this community), when someone has in fact just asked about the matter in question (the tsuris / tsores ‘troubles’); the speaker doesn’t go on to avoid this sensitive matter, but instead embraces it, launching into kvetching‘complaining’ about it.

The formula Don’t ask!  then serves as an announcement — a kind of alarm bell, if you will — that the speaker is about to go off on a (perhaps extended) kvetch. [so that it serves to convey that the situation in question is in fact dire, a mess or a disaster]

Two examples, both illustrating attitudes towards male homosexuality (specifically, in a woman’s son), the second exemplifying another feature of Yiddish-influenced English (not previously discussed on this blog), the mildly derogatory lexical item feygele(h) / faygele(h) ‘gay man’.

— from Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, by Michael Wex:

(#2)

— from a blog posting“Some of My Favorite Jewish Jokes” (whose author, to judge from its link, might, or might not, be Lawrence Attard Bezzina):

(#3)

As a bonus for this blog, the second feygele son is named Arnold.

(Like Mary, Queen of Scots, I am not dead yet  — but my right hand barely works because the finger joints are seized up so terribly I can’t straighten the fingers, and painfully swollen, and I am mightily pissed; had to apply ice packs at dusk yesterday, when the air pressure went way low and the pain got intolerable. This is, blessedly, a brief posting with not much typing to do.)

Max Vasilatos on Facebook on 6/10, with a smiling selfie:

(#1) Max’s header: “Breakfast of champions” — Twizzlers (twists of licorice-like candy, in various flavors) as a guilty pleasure, possibly even for breakfast

The Wiktionary entry for breakfast of champions:

(ironic) Beer, junk food, or other foods implied to be unhealthy. ETYMOLOGY Originally an advertising slogan for Wheaties breakfast cereal. Used ironically in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions to refer to a martini.

About Twizzlers, from Wikipedia:

Twizzlers are the product of Y&S Candies, Inc., of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Twizzlers were first produced in 1929 by Young and Smylie, as the company was then called. The licorice company was founded in 1845, making it one of the oldest confectionery firms in the United States. Twizzlers ingredients consist of corn syrup, wheat flour, sugar, cornstarch, and smaller amounts of palm oil, salt, artificial flavor, glycerin, citric acid, potassium sorbate, Red 40, and soy lecithin. Because only black Twizzlers contain extracts of the licorice plant, they are collectively referred to as licorice-type candy. Seventy percent of the annual production of Twizzlers are strawberry, the most popular Twizzlers flavor.

(#2) Strawberry Twizzlers (photo from Wikipedia)

Also today’s food art. From Bill Badecker on Facebook this morning:

[The Orange Menace]’s lawyers have assailed the Georgia case in their efforts to derail it ahead of any indictments. “It is one thing to indict a ham sandwich,” some of his lawyers said in a recent court filing. “To indict the mustard-stained napkin that it once sat on is quite another.” – NYT, July 22

With this portrait of Helmet Grabpussy, a.k.a. Mustard Staining Cheesy Ham Sandwich:

Fond as I am of my own mocking names — do not utter the true name of the demon, lest you invoke him — Helmet Grabpussy and The Orange Menace — I admire Mustard Staining Cheesy Ham Sandwich. It is, alas, unwieldy, though I suppose it could be initialized to MSCHS (which has a nice rhythm). Or condensed to MusChee.

The Mother Goose and Grimm strip of 12/3/15 (lots of stuff hangs around on my desktop for a really long time), depicting a canine guardian of the gates of dog heaven:

The definite article of uniqueness, here distinguishing a proper name St. Bernard (unique in some salient world for the user and their audience), the name of a specific saint, from a common noun St. Bernard (a type name), the name of a breed of dogs

Now it turns out that this usage can be employed to distinguish two proper nouns (according to their salience in a particular sociocultural context); and to distinguish two common nouns (picking out the salient type, rather than naming an individual). (Necessarily rather complex) examples follow.

(The phenomena are well known — but were brought to my mind by the MGG strip. Also: not being an actual semanticist, I make no attempt to locate these phenomena in a formal account.)

Two proper names. The dogs are named after the Alpine monk Saint Bernard of Menton; while the co- founder of the Knights Templar (and a major leader in the reformation of the Benedictine Order through the developing Cistercian Order) is St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who is venerated simply as Saint Bernard.

So that, for most Catholics, the Clairvaux St. Bernard will be distinguished from the Menton St. Bernard (and, no doubt, some host of other St. Bernards) as the St. Bernard; in this sociocultural world, the doggy saint is a St. Bernard, but he’s not the St. Bernard.

Two common nouns. Distinguishing a type name from an individual name.

Q: What’s the red-breasted black bird — the name of an individual — over there called?

A: That’ s the red-breasted blackbird — the name of the type.

A different red-breasted black bird might not be the red-breasted blackbird (which is a conventional everyday name for the species Sturnella militaris).

The One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed on 12/7/18 — the Ramona St. posting mill grinds slowly, very slowly — is all about pragmatics, in particular what we take to be the point of questions we’re asked. In the strip, Ruthie asks her father what you can do to stop hiccups. Her father doesn’t inquire into why she’s asking, but assumes that she’s not merely asking an information question (she might, after all, be researching the matter for a presentation at school), and it never occurs to him that she’s asking a quiz question (to which she already knows the answer, but is checking his paternal competence at everyday medical care, should the occasion arise). Instead, he assumes that she has a personal interest in the answer to the question — this turns out to be so — indeed, that she has the hiccups and wants to know how to stop them — that’s a good guess, and it’s close, but it’s wrong — so instead of answering Ruthie’s question, by describing an appropriate remedy, he leaps to supplying the remedy himself:

(#1) A well-intentioned action misfire that follows from the various (literal) meanings of questions; practical reasoning about which ones are likely to be relevant to the situation at hand; the calculation of meanings that can be indirectly conveyed given a literal meaning — most pressingly the calculation of Ruthie’s intentions in asking this particular question, so that her father can respond to those intentions; and then his short-circuiting his reaction to all of this by dispensing with a verbal reply and going right to the action it would recommend

Why is she asking? That’s the crucial point, where it would be easy to go wrong.

A much transformed story from real life. A friend phoned me to ask, “What’s the difference between a garter snake and a rattlesnake?” A question I was well-prepared to answer, having spent a considerable part of my childhood on farms and on suburban streets right next to fields and forests, with substantial experience with garter snakes (memorably, in half-light on the way to the outhouse on one of the farms) and with rattlesnakes (in fetching firewood from wood-piles in the suburbs, also encountered sunning themselves on rocks at the edges of woods). The problem is that garter snakes have stripes, but some rattlesnakes have stripes too.

I held back on practical tips for telling them apart, to inquire, “Why are you asking?” In particular, was my caller confronted at close quarters by a snake of unknown species? Was this a herpetological emergency?

Well, no. They had recently seen photos of some garter snakes (there are several species, but the stripes are their garterish characteristic) and thought they looked a lot like rattlesnakes (there are several species of rattlesnake, some of them striped), and wasn’t that a problem?

Generally not, garter snakes being slender and rattlesnakes much heftier, and rattlesnakes having significant patterns other than stripes. You just don’t want to come on a rattlesnake unawares; those wood-piles take some caution.

More problematic questions. From the same time-period as #1, this web meme passed on to me by Tyler Schnoebelen:

(#2) From 1/11/19

The reduced alternative question Coffee or tea?  In the context of a flight attendant serving hot beverages to a passenger, normally understood as a question about the addressee’s preferences (‘Do you want coffee or do you want tea?’), and therefore as an indirect way of offering these alternatives to the addressee (‘Should I serve you coffee or should I serve you tea?’).

But it could also be as a question about the identity of the drink being served (“Is this coffee or is this tea?’) — understood either as an information question (the speaker doesn’t know which it is, and is asking for the addressee’s judgment on the matter); or as a quiz question (the speaker knows which it is, and is testing the addressee’s knowledge on this point), both of which are bizarre in the airplane context.

The pay-off to an elaborate set-up tale, giving a pun on a familiar expression (in this case a song title). From Vince the Sign Guy: Vince Rozmiarek of Indian Hills CO and (from his Facebook page) “his lighthearted puns shown on local community signs”:

Phonologically, there’s a stretch of speech that’s both I herd it through the grapevines (the pun, the pay-off from the vineyard cow story) and the nearly homophonous “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (the model, the song title); semiotically, however, that stretch of speech is either about one of these situations or the other, not two nearly identical situations

Specifically, there’s no metaphorical structuring of the vineyard cow situation (in the story) on the basis of the information exchange situation (in the song). Their only relationship is phonological.

This isn’t a defect; most puns are merely phonological, and that’s fine. Vince Rozmiarek’s vineyard cow story is a great little joke, of a recognizable genre of punning: the set-up + pay-off story based on a formulaic expression — for short, a formula pun.

It’s just that a small number of puns are what I’ve sometimes called — I’ve wrestled a long time with ways of saying this — satisfying, meaning semiotically satisfying: the participants are represented as belonging to two worlds at once. They are anteaters, say, with the formicavore’s passionate hunger for the insects, but they are also diners in conventional American restaurants, insisting on specific kinds of table service and exhibiting dining quirks (like an aversion to spicy food). The first of these worlds is systematically mapped into the second, in an elaborate metaphor. (The restaurant-going anteaters are a recurring theme in Bizarro cartoons.)

From this month in my postings: on 8/3 “Brief shot: cock time”, about the expression cock time:

An atrocious pun [on clock time], but satisfying in that some … item is not merely introduced into a context for a near-homophone, but participates in the world of that model expression. We see something that’s a cock [a man’s penis] and a (kind of) clock.

(Vince the Sign Guy on grapevines came to me on Facebook yesterday, passed through many hands, as is the way of such things; I got it from Susan Fischer.)

The phonology. From NOAD on the two nouns grapevine:

noun grapevine: 1 a vine native to both Eurasia and North America, especially one bearing fruit (grapes) used for eating or winemaking. Numerous cultivars and hybrids have been developed for the winemaking industry. Genus Vitis, family Vitaceae: many species, in particular V. vinifera and the American V. labrusca. 2 informal used to refer to the circulation of rumors and unofficial information: I’d heard through the grapevine that the business was nearly settled.

This ambiguity then combines with another lexical ambiguity, of the PRS-form verb herd vs. the PST-form verb heard.

The song. From Wikipedia:

“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” is a song written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for Motown Records in 1966. The first recording of the song to be released was produced by Whitfield for Gladys Knight & the Pips and released as a single in September 1967. It went to number one on the Billboard R&B Singles chart and number two on the Billboard Pop Singles chart and shortly became the biggest selling Motown single up to that time.

The Miracles were the first to record the song in 1966, but their version was not released until August 1968, when it was included on their album Special Occasion.

The Marvin Gaye version was the second to be recorded, in the beginning of 1967, but the third to be released. It was placed on his 1968 album In the Groove, a year and a half later, where it gained the attention of radio disc jockeys. Motown founder Berry Gordy finally agreed to its release as a single on the Tamla subsidiary in October 1968, when it went to the top of the Billboard Pop Singles chart for seven weeks from December 1968 to January 1969, overtaking the Gladys Knight & the Pips version as the biggest hit single on the Motown family of labels up to that point.

The Gaye recording has since become an acclaimed soul classic.

And I now have it lodged in my mind, on repeat.

On (semiotically) satisfying puns. See my 8/4/18 posting “Cultural knowledge”, on (metaphorical) translations of one world into another in three cartoons.

On formula puns. From my 7/6/22 posting “Toad away, groaning”:

Outrageous elaborate set-up puns, based on formulaic expressions, are a genre in themselves, often treated as a kind of shaggy dog story (because of their complexity), though classic shaggy dog stories are anticlimactic, while these formula puns culminate in a complex pay-off. I learned the elaborately transpositional boyfoot bear with teak of Chan in high school, and then the elaborately punning crossing staid lions for immortal porpoises not long after …

In any case, some cartoonists are especially drawn to the [set-up + pay-off] formula-pun genre. Stephan Pastis [of Pearls Before Swine], in particular.

rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate September, Labor Day weekend in my country, autumn in my hemisphere, and the 84th year of my life (I’m about to be — this coming Wednesday — 83, a nice prime number)

Meanwhile, a comment by Stewart Kramer on my 8/22 posting “The Jerk Fest” leads me to some reflections on where slurs — like jerk approximating asshole — come from. A slur like this use of jerk, or asshole itself,

— levels a culturally serious charge against its target (in the case of asshole, involving, among other things, arrogance, pretension, and rudeness)

— attributes this offense to a character flaw in the target (in Geoffrey Nunberg’s analysis of asshole, the flaw of culpable obtuseness — about their own importance, about the needs of others and the way they’re perceived by them)

— and insults the target.

The slur jerk developed from jerk referring to a fool or incompetent — what I’ll call a (mere) devaluation, meaning a term that refers to an identity regarded as of little worth. The examples that turn up in discussions of pejoration that I’ll cite involve terms referring to the devalued identities of fools and the inept (old-style jerk, dope, dummy); rustics and farm folk (hick, hillbilly, hayseed); and women (chick, dame, girl), but an extended discussion would take in (at least) terms referring to oddballs and nonconformists; foreigners; members of certain racioethnic groups; the aged; the disabled; and members of sexual minorities. (Bear in mind how astoundingly culture-specific all this material is.)

The route from devaluation to slur involves elevating cultural associations with the devalued identities to connotations of the devaluation and then to its semantic content: nasty metonymy, if you will. Fools and incompetents are seen as prone to egotistical interactions with others, so that foolish jerk begins to pick up the connotations of arrogance and rudeness, which can then become conventional aspects of meaning, leading to assholish jerk. The various stages in this progression can co-occur with one another for some time, as is certainly the case with jerk as described in the pieces quoted in my “Jerk Fest” posting.

Pejoratives and pejoration. The various stages along the way from devaluation to slur are often referred to as pejoratives, and the progression as pejoration. As intro, Stewart Kramer’s comment on my “Jerk Fest” posting and my response to it:

— SK: It reminds me of the different senses of rude (uncultured, then impolite, then insulting).

— AZ: Yes, and this probably merits a follow-up posting. Both are cases of pejoration (literally ‘worsening’) — a negatively tinged meaning becoming more negative in content. Which in cases like this would be better termed deprecation or derogation, with a mildly critical judgment elevated to a more serious (and more specific) charge. Seen also in the development of queer from a judgment of oddness, strangeness, or peculiarity to an insulting attribution of homosexuality (then ameliorated by the processes of reclaiming epithets).

Customary uses of some of these terms, from NOAD:

noun slur: 1 … [b] a derogatory or insulting term applied to particular group of people: a racial slur. …

noun derogation: … 2 the perception or treatment of someone or something as being of little worth [AZ: or significance]: the derogation of women.

adj. pejorative: expressing contempt or disapproval: permissiveness is used almost universally as a pejorative term. noun pejorative: a word expressing contempt or disapproval: most of what he said was inflammatory and filled with pejoratives.

Then from three big dictionaries of linguistic usages, in the order of their (original) publication:

— from the Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, 1996, compiled by Hadumod Bussmann; based on Bussmann’s Lexicon der Sprachwissenschaft (2nd ed., Kröner, 1990):

pejorative: Semantic characteristic of linguistic expressions wich invoke negative connotations: such derogatory meaning components can be created by new formations (e.g., wet-backs for ‘illegal Mexican immigrants’), by meaning change (e.g. dame, originally ‘(noble) lady’), as well as by prefixes such as mal -, pseudo-.

— from An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages (Blackwell), 1992, by David Crystal:

pejoration A change of meaning in which a word develops a sense of disapproval. An example is notorious, which formerly meant ‘widely known’, but now means ‘widely and unfavourably known’.

pejorative Descriptve of a linguistic form which expresses a disparaging meaning. Examples include goodish, a youth, and … patois.

patois A popular label for a provincial dialect, especially one spoken by people considered to be primitive, illiterate, or outside society in some way (e.g. rustics, gypsies). It usually carries a disparaging connotation, and is not used in dialectology.

— from The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics (Edinburgh Univ. Press in UK, Fitzroy Dearborn in US), 2000, by R. L. Trask:

pejoration (also degeneration) A type of semantic change in which a word comes to denote something more offensive than formerly. For example, all of English churl, villain and boor originally meant only ‘farm-worker’, but all have come to be insults, and much the same is now happening to peasant.

An old One Big Happy strip, one in a long series in which Ruthie or her brother Joe is confronted with some type of test question (rather than an information-seeking question):

Ruthie is laboring at a workbook — a culture object that subjects a student to test questions, in this case a question requiring the student to demonstrate their understanding of the culturally appropriate grounds for publicly assessing the characteristics of other people: industriousness is an appropriate ground for assessing a farmer (because it’s relevant to his doing his job), while a conventionally attractive appearance is not

Even though she’s filling in questions in a workbook, Ruthie falls back on treating busy-or-pretty? as a question about her opinions, rather than her knowledge of cultural appropriateness. In fact, for all we can tell from the workbook picture, Farmer Brown might not be at all busy; he might be sitting upright in a stationary tractor, daydreaming about what’s for supper. But he could perfectly well be busy, while even if was drawn to look like a handsome film star, his looks would be culturally irrelevant to his job. (Subtle point: they would, however, be culturally relevant in general, since men judged to be conventionally good-looking have a social edge over other men in various contexts.)

Here, Ruthie personalizes her response by giving her opinions. In other OBH test-question strips she looks situations from her point of view or takes her own experiences as background for answering questions. But test questions demand a depersonalized stance — and then regularly plumb very fine points of sociocultural awareness. Fine points that for the most part aren’t treated in the workbooks, aren’t explicitly taught in schools. I’ll give one further example from an earlier posting of mine below.

Workbooks. From Wikipedia:

Workbooks are paperback [auxiliary] textbooks issued to students. Workbooks are usually filled with practice problems, with empty space so that the answers can be written directly in the book.

Very often, the workbook pages are scored so that they can be easily torn out and handed in as homework.

Queens. From my 2/2/19 posting “Better than ABC order”:

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?

An old One Big Happy strip that recently came up in my comics feed:

Joe writes to Santa with a very specific gift list, with an accusatory flourish at the end (presupposing that in earlier years Santa had failed to honor Joe’s requests and telling Santa that now it’s time for the old guy to get it right) in which he addresses Santa as sport

This is one of those occasions where I pose questions that I’m in no position to answer, because I don’t have the resources to pursue them. I am an address terms guy — see the Page on this blog with links to my postings on the topic —  but sport isn’t a term I use myself, so I have no self-report data on it; and though dictionaries have some useful information on sport, they aren’t able to describe the complexities of usage of address terms like it; and, finally, sport is not one of the high-frequency address terms (like guy) that have gotten the attention of variationist sociolinguists, so we have no systematic data on the way it’s used.

Even so, my first response to Joe’s use was that it was odd. Somewhat antique, but more significantly, impertinent — treating Santa as if he were an equal, or in fact a subordinate. My impression is that Santa, in a somewhat old-fashioned way, might amiably address a little boy as sport, but little kids don’t talk to adults (especially powerful adults) that way. Such an impertinence would, however, fit right in with Joe’s challenge to Santa to get with the program of supplying Joe with the toys he’s asking for (well, demanding). Cheeky monkey.

Previously on this blog. From my 11/17/10 posting “Data points: address terms 11/17/10”, on the address terms pal and sport:

These are both address terms used by men to men — a rich lexical field on its own, without getting into the full collection of address terms available in English. Address terms in general are famously complex pragmatically, varying dramatically in their import depending on who’s using them to who in what contexts, and sociolinguistically, with different uses by different social groups, changing over time

… without the context, we can’t tell whether a vocative use of pal conveys male friendship, neutral male reference, or socially distant male reference

… But what strikes people I’ve talked to … is that vocative pal is not something they’d use, nor can they recall occasions where they’ve heard it; it sounds quaint, like something in an old movie (with smart-talking reporters, cops, private eyes, bartenders, and the like). It’s a high-masculinity address term, but somewhat old-fashioned.

… as with pal, male-address sport strikes me as somewhat old-fashioned. Somehow it got written into Ken Mack’s lines in [the gay porn film] Arcade on Route 9 to establish his persona as older (and more experienced) trucker talking to a [teenager], establishing himself as the boy’s “best buddy” who’s going to teach his very willing student about “that dirty sex stuff”.

So: from a powerful older authority to a young man. Hard to imagine the kid in Arcade addressing the trucker as sport, though my impression is that if he did, he’d be positioning himself as the trucker’s equal (rather than his acolyte) and framing their sexual liaison as mutual satisfaction rather than as a learning experience for the kid: goodbye “thank you, Daddy”, hello “great sex, dude”.

Cousin of sport. Revisiting sport put me in mind of the phonologically similar address term scout. Which, however, comes with a very different usage profile from scout, though actual data for the address term seems to be extraordinarily sparse. So I start with notes on referential scout. From NOAD:

5 informal, dated a man or boy: I’ve got nothing against Harrison — he’s a good scout.

Compare subentry 1, for someone who gathers — scouts out — information; and subentry 3, for Boy Scouts (and Girl Scouts too). And note the example, with good scout — an approving use of scout, indeed the typical collocation for scout. The OED on scout is still unrevised and lacks this (positive) generic use. But GDoS covers it:

4 in positive sense, a person, esp. as good scout, an admirable person [the popular image of the Boy Scouts] [1st cite from 1912; lots of good scout examples]

The referent of this scout is typically male. A vocative use would presumably preserve the central characteristics of this scout: judgmental, positive in affect, addressing a male. So probably most likely to be used by a man to another male, of equal or subordinate status; Santa might use it to a boy, but a boy wouldn’t use it to Santa. (In any case, like sport, it’s dated, somewhat antique.)

My sources have exactly one instance of vocative scout: from GDoS:

1998 [Irish novelist] Joseph O’Connor, The Salesman [set in Dublin] Are y’all right there, scout?

Here things grind to a halt. It would take me some weeks to get hold of a copy of the book, and then I’d have to search through it to find the cite in context, without which the quotation is inscrutable: who’s saying what to who? for what reason? and what was the Dublin English of the mid-20th century like?

I have no idea, but my feeling is that scout in the context of the One Big Happy strip above would be even odder, and more impertinent, than sport.

To cope with a day when I’m overwhelmed with e-mail to answer, an old Calvin and Hobbes strip salted away for just such days:

They exchange greeting hellos, and then the caller, detecting that the phone has been answered by a child, shifts to an indirect speech act designed to have the child get an adult — the caller specifically asks about their mother — to come to the phone: instead of (directly) asking Calvin to call his mother to the phone, they ask (politely) if his mother is home, assuming that Calvin will understand that they’re asking this because they assume she’s home and they want to talk to her, so they want him to turn the call over to her

The overall story here doesn’t depend on the phone being answered by a kid. It’s enough that the caller recognizes that the person answering the phone is not the one they want to talk to. In which case they could ask for them indirectly: Is Marcia home / in? (this being one big step of indirection beyond the conventionally indirect question May / Can I talk to Marcia?).

The crucial step in dealing with the yes-no question Is X home? is recognizing that because a literal understanding of it would be bizarre — why would some random caller need to know if X is home? — the caller must have some other motive in asking it. And on from there. But that’s where Calvin runs aground.

Well, that’s a lot for a little kid to work out in less than a second on the phone (and Calvin is not a patient or especially cooperative child). I actually remember being taught, explicitly, that if a phone caller, or someone at the door, asked if my mother was at home, that meant they wanted to talk to her, so I should get her. I imagine I could have worked this out eventually, but it might have taken some misfires for me to get the point.

(Part of this posting will dive right into gay porn for the day, with street-talk musings on man-on-man sex that’s totally off-limits for kids and the sexually modest; I’ll hold this part off until the end, so if you need to you can bail out then)

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and in my e-mail: two Bob Eckstein cartoons for the day (on turning and wearing green for the day); and a Falcon  Studios sale on gay porn, made holiday-appropriate by the mere addition of a shamrock, but which opens the topic of gay porn with actual St. Patrick’s day themes.

Background: being green. Ireland is associated with the color green: it’s the Emerald Isle (from its verdant landscape, the color of emeralds), the (very green) shamrock is a national symbol, and the national flag, the Irish tricolour, has a significantly green stripe. Ireland’s patron saint, Patrick, and his saint’s day, March 17th, then pick up the color green from Ireland.

I’ve posted about the shamrock — in a section of my 4/17/22 posting “Easter morning redux” — but not about the Irish tricolour, so a few words now on the national flag of Ireland:

(#1) Green, white, and orange stripes (a cousin to Italy’s green, white, and red)

Wikipedia on the Irish tricolour, an earnest and hopeful flag:

The green pale of the flag symbolises Roman Catholics, the orange represents the minority Protestants who were supporters of William of Orange. His title came from the Principality of Orange but his power from his leadership as Stadtholder of the Netherlands, a Protestant bastion from the 16th century. The white in the centre signifies a lasting peace and hope for union between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. The flag, as a whole, is intended to symbolise the inclusion and hoped-for union of the people of different traditions on the island of Ireland, which is expressed in the Constitution as the entitlement of every person born in Ireland to be part of the independent Irish nation, regardless of ethnic origin, religion or political conviction.

The bob cartoons: turning green, wearing green.

Turning green. In Weekly Humorist magazine, hot dogs on the street:

(#2) Turned green; the vendor maintains that it’s intentional — green beer, green cookies and cakes, why not green hot dogs (or pretzels or chestnuts or …)? — but the cautious buyer might want to perform a sniff test

But all this turning things green is on a small scale. On a larger scale, cities light up big buildings in green, paint some streets green, and, yes, dye their rivers green — Chicago, famously. From Travel and Leisure magazine, “How and Why Chicago Turns Its River Green for St. Patrick’s Day” by Meena Thiruvengadam on 6/23/23:

(#3) Shamrock green for St. Patrick (photo: Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Every year, St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago is celebrated with a massive parade. Preparations begin the Saturday before the holiday, when the city turns its namesake river green — part of a decades-long tradition that almost never happened.

In 1961, the city of Savannah, Ga., attempted to dye the river behind its City Hall green, however, the best they could do was create colored streaks in the water. The following year, Mayor Richard J. Daley — a politician of Irish-American descent who was raised in a heavily Irish neighborhood in Chicago — had been hoping to turn Lake Michigan green for the holiday.

After finding out that turning Lake Michigan green was a bit too much to ask, a group of Chicago plumbers identified the right formula for turning a city river the perfect shamrock shade, and a new holiday tradition was born the following year, in 1962. Finding the green color was truly a happy accident, according to the Illinois tourism site, as the plumbers union’s business manager just happened to notice bright green stains on another worker’s coveralls while they were off working on a different job — and the color was perfect.

Wearing green. In The West Side Rag (in NYC):

(#4) St. Patrick fashion for dogs

Meanwhile, for humans, hats in several Irish styles, ties, suits, dresses, shoes, and more, all shamrock green.

Patrick porn. (If you’re under 18, or XXX-averse, this is where you bail out.) What came up in my morning e-mail (with the dick in the original fuzzed out for WordPress modesty, but it’s a standing fuck, so it’s XXX conceptually, just not visually):

(#5) the image, with nicely posed bodies (though the angle of entry would be much more comfortable if the receptive man bent forward) and with classic facial expressions for the two men (Workman fucks Ecstatic); and (#6) the sale offer, with shamrock (porn-irrelevant) and phallus (holiday-irrelevant)

(The Shamrock and the Phallus: a title that clearly needs to be fleshed out in a saga of pedication in the emerald-green clover fields of March: Roll ‘im over / In the clover … Roll ‘im over ‘n / Fuck ‘im again!)

I then recalled that there are gay porn flicks, or at least scenes, on St. Patrick themes. There seems, in fact, to be a subgenre devoted to Pornstar1 Fucks Pornstar2 In Green — with one or both of the actors wearing a green Irish hat (and possibly some other green accessories). Yes, this is profoundly silly, but that’s part of its charm: diverting the urgent drive to fuck and get fucked, prolonging the ride, through playful interventions.

So, from the Queer Me Now site, “Jordan Boss Fucks Blayne Wilson in St. Patrick’s Day Porn” on 3/17/16:

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, of course porn studios are releasing St. Patrick’s Day theme porn videos. Gay Room just released this new POV video starring Blayne Wilson and former Sean Cody model Jordan Boss. Check out this video … where Blayne Wilson gets fucked by Jordan Boss.

(Note the shift in point of view: in the header, Boss fucks Wilson; in the text, Wilson gets fucked by Boss. The first is neutral reporting; the second adopts the viewpoint of  a large part of the clientele for gay porn, whose desires incline to the receptive.)

From this video:

(#6) Blayne Wilson, happily lordotic in a green hat and beads

To wrap things up, an earlier posting on Patrick Porn, from 3/17/19 (“V me, I’m Irish”):

(#7) Knox’s half-smile of pleasure at having Rivers’s cock in his ass oh yes baby yes yes yes fuck me like that oh sweet jesus fuck (not an actual transcript)

Four things: One, [in a St. Patrick’s Day sale ad:] Dakota Rivers fucking Liam Knox in Dick Danger 2: The Return of the Dick, and their facial expressions — in particular, Knox’s half-smile of pleasure in being fucked. Two, Kiss me, I’m Irish and playful variations on the catchphrase, including Fuck me, I’m Irish and Blow me, I’m Irish. Three, a note on the pleasures of being fucked. Four, some bilingual wordplay on Kiss me / Baise-moi.

Sadly, no green accessories for Liam Knox.

An old One Big Happy strip that’s been hanging around on my desktop for a couple of years. When you go to explain why it’s so weirdly funny, it turns out to be a complex exercise in what’s known in the linguistics trade as quantity implicature: someone uses a quantity expression, like 6 people or 18 years old, and we understand the speaker’s intentions to be to suggest exactly that quantity, or at least that quantity, or no more than that quantity — in technicalese, we take the speaker’s words to implicate one of these things — depending on the context and our assessments of the speaker’s reasons for mentioning that quantity in the context.

The standard discussions of quantity implicature are about reports of states of affairs. If, for example, a well-intentioned speaker tells you that there were 6 people at their birthday party, you take them to be conveying that there were exactly 6 people. I mean, if there were 8 people at the party, it would be true that there were 6 people; but then it would be uncooperative to say that there were 6 people, because if you knew there were 8 you should and would have said so, therefore saying there were 6 implicates that there were exactly 6. (This would be a good time to take a deep breath and rest for a moment.)

Now to the OBH strip. To start with, it’s not about reports, but about requirements, about stipulated criteria — things like

You must/should be this tall [pointing to a measure stick or mark] to get on the ride.

Which absolutely does not require that you be exactly that tall, instead that you be at least that tall: that tall or more (it sets a lower bound), Similarly,

They have to be 18, or it’s statutory rape. [18 or older]

You need to have four pieces of identification. [at least 4]

There are stipulated criteria that we understand to be exact, but they need very special contexts. As in a likely understanding of:

You must be born on September 6th to collect the birthday jackpot.

And finally, there are stipulated criteria we take to be requiring that something be at most some quantity: no more than that quantity (they set an upper bound):

You may/can (only) take 4 pieces of baggage with you.

(which permits you to take, say, 2 pieces of baggage, but not 5). Or in a negative formulation:

You can’t take 5 pieces of baggage with you. [but 4 or less would be ok]

The criterion in the cartoon,

Men in their 40s shouldn’t be skateboarding.

is of this third, or upper-bound, type, negatively formulated: men in their 40s or older shouldn’t be skateboarding. But then the cartoon:

Here, Brad totally screws things up, goofily taking in his forties in his doctor’s advice to convey an exact quantity — the decade of one’s 40s, not before and not after — so that Brad felt entitled to resume skateboarding when he turned 50

Brad’s idea is goofy because he’s disregarded why his doctor would have advised men in their 40s not to skateboard: because they’ve gotten too old for it, and it’s now become dangerous. All of that unsaid, because the doctor assumed Brad could figure it out.

Yes, that’s compressed, and there are lots of details, but the key idea is that stipulated criteria have reasons for being, and the nitty-gritty of these reasons governs when a criterion will be understood as lower-bounding, stipulating exactly, or upper-bounding.

Firecrackers! For a prize from the Swedish royal academies, something  you might think of as a Nobel Prize’s little brother, awarded to two colleagues in linguistics and philosophy, one an old friend (and exact contemporary) of mine. From the website of the Swedish royal academies, “Science, art and music meet in the Rolf Schock Prizes 2024”, a press release of 3/14/24:

2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy is jointly awarded Hans Kamp, University of Stuttgart, Germany and Irene Heim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

“for (mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.”

Natural languages are highly context-dependent – how a sentence is interpreted often depends on the situation, but also on what has been uttered before. In one type of case, a pronoun depends on an earlier phrase in a separate clause. In the mid-1970s, some constructions of this type posed a hard problem for formal semantic theory.

Around 1980, Hans Kamp and Irene Heim each separately developed very similar solutions to this problem. Their theories brought far-reaching changes in the field. Both introduced a new level of representation between the linguistic expression and its worldly interpretation and, in both, this level has a new type of linguistic meaning. Instead of the traditional idea that a clause describes a worldly condition, meaning at this level consists in the way it contributes to updating information. Based on these fundamentally new ideas, the theories provide adequate interpretations of the problematic constructions.

Kamp was born in the Netherlands in 1940. He received his PhD from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968 and has been a professor at University of Stuttgart, Germany, since 1988.

(#1) Hans Kamp (photo: Kerstin Sänger)

Heim was born in Germany in 1954. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1982 and has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA since 1997.

(#2) Irene Heim (photo: Philipp Heim-Antolin)

About the prize.

The Rolf Schock Prize is unusual in that it rewards both logic and philosophy, mathematics, visual arts and music. The laureates are selected through a unique collaboration between three Swedish royal academies: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The final decision is made by The Schock Foundation.

Hans Kamp. A friend since we were fellows together at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1981-82. Now, from John Beavers (chair of the UT-Austin linguistics department) on Facebook on 3/18, we hear that HK has been able to continue presenting his ideas in courses at Texas:

Huge congrats to our colleague and friend Hans Kamp on this amazing award! Hans was full-time faculty at UT Philosophy in the mid-1980s, and since 2009 has been with us in Linguistics as well as Philosophy as a Visiting Professor. This prize is richly deserved, a recongition of the foundational work he has done on formal semantics and the modeling of discourse. Working closely with Hans over these years has been a highlight of my time at UT, and it’s wonderful to see his life’s work recognized in this way. … our announcement from Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin:

Please join us in congratulating our colleague Professor Hans Kamp, who has just been awarded the prestigious Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy by the Royal Swedish Academies of Science, Music and Fine Arts!

Hans shares this year’s prize with Prof. Irene Heim (MIT). … the prize is for Hans’s creation of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), a landmark in formal semantics. Alongside Irene Heim’s File Change Semantics, DRT was one of the first serious attempts to build a model of semantics that takes discourse into account and thus handle meanings across sentences, and it’s something Hans has continued to develop in the intervening years, with many important papers and a textbook. It is fair to say that there is not a single working semanticist in the world who is not intimately familiar with DRT, and there are many who continue to actively use the framework.

Coincidentally, Hans arrives in Austin today for his annual visit to the UT departments of Linguistics and Philosophy, and so all of us here in Austin will be able to congratulate him in person. He will be teaching a 5-week intensive course on Speech Act Theory, to which all are welcome.

For some time now, I’ve been collecting examples of a scheme of English derivational morphology I’ve called beheading, as in

crude (Adj) oil (N) -> crude (N), where the derived item crude ‘crude oil’ is a Mass N (like oil)

commemorative (Adj) stamp (N) -> commemorative (N), where the derived item commemorative ‘commemorative stamp’ is a Count N (like stamp)

A great many of the examples come from jargons, the vocabularies of specific occupational or interest groups, like people in the energy business or philatelists — or medical professionals (N attending ‘attending physician’), food preparers, servers, and sellers (N Swiss ‘Swiss cheese’), and so on. More generally, most beheadings are notably context-specific. But some come from everyday language and don’t need much contextual backing.

Here, after a somewhat more careful account of what beheadings are, I’ll add a few everyday beheadings to supplement the ones in my files (see the Page on this blog). Then I’ll veer all the way to the other pole and note that with enough contextual backing, completely novel beheadings can be coined and understood. Finally, I’ll cite the everyday beheading that inspired this posting: three squares a day ‘three square meals a day’, from US President Joe Biden, which I put off because some commenters took it — or, possibly, the idiom square meal itself — to be outdated, hence a sign of Biden’s being old and out of touch, a development that merited some discussion on its own. But there are plenty of cites, including a NOAD entry for the beheading square; and then all those comments vanished from the net, so I had no one to bash.

What is beheading? From my 12/3/17 posting “Off with their heads!”:

Beheading is a word-formation process with

input: a 2-part expression-type Z = X + Y, where X is modifier and Y is head, so Z shares various syntactic properties with Y (in particular, syntactic category and subcategories)

output: a new expression-type X, with the syntactic properties and semantics of Z

Intuitively, Z has its head Y deleted — Z is “beheaded” — with its syntactic properties (including category) and its semantics inherited by the remainder/remnant X.

(And the derived item, with the phonology of X and the semantics of Z , can be referred to as a beheading: like the nouns crude and commemorative in the examples above.)

Some everyday beheadings. Two Ns spare, two Ns flat, and three Ns special. All entries from NOAD.

spare.

adj. spare: 1 additional to what is required for ordinary use: few people had spare cash for inessentials. …

noun spare: 1 [a] [AZ: a spare item] an item kept in case another item of the same type is lost, broken, or worn out: with three to choose from, your child will never be without a spare. [b] a spare tire: make sure there are no problems with any of the tires, including the spare. …

flat.

adj. flat: 1 [g] (of shoes) without heels or with very low heels. … 3 [a] (of a sparkling drink) having lost its effervescence: flat champagne. [b] of something kept inflated, especially a tire) having lost some or all of its air, typically because of a puncture: you’ve got a flat tire.

noun flat: 1 [d] [AZ: a flat shoe] a shoe with a very low heel or no heel: she wore a white strapless dress and a pair of electric blue flats. … 3 informal, mainly North American a flat tire: I’ve got a flat — there were nails under the wheel.

special.

adj. special: 1 [d] designed or organized for a particular person, purpose, or occasion: we will return by special coaches.

noun special: [a] [AZ: a special event / broadcast] a thing, such as an event, product, or broadcast, that is designed or organized for a particular occasion or purpose: television’s election night specials. [b] [AZ: a special dish] a dish not on the regular menu at a restaurant but served on a particular day. [c] [AZ: a special offer] informal a product or service offered at a temporarily reduced price: Mrs. Hill was a careful shopper, choosing house brands and in-store specials.

Novel beheadings, exquisitely context-bound. Suppose a restaurant offers one hot lunch special each day — a stew or a pasta dish — and one cold lunch special — some sort of salad. When you go there for lunch, you can then ask your server what the hot is for the day and what the cold is, and you can expect them to understand that without explanation.

As it turns out, I have a real-life variant of this story to tell you. My Princeton eating club offered one hot cereal for breakfast each day (plus a standing assortment of cold cereals): one day oatmeal, one day Wheatena, one day Cream of Wheat (maybe there were more, but I remember these three). When you arrived for breakfast, the waiter would announce the day’s selection, for example:

Wheatena’s the hot.

Most of us had never heard this use of hot before we joined the club, and it’s not in dictionaries, but in this highly constrained context, we got it right away.

Once you’ve seen these stories, you could concoct tales that would provide backing for no end of novel beheadings. Some beheadings turned out to be useful in specific sociocultural settings, so got conventionalized. Others wait in the wings; maybe their time will come.

Joe Biden’s three squares. On the whitehouse.gov site on 1/19/22, from “Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference”:

Now, should everybody in America know [about Biden’s COVID vaccine program]?  No, they don’t necessarily know that; they’re just trying to figure how to put three squares on the table and stay safe.

A few commenters (from media sources, as I recall) took it — or, possibly, the idiom square meal itself — to be outdated, hence a sign of Biden’s being old and out of touch. It pissed me off that the media were doing Helmet Grabpussy’s campaigning for him by harping on the theme of Biden’s being too old and infirm and incompetent to serve another term. I was ready to bash back at these commenters, but when I went to get the offending quotations, they had all been removed from the net.

But then I did some searching on the idiom square meal ‘a full or complete meal’ (Merriam Webster online), which is very widely used (though it’s possible that it’s no longer current in speakers under 30). And three squares a day gets lots of hits too — so it was no surprise that NOAD turned out to have an entry for beheaded square (<- square meal):

noun square: … 6 North American informal a square meal: three squares a day

Hah! Biden’s very usage.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move on.

three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:

(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”

Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.

turn on a dime. From NOAD (under the noun dime), a somewhat too-specific definition for the idiom on a dime:

phrase on a dime: North American informal used to refer to a maneuver that can be performed by a moving vehicle or person within a small area or short distance: boats that can turn on a dime.

stop on a dime and turn on a dime are both common instances of the idiom; pivot on a dime and reverse on a dime are both attested, and I’m sure there are more. But on a dime is also used used for actions performed in a short period of time (rather than space), as in the well-attested respond on a dime ‘respond almost immediately’.

The idiom is metaphorical, based on the dime’s being the smallest-sized US coin, so you can use it to refer to tiny amounts of space or time.

Easter + April Fool’s. My 4/1/18 posting “Easter Fool’s” was about 4/1/18’s being simultaneously Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day. In 2024 they’re consecutive; we’ve turned on a dime from Easter to April Fool’s Day. Both occasions come with rabbits, hence the relevance of Maria Scrivan’s wonderful pun.

The yellow flowers of April. Les jaunes d’Avril. It’s the season for yellow crocuses and yellow daffodils, and eventually yellow tulips. With yellow as the color of early spring, in April. Treated in my 5/1/19 posting “The May flower” — about white muguets as the flower of that month, but with a long look backward at yellow April.

April and the color yellow, as put together by Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1893 poster of the can-can dancer Jeanne Louise Beaudon, whose stage name was Jane Avril:

(#2) Jane Avril, a vision in yellow

(I) love what you’ve done with X. The format for a family of exclamatory compliments, of which I love what you’ve done with your hare in #1 is an instance. The syntax of these expressions is fairly complicated, but their meanings and uses are deducible from their syntax; they are not idioms. They do, however, have something special about them: they come easily to hand; they are, so to speak, at the front of the shelf of expressions for these purposes; they are stock expressions.

I’ll refer to this family as LWYDW, after the words in the format:

the main verb love;

with an interrogative-clause object introduced by indefinite what representing the direct object in that clause;

with the addressee pronoun you as the subject in that clause;

with activity do as the verb in that clause;

and with the preposition with marking an oblique object (referring to material used for some purpose) in that clause.

Now, comments on a few of the parts of LWYDW (with no pretensions to completeness).

The main verb love (or its less extreme variant like) is conventionally used in exclamations of admiration, hence normally has a 1st-person subject there (though of course reports of other people’s admiration can have other subjects):

Love your hat! Love how you walk! Love the furniture arangement! Like that bathing suit!

Omissible subject I. In informal registers in English, a main-clause subject I is generally omissible — in a type of informal “subject-drop”. As in the examples just above, and in:

Hate to tell you this, but your photos are all upside down.  Knew right away that we’d be friends.

Exclamatory reinforcement. Exclamations can occur with the reinforcing adverb just ‘really’ (vs. just ‘only, merely’):

Just love your hat! ‘I really admire your hat!, What a wonderful hat!’

and in LWYDW examples like:

Just love what you’ve done with your hair!

Objects of activity do. This verb freely occurs with indefinite objects:

do something / nothing / everything / (negated) anything / (interrogative) what / a little / little / a lot / much

As in:

I can’t do anything with my hair. I can do a lot with my hair. What have you done with your hair? I love what you’ve done with your hair!

Objects of the preposition with in LWYDW. These are

— the / this / your place

— your N, where N is hair, makeup, an item of apparel (belt, shoes), a household furnishing (rug, quilts), a dwelling (house, apartment) or room in one (kitchen, bathrooms), or anything else that can be (re)designed or decorated or otherwise artfully arranged or altered

Then, given the stock expression, you can fool around with the format for other purposes, as I did in my title for this posting:

Love what Scrivan did with the rabbit pun!

xx

In e-mail from Larry Horn on 7/18, this Good News / Bad News (GN/BN) joke cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner from 6/18/24 (in The New Yorker issue of July 1):

“First the good news, Mr. Edmonds: you’re going to get closure.”

(#1) Doctor to patient in hospital, offering the truncated variant of GN/BN, with (the dire) BN omitted (to be supplied by the reader from the context)

This is closure as in sense 3b from NOAD:

noun closure: … 3 [a] a sense of resolution or conclusion at the end of an artistic work: he brings modernistic closure to his narrative. [b] a feeling that an emotional or traumatic experience has been resolved: I am desperately trying to reach closure but I don’t know how to do it without answers from him.

In a GN/BN joke, the GN carries a sting in its tail, made overt in the BN. In #1, the GN is that the patient’s ordeal of illness is coming to an end — by his imminent death (the BN), which nobody says aloud.

Things to talk about. First, GN/BN, as treated in earlier postings on this blog (prominently featuring Larry Horn). Then, another joke form with a sting in its tail, kin to GN/BN: Genie’s Wish.

Previously on this blog. My 7/7/19 posting “GN/BN” begins with a Cyanide and Happiness comic strip (below), provides a survey of the GN/BN discussion on this blog, and then segues into a guest posting by Larry Horn (in his guise as Prof. Laurence R. Horn, the eminent authority on semantics and pragmatics) on the topic.

(#2) Cyanide and Happiness specializes in dark BN/GN jokes; formally, BN/GN is a reversed variant of GN/BN — but the sting is still in the tail, in what’s labeled as GN (once again, imminent death)

Genie’s Wish. A joke format (presented verbally or in a comic strip) involving a finder — someone who finds a magic lantern and rubs it — and a genie — a magical being that materializes from the lamp and grants the finder three wishes (Good News!). Classically, the joke comes with a sting in its tail, in the way the third wish is fulfilled, with disastrous consequences for the finder (Bad News!).

An example (“A Man’s Biggest Wishes”), from the Jokes By BabaMail site:

A man is walking through the woods, and he finds a magic lamp on the ground. Instinctively, he picks the lamp up, rubs the side of it with his sleeve, and out pops a genie. The genie thanks the man for freeing him, and offers to grant him three wishes. The man is ecstatic and knows exactly what he wants. “First,” says the man, “I want a billion dollars.” The genie snaps his fingers and a briefcase full of money materializes out of thin air. The man is wide eyed in amazement and continues, “Next, I want a Ferrari.” The genie snaps his fingers and a Ferrari appears from a puff of smoke. The man continues, “Finally, I want to be irresistible to women.” The genie snaps his fingers and the man promptly turns into a box of chocolates.

Similarly, a wish for some large amount of money is satisfied by having the finder’s most beloved die and leave them the money in an insurance policy. An ill-intentioned genie can transform any kind of gold into rubbish.

(The joke form has its roots in the Aladdin folktale; see my 3/10/21 posting “genealogy, genie-ology”, on genies and the Aladdin story.)

There are of course many variants. Sometimes only one wish, sometimes all three wishes go awry, sometimes the fulfillment is silly rather than actually disastrous (the desired Ferrari is a toy, the desired 12-inch penis is misunderstood as a 12-inch pianist — see my 5/2/13 posting “The 12-inch pianist”), and so on.

But always the Good News of getting wishes followed by the Bad News of the way they’re fulfilled.

Caption on a photo on the front page of today’s New York Times:

A Somber Procession
First responders at the funeral of a father of two killed in the attack on NN

(where NN stands for the name of 45, TFG, the Orange Menace, Helmet Grabpussy; the attack was an attempted assassination). In principle, the PSP (past participial) phrase at the end of the caption — killed in the attack on NN — could be parsed with the preceding material in (at least) four different ways, as a predicative or in one of three ways as a modifier (which I’ll label VHA (very high attachment), HA (high attachment), and LA (low attachment). I doubt that either of the first two parsings would occur to any normal reader (though a mechanical parser would entertain them), but the last two are more imaginable.

To look ahead: ceteris paribus, LA is the favored parsing, but plausibility in context is a powerful effect and often favors HA. I was lured into understanding the caption with LA and had a lot of trouble shaking that parsing, despite its incongruity with the facts of the situation as I knew them and the real-world unlikelihood of this understanding.

The PSP phrase as predicative. In which case the caption is understood as a full sentence with the copula omitted, as in headlinese, as:

subject NP: first responders at the funeral of a father of two
+
predicate VP: (are/were) killed in the attack on NN

But in the actual event, no first responders were killed, much less first responders at anyone’s funeral.

The PSP phrase as modifier: VHA. To see that this is even theoretically possible, consider the NP

the funeral of a father of two presided over by the Rev. U.N. Owen

— in which the final PSP phrase presided over by the Rev. U.N. Owen modifies the large NP the funeral of a father of two, so that this PSP phrase is understood as conveying that this funeral was presided over by the minister in question.

But interpreting the PSA phrase in #1  — killed in the attack on NN — in a parallel fashion would have the funeral referred to in #1 killed in an attack, so that a literal understanding is semantically anomalous; the literal sense of kill (’cause the death of (a person, animal, or other living thing)’ (NOAD‘s sense 1a)) is incompatible with a direct object that denotes an event, like a funeral.

So to parse the PSA phrase in #1 with VHA, you have to understand kill figuratively, as ‘put an end to or cause the failure or defeat of (something)’ (NOAD‘s sense 2a); the PSA phrase must then be understood as conveying that the funeral in question was derailed in the attack. This is already an interpretive stretch (novel figurative readings do not readily occur to people unless they’re set up in the context), but in any case the photo that all this is caption to shows the funeral in progress, so it was not killed, by the attack or anything else.

The PSP phrase as modifier: What remains: HA of this modifier (conveying that a father of two was killed in the attack) and LA of this modifier (conveying that two (people) were killed in the attack).

As I noted above, LA is the generally favored parsing, but plausibility in context is a powerful effect and often favors HA. As it turns out, the LA reading not only is contrary to fact (only one person was killed in the attack, not two) but also requires that a father of two be understood as ‘one father (out of several) of two people’ (it’s possible, but rare, to have two or more fathers , so that this understanding of a father requires considerable support in context — support not available in #1).

HA of the modifier has neither of these problems. The NP a father of two there refers to one person, and the problem with a father doesn’t arise, since in #1 a father of two in the HA parsing is understood as ‘someone who is a father of two, someone who has two children’ (the ways that the indefinite article a(n) is used in English are intricate, a topic all on its own; here I’m just reporting on some relevant facts about these uses).

So HA of the PSP phrase is just fine in the real world, and it’s surely what the writer of the caption in #1 had in mind. But I was taken in by the lure of LA, and though I eventually realized why this parsing is wrong in fact and bizarre in meaning, it stuck with me for quite some time. A tribute to the power of LA, and maybe to the inflexibility of old age (at the age of 83, I’m still keen of mind, but somewhat slower in thought than I once was). I do wonder how many readers went, for a moment, for the peculiar LA parsing.

Today’s Wayno /Piraro Bizarro:

A flasky put-down pun, from the hip flask to the lab flask (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

First, the pun: in the adjective hip ‘following the latest fashion, especially in popular music and clothes’ (NOAD), punning on the bodypart noun hip in hip flask. Now, all the lexical flask stuff.

flasks. From NOAD, with a general sense a, and specialized senses b through e:

noun flask: [a] a container for liquids. [b] a narrow-necked glass container, typically conical or spherical, used in a laboratory to hold reagents or samples [see laboratory flask below]. [c] a metal container for storing a small amount of liquor, typically to be carried in one’s pocket [see hip flask below]: his silver flask of brandy. [d] a narrow-necked bulbous glass container, typically with a covering of wickerwork, for storing wine or oil. [e] a vacuum flask. [f] the contents of a flask: a flask of coffee.

compound noun hip flask: a small flask for liquor, of a kind intended to be carried in a hip pocket. [AZ: most often made of stainless steel; typically, contoured to fit a hip or thigh]

Then paraphrasing Wikipedia:

compound noun laboratory flask [AZ: lab flask for short], a flask (usually made of glass) characterized by a narrow tubular neck section at the top and a wider vessel body

— like the Erlenmeyer flask in the cartoon. From Wikipedia:

An Erlenmeyer flask … is a type of laboratory flask with a flat bottom, a conical body, and a cylindrical neck. It is named after the German chemist Emil Erlenmeyer (1825–1909), who invented it in 1860.

In my mail this morning, from Research Gate, the text of Laura A. Michaelis’s long and rich “Staying terminologically rigid, conceptually open and socially cohesive: How to make room for the next generation of construction grammarians”, in the John Benjamins journal Constructions and Frames 16.2 (August 2024) — in part an homage to Chuck Fillmore (Charles J. Fillmore, 1929 – 2014), but primarily a development of his ideas. And there, in the middle of the abstract, was a reference to my 1994 Berkeley Linguistics Society paper “Dealing out meaning”  (available on-line here), which LM calls my “classic paper” in her article (Chuck himself liked it a lot, but mostly it seemed to have gone without citation, so I thought it had been largely forgotten).

(the Research Gate PDF of LM’s text can be accessed here)

The abstract:

When he introduced the framework now known as Construction Grammar, Charles Fillmore said: “Grammatical Construction Theory differs from […] other frameworks […] in its insistence that syntactic patterns are often tightly associated with interpretation instructions” (Fillmore 1989 : 17). Construction Grammarians view the patterns, the associations and the interpretive instructions as matters of linguistic convention — a fact not always appreciated within the wider cognitive-functional community that embraces Construction Grammar, In CxG, we do not use general principles to explain the existence of the form-function pairs we encounter in a language, but rather treat those as the product of lexical and constructional licensing (Zwicky 1994). But emergentists and stipulators share one core belief: grammatical structure is inherently symbolic. Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) makes this insight formally explicit by treating constructions as licensors of signs-signs that are phrases, lexemes or words-and allowing for semantic and usage constraints to be directly associated with constructions. But practitioners of Construction Grammar might reasonably reject the SBCG formalism as incompatible with major foundations of constructional thinking: the top-down nature of constructional meaning, the idiomaticity continuum and the narrow scope of linguistic generalizations. My task in this article is to address this concern, illustrating a variety of applications.

From the body of the paper, about Chuck’s work on constructions (collected only after his death):

It is only recently that Fillmore’s works on Construction Grammar were collected as Papers on Linguistic Theory and Constructions, the third volume of a CSLI book series entitled Form and Meaning in Language (Fillmore 2020). Here we can witness the debut of the “container diagram” notation for constructions, in the 1985 paper “Syntactic Intrusions and the Notion of Grammatical Construction”, and learn why Fillmore chose that system over phrase-structure rules. The three CSLI volumes of Fillmore’s collected works offer a clear picture of the areas of conceptual tools that Fillmore developed to probe the interface of lexical semantics, indexicality, frame semantics and argument structure. But throughout his long career, in which he mentored some of the most talented scholars of language working today, and oversaw the creation of an extraordinary piece of linguistic infrastructure, FrameNet (Fillmore et al. 2003; Torrent et al. 2018; Ruppenhofer et al. 2016), he published no book-length work.

His academic writing was a marvel of grace and clarity, often very funny. And he was also one of the world’s nicest people. Now it’s a great pleasure to see Laura’s thoughtful piece.

From the annals of birthday greetings, as I struggle to provide at least a minimal response to the over a hundred people who have wished me happy birthday, in one way or another (several offering accompanying flower photos, knowing these would give me pleasure; my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez gave me an actual bouquet, an impressive assortment of white flowers).

From the previous report on birthday greetings, my 9/6/22 posting “Three greetings for 9/6/22”:

Alternatives to Happy birthday, nice though that greeting is. The household tradition (which comes from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky) is I am glad [or happy] you were born. Today’s greeting, from Gadi Niram: (long form, from Gadi) I can’t tell you how happy I am that you keep having birthdays; (short form, edited down by me) I’m happy you keep having birthdays.

Which is to say, I’m happy you’re still alive. Welcome words to someone who’s now 84, seriously impaired, but still kicking.

Now, for my 7-dozenth birthday — only 70 in duodecimal notation — Bill Poser has offered a fourth alternative:

May the hair on your toes grow longer and longer

— adapting this sentiment from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Thorin Oakenshield addressing Bilbo Baggins:

May the hair on his toes never fall out! all praise to his wine and ale!

As it happens, I am like Jacob’s brother Esau, in Genesis 27:11 (KJV):

11 And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man

Medical people are inclined to view my hairiness as a defect, an annoyance to them in affixing leads for tests, bandages, and the like; they have to shave the sites (or else attach the things on my hairy body and then rip them off, painfully taking a lot of hair with them).

But the hair on my fingers and toes is very light, really not noticeable. Even so, it would please me to keep what I have, not to have any of it fall out. So Bill’s birthday wish pleases me.