A typical report on recent approaches to those seeking entrance to the U.S. at the Mexican border, “Here Are the Facts About [REDACTED]’s Family Separation Policy” by Maya Thodan in Time magazine on the 20th:

Administration officials have often characterized these policies [of interviews and hearings] as “loopholes” that are exploited by those seeking to enter the U.S. Some administration officials have suggested that the “zero tolerance” policy could serve as a deterrent for other migrants who are seeking to come to the U.S.

The idea is that applicants should all be rejected, and in a way so savage that others would be deterred from applying. The aim of the policy is, in Voltaire’s pointed phrasing, pour encourager les autres.

Deterrence can work in several ways. Often it’s hoped that the very existence of a severe punishment will serve as a deterrent to offense — that, for example, a death penalty on the books will dissuade people from committing murder.

Or punishment is (ad)monitory, a warning:

either it’s hoped that meting out punishment to an offender will serve as a deterrent to further offense: as we say, this is to teach you a lesson; let this be a lesson to you.

or it’s hoped that a punishment will serve as a deterrent to others: as we say, we’ll make an example of you.

It’s the last case that’s at play in the Mexican border situation. From Merriam-Webster online:

idiom make an example of: to punish (a person who has done something wrong) as a way of warning other people not to do the same thing – Although it was only his first offense, the judge decided to make an example of him and sentence him to prison.

This way of talking makes no explicit reference to those for whom the punishment is intended as a warning. The Voltairism mentions them (though it doesn’t characterize them). Again from M-W online:

quotation (from Voltaire) pour encourager les autres: in order to encourage the others  — said ironically of an action (such as an execution) carried out as a warning to others

(In the Mexican border case, the (potential) offense is the misdemeanor of entering the U.S. without papers, against which a number of punishments can be deployed: incarceration, separation of families, deportation, all managed as unpleasantly and contemptuously as possible.)

But the full Voltaire quotation (from Candide) is richer than this, and it has a historical context:

(#1)

The context in Candide (1759), in the Project Gutenberg translation:

[Candide:] “And why kill this Admiral?”

[Dr. Pangloss:] “It is because he did not kill a sufficient number of men himself. He gave battle to a French Admiral; and it has been proved that he was not near enough to him.”

“But,” replied Candide, “the French Admiral was as far from the English Admiral.”

“There is no doubt of it; but in this country it is found good, from time to time, to kill one Admiral to encourage the others.”

That is, the Admiral was executed for underperformance in battle, as an example to others. This is not simple invention on Voltaire’s part. From the Wikipedia entry on the Battle of Minorca (1756) and the fate of Admiral John Byng in that encounter:

The Battle of Minorca (20 May 1756) was a naval battle between French and British fleets. It was the opening sea battle of the Seven Years’ War in the European theatre. Shortly after the war began British and French squadrons met off the Mediterranean island of Minorca. The French won the battle. The subsequent decision by the British to withdraw to Gibraltar handed France a strategic victory and led directly to the Fall of Minorca.

The British failure to save Minorca led to the controversial court-martial and execution of the British commander, Admiral John Byng, for “failure to do his utmost” to relieve the siege of the British garrison on Minorca.

(#2)

… Byng’s execution is referred to in Voltaire’s novel Candide with the line [above].

I’ve long been fond of the pointedly ironic pour encourager les autres — or its English version to encourage the others, I don’t insist on the affectation of quoting in French– especially if delivered in creaky voice or some other notable vocal quality.

… celebrated yesterday. From Wikipedia on UFOs:

Fanciful illustration of alien spacecraft (Chris Clor / Getty Images / Blend Images): saucer shape, ring of lights on the rim of the saucer, searchlight projecting from the bottom of the craft as it hovers

An unidentified flying object or “UFO” is an object observed in the sky that is not readily identified. Most UFOs are later identified as conventional objects or phenomena. The term is widely used for claimed observations of extraterrestrial craft.

And on the holiday, from Wikipedia:

World UFO Day is an awareness day for people to gather together and watch the skies for unidentified flying objects. The day is celebrated by some on June 24, and others on July 2. June 24 is the date [in 1947] that aviator Kenneth Arnold reported what is generally considered to be the first widely reported unidentified flying object sighting in the United States, while July 2 commemorates the supposed UFO crash in the 1947 Roswell [NM] UFO Incident.

The stated goal of the July 2 celebration is to raise awareness of “the undoubted existence of UFOs” and to encourage governments to declassify their files on UFO sightings.

In these entries, you can see two shifts in the semantics of the lexical item UFO.

It starts as an initialism, an abbreviation for the expression unidentified flying object, with the meaning (just above) of the longer expression. That’s UFO-a.

Initialisms are lexical items with lives of their own: they have their own morphology and syntax; they are sometimes orphaned (the longer expression drops out of use, while the initialism continues in use); and they very often drift semantically, away from their original meaning.  As when UFO “is widely used for claimed observations of extraterrestrial craft” (from the Wikipedia entry above). That’s UFO-b ‘flying object claimed to be an extraterrestrial craft’; the item has picked up additional semantic content, from being frequently used in contexts where UFO-a’s were claimed to have extraterrestrial origin.

Then in the Wikipedia entry on the holiday, we get a further development, in “the undoubted existence of UFOs”: the term is now even more specific, through the elevation of a claim of extraterrestriality to certainty about the origin of the craft. This is UFO-c ‘flying object that is an extraterrestrial craft’.

No one doubts the existence of UFO-a’s. There have been many sightings of flying objects that at first failed to have their source identified, and some number have never been fully explained, though many people believe that their origins are like the origins of the ones that have been explained.

And no one doubts the existence of UFO-b’s. There are a fair number of sightings of flying objects that have been claimed to be of extraterrestrial origin.

But plenty of people doubt the existence of UFO-c’s, doubt that there are flying objects of extraterrestrial origin. Clearly, one bit of the Wikipedia article — “the undoubted existence of UFOs” —  was written by a True Believer.

Instead of scanning the sky for alien invaders on July 2nd, you might better spend the day enjoying some of the gripping science fiction movies about UFO-c’s — for example:

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951); Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977);  Alien (1979); E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982); The Thing (1982); Independence Day (1996)

Especially the last, since its action is crucially linked to U.S. Independence Day, July 4th.

Today’s Zippy has Mr. the Toad recruiting a Pinhead named Foswelch — Toad uses the name as an address term in every panel of the strip except the last — as a Formstone siding salesman in Baltimore:

(#1)

There’s the name Foswelch, another in a series of F-initial family names that Bill Griffith seems to be fond of. And the combination of siding and Baltimore — a natural for Formstone, but also evoking the movie Tin Men.

Griffithian names. Griffith savors names, some of them with great pleasure. For example, Fenwick, in my 5/14/18 posting “Fenwick the semi-generic”; and Fenwich, in my 5/28/18 posting “Fenwich, come here, I need you”. On 5/4/15, in “Morning with the Fosdicks”, I looked at two celebrated Fosdicks — Harry Emerson Fosdick and Fearless Fosdick (in the Dick Tracy comic strip) — and the name Fosdick occasionally appears in Zippy strips, as here (on 11/26/12):

(#2) Featuring Fernwick “Ferny” von Fosdick

But of Foswelch, there is no trace in Zippy. Or anywhere, as far as I can tell; it looks like pure Griffithian invention. There is an attested name Foswick, as on this gravestone:

(#3) (Think of Foswick as the love child of Fosdick and Fenwick)

But Foswick seems not to have made it into Zippy. Instead, we get Foswelch.

Baltimore siding. Previously on this blog, in the 10/27/15 posting “Flintstone and Formstone”:

(#4) Formstoned row houses in Baltimore

Formstone [invented in Baltimore] is a type of stucco commonly applied to brick rowhouses in many East Coast urban areas in the United States, although it is most strongly associated with Baltimore. (from Wikipedia)

The strip in #1 ends up with a reference to the great American play Death of a Salesman, but you say show, Baltimore, and siding to me, what I get is Tin Men. From Wikipedia:

(#5) Poster for the movie

Tin Men is a 1987 American comedy film written and directed by Barry Levinson, produced by Mark Johnson, and starring Richard Dreyfuss [as BB], Danny DeVito [as Ernest], and Barbara Hershey.

It is the second of Levinson’s four “Baltimore Films” set in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987), Avalon (1990), and Liberty Heights (1999).

Ernest Tilley and Bill “BB” Babowsky are rival door-to-door aluminum siding salesmen in Baltimore, Maryland in 1963, an era when “tin men,” as they’re called, will do almost anything — legal or illegal — to close a sale.

The instruction goes COVER ME or COVER YOURSELF. What are you supposed to do? Well, the verb cover, um, covers a lot of possibilities, so there’s plenty of room for play, amply illustrated in cartoons and other forms of visual/verbal play. Especially common are plays on COVER ME intended as having what I’ll call “gunfire cover” but understood as having some other sense, in particular what I’ll call “(general) placement cover“; and plays on COVER YOURSELF intended as having what I’ll call “corporal-modesty cover” (cover your nakedness) but understood as having (general) placement cover.

Background: a few verbs cover. From NOAD on transitive cover:

1 put something such as a cloth or lid on top of or in front of (something) in order to protect or conceal it [(general) placement cover]

6 [a] aim a gun at (someone) in order to prevent them from moving or escaping. [b] protect (an exposed person) by shooting at an enemy [6b is gunfire cover]

7 record or perform a new version of (a song) originally performed by someone else [recording cover]

8 (of a male animal, especially a stallion) copulate with (a female animal), especially as part of a commercial transaction between the owners of the animals. [copulatory cover]

Placement cover provides the theme song for COVER ME section of this posting: Bruce Springsteen. From Wikipedia:

(#1) You can listen to the 1984 track here

“Cover Me” is a …1984 hit song, written and performed by American rock singer Bruce Springsteen. It was the second single released from his successful album Born in the U.S.A. Springsteen wrote the song for Donna Summer. However, his manager, Jon Landau, decided the song had hit potential, and so he kept it for the upcoming Springsteen album.

The crucial lyrics:

The times are tough now, just getting tougher
This old world is rough, it’s just getting rougher
Cover me, come on baby, cover me
Well I’m looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me
Promise me baby you won’t let them find us
Hold me in your arms, let’s let our love blind us
Cover me, shut the door and cover me
Well I’m looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me

COVER ME. Placement cover (1 above) has a number of transferred and figurative uses (some hinted at in the Springsteen lyrics), well short of the very divergent specialized senses in 6-8. But the verbs above are dramatically different, and so allow for broad humor. Three gag cartoons in which intended gunfire cover is understood as placement cover (#2 and 3) or copulatory cover (#4); recording cover would serve as the basis for a gag cartoon, but I haven’t (yet) found one.

(#2) A Cyanide and Happiness cartoon

(#3) A viral image reproduced on Imgur

(#4) Copulatory cover on DeviantArt

COVER YOURSELF. On to ambiguous signage, and to more subtle ambiguities in cover. This part of the story began with this two-part image (found on Facebook and passed on by Kim Darnell)”

(#5) At the top, the sign; at the bottom, one woman’s response to it

As it turns out, it’s one of many. The story from HuffPo on 5/29/15, by Caroline Bologna, “Sign Told Breastfeeding Moms To Cover Themselves, So They Literally Did”:

(#6) The BFMT model

When the organizers of the Breastfeeding Mama Talk support group came across a sign telling moms to cover themselves while nursing, they had a brilliant response.

The group shared a photo of the sign on its Facebook page — along with two pictures of breastfeeding moms … well, covering themselves.

From their Facebook page:

Thought I would do something different and fun with this!!
I have this picture in the comments except it’s without the two breastfeeding pictures in this meme so that you can add your own breastfeeding picture to it.  If you post it please hash tag #ThisIsHowWeCoverBFMT

From this, it should be clear that placement cover takes in a lot of territory. The sign, however, is intended as a specific instruction, to women, to cover their breasts while breastfeeding (in public): COVER YOURSELF has a specialized sense of cover, the cover of cover your nakedness, or what I’m calling “corporal-modesty” cover. The BFMT women are choosing to disregard the sign-maker’s intentions by understanding COVER YOURSELF as having general placement cover instead, so they are following the instruction by covering their faces. Note the three different ways of placement-covering someone in #2 (protecting with an umbrella), #3 (putting a blanket on the shoulders), and #5/6 (hiding the face with a cloth); there are, of course, many more.

The OED2 entry for the verb cover is in need of elaboration. Here’s material from the section on the main transitive uses, with some comments of mine:

I.1. ‘to put or lay something over (an object), with the effect of hiding from view, protecting, or enclosing’ [(general) placement cover]

I.3.a. ‘to clothe (the body)’

[This is not separately listed in OED, but the verb is also specifically used for covering private parts of the body (female breasts; genitals or buttocks of either sex) — see the OED‘s early quotes in I.3.a about ‘covering one’s nakedness’ — what I’m calling “corporal-modesty cover“.]

I.4. to cover (one’s head): to put on or wear one’s hat or other head-covering; spec.after it has been taken off as a mark of reverence or respect.

[The specific clause in I.4. is a reference to the custom of a man’s doffing his hat as a sign of respect to a woman or a figure of authority. This is not separately listed in the OED, but the verb is also specifically used for covering one’s head as a matter of religious practice — for women in churches in Roman Catholic and some other Christian traditions and more generally in some Anabaptist (Amish and Mennonite) traditions; for men in Jewish religious practice (the kippah / yarmulke / skullcap); for Muslim men in religious practice (the taqiyah / skullcap) or more generally (the turban for some Shias); for Sikhs generally (the turban); for women in public in Islam (the hijab). I’ll call this “capital-religious cover“.]

Signage notes. Instructions on signs are usually telegraphic (to convey a complex message in a small space), with a compression that introduces ambiguities in the message — ambiguities that sign-makers expect their audiences to weed out by practical reasoning in context. But you can play with them for the sake of a gag, or pointed social commentary.

Three recent postings with cartoons exploiting signage ambiguities:

on 3/10/18 in “scratch and sniff card”: the sign SCRATCH AND SNIFF CARDS

on 5/1/18 in “Another signage ambiguity”: the signs PET AREA and ATTACK DOG

on 6/11/18 in “In case of fire, see therapist”: the signs IN CASE OF FIRE, TAKE STAIRS and IN CASE OF FIRE, BREAK GLASS

The June 26th One Big Happy, with an updated version of a bit of childlore:

(#1)

It starts out traditionally, with a retort to insult beginning “I’m rubber and you’re glue…”, but then it takes a modern-tech social-media turn (while preserving the glue … you rhyme).

The xkcd #1139 of 11/29/12 (Rubber and Glue) takes a grim scientific view of the retort:

(#2)

With this account on the Explain xkcd site:

“I’m rubber, you’re glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you” is a school-ground retort used by children to suggest that one’s insults are being ignored by the intended recipient of the insult and counter that the insult rather refers to the insulter. On a deeper level, it may imply that a person insulting others is an indication of their own insecurity and weakness.

Meanwhile, on The Big Bang Theory, Jim Parsons’s character Sheldon Cooper goes all-out technical:

(#3) From “The Bat Jar Conjecture” (S1 E13, 4/21/08)

To yesterday’s posting “Hybrid referent, portmanteau name” (mostly about the flumpet, with a bit on the fluba), Robert Coren added a comment about Peter Schickele / P.D.Q. Bach and his invention, the tromboon:

(#1)

The tromboon is a musical instrument made up of the reed and bocal of a bassoon, attached to the body of a trombone in place of the trombone’s mouthpiece. It combines the sound of double reeds and the slide for a distinctive and unusual instrument. The name of the instrument is a portmanteau of “trombone” and “bassoon”. The sound quality of the instrument is best described as comical and loud.

The tromboon was developed by Peter Schickele, a skilled bassoonist himself, and featured in some of his live concert and recorded performances. Schickele called it “a hybrid – that’s the nicer word – constructed from the parts of a bassoon and a trombone; it has all the disadvantages of both”. This instrument is called for in the scores of P. D. Q. Bach’s oratorio The Seasonings, as well as the Serenude (for devious instruments) and Shepherd on the Rocks, With a Twist. (Wikipedia link)

Here I’m focusing on that’s the nicer word: just what did Schickele think (in 2008) was a less nice, more offensive, way to refer to a hybrid (more specifically, to someone of mixed race, which is probably where the insult vocabulary for hybrids is going to come from)? Specifically, what does an old white guy addressing a mostly white audience think might be a more offensive way to refer to hybrids? (A young black guy would probably insult a half-black half-white guy by calling him white.)

I see three possibilities: half-breed, mongrel, and bastard.

From NOAD:

noun half-breed: offensive a person whose parents are of different races, especially the offspring of an American Indian and a person of white European ancestry.

OED2’s entry has some transferred and figurative uses of half-breed: from Mark Twain, referring to one parent Northern, the other Southern; from Adlai Stevenson, referring to one parent Democrat and Presbyterian, the other Republican and Unitarian. An extension to referents other than people would be natural, and the term is widely used for dogs of mixed breed, occasionally for other animals and for plants, but rarely (if at all) for inanimates.

Meanwhile, mongrel starts with dogs and extends to other animals and then to people (but, apparently, rarely to plants or to inanimates, though it would be a natural metaphor). From NOAD2:

noun mongrel: [a] a dog of no definable type or breed: [as modifier]: a lovable mongrel puppy. [b] any animal resulting from the crossing of different breeds or types. [c] offensive a person of mixed descent. ORIGIN late Middle English: of Germanic origin, apparently from a base meaning ‘mix’, and related to mingle and among.

Finally, bastard, which is much more complex historically and sociolinguistically. From NOAD:

noun bastard: 1 [a] informal an unpleasant or despicable person: he lied to me, the bastard! [b] [with adjective] British informal a person of a specified kind: he was a lucky bastard. [c] British informal a difficult or awkward undertaking, situation, or device: it’s been a bastard of a week. 2 archaic or derogatory a person born of parents not married to each other.

adj. bastard: [attributive] 1 [a] (of a thing) no longer in its pure or original form; debased: a bastard Darwinism. [b] (of a handwriting script or typeface) showing a mixture of different styles. [further extended sense: a mixture of different elements] 2 archaic or derogatory born of parents not married to each other; illegitimate: a bastard child.

OED2 expands on adj. sense 1a:

4. fig. Not genuine; counterfeit, spurious; debased, adulterated, corrupt. [1st cite 1552]

5. Having the appearance of, somewhat resembling; an inferior or less proper kind of; esp. in scientific nomenclature applied to things resembling, but not identical with, the species which legitimately bear the name. [1st cite 1530] [specifically in botany: bastard rhubarb, bastard alkanet, bastard balm, bastard saffron, bastard toad-flax, etc. (a huge number of these); other uses in zoology / physiology, medicine, geology and mineralogy]

6. Of abnormal shape or irregular (esp. unusually large) size [e.g., bastard file “a file intermediate between the coarse and fine ‘cuts'”]

But it’s adj. sense 1b that’s potentially relevant to tromboons (and flumpets and flubas and all the rest): the sense ‘(illegitimate) mixture of elements’ shows up occasionally in things like “a sort of bastard violin, or “violin champêtre”” (from A History of the Violin by Sandys and Forster).

Schickele. Some notes on the musician, who came up on this blog in a 5/26/16 posting “Gerald Hoffnung”, with Hoffnung’s drawings of animal + instrument hybrids (hippopotamus + piano, caterpillar + accordion, turtledove + drum, python + bassoon) and the instrumental hybrid the string tuba; and with a reference to Schickele, but mostly a promissory note (now cashed out here).

There is a substantial Peter Schickele / P.D.Q. Bach website and a Wikipedia entry, from which:

(#2)

Peter Schickele ( born July 17, 1935) is an American composer, musical educator, and parodist, best known for comedy albums featuring music written by Schickele, but which he presents as being composed by the fictional P. D. Q. Bach. He also hosted a longrunning weekly radio program called Schickele Mix [original broadcasts 1992-99, rebroadcasts until 2007].

… Besides composing music under his own name, Schickele has developed an elaborate parodic persona built around his studies of the fictional “youngest and the oddest of the twenty-odd children” of Johann Sebastian Bach, P.D.Q. Bach. Among the fictional composer’s “forgotten” repertory supposedly “uncovered” by Schickele are such farcical works as The Abduction of Figaro, Canine Cantata: “Wachet Arf!” (S. K9), Good King Kong Looked Out, the Trite Quintet (S. 6 of 1), “O Little Town of Hackensack”,  A Little Nightmare Music, the cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn, the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, The Art of The Ground Round (S. $1.19/lb.), Blaues Grasse (The Bluegrass Cantata), and perhaps best known of all, the dramatic oratorio, Oedipus Tex, featuring the “O.K. Chorale”. Though P.D.Q. Bach is ostensibly a Baroque composer, Schickele extends his repertoire to parody much more modern works such as Einstein on the Fritz, a parody of his Juilliard classmate Philip Glass.

His fictitious “home establishment,” where he reports having tenure as “Very Full Professor Peter Schickele” of “musicolology” and “musical pathology”, is the “University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople”, which is described as “a little-known institution which does not normally welcome out-of-state visitors”. To illustrate the work of his uncovered composer, Schickele invented a range of rather unusual instruments. The most complicated of these is the Hardart, a variety of tone-generating devices mounted on the frame of an “automat”, a coin-operated food dispenser. The modified automat is used in the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, a play on the name of proprietors Horn & Hardart, who pioneered the North American use of the automat in their restaurants.

Schickele also invented the “dill piccolo” for playing sour notes, the “left-handed sewer flute”, the “tromboon” (“a cross between a trombone and a bassoon, having all the disadvantages of both”), the “lasso d’amore”, the double-reed slide music stand, which he described as having “a range of major third and even less expressiveness,” the “tuba mirum”, a flexible tube filled with wine, and the “pastaphone”, an uncooked tube of manicotti pasta played as a horn. Further invented instruments of his include the “pumpflute” (an instrument that requires two people to play: one to pump, and one to flute) and the “proctophone” (a latex glove attached to a mouthpiece, and “the less said about it, the better”). The überklavier or super piano, with a 15 octave keyboard ranging from sounds which only dogs can hear down to sounds which only whales can make, was invented in 1797 by Klarck Känt (pronounced “Clark Kent”), a Munich piano-maker who demonstrated the instrument for P.D.Q. A sample of a piece written for the überklavier, The Trance and Dental Etudes appeared in P.D.Q.’s unauthorized autobiography, published in 1976. P.D.Q’s Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons (1965) demonstrated the inherent musical qualities of everyday objects in ways not equally agreeable to all who listen to them.

To get some some feel for Schickele’s classic performances, check out the WQXR website posting on 12/9/15, “7 Hilarious Videos Celebrating P.D.Q. Bach”, including:

7. Schickele didn’t limit his satires just to shorter pieces; he set his sights on grand opera. The most ambitious of those works, The Abduction of Figaro, which premiered at the Minnesota Opera, was called “a crazed pastiche of the five major Mozart Operas,” by The New York Times in a review

(There will be talk of men’s bodies, among a number of other things, so you might want to exercise some caution.)

Yesterday was National Underwear Day (utilitarian garments elevated to objects of play, desire, and fashion display), today is Hiroshima Day (remembering the horror of an event of mass destruction, death, and suffering). An uncomfortable, even absurd, juxtaposition, but there is a link in the symbolism of the two occasions. In my comics feed for these occasions: four language-related cartoons on familiar language-related themes, none of them having anything to do with either underwear or nuclear holocaust, probably for good reason.

Cartoons first, then the underwear and atomic bombs.

A Bizarro/Wayno collab. A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), a favorite joke form for the artists:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

stun gun + gun control

The guys could have gone with an underwear-themed POP for yesterday (this is today’s strip; yesterday’s — a street kid explaining tagging to Rembrandt — was about Art rather than Language):

boxer brief encounter, jock strap hanger, dance belt loop, forbidden Fruit of the Loom, tighty Whitey Bulger, Calvin Kleine Nachtmusik, …

A One Big Happy. In which Ruthie, coming across an unfamiliar name in her reading — HBO – does her best to assimilate it to words she knows:

(#2) (Note that OBH HBO is a palindrome.)

A Zits. Another verbal duel between mother and son, this time with indirect speech acts in which the 3rd-person indefinite pronoun someone (in an expression of 1st-person wish,  in the object of I hope) is used to convey a 2nd-person imperative (something in between a request and a command) :

(#3) (until the final panel, when both participants express actual wishes, but still with someone referring to the addressee)

Such uses of 3rd-person indefinites — someone, somebody, generic a person, etc.) can be monitory or celebratory ([with a smile] Someone’s going to get a big surprise tonight!)

A Rhymes With Orange. With a Magic Dog portmanteau:

(#4) the incantation abracadabra + the dog-breed name labrador (retriever)

In my 10/6/14 posting “A dogmanteau”, a texty composition with the complex portmanteau labracadabrador.

And in my 7/9/14 posting “Layered portmanteaus”, a Bizarro with abracadabradoodle, a portmanteau of abracadabra + labradoodle, where labradoodle is a portmanteau (attested) of labrador + poodle.

For National Underwear Day. It’s always underwear day around here, specifically men’s underwear, and specifically underwear for the groin area (rather than the upper body) — that is, underpants (and such related garments as jock straps and dance belts). Here’s a Daily Jocks sale offer on Pump! underwear from October 2017 that I’ve been saving while I contemplate a suitable caption for it:

(#5) Three primary foci of attention: his facial expression; the front presentation of his upper body in the V made by his shoulders down to his inguinal crease; and his genitals in his underwear

(Secondarily: other features of his head, including his hairstyle and his scruffy face; his arms; and his thighs.)

It’s all an erotic display (including his buttocks, which we don’t see in this shot), but the cock in his pants tends to overwhelm the other features –so Iwas considering using a cropped version to caption:

(#6) The face and upper body: how to read it?

I saw sexual interest mingled with indecision, but never settled on a caption that pleased me.

The attention-grabbing draw of human faces is so great that underwear companies usually crop them out; from their point of view, the faces are just a diversion from the parts of the body that will sell underwear, by inviting male viewers to either identify with the stunning model or desire him (or both). Their usual choice of croppings:

(#7) Be me! Do me! Buy me!

Then today, DJ offered this jockstrap for sale:

(#8) [from the ad:] The Garçon Model Camo Collection is your essential arsenal for any good military-theme party or just plain daily-life survival. We like to call it “underwear on a mission.” Ultra soft waistband. Soft, lightweight fabric. Tagless for itch-free comfort.

Oh my, a world where military-theme parties that call for a camo-pattern jockstrap are unremarkable events!

From a GM ad posted about in an earlier posting, “The Sex Games” of 2/8/18:

(#9)

All this to help you celebrate National Underwear Day.

The holocausts. The fire-bombing of Dresden on February 13th-15th, 1945, and then the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (August 6th, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9th). The atomic bombs were named, Little Boy (Hiroshima) and Fat Man (Nagasaki) — both personified, and male.

Further with this thought, in my 5/7/12 posting “Missile phallicity”:

William J. Broad, “North Korea’s Performance Anxiety”, in yesterday’s NYT Sunday Review:

“It’s a boy,” Edward Teller exulted after the world’s first hydrogen bomb exploded in 1952 with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

From the start, the nuclear era seethed with sexual allusions. Military officers joked about the phallic symbolism of their big missiles and warheads — and of emasculating the enemy. “Dr. Strangelove” mocked the idea with big cigars and an excited man [Major T.J. “King” Kong, played by Slim Pickens] riding into the thermonuclear sunset with a bomb tucked between his legs.

Helen Caldicott, the antinuclear activist, argued in the 1980s that male insecurity accounted for the cold war’s perilous spiral of arms. Her book? “Missile Envy.”

But wait, there’s more. There are the photos of the mushroom clouds from the two bombings:

(#10) Hiroshima on the left, Nagasaki on the right

From that time, such mushroom clouds have been folded into the sexual imagery of the atomic age: the bombs as symbolic phalluses, the mushroom clouds as symbolic ejaculations. Nuclear come shots. Shudder.

Underwear and the Bomb don’t seem to have been linked in anti-nuclear protests, despite their calendrical adjacency. Two advocacy signs yet to be linked:

UP WITH UNDERWEAR!

BAN THE BOMB!

What looks to be an excellent report on work in semantics/pragmatics on speech acts, from OUP:

(#1)

Alerted to this by Geoff Nunberg on ADS-L, who provided the following note on his piece:

Includes my paper “The Social Life of Slurs” which found a home at last thanks to Dan Harris and the other editors (an earlier version is still up at the Semantics Archive http://tinyurl.com/y76nckep). The thesis, in a nutshell: “Racists don’t use slurs because they’re derogative; slurs are derogative because they’re the words that racists use.”

(and similarly for other group-directed slurs).

The table of contents:

(#2)

More than this I can’t tell you. I haven’t seen the book, and I probably never will, so long as it sells for $100 (before taxes and shipping). Perhaps if OUP sells enough copies to academic libraries, they will eventually put out a paperback edition that impoverished academic types could afford.

The text for the day is a dialogue posted on Facebook on the 19th by John Beavers (a guitarist who moonlights as a linguistics professor at the University of Texas, Austin), between John’s son Ezra and John’s wife / Ezra’s mother Janice Ta:

Ezra on his 3rd birthday (July 28th)

Ezra: Mommy, do “boy” and “toy” rhyme?

Janice: Yes, they do! You’re very good at rhyming. Do “boy” and “man” rhyme?

Ezra: No. You’re not very good at rhyming.

Ah, a significant ambiguity in the use of interrogative sentences: between information-seeking interrogatives (infoseek questions, I’ll call them), like Ezra’s do “boy” and “toy” rhyme?; and examination interrogatives (test questions, I’ll call them; they’re also known as quiz questions), like Janice’s do “boy” and “man” rhyme?

(These aren’t the only uses of interrogative sentences. There are plenty more, including several types of “rhetorical questions”: (positive assertion) Am I angry? (You bet I am!); (negative assertion) Can you have ice cream for breakfast? (Hell, no!); (assent) Is the Pope Catholic? (= Yes.))

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.) Ezra has (apparently) not yet twigged to this fact: he asks infoseek questions and expects that others are doing the same. So if his mother asks if boy and man rhyme, that must be because she doesn’t know whether they do, which means that there’s a lot about rhyming that she doesn’t know.

Well, … Ezra has been going to day care, and is now in pre-school, so he’s probably been exposed to some test questions already and will now experience a weary ton of them. Maybe he just wasn’t prepared for his mother to slip into this teacher-schoolchild routine. Or he’s a wise and cheeky kid who’s messing with his mother, deliberately undermining the routine. Is that a trusting smile? Or a sly one? (Already at this age my grand-daughter was capable of pointed subversion of such schoolroom routines.)

Note 1. Test questions can range over the full range of interrogative forms. In particular, they can be yes-no questions (like the examples so far), or alternative questions (Was Barack Obama born in Kenya or the United States?), or constituent questions (What is the capital of Nevada? Who was Winston Churchill? When did World War II come to an end? Why is the sky blue?) 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.

To appreciate this last point, note that the following is not an acceptable answer to What is the capital of Nevada?:

The capital of Nevada is the seat of government and the administrative center of the state of Nevada.

Nor would this count as an acceptable answer to Who was Winston Churchill?:

Winston Churchill, known as the Cavalier Colonel, was an English soldier, nobleman, historian, and politician who lived from 1620 to 1688.

(A little more on this point below.)

Note 2. There’s a division of imperative sentences that’s parallel to infoseek vs. test questions — in particular, there’s a class of test imperatives, directives to an addressee to perform various acts as a demonstration of the addressee’s knowledge or abilities. Some of the tasks are verbal (List the first eight numbers in the Fibonacci sequence), some not (Do 50 pushups; Draw a penguin), and some both (Take nine heel-to-toe steps along this straight line, keeping your arms to your side and counting each step out loud).

An example, from a version of the U.S. Foreign Service exam (the Foreign Service Officer Test) administered to candidates for the U.S. diplomatic service. This particular task was given to a friend of mine many years ago: List all the countries along the Rhine River, in order, from its source to its outlet in the sea.

Note that verbal test imperatives can be alternatively framed as test questions: What are the first eight numbers in the Fibonacci sequence? etc.

[Digression. From Wikipedia, with the Rhine River information and some indication of why it might be a good task to set for a prospective Foreign Service officer:

The Rhine … is a European river that begins in the Swiss canton of Graubünden in the southeastern Swiss Alps, forms part of the Swiss-Liechtenstein, Swiss-Austrian, Swiss-German and then the Franco-German border, then flows through the German Rhineland and the Netherlands and eventually empties into the North Sea.

… The Rhine and the Danube formed most of the northern inland frontier of the Roman Empire and, since those days, the Rhine has been a vital and navigable waterway carrying trade and goods deep inland. Its importance as a waterway in the Holy Roman Empire is supported by the many castles and fortifications built along it. In the modern era, it has become a symbol of German nationalism.]

Final note on test questions and imperatives, from my 2/27/11 posting “Dubious diagnostics”:

(In an earlier discussion of test questions — “What is this question about?”, on Language Log, here — I started with the question “What color is a banana?” (addressed to a young child) and moved on to “What is the opposite of ___?” and “Which one of these things is not like the others?” and, in comments, “What is the next number in the series ___, ___, ___?” Answering such questions “correctly” involves mustering all sorts of cultural knowledge and also experience with the contexts in which people ask them such questions and the kinds of answers that are expected.)

Notice that the subjects of the similarities test are described as “patients”, so they’re probably used to being asked unaccountable, but somehow important, questions by professionals of various sorts. Still, the experience is rather weird and unnatural, and can be baffling. My man Jacques, during his many years of descent into neurological hell, was generally cooperative, but sometimes bridled at (say) being asked what month it was (“Why do you want to know?”) or being asked to count backwards from 100 by 7s (“Why should I?”), and often performed very badly (well short of his actual abilities) when put on the spot and obliged to reflect on what he was doing.

The word from predators, in this Jake Likes Onions cartoon (by Jake Thompson):

(#1) Title: “Maybe he’s running from the truth”

Predator 2 omits the what of what the hell (in a Wh, or constituent, question What is that guy doing? with the question word what emphatically extended by the expletive the hell).

About the syntax, and then about the strip and the artist…

(Hat tip to Melinda Shore.)

Truncations, front and back, conversational and conventionalized. Material at the margins of sentences, front (initial) or back (final), is often omissible in informal conversation — because it’s predictable from the remainder of the material in the sentence or from context (and, especially for initial material, because it’s both semantically and phonologically light). Typical (attested) examples:

initial truncation [aka initial material deletion]: Turns out that, again like Stonewall, someone is making a movie about it. [omitted: it]

final truncation [aka just truncation]: England expects, Jones. [omitted: every man to do his duty]

Many truncations are nonce omissions, off-the-cuff, spur-of-the-moment events, crafted to save effort for the speaker while still getting the intended message across to the addressee, who has to work out what the speaker was getting at; that’s surely the case for the England expects example. Call these conversational truncations.

But through repeated use, some truncations can become conventionalized for some people: they no longer require calculation on the part of such people as speaker or addressee, but are just new linguistic forms for them, new constructions (or idioms). Brief discussion in my 3/29/18 posting “Bits of culture”, with the examples of the development from as far as X is concerned / as far as X goes by truncation to as far as X, which is then conventionalized as a topic-restricting construction on its own; and from no matter what X is by truncation to no matter what X, which is then conventionalized as a concessive construction on its own.

This conventionalization seems to be in progress for the truncation of what the hell/fuck questions (in what I’ll call the QuEx construction, for short), as in the cartoon. And in this 3/26/13 posting “Truncated what the fuck“, about an example from an interview that has

the fuck standing for what the fuck.

… I don’t recall having seen or heard this truncation before, and it’s hard to search for without picking up lots of occurrences of the full idiom. (Similarly for the hell as a truncation of what the hell.)

Searching is indeed difficult, but I’ve managed to find one more the hell example, from the CHEEZburger site:

(#2) Title: “The Hell Is That?!”

The 2013 posting goes on to distinguish truncated QuEx (TruncQuEx) from another expletive-initial construction, used for dismissal or denial, as in the defiant response The hell/fuck I will! (I’ll call it NoWayF for short).

The constructions (untruncated) QuEx and NoWayF in a 12/27/17 posting “Expletive syntax: I will marry the crap out of you, Sean Spencer”, in an inventory of constructions using expletives:

6. QuEx: interrogative postnominal expletive. An interrogative (not relative) word (not phrase) with a postmodifying definite expletive (the hell / heck / fuck / shit) or locative PP (in (the) hell / on earth / in the world):

e.g., What the fuck / the hell / in hell / on earth were you thinking? I wonder where the hell / the shit / in the world I put my glasses.

There is a modest literature on this fascinating construction.

5.  NoWayF: dismissal/denial the hell/fuck, modifying a following elliptical clause. The pattern is: the Ex + Pro Aux (with VPE), conveying ‘no way Pro Aux, Pro Aux not’:

e.g., the hell you are ‘no way you are, you are not’, the fuck he will, the hell they can

There’s a large collection of examples (from 1845 through 1998) in GDoS

[Note. Both TruncQuEx and NoWayF are main-clause phenomenon (not generally acceptable in embedded clauses); as a result, they’re essentially restricted to sentence-initial, not merely clause-initial, position.]

[Further note. There’s another path for the development of TruncQuEx, regardless of its position within sentences: what I’ll call the Generalized Jespersen Cycle, generalized from the history of negation in several languages. Brutally simplified from the history of French:

(a) ne marks plain clausal negation; (b) emphatic negation is marked by ne plus one of several emphatic extensions; (c) the particular extension pas ‘(a) step’ becomes specialized in this emphatic function; (d) pas is increasingly reanalyzed as the primary marker of clause negation; (e) ne becomes optional.

Then the new primary negator will itself pick up emphatic extensions, and the cycle turns on.

From Tracking Jespersen’s cycle (by Paul Kiparsky & Cleo Condoravdi), in M. Janse, B.D. Joseph, & A. Ralli (edd.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory (Mytilene: Doukas, 2006):

Observation of such patterns of change in Germanic and Romance negation led Jespersen (1917 [Negation in English and Other Languages]) to posit a historical process of repeated weakening and reinforcement now known as JESPERSEN’S CYCLE, which he summarized as follows:

. . . the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in the course of time be subject to the same development as the original word. (Jespersen 1917:4)

The development of TruncQuEx could be seen as parallel, with the emphatic (expletive) extension coming to be reanalyzed as the primary subordinator, so that the Wh element is omissible.

(I’m not offering this proposal as a competitor to the initial-truncation proposal, but rather as a possible reinforcement of it.)]

Jake Thompson and his cartoons. Thompson has been drawing the Jake Likes Onions webcomic for several years (and is now being carried by GoComics); check out his website, or follow him on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. And consider his book:

(#3) Note the stick-figure faces

His cartoons are often darkly funny and sometimes raunchy. Three further examples. First a penguin toon that’s really about guys (and butt sex):

(#4) Title: “penguins are just like us”

Then Thompson’s version of Labels Are Not Definitions:

(#5) Title: “Labels are bad”

And a strip on one of the senses of straight:

(#6) Title: “Okay less straight than that”

From NOAD, the run-down on senses of the adjective straight and the relevant entry for the adverb straight (with the relevant senses boldfaced):

adj. straight:1 extending or moving uniformly in one direction only; without a curve or bend: a long, straight road. [with various specialized uses] 2 properly positioned so as to be level, upright, or symmetrical: he made sure his tie was straight. [with various specializations] 3 [a] not evasive; honest: a straight answer | thank you for being straight with me. [b] simple; straightforward: a straight choice between nuclear power and penury. [c] (of a look) bold and steady: he gave her a straight, no-nonsense look. [d] (of thinking) clear, logical, and unemotional. [e] not addicted to drugs. 4 [attributive] [a] in continuous succession: he scored his fourth straight win. [b] supporting all the principles and candidates of one political party: he generally voted a straight ticket. 5 (of an alcoholic drink) undiluted; neat: straight brandy. 6 (especially of drama) serious as opposed to comic or musical; employing the conventional techniques of its art form: a straight play. 7 informal [a] (of a person) conventional or respectable: she looked pretty straight in her school clothes. [b] heterosexual.

adv. straight: …3 [a] correctly; clearly: I’m so tired I can hardly think straight. [b] honestly and directly; in a straightforward manner: I told her straight — the kid’s right.

#6 uses sense 3b of the adverb, which is based on sense 3a of the adjective.

Note on graphic style. For the most part, Thompson’s artwork is detailed and wonderfully textural — except that almost all of his human faces are crude stick-figure faces: in #1, dramatically in #3 and #6.

The Palo Alto Medical Foundation periodically revises the format for its on-line statements, including after visit summaries to its physicians and labs. As far as I can tell, every such software upgrade arrives with bugs, sometimes spectacular ones; this is, after, the way of software the world over.

So it was with recent after visit summaries, in which my name at the top was given as

Dr. Zwicky M. Zwicky

I have an idea about how this might have come about. Probably not verifable, since it involves decisions by two different people, neither of whom could easily be identified.

One decision seems to have been to break down the patient’s name, for printing out forms, into parts, or fields. At least two, call them A (a first part, FN, possibly with a prefix of some kind) and B (a second part, LN, possibly with a preceding middle initial). In my case, A would be Arnold (possibly with the prefix Mr., Prof., or Dr.) and B would be (M.) Zwicky.

The other decision was to collect information about how the patient wants to be addressed, their preferred address term.

I’ve posted a few times about the complexities of address terms in a medical setting, and I have material for more postings; what makes matters complex is that the choices are different for different medical personnel (physicians, physicians’ assistants, lab technicians, therapists, receptionists, and so on) on different occasions (in face-to-face interactions, phone calls, and written messages, for one thing), and people have their own personal preferences (for terms to give and terms to receive). I’ve explicitly negotiated address patterns with a few medical people, but mostly people just wing it, often quite uneasily. However, in one of these negotiations, the pattern we ended up agreeing on was mutual Dr. LN. And this particular negotiation seems to have come at the time when someone was collecting information on preferred address terms, so in some database it was noted, in effect: call him Dr. Zwicky.

Separately, a great many support people prefer mutual FN (as being friendlier, warmer, more welcoming, etc.). Even some people who would prefer to use the more respectful MPre LN (where MPre is Ms. / Miss / Mrs. / Mr.) have grave trouble pronouncing Zwicky, so they opt instead for addressing me with FN (Arnold) or the combo MPre FN (Mr. Arnold).

Then, I speculate, when it came time to integrate these two pieces of information — parts A and B of the patient’s name and the patient’s preferred address term —  someone made the simplifying assumption that A would just be the preferred address term. For me, that gives

part A = preferred address term (in some database as Dr. Zwicky)

part B = M. Zwicky

therefore: Dr. Zwicky M. Zwicky as my name on printed forms.

I made no attempt to get into the details of PAMF’s system, but just had the name to be printed out changed by hand to Arnold M. Zwicky. Life goes on.

[Added 9/28, to fill in something I didn’t make explicit in the original posting: up until the recent format change (evidenced in a variety of changes in the placement, wording, typefaces, etc. of information), my name was printed as: Arnold M. Zwicky.

Then at the same time, staff members calling me in for appointments began using (with considerable difficulty) the name Dr. Zwicky, instead of Arnold or Mr. Arnold.]

Reported back on the 19th, a stunner of a 2017 headline about Wheaton College (IL) events dating back to 2016. First, the story from a source other than the one that produced the remarkable headline: from the Daily Mail (UK) by Jennifer Smith on 2/14/18: “Christian college ‘punished’ football players who ‘kidnapped, beat and sexually assaulted’ freshman in brutal hazing ritual by asking them to write an eight-page essay and complete community service”:

The hazing incident happened in March 2016 at Wheaton College in Illinois

Seniors James Cooksey, Kyler Kregel, Benjamin Pettway, Samuel TeBos and Noah Spielman were involved

They allegedly kidnapped a freshman, tormented him in a car when he had a pillowcase over his head and tried to sexually assault him

They then dumped him half-naked in a baseball field on the other side of campus

The boy reported it to police and school officials and then transferred colleges

Wheaton punished the seniors with an essay and 50 hours of community service

Seven months later, when the students were later charged by police, they suspended them

But then, on the DeadState site on 9/19/17, a story by Sky Palma about the Wheaton events that was given the headline, call it ℋ:

Christian college punished football players who raped and beat a student with an 8-page essay

ℋ  ends with a modifying PP, call it ℳ, with an 8-page essay. The question is: what does ℳ modify? That is, which preceding phrase does ℳ attach to as a postmodifier? There are, in fact, four possibilities:

parsing 1: ℳ modifies the nominal a student; conveying ‘a student who had an 8-page essay’

parsing 2: ℳ modifies the VP with head V beat (beat a student); conveying ‘used an 8-page essay to beat a student’

parsing 3: ℳ modifies the VP with (coordinate) head V raped and beat (raped and beat a student); conveying ‘used an 8-page essay to rape and beat a student’

parsing 4: ℳ modifies VP with head V punished (punished football players who raped and beat a student); conveying ‘used an 8-page essay to punish football players who raped and beat a student’

So ℋ  is in principle (at least) 4-ways ambiguous. The default for modifier attachment is LA (low attachment) — parsing 1, in this case — but many factors outweigh the default. In the case of ℋ, the student’s having or not having an essay would have no discernible relevance to raping / beating or punishing, so I would expect almost no one to entertain this reading. (But there are people who are hypersensitive to matters of linguistic form, over semantic and pragmatic considerations like estimates of writer’s or speaker’s intent, real-world plausibility, and relevance.)

The intended reading is parsing 4, the highest of high attachments (HA). HA frequently results from strategies in language production: the writer begins producing some constituent for which they have some modifier in mind, but they are reluctant to break up the current constituent, and in any case the modifier supplies new, or newly important, content in the discourse (or in the reader’s experience) and so should preferably come last, after other material.

So it is in ℋ. The raping and beating of a college student by football players is treated as background material, as information familiar to the reader — or, more precisely, as if it is information familiar to the reader. What’s now prominent is that the football players’ punishment was (merely) an 8-page essay.

So we get ℋ instead of

Christian college punished, with an 8-page essay, football players who raped and beat a student with an 8-page essay

and instead of other variants with ℳ up in front of the highest VP:

Christian college, with an 8-page essay, punished football players who raped and beat a student

With an 8-page essay, Christian college punished football players who raped and beat a student

What remains in interpreting ℋ, beyond the unlikely LA and the intended highest of HA, are intermediate HAs conveying that football players used an 8-page essay to viciously mistreat a student. If you entertain either of these intermediate HAs, then you’ll find ℋ absurd and risible, at least for a moment. I’m not convinced that most ordinary readers would do this. On the other hand, the distance between the highest V in ℋ, punished, and ℳ  is considerable, so it’s not inconceivable that some readers might momentarily choose an intermediate VP as the modified one, however preposterous the interpretation that results.

My assumption is that only hypersensitive readers will do this in any numbers. This is a testable hypothesis — testable through carefully constructed experiments on reading times for ℋ and similar examples: on the hypothesis, such examples will have somewhat longer reading times, because readers will be momentarily sidetracked by the preposterous interpretation. But constructing the experiments properly is something of a nightmare, and then you need a lab to run them in, and … (Note: introspection is not the way to go here.)

In today’s comics feed, the One Big Happy for September 21st:

Playground Lady intends a WH question with (a reduced variant of) the auxiliary V is + a predicative PP headed by the P like ‘similar to’. Ruthie, ever keen on the reading not intended, hears a WH question with (a reduced variant of) the auxiliary V does (a PRS form of the V lexeme DO) + a complement VP headed by the BSE form like of the V lexeme LIKE ‘find enjoyable’. What is he like? (possible answer: He’s short and blond and funny-looking ) vs. What does he like? (possible answer: He likes playing video games).

Ruthie’s interpretation is, in fact, an uncooperative one in the context: Playground Lady, on being asked about Joe, admits that she doesn’t know him, so is (indirectly) asking for some guidance on how to find him. In this context, information about his physical appearance would be useful, but information about his favorite activities would probably not be.

is/does ambiguities induced by Auxiliary Reduction (AR) are hard to set up, given the very different syntaxes associated with the auxiliaries BE and DO, in combination with the fact that lack of accent is a necessary condition on AR (which, for DO, essentially means that AR is possible only in WH questions).

is/has ambiguities, however, are easy to set up, since both auxiliaries can occur with PSP complements (for BE, in the passive construction; for HAVE, in the perfect construction): He’s attacked every day as a variant of either He is attacked every day or He has attacked every day.

In a similar (but more complex) vein, there are would/had ambiguities, since would occurs with BSE complements (She would / She’d attack every day), had occurs with PSP complements (She had / She’d attacked every day), and there are “bare-PST/PSP” verbs (hit, bid, etc.) for which PST/PSP is identical to BSE: She’d hit them again and again as a variant of either She would hit [BSE] them again and again or She had hit [PSP] them again and again.

This photoon passed on to me by Karen Chung on Facebook (I have no idea of its ultimate source):

(#1)

Context, context, context.

The spatial P in can locate a person p in context in (at least) two different ways — either directly and concretely, by locating p‘s body (at the reference time of the larger utterance) as being within some enclosing space (in #1, the hotel lobby); or in a displaced and somewhat more abstract way, by locating p as being within some enclosing space in an auxiliary subworld. In #1, this subworld is the one in which each hotel guest has a specific enclosing space — a hotel room — assigned to them, and in that subworld p in #1 is paired with room r; the result is that “p is in r” can be true (in the room-assignment subworld) and “p has never been in r” can also be true (in the larger world). And

I am in the lobby of the hotel and in Room 666.

can be non-contradictory (even, in the right circumstances, true), but still sound a bit odd (triggering a brief moment of processing difficulty): it’s not a zeugma, since there are two separate occurrences of in, understood somewhat differently, not a single occurrence that has to be understood both ways at once; instead it’s what I’ve called a zeugmoid (see my 11/17/10 posting “Zeugmoids”), close enough to zeugma to give many readers or hearers pause.

Meanwhile, p‘s intention (clear in context) in #1 is to ask about the room-assignment subworld, while the hotel clerk (uncooperatively) responds with an answer about the larger world.

It’s all about pragmatics: context, intentions, cooperativeness in conversation.

Note 1. Photoons. #1 has both the visual and the textual components of a cartoon, and both contribute significantly to its content: the visual component locates the exchange at the front desk of a hotel, and the text in the speech balloons supplies crucial conversational content . What sets it apart from a prototypical cartoon is that the visual component is a photograph rather tha a drawing. From my 8/25/18 posting “But is it a cartoon?”:

It’s a photograph intended as a cartoon, and I say we take it at face value. Maybe call such things — some others have come by on this blog — photoons.

Note 2. Verbal jokes and cartoons.To a considerable extent, verbal jokes and cartoons are interconvertible: the set-up of a joke (“Three nuns come into a bar”) can often be depicted rather than described; and a cartoon can often have its crucial background elements described in words rather than depicted.

So it is with #1, which can be done with text only:

A hotel guest comes up to the desk clerk and says: “Hi, I’ve forgotten what room I’m in.”

The clerk replies: “No problem, Sir. This is called ‘The Lobby’.”

Context, context, context. An old theme here. From my Language Log posting of 5/1/07, “Context, context, context”:

The title of this posting is a favorite saying of my friend Ellen Evans.  It’s scarcely original with her, as you can see by googling on it.  Googling will, in fact, yield “context, context, context” as an explicit instance of the X3 snowclone

… But with Ellen Evans you get more: a CafePress shop, Ellen de Sui Generis, with merchandise featuring characteristic Evansian sayings: Piffle; Er, no; FSVO (an acronym for “for some value of”, and pronounced like “fizzvo”); and of course Context, context, context.  There you will find two items with CCC on them: a classic thong for $7.99 and a mug for $10.99.  The mugs make excellent presents for your friends in semantics/pragmatics and sociolinguistics (or computer science or postmodern criticism or …).  (Disclosure: I have no connection, financial or otherwise, with the shop.  I’m merely a Friend of Ellen, and of Lars Ingebrigtsen, who set the shop up.)

The mug:

(#2)

I have one myself.

On the Linguistic Typology mailing list recently, David Gil (Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany) relayed a query from a friend:

Teknonymy is the phenomenon in which a parent is referred to by the name of his or her children.  For example, my father was addressed and referred to by his Arabic-speaking friends as “Abu Daud”, or ‘father of David’. Teknonymy is attested in many different cultures around the world.

In at least some Arab societies, teknonymy interacts with gender in the following way. Whereas men, once assigned a teknonym, may still be addressed or referred to by their original name, women who are assigned a teknonym [like Umm Malik ‘mother of Malik’] may no longer be addressed or referred to by their original name — their original name is simply lost.

My question: Is anybody familiar with similar cases of gender asymmetry in teknonyms in other languages/societies?

I was familiar with the phenomenon, but didn’t have a name for it. Now I have several.

From Wikipedia:

Teknonymy (from Greek: τέκνον, “child” and Greek: ὄνομα, “name”), more often known as [paedonymy], is the practice of referring to parents by the names of their children. [Such a name itself is a teknonym, teknonymic, paedonym, or paedonymic.] This practice can be found in many different cultures around the world. The term was coined by anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in an 1889 paper.

Teknonymy can be found in (among other places listed in Wikipedia): various Austronesian peoples; the Arab world; Amazonia; the Zuni language; and the Yoruba language of Western Africa.

From the technical literature, the first page of an article from An Anthropology of Names and Naming (ed. by Gabriele vom Bruck & Barbara Bodenhorn, in print 2006):

(#1)

The author is the British anthropologist Maurice Bloch (who’s spent most of his career at the London School of Economics). From Wikipedia:

Bloch’s field research has been mainly carried out in two different areas of Madagascar. One field site has been among the peasants of central Imerina; and the other in a remote forest inhabited by a group of people called Zafimaniry. His writing deals with religion, kinship, economics, politics and language. His research has been much influenced by French Marxist ideas.

He has been an innovator in relating social anthropology to linguistics and cognitive psychology. Much of his theoretical work since the 1970s has concerned the interface between cognition and social and cultural life. What he has written on this subject faces two ways: on the one hand, he criticises anthropologists for exaggerating the particularity of specific cultures; on the other hand, he criticises cognitive scientists for underestimating it.

On the Zafimaniry, from Wikipedia:

The Zafimaniry are a sub-group of the Betsileo ethnic group of Madagascar. … The Zafimaniry speak a dialect of the Malagasy language, which is a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian language group [a subgroup of the Austronesian languages].

(#2)The world of the Austronesian peoples and languages: from Taiwan and Hawaii on the north, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) on the east, New Zealand on the south, to Madagascar on the west

Three bulletins on hypallage on the net: a Page on this blog; a review of some net and media discussion from 2007-09; and recent Facebook discussion of a class of cases that I’ll refer to as food-source hypallage.

First, from the archives, in a 10/21/13 posting “Two cartoons”, image #1, a Bizarro with play a little guitar:

hypallage … with a VP adverbial (here, a little) converted to a modifier of a N: play guitar a little > play a little guitar.This particular hypallage has become conventionalized: play some / a lot of / occasional / etc. guitar.

The Page. Links to postings, with annotations. All but the first on this blog. And the first is this LLog posting of mine from 12/4/07, “Extramarital toes”:

From the Dec. 1, 2007 Economist: “As British political scandals go, this one is not particularly juicy. No honours seem to have been sold, no politician’s Parisian hotel bills picked up, no extramarital toes sucked.”

2007-09 discussion. Jan Freeman (Boston Globe“The Word” column, 8/24/08) quoted my extramarital toes example and also a wonderful free-range mayonnaise example (from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words column):

(Quinion) I was at a meeting on Thursday that included a sandwich lunch. Mine was Italian Chicken, whose other ingredients were Italian pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, freshly-ground black pepper, and free-range mayonnaise. It was sad to think of those cute little mayonnaises, running around unconstrained and happy until it was time for them to join the rest of the ingredients in my sandwich.

And concluded:

But not all hypallage is funny, or even striking. Try sleepless night (it wasn’t sleepless, you were), joyous dawn, a happy event, or Shakespeare’s “rainy marching in the painful field.” Or Thomas Gray’s line from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: “The ploughman homeward plods his weary way.”

We all use hypallage, whether or not we know its name.

Next up was Ben Zimmer on his Visual Thesaurus “Word Routes” column of 11/3/09, “Hyping Hypallage”, on distracted driving and drunk driving, citing Jan Freeman, Michael Quinion, me, and Martha Barnette (co-host and co-producer, with Grant Barrett, of the language podcast A Way With Words):

On a flight yesterday, I ran into another example. A sign in the lavatory read: airsick bags. Gee, I hope not.

Food-source hypallage. Then, much more recently, exchanges on a friend’s private Facebook group about a series of food-source hypallages starting with grass-fed gelatin ‘gelatin from grass-fed cows, cows that are fed grass’ — it’s the cows that were grass-fed, not of course the gelatin — which is deeply mysterious if you don’t know that gelatin is a protein made from collagen, itself derived from animal parts (originally from cattle hooves, now mostly from pork skins, pork and cattle bones, or split cattle hides).

As discussants noted, grass-fed gelatin is entirely parallel to grass-fed milk and grass-fed beef. If there’s a problem with the gelatin, that has to do with real-world knowledge.

The exchange then turned to cage-free eggs ‘eggs from cage-free chickens’ and free-range eggs ‘eggs from free-range chickens, chickens that were allowed to range freely in feeding’. The eggs themselves, of course, were not in risk of being caged, nor were they allowed to range freely.

And then in one further step from this, free-range mayonnaise ‘mayonnaise made with free-range eggs’, that is, ‘mayonnaise from eggs from chickens that were allowed to range freely in feeding’.

It’s the hypallage two-step. Also seen in my 8/7/10 posting “Names and occupations”, treating

organic donuts ‘donuts made from organic grain’ (modifier transferred from the grain to the foodstuff made from the grain)

< organic grain ‘grain grown organically, without use of artificial agents’ (adverbial modifier of grown transferred to an adjective modifying the thing grown)

This use of organic has, however, become lexicalized; see NOAD‘s

adj. organic: 2 (of food or farming methods) produced or involving production without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or other artificial agents.

so organic donuts isn’t quite as much of a stretch as free-range mayonnaise.

(I’m imagining a free-range potato salad: potato salad made with mayonnaise made with eggs from chickens that were allowed to range freely in feeding.)

An anaphoric island. The smoke signalling another Page on this blog for anaphoric islands. Created back on 5/27/15, an Anaphoric islands Page, with links to postings about anaphoric islands (like this one). Now, today, a new Page with examples of them.

Today’s example was distributed to an informal group of anaphoric islanders (we collect the things — hey, it’s an innocent hobby) by one of our number, Larry Horn, who noted it back in the 1970s. Out of context, it’s a real challenge to interpret:

(1) I don’t think that non-smokers should have to put up with people who do

The noun non-smokers ‘people who are not smokers’ is treated here as equivalent to people who don’t smoke, so that (1) is intended as a paraphrase of

(2) I don’t think that people who don’t smoke should have to put up with people who do (smoke)

Now, the anaphora in (2) is unproblematic, and the contrast between people who don’t smoke and people who do smoke  is clearly expressed in the parallel relative clauses there.

But in (1) the verb smoke that’s the antecedent for the anaphor do is fairly far “inside” the word nonsmokers:

(with negative prefx non-; agentive suffix -er; and plural suffix -s)

and the antecedent and anaphor are not at all in structurally parallel positions.

Given (1) on its own, with some effort you can work out what’s packed into the anaphor do. But things are much easier if you have the context:

he thought a law providing non-smoking areas in public places would be fair for both smokers and non-smokers. [Here the contrast is set up explicitly and clearly, in preparation for (1).] “I don’t think that non-smokers should have to put up with people who do, and it would not be that hard for smokers to smoke in special areas.”

It started at the Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto at breakfast (with Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky) this morning, quickly led to a chocolate beverage from northern New Jersey (and to manner-of-speaking verbs) and after a whirlwind worldwide beverage tour ended up with an echt-Swiss dairy soft drink from Canton Aargau, Switzerland (up north, on the flatlands near the Rhine).

The impetus for all this, a vintage advertising poster on the wall at the Creamery:

(#1) ASK FOR IT by NAME: Yoo-hoo

I remembered Yoo-hoo from years ago, as sort of like a chocolate egg cream, but not nearly as good. I’d supposed that the company had long ago gone out of business, but (as EDZ quickly confrmed on her phone) no; they are still yoo-hooing. Call for it by name.

Yoo-hoo. From Wikipedia:

(#2) The Whole ‘Hoo Family

Yoo-hoo is an American brand of chocolate beverage that was developed in New Jersey in 1926; it is [now] manufactured by Keurig Dr Pepper. [The company’s ownership is a tangled mess of corporate takeovers, sales, mergers, and splits, covered in some detail in Wikipedia.]

The term Yoo-hoo was first applied to a fruit drink called “Tru-milk”, sold in the 1920s by Italian-American Natale Olivieri in his small soda fountain on Hackensack Street in Carlstadt, [in northern] New Jersey. Olivieri soon found a way to produce a kind of chocolate-milk drink that would not spoil in the summer heat as pure chocolate milk would. The name “Yoo-hoo” became associated with the chocolate-flavored drink as well.

In the 1940s, Thomas Giresi opened a bottling plant in Batesburg, South Carolina, for distribution of Yoo-hoo. In the 1960s, an advertising campaign tried to appeal to an older public for the drink, and featured Yogi Berra and his New York Yankees teammates. Berra, in a pin-striped business suit, drinks a bottle of Yoo-hoo, lifts it next to his cheek, and says with a smile, “It’s Me-He for Yoo-Hoo!”

(#3) Another ad, alluding to Berra and his baseball buddies (among them, Mickey Mantle)

… Yoo-hoo’s several flavors include chocolate, strawberry, chocolate banana, chocolate strawberry, chocolate peanut butter, and chocolate caramel.

The drink isn’t a soft drink (or soda or pop or whatever your term is), because it has no carbonated water (with dissolved CO2) in it.

Digression on yoo-hoo. From NOAD:

excl. yoo-hoo: a call used to attract attention to one’s arrival or presence: Yoo-hoo! — Is anyone there? ORIGIN natural exclamation: first recorded in English in the 1920s.

The call (with primary accent on the first syllable for most speakers, but on the second for some) was first recorded then, and was quickly seized on as a trade name. The first four cites in OED2:

1924 Dial. Notes 5 280 Yoo-hoo (call). [from the American Dialect Society, with earlier, but then-recent, cites]

1926 New Yorker 2 Jan. 18/3 Yoo-hoo! When did your school let out? [an American cite]

1937 M. Allingham Case of Late Pig vii. 49 He opened the breakfast-room door. ‘Yoo-hoo!’ said someone inside. [a British cite]

1946 A. Marshall in W. Murdoch & H. Drake-Brockman Austral. Short Stories (1951) 316 There was a faint ‘yoo-hoo!’ from behind us. We all turned. [an Australian cite]

The exclamation was then subject to verbing (in the OED entry, aways with first-syllable accent):

 ˈyoohoo  v. (also ˈyoo-hoo) (intransitive and transitive) to call ‘yoo-hoo!’ (to).

1948 D. Ballantyne Cunninghams  i. iii. 14 He..yoohooed for a chair.

1957 J. Kerouac On the Road  i. xiii. 88 Then they yoohooed us.

1978 ‘J. Gash’ Gold from Gemini iii. 24 Patrick yoo-hooed me over to his place.

Not just verbed, but converted specifically to a manner-of-speaking verb, usable in a variety of syntactic constructions (some of them illustrated above). Details in my squib “In a manner of speaking” (Linguistic Inquiry, 1971). With a long list of these verbs in Beth Levin’s English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation (1993), section 37.3 (Verbs of Manner of Speaking), from babble through yodel, but not including yoo-hoo (the list is indefinitely extendible by neologisms).

Now back to beverages.

The egg cream. From Wikipedia:

An egg cream is a beverage consisting of milk, carbonated water, and flavored syrup (typically chocolate or vanilla). Despite the name, the drink contains neither eggs nor cream.

(#4) A chocolate egg cream; the drink is associated with New Yorkers of Eastern European Jewish descent

The egg cream is almost exclusively a fountain drink. Although there have been several attempts to bottle it, none has been wholly successful, as its fresh taste and characteristic head [or froth] require mixing of the ingredients just before drinking.

(#5) Ingredients for a chocolate egg cream: flavored syrup, soda water, milk

The OED2 draft additions 1993 for egg cream mix early cites (1841, 1906) for drinks made with eggs and cream with proper NYC egg cream cites:

1947 I. Shulman Amboy Dukes i. 4 The strollers..stood at the open windows of candy stores .. drinking .. three-cent egg creams.

1975 New Yorker 21 July 22/1 My beloved wife, Whitney, began introducing New York delicacies like borscht, egg creams, and matzohbrei to the populace.

1988 M. Stewart Quick Cook Menus 213 (caption) This chocolate fizz, served in a ruby goblet in front of a leaded window in the hall, is similar to an egg cream — a traditional New York drink that contains neither egg nor cream.

Related drinks. From around the world. More from the Wikipedia egg cream article:

Similar beverages:

Other sweet soda and milk-based beverages include the Vietnamese soda sữa hột gà, a beverage prepared with sweetened condensed milk, egg yolk, and soda water.

In Indonesia, a soda gembira (literally, “happy soda”) consists of soda water, sweetened condensed milk, and grenadine. It can use cola instead of soda water…

Milkis, a beverage made by the Korean Company, Lotte Chilsung, is also a sweet-soda-milk drink. It is a citrusy soda base mixed with a little milk. Milkis comes in a variety of flavors, including strawberry, orange, and muskmelon.

A Smith and Curran (or Smith and Kearns) is an alcoholic beverage, developed in North Dakota during the mid-20th-century oil boom, made of coffee liqueur, cream, and soda water.

To remind you: a Yoo-hoo has the flavored syrup and the dairy (in the form of milk), but lacks the soda water.

A milkshake also has the dairy and the sweet flavorings, but not the soda water.

An Italian soda has the soda water and the sweet flavorings, but not the dairy.

An ice cream soda / float has the soda water and sweet flavorings (or the two together in a commercial soda, like root beer or Coca Cola), but the dairy is ice cream rather than liquid.

Somewhat more distantly, from Wikipedia, a non-dairy drink with a tang:

Phosphate soda [aka a phosphate]  is a type of beverage that has a tangy or sour taste. These beverages became popular among children in the 1870s in the United States. Phosphate beverages were made with fruit flavorings, egg, malt, or wine. In the 1900s, the beverages became popular, and fruit-flavoured phosphate sodas were served at soda fountains, before losing popularity to ice cream based treats in the 1930s. Phosphoric acid is used in many bottled soft drinks, including Coca-Cola. The original acid phosphate, made by the Horsford Chemical Company, was a mixture of calcium, magnesium and potassium phosphate salts with a small amount of phosphoric acid producing a liquid mixture with a pH of around 2.0, the same as freshly squeezed lime juice.

Rivella. Contemplating Yoo-hoo, EDZ and I were both reminded of the characteristic Swiss soft drink, the milky Rivella. From Wikipedia:

(#6) Three Rivella varieties

Rivella is a soft drink from Switzerland, created by Robert Barth in 1952 [originally produced in a Stäfa (Canton Zürich) factory, which relocated to Rothrist in Canton Aargau in 1954], which is produced from milk whey, and therefore includes ingredients such as lactose, lactic acid and minerals. It comes in seven varieties [Red (original), Blue (low-calorie), Green (with green tea extract), Yellow (plant-derived), CLIQ Peach, CLIQ Rhubarb; plus, very recently, Cranberry and Mango].

… The name Rivella was inspired by the municipality of Riva San Vitale in Canton Ticino and the Italian word for “revelation”, rivelazione.

… Rivella is seen as Switzerland’s national beverage. The share by value of Rivella AG in the Swiss soft drinks market was 15.3 per cent in 2013, putting Rivella second to Coca-Cola.

It’s got it all: the flavored syrup (fruity rather than chocolate), the soda water, and the dairy.

At this point, EDZ mused on the fact that though our knowledge of Swiss geography was pretty good, neither of us really know where Canton Aargau was — a consequence of the fact that the canton has no cities of note or world-renowned attractions. So of course I looked it up. From Wikipedia:

(#7) Canton Aargau, on what counts as the plains in Switzerland

The canton of Aargau … is one of the more northerly cantons of Switzerland. It is situated [along] the lower course of the Aare [which is also Bern’s river], which is why the canton is called Aar-gau (meaning Aare province). It is one of the most densely populated regions of Switzerland.

… The capital of the canton is Aarau [population ca. 20,000 in 2011], which is located on its western border, on the Aare. The canton borders Germany (Baden-Württemberg) to the north, the Rhine forming the border. To the west lie the Swiss cantons of Basel-Landschaft, Solothurn and Bern; the canton of Lucerne lies south, and Zürich and Zug to the east. Its total area is 1,404 square kilometers (542 sq mi). It contains [two] large rivers, the Aare and the Reuss.

The canton of Aargau is one of the least mountainous Swiss cantons, forming part of a great table-land, to the north of the Alps and the east of the Jura, above which rise low hills. The surface of the country is beautifully diversified, undulating tracts and well-wooded hills alternating with fertile valleys watered mainly by the Aare and its tributaries. The valleys alternate with pleasant hills, most of which are full of woods.

The canton appears to be well-supplied with quaint villages, pleasant vistas, the occasional small castle, and growing technology centers, plus of course the Rhine. Just nothing stunning or breath-taking, which in Switzerland makes it seem pedestrian.

Chip Dunham’s Overboard strip from December 28th:

(#1) Captain Crow and his dog Louie

An exercise in both syntax/semantics and semantics/pragmatics: on syntactic constructions and their semantics, and on the indirect conveying of meaning in context.

Above, what will become example (c) in the syntactic discussion:

(c) I don’t think I’ve told you today what a wonderful dog you are

which will lead to a related example, Sir Van Morrison’s song line in (d):

(d) Have I told you lately that I love you?

(Hat tip to Geoff Nathan.)

Warning: even when stripped to the barest of skeletons, what I have to say about syntax, semantics, and pragmatics has an irreducibly technical core. Do not despair. (On the other hand, I have deliberately avoided much technical terminology and virtually all careful conceptual analysis, in favor of merely suggestive exposition, designed to give a feel for the ideas rather than an academically respectable presentation and cutting corners everywhere. Semanticists, forgive me.)

Syntax 1: NEG-Raising with THINK. Some complement-taking verbs of mental action (THINK among them) allow an alternation between occurring with a negative direct object and having the negation “raised” to their own clause:

[with NEG-Raising] I don’t think that’s ethical ≈  [without] I think that’s not ethical

The ≈ sign indicates near-equivalence. (The sentences are certainly not mutually substitutible, without consequences, in all contexts. At the very least, the NEG-Raised examples are muted in effect, conveying weaker or hedged assertions.)

Then, with TELL in the object clause , more generally:

[with NEG-Raising] I don’t think I’ve told you X ≈ [without] I think I haven’t told you X

Syntax 2: WH-Exclam with TELL. Meanwhile, exclamatory WH clauses are in alternation with plain declarative variants; for what-a WH-Exclams:

main clause: [WH-Exclam] What a wonderful dog you are ≈ [Decl] You are a wonderful dog

object clause: [WH-Exclam] I’ve said / revealed today what a wonderful dog you are ≈ [Decl] I’ve said / revealed today that you are a wonderful dog

object clause of TELL: [WH-Exclam] I’ve told you today what a wonderful dog you are ≈ [Decl] I’ve told you today that you are a wonderful dog

and a negated version of such a clause: [WH-Exclam] I haven’t told you today what a wonderful dog you are ≈ [Decl]  I haven’t told you today that you are a wonderful dog

Syntax 3: putting the two together. With that negative clause as an object of THINK:

(a) I think I haven’t told you today what a wonderful dog you are ≈ (b) I think I  haven’t told you today that you are a wonderful dog

Then, from the above discussion on NEG-Raising,

(c) [with NEG-Raising] I don’t think I’ve told you today what a wonderful dog you are ≈ (a) [without]  I think I haven’t told you today what a wonderful dog you are

and (a) ≈ (b), so

(c), the sentence in the cartoon, ≈ (b) I think I haven’t told you today that you are a wonderful dog

From semantics to pragmatics. That is, the sentence in the cartoon literally conveys (b), but, as Louie the dog observes (in his thought balloon), his owner Captain Crow hasn’t actually complimented him on being a wonderful dog, because (b) is, technically, not a compliment, but a report of a mental state, the state of Captain Crow’s thinking something, that something being that he hasn’t told Louie something, that something being that Louie is a wonderful dog — and that‘s the compliment.

Getting from what Captain Crow actually says to what he implicates — conveys by indirection — takes several steps. Compressing things a great deal:

(i) I think X implicates X; asserting that you think something is so indirectly asserts that it is so

(ii) I haven’t done X implicates that I should have done X (in the case at hand, that I should have told you that you’re a wonderful dog)

(iii) and that, in turn, indirectly does X — in this case, tells Louie that he is a wonderful dog

Each of these steps is backed by a kind of commonsense reasoning, based on (Gricean) relevance: Why is the speaker telling us what he thinks, what he hasn’t done, what he should have done? Surely not just to inform us about his mental state, his failure to act, his obligation to act; all this talk on his part must somehow be relevant to the situation he’s in. He tells us what he’s thinking because he wants us to share these thoughts, and he chooses indirection over flat assertion because that’s more polite (more face-saving for the person he’s talking to), though he could have chosen the more direct

I haven’t told you today that you are a wonderful dog

Introductory I think is one way to moderate the assertion; an interrogative variant is another way:

Have I told you today that you are a wonderful dog?

(implicating that I haven’t — but I should have, so you’re a wonderful dog). (This interrogative example has the same crucial features as the song line in (d), to which I’ll return below.)

In outline, that’s how (i) works; (ii) and (iii) can be similarly unpacked.

Now, no one thinks people work through such reasoning in real time as they process what other people say; like pairings of syntactic form with semantics, implicatures are conventionalized, automatized, and can be processed in a flash. Kids have to learn how to understand this stuff, and how to wield it themselves, and that takes a while .

One more semantic twist: the presuppositions of TELL. Now compare three complement-taking verbs:

REVEAL: I revealed (to them) that I’m a Martian.

SAY: I said (to them) I that I’m a Martian.

TELL: I told them that I’m a Martian.

For REVEAL, the verb brings with it the semantic content of its complement, pretty much no matter what you do to it.

I revealed (to them) that I’m a Martian ⊃ I’m a Martian

I didn’t reveal (to them) that I’m a Martian ⊃ I’m a Martian

Did I reveal (to them) that I’m a Martian? ⊃ I’m a Martian

If I revealed (to them) that I’m a Martian, I was stupid ⊃ I’m a Martian

So it’s inconsistent to deny this content, as here:

✘ I revealed (to them) that I’m a Martian, but I lied

The verb SAY has no such baggage:

I said (to them) that I’m a Martian⊅ I’m a Martian

and there’s no inconsistency in denying it:

✓ I revealed (to them) that I’m a Martian, but I lied

Verbs like REVEAL, with baggage, are called factive verbs; those like SAY, without it, non-factive.

And then — surely you saw this coming, since why would I be telling you about factivity? — there’s the verb TELL, which is ambiguous between factive and non-factive. Now, there are circumstances in which TELL is just factive, period. In particular, if it lacks a direct object, it seems always to be factive:

(They suspected I was a Martian, so) I told (them) ⊃ I’m a Martian

But otherwise, TELL can go either way, acting like REVEAL or like SAY, though there seems to be a considerable bias towards factive uses. (I hope someone has investigated this, but if no one has, someone should.)

factive: [Uncle Martin, the title character in the American tv sitcom My Favorite Martian:] The Army came by this morning on a sweep of Martians in the area, but I didn’t tell them I’m a Martian.

non-factive: [bullied kid at school:] The kids were razzing me about my funny looks, so I told them I’m a Martian.

non-factive: My latest draft was a piece of crap, but to cheer me up, everybody told me it was brilliant.

The base assumption seems to be that TELL is factive unless there’s a good reason in the context for a non-factive use, but that idea needs to be refined and investigated.

To get back to Captain Crow and Louie: in the strip, Louie might have been satisfied that Captain Crow has said that — uttered words to the effect that — Louie is a wonderful dog. That might be enough of a compliment for him; insincere compliments can be issued for any number of reasons, including politeness as well as flattery, and we don’t always want to inquire into the the sincerity of compliments. But Louie might think that Captain Crow has committed himself to a belief that Louie is in fact a wonderful dog (so that the compliment is a heartfelt one); that’s a matter of the interpretation of the verb TELL, which is ambiguous on just this point. But I think that Louie was hoping for a heartfelt compliment.

“Have I Told You Lately (That I Love You)?” From Wikipedia:

(#2) The Van Morrison cover art; note: singing this song can get you a knighthood (Morrison and Stewart, both in 2016)

(#3) The Rod Stewart 1991 version, with lyrics, which you can listen to by clicking above

“Have I Told You Lately” is a song written and recorded by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison for his nineteenth studio album Avalon Sunset (1989). It is a romantic ballad that is often played at weddings, although it was originally written as a prayer.

… Rod Stewart covered the song for his album Vagabond Heart (1991). A live version from his album Unplugged…and Seated (1993) was released as a single, becoming a number-five hit in the US and the UK.

Lyrics for verse 1:

Have I told you lately that I love you?
Have I told you there’s no one else above you?
Fill my heart with gladness, take away all my sadness
Ease my troubles, that’s what you do

Clearly, factive TELL is intended; this is a heartfelt protestation of love.  Meanwhile, as sketched above, the interrogative conveys (indirectly) that the singer hasn’t told the person he’s singing to; but that he should have; and that consequently he’s now doing so. Awww.

On Overboard. The strip was new to me. It has a wondefully goofy premise; from Wikipedia:

Overboard is Chip Dunham’s daily newspaper comic strip about a shipload of incompetent pirates. It debuted in 1990 and is distributed by Andrews McMeel Syndication.

Overboard derives much of its humor from having its characters anachronistically placed in modern times. For instance, they put quarters in dockside parking meters, order pizza by cellphone, and have a company health insurance plan.

These pirates are much less fearsome than their ruthless predecessors. In the early years of the strip, much of their activity involved standing around on deck drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. Recent strips feature golf, pet care and gardening. Their enemy is the Green Ship and its rival band of pirates, but giant rabbits attacking the garden, sharks, octopuses, and the Internal Revenue Service also are threats.

Competence is also an issue. While the Overboard crew carries cutlasses and makes raids, most often their treasure is stolen by disgruntled shipmates or by more able pirates. The captain has made a horrendous mess of the investments for their pension fund (at one point, he adjusts his failed investment strategy by flushing cash straight down the toilet).

The pirates actively pursue dates with women but instead repulse them with poor hygiene, fleas, disgusting table manners, immaturity, cheapness, and a lack of interest in the arts.

… Captain Henry Crow — the bland skipper of their ship, the “Revenge”. Crow seems a little smarter and more sophisticated than the crew, but he is far too decent to be a successful pirate, even if he were otherwise capable. Regularly participates in large battles but, curiously, reacts to duels with cowardice.

… Louie — Captain Crow’s pet dog. He doesn’t speak but rather projects thought balloons, in the manner of Snoopy or Garfield. … He is a yellow Labrador Retriever, … and many of Louie’s behaviours are considered stereotypical of the breed.

Adrienne Shapiro on Facebook on the 14th, reporting on a day trip from Seattle with Kit Transue:

Cape Disappointment did not [understood: disappoint].

An instance of the anaphoric construction VPE (Verb Phrase Ellipsis) in which the antecedent for the ellipted material is not an actual expression in the preceding text, but instead is merely evoked by a word-part in this text, the disappoint inside the nominalization disappointment. The configuration requires some processing work on the part of a reader (or hearer) — it presents a kind of puzzle for you to solve — so it’s jokey, likely to elicit a smile from you, in admiration of Adrienne’s condensed cleverness.

Background: the place. From Wikipedia:

Aerial view of Cape Disappointment, view to the northeast, with very modest fog

Cape Disappointment is a headland located at the extreme southwestern corner of Washington State on the north side of the Columbia River bar … The point of the cape is located on the Pacific Ocean in Pacific County, approximately two miles (3.2 km) southwest of the town of Ilwaco. Cape Disappointment receives about 2,552 hours of fog a year – the equivalent of 106 days – making it one of the foggiest places in the US.

The cape was named on April 12, 1788, by British fur trader John Meares who was sailing south from Nootka in search of trade. After a storm, he turned his ship around just north of the Cape and therefore just missed the discovery of the Columbia River. George Vancouver credits John Meares in his account when he saw Cape Disappointment on April 27, 1792.

Background: anaphoric islands. I begin with a 10/20/07 posting of mine on Language Log, “More fun with VPE”, about the playful example:

one of those see-through blouses you don’t even want to [understood: see through]

Notes from that posting:

[an idea from 50-some years ago that] lexical items are “islands” for anaphora, that parts of lexical items or referents merely evoked by lexical items cannot serve as antecedents for anaphoric elements (of several different kinds[, including in VPE])

… some linguists began to argue that the AIC [Anaphoric Island Constraint] was not a syntactic phenomenon at all, but a pragmatic one, having to do ease of antecedent retrieval (as related to contextual cues and morphological transparency, in particular)

Many anaphoric-island examples are merely ways of speaking or writing compactly (look at the examples on this Page on this blog), but the configuration is wide open for playfulness. Three more examples from my postings:

on 4/23/11 in “Porn name up for grabs”: Tony Buff (who is both buff and in the buff) and Brandon Bangs (who does)

on 8/20/18 in “Anaphora into proper names”: “Margaritaville” was playing over the sound system, so she ordered one [understood as: a Margarita].

on 12/12/18 in “Prosthetics on an anaphoric island”: He conducted most of his career singlehandedly — the other [understood: hand] having been blown off by a cannonball.