Sucking the life out of the state
Returning to a very old topic on this blog, making small advances on some outstanding puzzles. It starts with my 6/8/11 posting (yes, 14 years ago) “Parasites and the body politic”, about my dismayed...
View ArticleElegantized insults
elegantized insult: a replacement for an insulting word or phrase that’s notably more elegant than the replaced item, by using material from either the specialized or technical Greco-Latin stratum of...
View ArticleHooray for constructions, positive licensing, and GKP
Yesterday, Laura Michaelis (Univ. of Colorado-Boulder co-author of, among other things, the 2020 Cambridge book Syntactic Constructions in English) alerted me to an article by Philip Miller (Université...
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May I take your coat?
A Sandra Boynton turkey cartoon from 1980, showing a (polite) offer framed as a request in the form of a question, using the formula May I VP?: (#1) The exchange — with the offer made by a turkey who...
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A coat of arms
Unus pro omnibus Omnes pro uno This display came by me on my Facebook feed this morning; as a grandson of Switzerland I found it offensive (and, by the way, inaccurate): (#1) From the Holy Roman Empire...
View ArticleThe half-disaster
An antic tale of medical misadventure — in the sprit of yesterday’s posting “The knuckle nick” — from a while back on Facebook, but not chronicled here. Now I have a lot to say about the half-disaster...
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A menagerie of monikers
Today on Facebook, in a report on grocery prices, I reviled Helmet Grabpussy, Felonious Bunk, and the Anaranjado Rapist. Hana Filip then initiated a meta-discussion, about my discussion: — HF: What a...
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A revilation of the NYT business department
I come to revile the New York Times‘s business department. Don’t tell me to complain to them; I’ve done that, and nothing came of it beyond my getting insulted by the reps on the phone (and this is how...
View ArticleMisleading
My note on Facebook on 3/26 about one small point in the Signal Chat affair: Listening fairly carefully to testimony yesterday in the Signal fiasco, I realized that some of those questioned were not...
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bob’s extortion / appeasement cartoon
The cartoonist is bob, whose full name is Bob Eckstein, and the one-panel gag cartoon in question is a very recent one (from the May 2025 issue of Funny Times) and a pointedly topical one — and I...
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