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until the eagle grins
Susan Cheever in Newsweek for August 13th and 20th, p. 6,“Gin Without the Tonic”, on the rich: There are still titans with a conscience in the 21st century — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Oprah...
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Brief mention: toolbook
An NBC news analyst, reporting on the U.S. Presidential election last night: We need to look at our toolbook — I mean our toolbox, our playbook… A blend of two (somewhat) idiomatic compounds,...
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Ab-vengers
Passed on by Elizabeth Zwicky from the Cheezburger site, this pastiche of superheroes that’s all about the abdominals, hence the regrettable portmanteau Ab-vengers (a substitution portmanteau combining...
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Commando no more
[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much...
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occasional
A recent One Big Happy has Ruthie coping with an ambiguity in the English adjective occasional: Ruthie, quite reasonably, understands occasional in its primary sense, semantically related to the adverb...
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dress left/right
Tailor’s terminology for which side of his trousers a man normally stashes his junk on; “Do you dress left or right, sir?” (The crotch dimensions will then be adjusted some to accomodate the man’s...
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Truncated what the fuck
In a Details (April 2013) interview of Matthew McConaughey (by Adam Sachs), this unlikely passage describing McConaughey’s interaction with a red songbird in New Orleans: They’re staring at each other...
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eggs over easily
Today’s Bizarro: The expression needs an adverb, right? Easy is an adjective, right? So eggs over easy is wrong-wrong-wrong; it has to be eggs over easily. Well easy is indeed an adjective, a lot of...
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Ralf König
I was pointed to a classic gay comic by the bibliography in the entertaining and informative The Dick Book: Tuning Your Favorite Body Part (Micha Schulze & Christian Scheuss, Bruno Gmünder 2013,...
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An unfortunate mishearing
From Victor Steinbok on ADS-L, a link to a HuffPost Comedy posting with this photograph: HuffPo’s comment: OOPS: Little Kid Celebrates Dad With Unintentionally Racist Cake We love hilarious...
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Reduplicative compounds
Today’s Rhymes With Orange: Hippy-dippy, artsy-fartsy. Compound-like combinations with parts that aren’t semantically independent but are related phonologically, in this case by rhyme. In addition to...
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Orange and apple
From various sources on Facebook, but most directly from Engrish.com: A pun on mandarin, and an allusion to the idiom comparing apples and oranges. The pun. Mandarin Chinese and the Mandarin orange. On...
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Nick Danger: an appreciation
My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed...
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A multiplicity of uses
… for the verb look, especially in combination with the particle up, in yesterday’s Zippy:
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Brief mention: where … at
Mar Rojo recently posted this exchange to the Facebook group The British Grammar Nazis: A (on the phone): Where are you at? B: I’m in the car. A: No, I mean where are you at? B: Ah, I’m on the M62,...
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Idiomaticity
Today’s Pearls Before Swine: The idiom golden throat ‘a widely admired singing or speaking voice’ is both metonymic (throat for ‘voice’) and metaphorical (golden ‘like gold in value’), but it’s complex...
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Possessive ambiguity
Today’s Pearls Before Swine: The -’s possessive is multiply ambiguous, and that ambiguity can be exploited for language play. A few days ago, I posted about the greeting card caption “Here’s your dick...
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Innovations
The June 9th NYT Magazine was an “Innovations Issue”, with pieces on the histories of devices (the Brannock Device, for measuring shoe size, the Cuisinart, the digital camera, keys, the salad spinner),...
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meet cute
Zippy continues his fixation on Barbara Stanwyck movies. Yesterday it was Stella Dallas (1937), today it’s Double Indemnity (1944): (#1) On the career of Babrbara Stanwyck: Barbara Stanwyck (July 16,...
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Idiomatic meta-strips
In today’s crop of cartoons, an outrageous Pearls Before Swine and a silly Mother Goose and Grimm, both of them meta-strips and both playing with idioms: (#1) (#2) In #1, the characters are treating...
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