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Religious double pun
An Andy Singer No Exit cartoon, accompanying Anthony Gottlieb’s review of Ruth R. Wisse, No More: Making Jewish Humor, NYT Book Review 6/2/13, pp. 38-9: Two parallel puns, on practicing and on...
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Cullum on morphology
From Larry Horn (through some intermediaries), two cartoons by the great gag cartoonist Leo Cullum on the theme of English morphology: (#1) That’s retox, on the model of detox (a clipping of...
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exoneree
From the NYT‘s Opinion pages on Sunday the 16th, “A Song for the Exonerated” by Francis X. Clines: Having lost 16 years in prison on a wrongful conviction for rape and murder, Jeffrey Deskovic opted...
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Wednesday puns
Two of today’s cartoons: a Dilbert and a Pearls Before Swine, both with elaborate puns: (#1) This turns on the verb weasel, plus the legal phrase (beyond a) reasonable doubt (plus the derivation of...
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-less and -ness
Back on July 11th, I posted this: Unlike my other postings this morning, shirtless men will not come into it. That is, this posting is shirtlessnessless. Yes, shirtlessnessless. The formal pattern here...
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Odds and ends 8/18/13
An assortment of short items on various topics, beginning with three from the July 22nd New Yorker. Portmanteaus, New Jerseyization, oology, dago, killer whale, and Gail Collins on Bob Filner. 1....
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Breaking up is hard to do
Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine: Rat is characteristically insulting; never hire Rat for a delicate task. Then there’s the agentive noun breaker upper (or breaker-upper), with double marking: -er on...
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Playing with French morphology
From Benita Bendon Campbell, this reminiscence of a moment during her time in Paris with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, many years ago: Ann and I and aother friend were having afternoon tea at our local café...
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Sunday Book Review language and sex
Two items from the NYT Sunday Book Review (the sex issue): the etymology of buddy and the grammaticality of zipless. 1. buddy. From Rachel Kushner’s contribution to the piece “Why is writing about sex...
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screwage
Today’s Bizarro, with the suggestive word screwage: It turns out that screwage is attested in at least three senses, involving differet bases screw and different uses of the derivational suffix -age....
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Brief morphological notes
Three recent items: robophobic, fungineering, fracktacular. Three sightinga, among many for each of these. robophobic. From Maureen Dowd in the NYT, “Mommy, the Drone’s Here”, 12/4/13: Law enforcement...
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Zippirony
Yesterday’s Zippy: First, there’s the morphological form dehumorized, an entirely transparent use of English derivational morphology (‘without humor, with humor removed’), but novel. But then there’s...
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-ify rolls on
A recent Dilbert, already posted on Language Log: Mark Liberman posted this to comment on management styles, but there’s also the word bossification. Derivative verbs in -ify (and related nouns in...
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-ify again
Last installment, on bossification, here. Now, a double-header, with Shoreditchification and hipsterfication (plus simple verbing of Shoreditch). From the Telegraph, Alex Proud on 1/13/14, “Why this...
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Three cartoons for Saturday
Maybe I’m just easily amused today, but three cartoons caught my eye: a Zippy, a Rhymes With Orange, and a Pearls Before Swine: (#1) (#2) (#3) Comments: the Zippy is a cartoon about cartoons; Griffy...
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The moth worm
From Arne Adolfsen on Facebook, an entertaining 1936 ad for Expello: The crucial linguistic point is de-mothers (or demothers, you can’t tell because of the line break). This is a semantically...
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goldilocksian
Several correspondents have written to compliment me on the content and organization of the “About (academic)” page on my website (here). One went so far as to refer to the goldilocksian mean — not too...
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More Zippy playful morphology
Yesterday’s Zippy: Another chapter in Zippy’s playful morphology, notably with -ity: seriosity and goofiosity. (The names Mrs. Decaf and Mr. Groundnuts are a bonus.) The laughter uh-hyuk is true...
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-ese
Today’s Bizarro: A play on the uses of the suffix -ese. Michael Quinion’s Affixes site gives two primary uses for -ese forming adjectives and nouns: (a) those denoting “an inhabitant or language of a...
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Generalizations
Revisiting my posting “The accent in Polish”, with a cartoon in which a Mr. Waterski corrects a desk clerk’s pronunciation of his name. The correction comes in two parts: (1) a statement of fact about...
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