Formulaic language – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Formulaic language’ Category
Hang free or peter out
May 14, 2026
Today’s adventure in analyzing the jokey allusions in my postings. The target allusion is the one boldfaced in this passage from my posting yesterday (5/13), “The pocket bulge”:
[The DJX bulge booster] provides a soft but protective pocket in which a man’s package (of whatever size) can be unconstrained (hang free or peter out, as the slogan goes)
I explained half of the joke in a comment about my raw materials for this posting:
“Live Free or Die”, the official state motto of New Hampshire
But then there’s peter out, a verb of fading (before coming to an end), so ‘fade to death’ here, framed with a pun on peter, with a covert allusion to the penis hanging unconstrained within the bulge booster.
Posted in Aktionsart, Allusion, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Puns, Slogans, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »
The contrary opinion
April 2, 2026
In the spirit of the Passover season, a Frank Cotham cartoon in the 4/6/26 issue of the New Yorker:
A gentle jab at the stereotypical Jewish inclination to public disputation, alluding to the saying two Jews, three opinions or three Jews, four opinions
Even Moses, parting the waters of the sea (to enable the Israelites to escape the Egyptians pursuing them) was not immune from second guessing, at least in Cotham’s telling (though the event somehow escaped recording in the Pentateuch).
Posted in Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
Annals of derogation: homo
March 19, 2026
An example on the hoof, complete with the libelous myth of gay recruitment:
“These homos are interested in recruiting new members,” Rev. Benjamin Bubar, leader of the fundamentalist Christian Civic League of Maine, told the Bangor Daily News. (“Remembering the Maine Gay Symposium”, link here)
with homo, an abbreviation of the medical-technical term homosexual, the short form derogating gay men — along with such terms as fairy, pansy, fruit, BrE poof(ter), and before some of us homos engaged in reclaiming it, fag(got). I’m comfortable, even proud and defiant, with faggot, but because fairy-boy was the primary verbal abuse directed (inexplicably) at me in childhood, along with (equally inexplicable) accusations that I wanted to be a girl, I’ll never get on good terms with fairy.
Your mileage probably varies. Most people recognize fairy — and homo — as usually intended to be insulting, but open for ironic and playful uses, even full reclamation, as in the Radical Faery movement (for queer liberation, community, and ecological awareness). So, on the homo front, we get a queer-studies colleague of mine, parting from a lunch together with the announcement that he had to get his homo ass back to work. How queer is that?
More to come in this vein.
Posted in Abbreviation, Clothing, Etymology, Formulaic language, Homosexuality, Insults, Language play, Lexicography, Movies and tv, Proverbs, Puns | 3 Comments »
The fabulously successful idiot plot
March 5, 2026
I recently stumbled on the notion of an idiot plot on Facebook — a cultural category I had surely encountered before but must have forgotten about. In any case, I now had Wikipedia’s explanation, along with a notable example, the plot of the Astaire / Rogers musical comedy film Top Hat.
But … despite some evident absurdity, I find the film enormously enjoyable, and in fact it’s by far the most successful of the Astaire / Rogers movies. Musical films are clearly not bound by constraints of rationality or fidelity to fact — indeed, the narrative objects of culture are in general unconstrained by such considerations: consider the plots of most operas and American Western movies, both set in times and places that never existed and often don’t make sense: consider, specifically, Manon Lescaut and The Magic Flute; or Red River and Stagecoach. Masterpieces of their genres, truly wonderful, but preposterous and inaccurate in many ways. We don’t care. All this stuff happens in fictive worlds that are imaginative creations with their own conventions (not unlike the fictive worlds of science fantasy).
Now: background about idiot plots. And then an appreciation of Top Hat.
Posted in Culture, Dance, Dancers, Formulaic language, Movies and tv, Music, Pop culture | 1 Comment »
You know it’s good, because it’s free
February 13, 2026
A step into greater complexity in my blog posting, after re-entry in two brief postings yesterday: “Zichichi” (here) and “Calvin Tompkins (here): two separate subjects, united by being cleverly stitched together in The Bob newsletters (from writer and cartoonist Bob Eckstein), about the 2026 Winter Olympics on television, with this cartoon from 2/7:
(Toon) The Bob at the Winter Olympics; BE says “The bob is here”, with this tag about the Olympics on tv:You know it’s good, because it’s free
This is subject 1, the excellent tag, which I would like to apply to this very blog of mine: you know it’s good because it’s free (and I have gone to some trouble to make it so; applaud here for me)
Meanwhile, Toon is BE’s wiener dog race version of the Olympics, in which the racing dogs are in hotdog buns, observed by an array of condiment bottles. On Facebook on 2/8:
BE: “I’m I’m watching the Puppy Bowl. It’s not the same. Gambling has ruined it, even though I’m admittedly part of the problem.
BE’s eccentric Puppy Bowl is subject 2, and it has nothing to do with the the tag.
Posted in Formulaic language, Language and animals, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
Like a Spanish cow
November 11, 2025
Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French:
parler français comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’
I heard this first from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and our good friend Benita Bendon Campbell, It’s vivid and silly, and then English like a Spanish cow can be adapted as a critique of someone’s linguistic abilities in French or English or, I assume, any language. Cows being linguistically quite limited, and Spaniards being one of the nationalities French people are inclined to mock (though I would have expected the cow to be Italian, Dutch, or German; or of some exotic despised nationality, like Turkish or Chinese).
Posted in Etymology, Formulaic language, French, Idioms, Insults, Morning names, Pragmatics, Stock expressions | 2 Comments »
School days, Golden Rule days
October 29, 2025
The background, from FactCheck.org (a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center), “Meme Doctors Quote From Well-Known Satirist” by Angelo Fichera on 12/12/19:
[satirical columnist Andy] Borowitz … in a post to his verified Facebook page in 2016:
Stopping T**mp is a short-term solution. The long-term solution, and it will be more difficult, is fixing the educational system that has created so many people ignorant enough to vote for T**mp.
This was quoted (in a punctuational variant) on Facebook today, with ensuing commentary (edited some here):
Posted in Education, Language and politics, Metaphor, Morality, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
Quiche, Henri, les flics!
October 21, 2025
Gretel Cunningham Young (of Columbus OH, where she grew up, with my daughter Elizabeth, many years ago) on Facebook yesterday:
— GY: My goal was to make a half-vegetarian, half-carnivorous quiche, so I ordered this divided pan
Noting her reference to carnivorous quiche, plus an odd quirk in way English vegetarian is used, I reacted to her statement with some alarm (my response in an expanded and improved form here):
— AZ: But I don’t think I want to get near a carnivorous (‘meat-eating’) quiche, lest I be devoured by it. vegetarian quiche has the adjective vegetarian ‘(of food or diet), plant-based, excluding meat’, not the noun vegetarian ‘(of people) a vegevore, someone who eats only plant-based food; a non-carnivore, someone who does not eat meat’. A quiche that’s a vegetarian would not be a threat to me (as a being made of meat), but it would nevertheless be creepy, in a cannibalistic sort of way. The meaty correspondent to vegetarian quiche ‘quiche for vegetarians’ would be quiche for carnivores.
Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, French, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Slogans | 1 Comment »
Gay banter: great big green beans
August 31, 2025
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) 🔧 Labor Sunday 🔨 (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B
Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:
graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty
A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:
— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!
This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.
And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff further on green beans / string beans / snap beans. (more…)
Posted in Alliteration, Events and occasions, Formulaic expressions, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Insults, Intention, It's Just Stuff, Language and plants, Language play, Masculinity, Metaphor, My life, Phallicity, Pragmatics, Routines and rituals, Speech acts | 1 Comment »
Eggcorns, innocent and deliberate
August 26, 2025
From a reader on 8/24:
Are you involved in collecting eggcorns? In case you are, I thought you might be interested in a potential one that I’ve encountered “in the wild” (i.e., a Reddit post). This person wrote jig solve puzzles instead of jigsaw puzzles:
I should have been diagnosed [with ADHD] as a child but it was the early 90s in a poor rural area. Special ed at my school didn’t diagnose me with anything specific … they just told my mom I needed to spend time doing jig solve puzzles. So, I forced my way through. (Reddit posting)
My response:
I certainly have been involved in collecting eggcorns. But there are only so many balls you can juggle at one time, and I am now a old man with not a lot of time left, so I’ve been pretty much out of the eggcorn business. But you will be pleased to hear that jigsaw > jig solve isn’t in the eggcorn database and hasn’t come up in the eggcorn forum, so I might post on it.
And now I am.
Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Formulaic language, Intention, Language play, Names, Play, Puns, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »