Pragmatics – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Pragmatics’ Category
The SIR shirt
April 30, 2026
(plenty of references to a wide rage of sexual practices, mostly between men (though not in street language), so dubious for kids and not for the sexually modest)
A e-mail ad today for a new t-shirt from the Peachy Kings shop: the SIR mesh football jersey ($40), with this pitch:
Yes SIR… we’ve got the top for you! Our new SIR mesh jersey will let everyone know who’s the boss! This top will get you all the attention this summer with its slinky sleeves, peek-a-boo mesh and slight-crop.
SIR now joins PK’s existing t-shirt labels GOOD BOY, PORN STAR, STUD, and TRASH, but with a sociolinguistic twist: sir is primarily an address term; unlike the count nouns boy, star, and stud, and the mass noun trash, it has virtually no uses as a referential common noun. In man-on-man sex, it’s used by a subordinate addressing a superordinate: a bottom to his top, a Boy to his Daddy, a sub(missive) to a dom(inant), a (sexual) slave to his master. I am Sir is used in bdsm contexts, but I am a sir ‘I am a top / Daddy / dom / master’ is decidedly odd.
Posted in Address terms, Clothing, Context, Emoji, Figurative language, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Signs and symbols, Slang | Leave a Comment »
Over-sensitive ambiguity alarms
April 17, 2026
As I regularly point out on this blog: if you look for it, ambiguity is everywhere; almost any expression can be understood in multiple ways, especially if you’re willing to entertain preposterous or unlikely ideas. So if you had a device that detects every possible ambiguity, it would be ringing forever and driving everyone crazy.
People typically fail to notice most of the possibilities, and then disregard the unlikely ones they do entertain (there’s evidence that most people hearing the word straw entertain, for a fleeting moment, both the interpretations ‘dried stalk of grain’ and ‘hollow tube for sucking a drink’ — even in The straw was mixed with hay and The straw was fabricated from plastic). So most ambiguity lies beneath the level of consciousness.
But some people have become accustomed to listening to and looking for details of language use — it’s one of the things they do — and so are inclined to have over-sensitive ambiguity alarms. Their ambiguity alarms are as a kind of occupational hazard. I am such a person, by profession. I have had to learn to suppress commentary on much of what I notice, because the details aren’t important for most people, though occasionally I’ll cite something that entertains me.
My friend Tim Evanson is also such a person, and since he’s a prodigious writer on Facebook, we get to see his ambiguity alarm in action. On 4/13, he citex a headline from Crain’s Cleveland Business:
CFO [is] named for Akron’s Trailhead Foundation (call this CCB)
And then quipped:
So, I have an etiquette question: Do we refer to her as “Ms. Trailhead”? Or as “Ms. Akron Trailhead”?
Posted in Ambiguity, Extraction, Lexical semantics, Modification, Pragmatics, Syntax | 3 Comments »
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 »
Checking out
March 6, 2026
A standard notice from the Instacart home-delivery service about a grocery order in progress from the Safeway supermarket:
You’ve still got time to shop
Add items until your shopper checks out
The intent is to convey the oldest intransitive phrasal verb check out: you can add items until your shopper has completed their search for items, informed the service of this, and left the store — 1b in the OED list below. But there are three other readings for check out, and the one that came to my twisted mind first was 4c ‘to die’. Evoking images of the fatal grocery order, which will never get delivered because the shopper dropped dead. (Presumably, the 4c reading had recently come by me in some other context, so it was somehow salient to me; my imagination is not normally so dark.)
Posted in Ambiguity, Context, Intention, Lexical semantics, Pragmatics, Salience | 4 Comments »
At the zeugmoid laundry
December 3, 2025
A tv commercial for the laundry detergent Tide, heard this morning:
If it’s got to be clean, then it’s got to be Tide [1]
(with the deontic modal of obligation have got to, roughly ‘must’). At this point, I’ll simplify the example somewhat by using the one-word variant have to rather than have got to:
If it has to be clean, then it has to be Tide [2]
[1] and [2] catch your attention because they’re somehow jokey, some kind of play on words. The two parallel underlined stretches are word-for-word identical, but they’re not parallel in meaning, and we expect them to be. This semantic disparity makes [1] and [2] examples of what I’ve called zeugmoids. More on all that to come, but first I want to make the phenomenon clearer.
Posted in Context, Figures of speech, Humor, Modality, Pragmatics, Salience, Zeugma | Leave a Comment »
By their remnants you shall know them
November 29, 2025
It’s penultimate November and the day after Black Friday, and the leftovers from Thanksgiving — my leftovers, being quirkily Korean, are surely not much like yours, but I have them and they are wonderful — will live again in other meals for several more days. And familiar old tv shows will be re-run as a background of pleasant memories.
Today’s re-runs are from the early days of the American police-procedural tv series NCIS. This morning, in the S4 E1 program “Shalom” (from 9/19/06), came a moment described in the episode summary as:
Tony remarks that Sacks is a self-centered, egotistical jackhole
You don’t need to know who Tony and Sacks are, because my interest in the summary is entirely in its notable final word, boldfaced above. A way of calling someone a jackass and an asshole without using a dirty word. The ass is silent. Twice. Only the respectable remnants of the insults are left over.
Now, jackhole isn’t a fresh discovery, even on this blog — though 2006 is 10 years earlier than the cite that set off an earlier posting of mine, “jockhole”, from 9/28/16 (which makes today’s posting “jockhole 2”). Return with me now to that posting.
Posted in Holidays, Insults, Lexicography, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
Quiet Piggy
November 23, 2025
11 … 2 … 3 it’s Fibonacci day today; the omens foretell 5 in your future, and then 8, and then 13, and then 21, leaping upward in ever-greater jumps, in an elegant spiral of numbers (I used to be a mathematician, and still have a license to chatter enthusiastically about numbers and abstract patterns). This is today’s moment of wonder and delight, the only protection I can offer against what comes next.
A moral monster of great power, dripping corruption and careening into dementia, is the stuff of unbearable nightmare; we are all living in it. Even worse: behind this demonic figure stand cool-headed engineers of death and dominion. But today I talk about the figurehead of their plots, Our Overlord Grabpussy. In two of his recent forays with the press, which I report on here from a New York Times story of 11/18 by Michael M. Grynbaum (which I believe to be the most accurate and detailed account of these two episodes — which I’ll call Saudi and Pedo); the NYT is behind a paywall for me, but three friends managed to get copies of the text for me.
Posted in Events and occasions, Insults, Language and politics, Language in social life, Mathematics, Monsters, Morality, Music, Public and private | 2 Comments »
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 »
Revolt against the bad guys
October 15, 2025
From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook on 10/5, passing on material from Tony Michaels’s Facebook page (“The Tony Michaels Podcast: Considered ‘The Rush Limbaugh of the Left’”), also from 10/5:
A Tony Michaels fabrication (see below)
Posted in History, Language and politics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Usage | Leave a Comment »
From the annals of NAA
October 15, 2025
The most recent Stephan Pastis Pearls Before Swine strip:
A classic NAA (non-apology apology): if you take offence, it’s your problem (in the strip: I’m sorry you were offended; ramped up: I’m sorry you’re an oversensitive ninny) (see Edwin L. Battistella’s Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology (Oxford, 2014))
From Wikipedia:
A non-apology apology, sometimes called a backhanded apology, empty apology, nonpology, or fauxpology, is a statement in the form of an apology that does not express remorse for what was done or said, or assigns fault to those ostensibly receiving the apology. It is common in politics and public relations.
Posted in Ambiguity, Apologies, Insults, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »