Context – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Context’ 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 »
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 »
An armed gunman
September 29, 2025
From John McIntyre on Facebook today:
— JM: Today’s Pleonasm Award goes to outlets that referred to Thomas Jacob Sanford, who attacked the Mormon church in Michigan, as an armed gunman.
Posted in Context, Modification, Redundancy, Relativization, Usage advice | Leave a Comment »
The risks of pedantry
September 20, 2025
This Chris Hallbeck cartoon came by me on Facebook this morning — a strip packed with matters of science (paleontology, specifically), lexicography and usage (the senses of the noun dinosaur, and the contexts in which they’re used), and pragmatics (the way in which the noun is used in interactions, especially in language about language; in the enforcement of language norms; and, oh alas, in the relevance of things said to the interests of those participating in the speech context):
A Maximumble cartoon from 5/24/14, whose humor turns crucially on the pragmatic foolishness of the (now deceased) professor (in the face of a ravening monster, he stops to insist, irrelevantly in the context, that his companion must use the proper terminology, while the companion flees to safety); and which is based on the usage of the noun dinosaur — for a member of a clade of prehistoric reptiles bearing the zoological taxonomical label Dinosauria; versus, in non-technical American usage, for any dinosaurid creature, resembling the prototypical dinosaurs (many people have seen a family resemblance)
Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Context, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Relevance, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »
Reading signs
July 27, 2025
Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes With Orange strip of 7/21 presents us with a dog that can read — not just converting text to sound (speaking written or printed matter aloud), but, crucially for the strip, converting text to meaning (‘looking at and comprehending the meaning of written or printed matter by mentally interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed’ (a definition adapted from NOAD)):
(#1) Panel 1: happy dog, in a state of innocence; panel 2, where all the action happens: dog sees sign, recognizes that it is a sign, reads it, understands that the sign says that its reader should beware of some dog in the sign’s surroundings (specifically, in the yard the sign is posted in), and recognizes that it is a dog in that yard, consequently concluding that it is the dog the sign’s reader is supposed to beware of, and unpacks the meaning of imperative beware as a warning, about the potential danger of this dog, therefore concluding that it has a reputation as a dangerous animal; panel 3, dog exhibits ferocity fitting to its reputation, by growling at passers-by
So that is one astoundingly clever dog. with an understanding of English and a ton of culture-specific information (about keeping dogs as pets and confining them in enclosed yards, about issuing warnings, and about the interpretation of material printed on signs, not to mention self-recognition, the knowledge that he is a dog). Why, you might think that dog was human — an American, in fact.
Now, some earlier postings (from 2015 and 2021), and notes from 2018 for one that never got posted, because it had started to branch into an essay on everything there is to say about signage– so here you’ll get the notes.
Posted in Context, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Reading, Signage, Sociocultural conventions, Speech acts, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
Nutritional mishearing
May 28, 2025
I posted this query on Facebook yesterday:
— AZ: I’ve been regularly getting a tv spot ad for the Boost Max nutritional drink , ‘Here’s to Now: Boost Max’ (published 8/13/24), in which a young Black man says what I hear as “Here’s to bean meat soup every Thursday” (which puzzles me). Can anyone correct — or confirm — my impression?
You can view the ad, from ispot.tv, here.
Crucially, I failed to take into account the context the speaker is in; I really should know better.
Posted in Context, Language and food, Language of advertising, Mishearings | Leave a Comment »
Misleading
March 29, 2025
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 only dodging questions and not recalling stuff but also framing answers so that they were (arguably) accurate, but only with the wording understood in a particular technical way. So that they said there were no war plans — because the plans were, technically, attack plans, not war plans. And that there was no classified intelligence — because the classified information was, technically, plans, not intelligence.
It reminded me of a ritual performed by a Muslim friend at a wonderful dinner at Ann and Bonnie’s in Princeton some 65 years ago (Eqbal and Ann are long dead, but Bonnie in Colorado and I in California squeak by), during which glasses of excellent wine were poured. Eqbal took a napkin, dipped a finger in his wine and flicked a drop of wine onto the napkin, then raised his glass and led a toast to Ann. A while later, we asked him what the flicking was about.
“Oh”, he explained, “the Qur’an teaches us: Thou shalt not drink one drop of wine. I was merely obeying the injunction”.
Posted in Ambiguity, Context, Pragmatics, Semantics | 3 Comments »
Hooray for constructions, positive licensing, and GKP
January 30, 2025
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 Paris Cité) & Peter W. Culicover (Ohio State Univ. & Univ. of Washington), “Lexical _be_“, Journal of Linguistics (2025), 1-24 — truly, hot off the press — which argues, in elegant detail, for a constructional approach to syntactic description, involving the positive licensing of constructions (rather than (negative) constraints on syntactic structures), and also honors Geoffrey K. Pullum (Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh).
So, yes, a fair amount of technical stuff, showing a bit of how (some) linguists approach the description of the syntax of one language and how they dispute with one another over the form of such descriptions. (I’m mostly just an observer here, but you should know that everyone I just mentioned — Michaelis, Miller, Culicover, Pullum — has been a departmental colleague or co-author of mine, so I have to be seen as a participant-observer, as we say in sociolinguistics.)
Posted in Compositional semantics, Constructions, Context, Linguists, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax | 1 Comment »
Alaskan prime
January 1, 2025
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month January and the year 2025
From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday. One fact that you need to know about CW is that she lives in Fairbanks AK (further facts, about CW and about Alaska, will become relevant as we go on):
Soft-spoken barista in a medium-loud café, as heard by me: … and would you like salmon on top of your cappuccino?
The barista said cinnamon, CW heard salmon. Phonologically similar, but from two different conceptual worlds. Why would CW even have entertained the possibility that the barista was offering salmon?
Posted in Context, Errors, Holidays, Mishearings, Misreadings, Perception, Psycholinguistics, Salience | Leave a Comment »