Today’s Calvin and Hobbes:

Calvin in one of his roles, as a 6-year-old boy in love with the clash of titans and destruction on a massive scale (he also has his moments of knowledge and opinion beyond his years, about art, for instance), and Hobbes in one of his roles, as an affectionate older-brother figure (he also has his moments as a tiger with tigerish instincts and as a playmate for Calvin). But what is Hobbes’s gently mocking speech act here.

Not irony or sarcasm: Hobbes isn’t saying something he believes to be false. But he is (gently) critiquing Calvin’s point of view, finding it to be deficient. Not stupid, exactly, but limited in assessing the film (something on the order of Gojira / Godzilla vs. Roldan or Mothra) only for its clash/crash value — like satire, but gentler. People do say that foreign film is inaccessible, but Calvin finds this one accessible, because it provides not much beyond clashes and crashes.

(Talk of sexual bodyparts and sexual acts, but with symbols rather than pictures of carnal reality.)

From the NYT‘s Fashion & Style section on the 14th, “Gaymoji: A New Language for That Search” by Guy Trebay, with the hot gay news from West Hollywood CA:

You don’t need a degree in semiotics to read meaning into an eggplant balanced on a ruler or peach with an old-fashioned telephone receiver on top. That the former is the universally recognized internet symbol for a large male member and the latter visual shorthand for a booty call is something most any 16-year-old could all too readily explain. [Maybe most any 16-year-old, but not a lot of older people; see below.]

As with most else in our culture, demographics define the future, particularly those describing an age cohort born with a smartphone in hand. That, at least, is the calculation being made by Grindr, the successful gay meeting app with ambitions to overhaul itself as an internet commons for a generation of young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their pals.

And so, starting this week, Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji — 500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.

One of the new emoji,  an image of semen / ejaculăte — jizz, spooge, cum, cream, spunk, etc.:

(#1)

Each emoji is a pictographic symbol, with a conventional name — usually, a description of the thing depicted — and a physical form (with a corresponding Unicode coding). I don’t know the names for Grindr’s gaymoji, but earlier emoji (released over a number of years) have names and forms collected in inventories you can find on-line. The names and forms don’t tell you, however, how the symbols are used to convey meaning. There are widely agreed-on meanings for some, but there are alternative forms for some uses, and alternative uses for some forms, considerable variation in local usage, and often creative deployments of emoji among small groups, and these usages are constantly in flux. You can think of the sets of emoji as like sets of slang vocabulary.

For sexting purposes, various emoji with relatively literal uses have become widespread conventional symbols for bodyparts and acts. For some time, the Eggplant emoji has been the conventional penis symbol, although recently it’s been challenged by two other emoji, Banana and Hot Dog. We’ll see plenty of Eggplants below, but here are the other two:

(#2)

(#3)

Then, there’s the Peach emoji, usually representing a butt or bottom (either buttocks or anus), but also sometimes used as a vaginal symbol, where it’s now in competition with the Taco emoji:

(#4)

Peaches are to come.

Specifically for the anus, there’s the Doughnut (or more outrageously, the Chocolate Doughnut) and the OK Symbol. For the testicles, Grapes. And for the breasts, Cherries. (There are other alternatives.)

The full range of penis emoji covers pretty much everything phallic, in addition to  eggplant/aubergine, banana, and hot dog: corncob, burrito, baby bottle, rocket, lipstick, unicorn, rooster (that is, cock; but the rooster is also used as a wake-up call), electric plug (can also convey ‘hook-up’), snake, mushroom, cactus, lollipop, joystick, elephant (can also convey ‘you’re not saying something that needs to be said’), gun (can also convey ‘insults fired’), soft ice cream, dagger, chili pepper, cricket bat, and field hockey stick. Three of my favorites from this set, Baby Bottle, Electric Plug, and Elephant:

(#5)

(#6)

(#7)

Back to the NYT story:

“Almost 20 percent of all Grindr messages” already use emoji, its creative director, Landis Smithers, said. “There’s this shift going on culturally and we need to follow the users where they’re taking us.”

That is, toward a visual language of rainbow unicorns, bears, otters and handcuffs — to cite some of the images available in the first set of 100 free Gaymoji symbols. An additional 400 are there for the unlocking by those willing to pay $3.99 to own digital icons arranged in categories like Mood, Objects, Body, and Dating and Sex.

The company’s founder, Joel Simkhai, said that in his own communications on Grindr he had often felt the need for emoji that were not previously available.

“Partly, this project started because the current set of emojis set by some international board were limited and not evolving fast enough for us,” said Mr. Simkhai, who in certain ways fits the stereotype of a gay man in West Hollywood: a lithe, gym-fit, hairless nonsmoker who enjoys dancing at gay circuit parties. “If I wanted to say something about going dancing, I would always have to use the red-dress dancing woman. I thought, ‘Why isn’t there a guy dancing?’ It was weird to me that I always had to send that woman in the red dress.”

Among the pitfalls Grindr faces by introducing a set of icons to represent a group no longer easily defined is that by replacing one set of hoary stereotypes, it may be introducing others just as clunky and unfortunate.

“One problem is, you have this common language that’s not being organically created by marginalized people,” as were secret hankie or hatband codes once used to signal identity in the era of the closet, said Doug Meyer, an assistant professor in the department of women, gender and sexuality at the University of Virginia. “The corporate element is a new part of this. Having a common corporate language created to benefit a business ends up excluding a lot of people and creating very particular and normative ways of thinking about sex.”

The point is not altogether lost on Mr. Simkhai, who noted that at a recent birthday celebrated just before he inaugurated the Gaymoji, he was given the bad news by colleagues that, at 40, he might have aged out of his own app.

As if to emphasize that assertion, a reporter combing through the new set of Gaymoji in search of something that would symbolize a person of Mr. Simkhai’s vintage could find only one.

It was an image of a gray-haired daddy holding aloft a credit card.

Ah yes, Grindr’s users tend very strongly to the young and fit, most of whom believe themselves to be butch, so the new gaymoji have little place for older men, bulkier men who don’t identify as bears, or fems. As far as I can tell, the only Grindr gaymoji for the extravagant amongst us is the Kiki character, seen here in a collection of new emoji:

(#8)

Row 1, emoji 3. From Wikipedia:

A “kiki” (alternately kiking or a ki) is a term which grew out of Queer Black /Latino social culture – loosely defined as an expression of laughter or onomatopoeia for laughing, which extended to mean a gathering of friends for the purpose of gossiping and chit-chat, and later made more widely known in the song “Let’s Have a Kiki” by the Scissor Sisters. [2012] [Scissor Sisters videos can be viewed here and here]

The Kiki world is extravagantly gay, also full of drag displays and general genderfuck. But the emoji that you’d expect to be used by guys who want to convey that they are noticeably gay — the Fire emoji, a picture of a flame, used for things that are “hot” in any of a number of senses

(#9)

— has sometimes been pressed into service to convey ‘flamer, flaming faggot, fem’, though (so far as I can tell) only in a negative way, to convey rejection (as in the old sex ad abbreviation NFF ‘no fats or fems’), with a red diagonal or cross over the flame, or in combination with a rejection emoji, Restriction or Cross Mark:

(#10)

(#11)

Row 1, emoji 4 in #8 has the Peach + Telephone combination mentioned in the NYT piece, conveying ‘booty call’. And in row 1, emoji 2, Banana + Hammock, referring to a men’s garment that cradles the man’s junk as in a sling, pushing it forward to show it off — as in a classic Speedo, so is often used to convey “Speedo swimsuit’. And in row 1, emoji 5, (Rainbow) Unicorn Head, which could be treating the unicorn merely as a magical gay creature; or could convey horniness (with the unicorn serving as a phallic symbol); or, remarkably, signify a bisexual woman available for three-way sex with a couple (why a unicorn? you ask — because such women are as rare as unicorns, to the point of non-existence).

The last two emoji in row 2 are clever ways of conveying ‘bottom’ (receptive) vs. ‘top’ (insertive) roles in anal sex, via a guy in the bottom vs.top bunk of a bunk bed.  In older systems of emoji, this “flagging” of bottom vs. top roles (managed in hanky and armband codes by displaying colors on the right vs. left side of the body) was achieved by down vs. up symbols: a down arrow or finger pointing down vs. an up arrow or finger pointing up (unfortunately the arrows can also be used to convey disapproval vs. approval or ‘no’ vs.’yes’).

Another display of Grindr gaymoji:

(#12)

Among other things, lots of eggplants and peaches. Also, in row 1, emoji 3, two guys in a men’s room stall, signifying tearoom / t-room sex. Meanwhile in row 3, Egglant + Ring used to convey ‘cockring’, Eggplant cock with a Prince Albert piercing, and Eggplant + Knife and Fork to convey ‘eat cock’.

Somewhat older intriguing emoji include Wind-Blowing Face:

(#13)

and Cheese Wedge:

(#14)

#13 conveys oral sex. #14 is sometimes described as a picture of a “hunk of cheese”, so that it could in principle convey ‘hunky man’ (the Grindr gaymoji include much more direct representations of such guys), but I don’t know if it’s been used that way.

Two gaps: hardly any semantics, hardly any syntax. The ordinary presentations of emoji for sexting give the visual forms and their names (or a description of the pictographs), but are remarkably coy about assigning meanings to them for use. This is like a slang lexicon without definitions. I’m not on Grindr — I don’t think I could get away with being a participant-observer (as I have been in looking at a number of other sexual practices of gay men), nor do I think it would be ethical for me to pretend to be guy looking for hook-ups on Grindr, in order to collect a corpus of emoji as used in actual interactions — so what I can glean about meaning in use is second-hand and imperfect (and mostly sanitized for presentation in newspapers, magazines, and blogs). It is clear that, as with slang lexical items, there’s a tremendous amount of variation here, and that the ways people use the emoji are enormously context-dependent. But I don’t have a grip on the variables, so I can only make some suggestive observations.

There’s an instructive comparison here to another type of system of visual forms with assigned names (and descriptions of the forms), but with what amounts to a semantics for the individual forms, namely phonetic symbols in various schemes of transcription. Pullum & Ladusaw’s Phonetic Symbol Guide (2nd ed., Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996) is an inventory of visual forms, each given a name and a description of its shape — but along with a description of the range of sounds the symbol refers to. Here’s one entry:

(#15)

It gets a name, we get the picture of its shape (and there’s a Unicode coding for the shape) — but we also get a semantics for the symbol (expressed in the technical vocabulary of articulatory phonetics.

For some sexting emoji, we get all of this. For instance, we get the name Eggplant and a picture of its shape (and there’s a Unicode coding for the shape) — and we also get a (rough and skeletal) semantics for the symbol, in an English gloss: ‘penis’. But the semantics is grossly impoverished: any use of the Eggplant emoji doesn’t just refer to a penis, it performs some speech act in which a penis plays a central role: in particular, the user is saying that he loves penises, or that he loves particular kinds of penises (uncut ones, or big ones, etc.), or that he’s offering his penis for sex, or that he’s looking for a penis to enjoy in sex, or that he wants to be gangbanged, or whatever.  To use the Eggplant successfully, you either need more material in your sext, or you need to believe that the person you’re sexting can supply the content of such material from context.

Somewhere in all of this, you need more than just a big bag of emoji, with their referents, floating in space: you need a pragmatics, and you probably need some syntax to organize the emoji into coherent larger units. There are useful emoji for this — for instance, the rejection emoji above, and emoji like Binoculars, conveying ‘looking for’:

(#16)

With some ingenuity, you can slap emoji together to get your hook-up message across. Your task is much like that of  speakers of mutually unintelligible languages who come into contact in a trading context; they come to share at least minimal lexical resources, and have to slap these words together into longer chunks, which (with the aid of gesture and facial expression) they can then use to get simple messages across. The process involves a lot of variability and indeterminacy, though the system can evolve to greater conventionalization and fixity — can move towards something more like an actual language, rather than an improvisational scheme for achieving simple goals.

Communicating via emoji (in sexting or for any other purpose) is different from communicating in a trade jargon context. Emoji texters share a lot of cultural knowledge; if they need to, they can fall back on regular texting in a language they share, or mix emoji and text (for a lot of texters, emoji serve mostly as a commentary on text or an expressive counterpart to it, much like prosody, gesture, and facial expression in speech); they will tend to treat emoji as an arena for playfulness, expressivity, and creativity; and they will see emoji as a medium for achieving great brevity and immediacy.

Today’s Zippy:

(#1)

One in a long series of Zippy strips about Tod Browning’s film Freaks, the characters in it, and the actors who played them (only some of them posted about here). Also one in a long series of strips referring to the Magrittean disavowal, a contradiction between text and image: in this case, the title of this comic strip, This is not a comic strip.

One more Magrittean disavowel (MD), sort of. This story begins with this Facebook query two days ago from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky:

I need a three word oath. The instructions are: “[K]eep in mind, that it should be action oriented, use short syllables and leave out punctuation and ampersands”

A cascade of suggestions followed: good advice, wonderful playfulness, catchphrases and quotations, unusable obscenities, the whole gamut. My own contribution was in the form of a MD — Not an oath, understood as an abbreviated version of This sentence is not an oath.

Unlike the title of the comic strip in #1, or the inscription Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’ in Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images — both involving a contradiction between text and image, the text —  the sentence This sentence is not an oath is self-referential (the sentence is about itself).

Now, self-referential sentences can simply be true or false. This sentence is six words long is true, This sentence is five words long is false. This sentence is not an oath is true; it has a surprising tinge to it, but it’s not literally paradoxical. This sentence is false, on the other hand, is genuinely paradoxical: if it’s true, it’s false, and if it’s false, it’s true.

MDs nevertheless have the flavor of paradox, arising (a) from the fact that the text is attached to the image, and consequently feels like part of it, and (b) from the slipperiness of the demonstrative this, which can point to various parts of the context of utterance.

Take the strip in #1 and its title, which contains the demonstrative this. If the this is understood as referring only to the title text, then the (self-referential) title sentence is true: it’s not a comic strip. If the this is understood as referring to the strip the title is attached to, then the (other-referential) title sentence is false: that referent is indeed a comic strip.

If the title is understood to be part of a complex entity (as Ceci ne pas une pipe is part of Magritte’s painting) and the this is understood as referring to this complex entity, then the (other-referential) title sentence would appear to be true again: the complex entity is not a comic strip, though it has a comic strip as one of its two parts. But the classification of the complex entity could be argued; in other circumstances, we’re comfortable posting entities of category X with entities of category X as proper parts. If we take that position in this case, then the title sentence is false again.

So: no self-contradiction, but plenty of uneasy bafflement.

At the end of this posting, I’ll append a list of MD postings on this blog. Now on to other topics that have come up above: nominations of three-word oaths; the notion of an oath; Oath Inc.; the song and movie Three Little Words; some other, much racier, candidates for three-word oath status.

Some nominations of three-word oaths. A great many of the expressions suggested as oaths are conventionized, formulaic language of various types: quotations, catchphrases, proverbs, and the like. And most of these are imperatives (a very small sampling of the suggestions):

Take the cannoli, Duck and cover, Abandon all hope, Omit needless words

or are understood as imperative in force (though not in form):

To the Batcave!, This side up, When in Rome [with do as the Romans do truncated]

or implicate an instruction, advice, or command:

Resistance is futile [a declarative, implicating Do not resist]

A few suggestions are imperatives, but not formulaic:

Leave me alone, Just restart it

And a very few aren’t imperative in form or intent:

[declarative] Veni vidi vici

Some other non-imperative possibilities, not (yet) in Elizabeth’s corpus:

God will provide, You never know, Who can tell, I love you, Haste makes waste, Bros before hos, E pluribus unum, Ladies and gentlemen, Bacon and eggs, Words and music, Now or never, Primus inter pares, Everything in moderation

A few of the suggested oaths are “foul oaths”, exclamatory expressions that are obscene or profane, for instance:

Fuck this shit!

What is an oath? From NOAD2 for the noun oath:

1 a solemn promise, often invoking a divine witness, regarding one’s future action or behavior: they took an oath of allegiance to the king; a sworn declaration that one will tell the truth, especially in a court of law. 2 a profane or offensive expression used to express anger or other strong emotions.

The main part of sense 1 is the relevant one here. The point about oaths is that they’re a kind of promise: they are commitments on the part of the speaker to engage in future action or behavior, and thus contrast sharply with advice, instructions, and commands, all suggesting or imposing commitments on the part of the addressee(s) to engage in future action or behavior. Three-word oaths in this sense are not very numerous:

I will serve, It’s my job [implicating and I will do it]

Three-word oaths in the ‘sworn declaration’ sense are equally rare:

I do swear, On/Upon my word

At this point, we should ask where the request for oaths ultimately comes from, and what purpose it’s intended to serve. The first question is easy: Oath Inc. The second is more puzzling, but I’d guess that the company is casting about for a slogan, a really pithy one, like

Do you Yahoo!?, Fair and balanced, Don’t be evil, Where’s the beef?, Snap crackle pop, Just do it, Stronger than dirt, Wintergreen for President, Be what’s next, Kills bugs dead, I like Ike, No more tears, Finger lickin’ good, Taste the rainbow, Imagination at work, Mmm Mmm good

Oath Inc. From Wikipedia:

Oath Inc. (also officially dubbed Verizon Digital Network) is a subsidiary of Verizon Communications’ Media and Telematics division, that will serve as the parent company of its content sub-divisions AOL and Yahoo!.

… AOL and Yahoo will maintain their respective brands following the completion of the transaction.

The Oath name is meant to convey the parent company’s commitment to the media business.

All this is relevant because Elizabeth, who sent out the original request for three-word oaths, works for Yahoo!

So I’m guessing that the new company wants three-word slogans that express commitment to the media business. Asking for punchy three-word oaths seems to net you a lot of imperatives about all manner of things not especially connected to the media business — but it’s kind of fun.

(Apparently, there’s nothing we can do about the new company’s name; it is what it is. But it doesn’t conjure up much in the way of imagery, and I know from experience that unless you say the name very slowly and clearly, people are inclined to think you’ve said the company’s named Oaf.

Well, I don’t know what I’d do onomastically with a conglomerate of Verizon, Yahoo!, and AOL, so maybe I should hold my tongue.)

Three Little Words, the song and the movie. The three-word requirement led me immediately, of course, to the song and the movie that it gave its name to:

On the song, from Wikipedia:

“Three Little Words” is a popular song with music by Harry Ruby and lyrics by Bert Kalmar, published in 1930.

The Rhythm Boys (including Bing Crosby), accompanied by the Duke Ellington orchestra, recorded it on August 26, 1930 and it enjoyed great success. Their version was used in the 1930 Amos ‘n’ Andy film Check and Double Check, with orchestra members miming to it. The film was co-written by Kalmar and Ruby along with J. Walter Ruben. The song also figured prominently in the film Three Little Words, a 1950 biopic about Kalmar and Ruby.

You can listen to the Ellington/Crosby recording here. The crucial lines:

Three little words
Eight little letters
Which simply mean I love you

On the movie, from Wikipedia:

(#2)

Three Little Words is a 1950 American musical film biography of the Tin Pan Alley songwriting partnership of Kalmar and Ruby and stars Fred Astaire as lyricist Bert Kalmar, Red Skelton as composer Harry Ruby, along with Vera-Ellen and Arlene Dahl as their wives, with Debbie Reynolds in a small but notable role as singer Helen Kane.

… In this closing scene, Astaire and Skelton perform a medley of most of the songs featured in the film, ending with “Three Little Words” – Kalmar having finally found a suitable lyric for Ruby’s melody, a running gag throughout most of the film.

(A tremendously enjoyable musical.)

Three-word sex talk. Long ago, my recollections of the movie (which I saw as a child, when it came out) combined with my (later) interests in gay porn and in language to inspire me to collect a small inventory of three-word formulaic expressions in mansex talk: Suck my cock, Fuck me harder, Fill me up, Eat my ass, etc. (plus some that are two-word imperatives plus an address term: Eat dick, faggot! and the like). The idea was that these are the three little words that would move a queer.

I seem to have lost the file, but you surely get the idea. Mostly punchy imperatives, so they’d fit in with the expressions people have been offering to Elizabeth, though Oath Inc. would be appalled at them as slogans. Well, how about Eat our words!?

Inventory of MD postings. On this blog, about the Magrittean disavowal:

on 7/19/12, “Magritte”

on 10/8/13, “Speech balloons in Dingburg”

on 12/13/13, “Friday cartoons”

on 3/11/15, “Magritte goes on”

on 3/29/15, “This is not a Ding Dong”

on 7/1/16, “Big and cool and tangentially surreal”

on 2/15/17, “The news for penguins, and, oh yes, penises”

on 2/19/17, “Art of the penis”

on 2/27/17, “Two Ztoons on language use”

on 6/3/17, “This is not a president”

Aggressive days in the men’s underwear world, in my adaptation of a Daily Jocks ad from the 11th. There will be hot men in their underwear, suggestive captions, and a certain amount of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; use your judgment.

OR

  (#1)

Well, now they often call him Bluto
But his real name is Dickie Steele

 (#2)

OR ELSE:

 (#3)

His balls are fuckin’ awesome
But nothing like his guy Genteel’s:

(#4)

Steele remembers Speedo,
A guy who don’t never take it slow:

 (#5)

Well, now, some may call on Joe:

 (#6)

And some may call on Moe:

 (#7)

But the twins can’t never beat Bluto
To put two lips together and blow.

……………………………………………………………………………………….

Ingredients. The main image is this DJ ad offer:

(#8)

This is the offer on the DJ site:

The DailyJocks Monthly Underwear Club is the best way to discover men’s underwear. Every month, we choose from a curated selection of underwear from international designer brands and send you a pair in your size and preferred style. It’s like a monthly surprise of the best underwear around.

It’s $21.95 a month after the come-on offer.

In (#1), the offer line has has been removed from #8, and the simple juxtaposition of clauses —

Join our underwear club
We’ll send you designer underwear every month

— (intended to convey a promise) has been turned into a (threatening) coordination with or:

Join our underwear club
Or we’ll send you designer underwear every month

After #1 comes a version of the I Want You Uncle Sam poster from World Wars I and II, an I Want You to Obey version from the Federal Trade Commission. And then in #3 a Popeye cartoon with Popeye’s nemesis Bluto pounding Popeye.

There follow four additional intense underwear images from the DJ offer site (#4 – #7). It’s all drenched in sex.

The text for all of this is adapted from the lyrics of the 1955 doo-wop hit “Speedoo” (in the original spelling) / “Speedo” (in most later references). The relevant lyrics:

Well, now, they often call me Speedo
But my real name is Mister Earl
… Well, now, some may call me Joe
Some may call me Moe
Just remember Speedo
He don’t never take it slow

You can listen to the original Cadillacs recording here.

[Digression: the lyrics of the original have been misunderstood in an enormous number of ways, including the one that I firmly believed in for years: “… they up and call me Speedo”, with the colloquial Up And VP construction. I still think that’s a more interesting line than “… they often call me Speedo”.]

From Wikipedia:

The Cadillacs were an American rock and roll and doo-wop group from Harlem, New York, active from 1953 to 1962. The group was noted for their 1955 hit “Speedoo”, written by Esther Navarro, which was instrumental in attracting white audiences to black rock and roll performers.

… Earl “Speedo” Carroll [the lead singer, whose nickname gave the title to the song] died on November 25, 2012.

Parataxis, hypotaxis, conditionals, promises, and threats. We start with Offer-Jux (above), a simple juxtaposition of two clauses, the first (join our underwear club) a subjectless BSE-form VP, the second (we’ll send you designer underwear every month) a full finite clause. Your task as reader or hearer is to construct a plausible connection between these two, to make this two-clause text coherent.

This is the general task for making sense out of text, but there are shortcuts that are conventionalized to one degree or another, and one of these is for pairs of the form above, which are more or less automatically understood as conveying a conditional:

Talk to me that way again, I’ll kiss you conveying ‘If you talk to me that way again, I’ll kiss you’

(which can be taken as a warning or threat, or as an offer or promise). In any case, a paratactic form conveying a relationship that would ordinarily be conveyed by hypotactic syntax.

In #8, the two clauses are juxtaposed on separate lines, without punctuation (as is customary in advertising copy), leading readers to take the first clause to be not merely a subjectless BSE-form VP, but in fact an imperative, so that #8 conveys both an instruction or injunction (to join the underwear club) and a conditional, that is:

Join our underwear club / We’ll send you designer underwear every month conveying ‘You should join our underwear club, and if you join, we’ll send you designer underwear every month’

Turn now to conditionals. In addition to a particular relationship between situations, conditionals can also convey either a warning or threat or an offer or promise. The same is true of coordination with and, as in

Talk to me that way again, and I’ll kiss you. (It all depends of how the addressee feels about the prospect of being kissed.)

Join our underwear club, and we’ll send you designer underwear every month.

The second of these would ordinarily be understood as an offer, on the plausible assumption that it’s directed at an audience that would welcome getting designer underwear every month; but if this assumption is wrong, then it sounds like a threat.

The corresponding coordinations with or usually convey a threat or warning

Join our underwear club, or we’ll send you designer underwear every month conveying ‘If you don’t join our underwear club, we’ll send you designer underwear every month (and I believe you wouldn’t like that)’

which is what I was playing with in #1.

(Note: my observations about the examples in this section are not original, but have been framed here so as to play down complexities in the technical literature.)

Two recent One Big Happy strips:

(#1) Can you say … “cat”… um, “sheepshank”?

The Mister Rogers trope Can you say X? ‘Say X’ (in a pedagogical tone); idiomatic go/get (all) X on Y

(#2) Can you spell “cat”?

Spanish sí ‘yes’ vs. English /si/ C (the letter of the alphabet); linguistic and natural mean; and more.

Can you say sheepshank? In #1, it’s indirect speech acts time: questions about ability to do something can function as suggestions, requests, or instructions to do it, as here. The kids’ grandfather is gently suggesting that they pronounce the unfamiliar word, as a way of making it familiar. But even if he’s avoided teachery prosody, the question is likely to have a patronizing classroom smell about it — and the kids pick up on that.

And they attribute the pedagogical “Can you say …?” figure to the PBS children’s tv show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

(#3) Fred Rogers, cardigan and all

But the TV Tropes site absolves Fred Rogers of responsibility for the formula:

For some reason, Mister Rogers is famous for saying, “Can you say ____?” The line appears in several parodies but aside from asking his viewers to say “pentagon” in an early episode, he almost never said it on the show, and in fact thought the phrase would be an insult to the intelligence of even his very young audience.

What we all remember is in fact not Mister Rogers but his parody counterpart Mister Robinson, the manic foul-mouthed homey played by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live, who was fond of introducing florid slurs via the Can you say …? formula:

(#4) S7 E3 scum bucket

Ohhhh, look! An eviction notice! Brought by Mr. Landlord! [he slams his door] Can you say “Scumbucket”? THat’s our special word for today, boys and girls! [he points out the word on his easel] Do you know any scumbuckets? I bet you do! (SNL transcript)

From the previous season (S6 E11), bitch:

Hi, boys and girls! I’m all alone today. But that don’t mean you can stay too long. My wife will be home from work soon. Can you say “BITCH”? I’m sure you can. That’s our special word today, you know. Come see. [he steps over to an easel with the word “BITCH” on it] It’s a very special word

There were more.

The idiom go/get (all) X on Y. In the last panel of #1, Joe produces an instance of this little idiom family, in which X is a predicative expression denoting a behavioral state — an adjective:

In keeping with the technology-inspired theme, Kim went all futuristic on us at the 2016 Met Gala. (link)

she went all groovy on us (link)

or a nominal:

Remember when State Treasurer John Kennedy went all angry American about the expensive art at the New Charity Hospital. (link)

or, very often, a proper name, as in #1 and here:

Martha Stewart Went All Bill Maher on Us: Got Too Comfortable and Dropped the N-Word (link)

The predicative expression X, which attributes the behavioral state to the referent of the subject of its clause, can be modified by an intensifier (pretty, really, very, totally, etc., including intensifier all). Y, denoting an affected person or persons, seems most often to be 1st person, me or us.

Just the beginnings of a sketch of the idioms, but enough to explicate what Joe (speaking on behalf of himself and his sister) is saying to their grandfather: exhorting him not to become totally like Mister Rogers in his behavior. (No more of this Can you say …? stuff, please.)

(I’m putting aside the nature of sheepshank knots, and also the grandfather’s excuse that drugs must have made him slip into a pedagogical persona.)

Meaning, meaning, meaning. The easy part of #2 is the ambiguity in /si/: Cylene intends to say “yes, yes” in Spanish (sí , sí) — conveying ‘yes, I have some pets’ as an answer to Ruthie’s question “Do you have any pets?” — but Ruthie interprets Cyclene’s /si/ to be the name of the letter C. We then have to guess further at Ruthie’s thought processes as she guesses at Cylene’s.

Cylene, we suppose Ruthie thinks, is groping towards an answer to Ruthie’s question, saying C, C as she struggles to produce a word in reply. What word? The name of a common pet, clearly: we suppose Ruthie assumes that Cylene is behaving cooperatively and is trying to provide an accurate answer to Ruthie’s question (rather than, say, going off on a tangent to report on an idea that’s just popped into her head). Ah, yes, cat. But if Cylene were trying to say cat, she’d be stuttering /k … k …/, so Cylene must (for reasons that are unclear to us, and probably to Ruthie) be trying to spell the answer C A T /si e ti/, and she’s unsure how to proceed past the initial letter C. Remarkable that Cylene doesn’t know how to go on, but there it is.

So Ruthie asks her to go on, a request that baffles Cylene: Ruthie, it appears to Cylene, doesn’t understand /si si/. (Now we’re speculating about Cylene’s thought processes.) Cylene, finding this hard to credit, asks Ruthie if, indeed, she doesn’t know what /si si/ means, and Ruthie then reveals her own interpretation of what’s been going on, by asking Cylene if she doesn’t know how to spell cat (supposing that Cylene might, remarkably, answer that no, she doesn’t).

If we just take Ruthie’s and Cylene’s words at face value, none of what goes on in the strip makes much sense. But if we see that each of the two participants is using what the other says to judge the other’s intentions, things become clearer.

And in fact as witnesses to these exchanges, we ourselves make sense of them by judging the participants’ intentions (as I have just done). We can then appreciate the humor in their mutual misapprehensions.

All of this (tacit) reasoning about intentions needs something to work on: the conventional meanings of lexical items (and syntactic constructions). To which I now turn.

Linguistic mean and natural mean. Two bits from #2:

(C3) Cylene, panel 3: know what [/si si/] means

(R4) Ruthie, panel 4: [/si si/ means] you’re having trouble spelling “cat”

The mean in C3 — as in /si si/ means ‘yes, yes’ — is one kind of linguistic mean; from NOAD2:

verb mean: (of a word [or other expression]) have (something) as its signification in the same language or its equivalent in another language

The mean in R4 — what I’ll call natural mean (echoing Paul Grice) — is not in NOAD2 (though it’s related to one of the senses there): it denotes a relationship between situations somewhat short of ‘be caused by, result from’, that is, roughly,

verb mean: suggest, indicate: Smoke means fire. Your facial expression means that you understand your guilt.

One further wrinkle in R4: the implicit subject of (the implicit verb) mean in R4 denotes a linguistic expression, not a situation, yet the sense of mean there is clearly natural rather than linguistic mean. What we have here is a metonymy in which an expression E conveys ‘someone’s producing (saying, writing, etc.) E’, as in “I am not a crook” was the last straw for me. That is, the expression E evokes a situation, and that allows E to serve, among other things, as the subject of natural mean. In R4, Cylene’s saying /si si/ means — suggests, indicates — to Ruthie that Cylene doesn’t know how to spell cat.

All this sematic / pragmatic calculation — on Ruthie’s, Cylene’s, and our part — takes place in centiseconds (while running in tandem with phonological, morphological, and syntactic processing, not to mention the processing of all sorts of paralinguistic and extralinguistic information), but not necessarily in the way I’ve articulated things above. Still, it’s a remarkable display of cognitive abilities, even if it works very imperfectly and runs aground every so often (as in #2) — but then all it has to do is work well enough most of the time.

The One Big Happy from February 10th:

The sign says (but with reduced and):

SCRATCH AND SNIFF CARDS

Is that to be parsed as conjoined imperatives — you are to scratch and to sniff cards — or as an NP describing some cards — these are cards you can scratch and sniff, cards for scratching and sniffing?

Ruthie takes the sign to have the analysis:

(P1) SCRATCH-v AND SNIFF-v CARDS

but the intended analysis is instead:

(P2) [ SCRATCH-n AND SNIFF-n ] [ CARDS ]

((P1) can be parsed in either of two ways; see below.)

In both P1 and P2, CARDS is to be understood not as referring to any old cards, it doesn’t matter which ones, but as referring to the cards in the context, the cards in the display to which the sign is attached. Ruthie gets things wrong, but not as wrong as she could have: she could have behaved like the joke character in a lab with a developing fire, the person who looks at the sign

IN CASE OF FIRE, BREAK GLASS

on a box enclosing a fire alarm box, a fire hose, or some other object useful in fighting fires, and picks up a beaker in the lab and smashes it, not appreciating that the glass to break is the window in the front of the box the sign is attached to. Context, context, context.

Still, Ruthie understands the sign as having a conjoined imperative, as in (P1). But P1 can be understood in two ways: as

(P1a) SCRATCH-v, AND also SNIFF-v CARDS

(with an intransitive verb as the first conjunct and a transitive verb + direct object as the second); or with a parsing parallel to (P2):

(P1b) [ SCRATCH-v AND also SNIFF-v ] [ CARDS ]

(that is, as conveying ‘scratch the cards and sniff the cards’).

Ruthie, striking out on her own path, goes for (P1a).

There are still further potential ambiguities. A verb that is formally intransitive (lacking a direct object) is typically open to several interpretations: as referring simply to an action (with no understood affected participant, as in Sandy danced) or to an event affecting the referent of the subject, as in Sandy vanished), as referring to an action with an understood indefinite affected participant, as referring to an action with an understood definite affected participant (whose referent is supplied from context), to a reflexive action (as in Sandy washed), or to a reciprocal action (as in Sandy and Chris met). The possibilities are different for different verbs, and there’s significant dialect variation.

Of these choices for the (formally) intransitive verb scratch, Ruthie chooses the reflexive option (she could have made scratching motions in the air, or scratched the side of the display). She scratches herself and sniffs a card from the display.

(There will be talk of men’s bodies, among a number of other things, so you might want to exercise some caution.)

Yesterday was National Underwear Day (utilitarian garments elevated to objects of play, desire, and fashion display), today is Hiroshima Day (remembering the horror of an event of mass destruction, death, and suffering). An uncomfortable, even absurd, juxtaposition, but there is a link in the symbolism of the two occasions. In my comics feed for these occasions: four language-related cartoons on familiar language-related themes, none of them having anything to do with either underwear or nuclear holocaust, probably for good reason.

Cartoons first, then the underwear and atomic bombs.

A Bizarro/Wayno collab. A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), a favorite joke form for the artists:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

stun gun + gun control

The guys could have gone with an underwear-themed POP for yesterday (this is today’s strip; yesterday’s — a street kid explaining tagging to Rembrandt — was about Art rather than Language):

boxer brief encounter, jock strap hanger, dance belt loop, forbidden Fruit of the Loom, tighty Whitey Bulger, Calvin Kleine Nachtmusik, …

A One Big Happy. In which Ruthie, coming across an unfamiliar name in her reading — HBO – does her best to assimilate it to words she knows:

(#2) (Note that OBH HBO is a palindrome.)

A Zits. Another verbal duel between mother and son, this time with indirect speech acts in which the 3rd-person indefinite pronoun someone (in an expression of 1st-person wish,  in the object of I hope) is used to convey a 2nd-person imperative (something in between a request and a command) :

(#3) (until the final panel, when both participants express actual wishes, but still with someone referring to the addressee)

Such uses of 3rd-person indefinites — someone, somebody, generic a person, etc.) can be monitory or celebratory ([with a smile] Someone’s going to get a big surprise tonight!)

A Rhymes With Orange. With a Magic Dog portmanteau:

(#4) the incantation abracadabra + the dog-breed name labrador (retriever)

In my 10/6/14 posting “A dogmanteau”, a texty composition with the complex portmanteau labracadabrador.

And in my 7/9/14 posting “Layered portmanteaus”, a Bizarro with abracadabradoodle, a portmanteau of abracadabra + labradoodle, where labradoodle is a portmanteau (attested) of labrador + poodle.

For National Underwear Day. It’s always underwear day around here, specifically men’s underwear, and specifically underwear for the groin area (rather than the upper body) — that is, underpants (and such related garments as jock straps and dance belts). Here’s a Daily Jocks sale offer on Pump! underwear from October 2017 that I’ve been saving while I contemplate a suitable caption for it:

(#5) Three primary foci of attention: his facial expression; the front presentation of his upper body in the V made by his shoulders down to his inguinal crease; and his genitals in his underwear

(Secondarily: other features of his head, including his hairstyle and his scruffy face; his arms; and his thighs.)

It’s all an erotic display (including his buttocks, which we don’t see in this shot), but the cock in his pants tends to overwhelm the other features –so Iwas considering using a cropped version to caption:

(#6) The face and upper body: how to read it?

I saw sexual interest mingled with indecision, but never settled on a caption that pleased me.

The attention-grabbing draw of human faces is so great that underwear companies usually crop them out; from their point of view, the faces are just a diversion from the parts of the body that will sell underwear, by inviting male viewers to either identify with the stunning model or desire him (or both). Their usual choice of croppings:

(#7) Be me! Do me! Buy me!

Then today, DJ offered this jockstrap for sale:

(#8) [from the ad:] The Garçon Model Camo Collection is your essential arsenal for any good military-theme party or just plain daily-life survival. We like to call it “underwear on a mission.” Ultra soft waistband. Soft, lightweight fabric. Tagless for itch-free comfort.

Oh my, a world where military-theme parties that call for a camo-pattern jockstrap are unremarkable events!

From a GM ad posted about in an earlier posting, “The Sex Games” of 2/8/18:

(#9)

All this to help you celebrate National Underwear Day.

The holocausts. The fire-bombing of Dresden on February 13th-15th, 1945, and then the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (August 6th, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9th). The atomic bombs were named, Little Boy (Hiroshima) and Fat Man (Nagasaki) — both personified, and male.

Further with this thought, in my 5/7/12 posting “Missile phallicity”:

William J. Broad, “North Korea’s Performance Anxiety”, in yesterday’s NYT Sunday Review:

“It’s a boy,” Edward Teller exulted after the world’s first hydrogen bomb exploded in 1952 with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

From the start, the nuclear era seethed with sexual allusions. Military officers joked about the phallic symbolism of their big missiles and warheads — and of emasculating the enemy. “Dr. Strangelove” mocked the idea with big cigars and an excited man [Major T.J. “King” Kong, played by Slim Pickens] riding into the thermonuclear sunset with a bomb tucked between his legs.

Helen Caldicott, the antinuclear activist, argued in the 1980s that male insecurity accounted for the cold war’s perilous spiral of arms. Her book? “Missile Envy.”

But wait, there’s more. There are the photos of the mushroom clouds from the two bombings:

(#10) Hiroshima on the left, Nagasaki on the right

From that time, such mushroom clouds have been folded into the sexual imagery of the atomic age: the bombs as symbolic phalluses, the mushroom clouds as symbolic ejaculations. Nuclear come shots. Shudder.

Underwear and the Bomb don’t seem to have been linked in anti-nuclear protests, despite their calendrical adjacency. Two advocacy signs yet to be linked:

UP WITH UNDERWEAR!

BAN THE BOMB!

What looks to be an excellent report on work in semantics/pragmatics on speech acts, from OUP:

(#1)

Alerted to this by Geoff Nunberg on ADS-L, who provided the following note on his piece:

Includes my paper “The Social Life of Slurs” which found a home at last thanks to Dan Harris and the other editors (an earlier version is still up at the Semantics Archive http://tinyurl.com/y76nckep). The thesis, in a nutshell: “Racists don’t use slurs because they’re derogative; slurs are derogative because they’re the words that racists use.”

(and similarly for other group-directed slurs).

The table of contents:

(#2)

More than this I can’t tell you. I haven’t seen the book, and I probably never will, so long as it sells for $100 (before taxes and shipping). Perhaps if OUP sells enough copies to academic libraries, they will eventually put out a paperback edition that impoverished academic types could afford.

The text for the day is a dialogue posted on Facebook on the 19th by John Beavers (a guitarist who moonlights as a linguistics professor at the University of Texas, Austin), between John’s son Ezra and John’s wife / Ezra’s mother Janice Ta:

Ezra on his 3rd birthday (July 28th)

Ezra: Mommy, do “boy” and “toy” rhyme?

Janice: Yes, they do! You’re very good at rhyming. Do “boy” and “man” rhyme?

Ezra: No. You’re not very good at rhyming.

Ah, a significant ambiguity in the use of interrogative sentences: between information-seeking interrogatives (infoseek questions, I’ll call them), like Ezra’s do “boy” and “toy” rhyme?; and examination interrogatives (test questions, I’ll call them; they’re also known as quiz questions), like Janice’s do “boy” and “man” rhyme?

(These aren’t the only uses of interrogative sentences. There are plenty more, including several types of “rhetorical questions”: (positive assertion) Am I angry? (You bet I am!); (negative assertion) Can you have ice cream for breakfast? (Hell, no!); (assent) Is the Pope Catholic? (= Yes.))

Infoseek questions are the pragmatically prototypical interrogatives, acquired first and statistically dominant in conversation and texts. In its simplest variant, the speaker lacks some piece of information I (or is unsure about it), wants to acquire I, believes the addressee might be able to supply I, and is requesting the addressee to do so. Infoseek questions are a basic tool in coping with ignorance about things in the world; we are all ignorant of a great many things, small children especially so — so once they have the linguistic resources, they ask an enormous number of infoseek questions.

In test questions, the speaker has the relevant knowledge about I and is asking the addressee to perform by displaying the extent of their knowledge. This performance might be intended as part of a learning routine (the assumption being that the addressee should have I and so needs practice and correction), as an evaluation exercise (about the addressee’s knowledge), as part of a competition, whatever.

Infoseek questions can be directed at a wide range of addressees, but test questions are heavily loaded socioculturally: only certain speakers can direct them at only certain addressees, and only in certain contexts. One of the burdens of being a child in our culture is that all sorts of adults subject you to barrages of test questions, to which you are expected to respond cooperatively. (Similarly for people in an assortment of interview circumstances — for jobs, for school admission, to receive awards, in medical evaluations, etc. — where infoseek questions and test questions are likely to be mixed together.) Ezra has (apparently) not yet twigged to this fact: he asks infoseek questions and expects that others are doing the same. So if his mother asks if boy and man rhyme, that must be because she doesn’t know whether they do, which means that there’s a lot about rhyming that she doesn’t know.

Well, … Ezra has been going to day care, and is now in pre-school, so he’s probably been exposed to some test questions already and will now experience a weary ton of them. Maybe he just wasn’t prepared for his mother to slip into this teacher-schoolchild routine. Or he’s a wise and cheeky kid who’s messing with his mother, deliberately undermining the routine. Is that a trusting smile? Or a sly one? (Already at this age my grand-daughter was capable of pointed subversion of such schoolroom routines.)

Note 1. Test questions can range over the full range of interrogative forms. In particular, they can be yes-no questions (like the examples so far), or alternative questions (Was Barack Obama born in Kenya or the United States?), or constituent questions (What is the capital of Nevada? Who was Winston Churchill? When did World War II come to an end? Why is the sky blue?) Learning to cope with test questions involves a great deal of (quite culture-specific) learning about what, precisely, the questions are asking about and what, precisely, would count as an answer.

To appreciate this last point, note that the following is not an acceptable answer to What is the capital of Nevada?:

The capital of Nevada is the seat of government and the administrative center of the state of Nevada.

Nor would this count as an acceptable answer to Who was Winston Churchill?:

Winston Churchill, known as the Cavalier Colonel, was an English soldier, nobleman, historian, and politician who lived from 1620 to 1688.

(A little more on this point below.)

Note 2. There’s a division of imperative sentences that’s parallel to infoseek vs. test questions — in particular, there’s a class of test imperatives, directives to an addressee to perform various acts as a demonstration of the addressee’s knowledge or abilities. Some of the tasks are verbal (List the first eight numbers in the Fibonacci sequence), some not (Do 50 pushups; Draw a penguin), and some both (Take nine heel-to-toe steps along this straight line, keeping your arms to your side and counting each step out loud).

An example, from a version of the U.S. Foreign Service exam (the Foreign Service Officer Test) administered to candidates for the U.S. diplomatic service. This particular task was given to a friend of mine many years ago: List all the countries along the Rhine River, in order, from its source to its outlet in the sea.

Note that verbal test imperatives can be alternatively framed as test questions: What are the first eight numbers in the Fibonacci sequence? etc.

[Digression. From Wikipedia, with the Rhine River information and some indication of why it might be a good task to set for a prospective Foreign Service officer:

The Rhine … is a European river that begins in the Swiss canton of Graubünden in the southeastern Swiss Alps, forms part of the Swiss-Liechtenstein, Swiss-Austrian, Swiss-German and then the Franco-German border, then flows through the German Rhineland and the Netherlands and eventually empties into the North Sea.

… The Rhine and the Danube formed most of the northern inland frontier of the Roman Empire and, since those days, the Rhine has been a vital and navigable waterway carrying trade and goods deep inland. Its importance as a waterway in the Holy Roman Empire is supported by the many castles and fortifications built along it. In the modern era, it has become a symbol of German nationalism.]

Final note on test questions and imperatives, from my 2/27/11 posting “Dubious diagnostics”:

(In an earlier discussion of test questions — “What is this question about?”, on Language Log, here — I started with the question “What color is a banana?” (addressed to a young child) and moved on to “What is the opposite of ___?” and “Which one of these things is not like the others?” and, in comments, “What is the next number in the series ___, ___, ___?” Answering such questions “correctly” involves mustering all sorts of cultural knowledge and also experience with the contexts in which people ask them such questions and the kinds of answers that are expected.)

Notice that the subjects of the similarities test are described as “patients”, so they’re probably used to being asked unaccountable, but somehow important, questions by professionals of various sorts. Still, the experience is rather weird and unnatural, and can be baffling. My man Jacques, during his many years of descent into neurological hell, was generally cooperative, but sometimes bridled at (say) being asked what month it was (“Why do you want to know?”) or being asked to count backwards from 100 by 7s (“Why should I?”), and often performed very badly (well short of his actual abilities) when put on the spot and obliged to reflect on what he was doing.

This photoon passed on to me by Karen Chung on Facebook (I have no idea of its ultimate source):

(#1)

Context, context, context.

The spatial P in can locate a person p in context in (at least) two different ways — either directly and concretely, by locating p‘s body (at the reference time of the larger utterance) as being within some enclosing space (in #1, the hotel lobby); or in a displaced and somewhat more abstract way, by locating p as being within some enclosing space in an auxiliary subworld. In #1, this subworld is the one in which each hotel guest has a specific enclosing space — a hotel room — assigned to them, and in that subworld p in #1 is paired with room r; the result is that “p is in r” can be true (in the room-assignment subworld) and “p has never been in r” can also be true (in the larger world). And

I am in the lobby of the hotel and in Room 666.

can be non-contradictory (even, in the right circumstances, true), but still sound a bit odd (triggering a brief moment of processing difficulty): it’s not a zeugma, since there are two separate occurrences of in, understood somewhat differently, not a single occurrence that has to be understood both ways at once; instead it’s what I’ve called a zeugmoid (see my 11/17/10 posting “Zeugmoids”), close enough to zeugma to give many readers or hearers pause.

Meanwhile, p‘s intention (clear in context) in #1 is to ask about the room-assignment subworld, while the hotel clerk (uncooperatively) responds with an answer about the larger world.

It’s all about pragmatics: context, intentions, cooperativeness in conversation.

Note 1. Photoons. #1 has both the visual and the textual components of a cartoon, and both contribute significantly to its content: the visual component locates the exchange at the front desk of a hotel, and the text in the speech balloons supplies crucial conversational content . What sets it apart from a prototypical cartoon is that the visual component is a photograph rather tha a drawing. From my 8/25/18 posting “But is it a cartoon?”:

It’s a photograph intended as a cartoon, and I say we take it at face value. Maybe call such things — some others have come by on this blog — photoons.

Note 2. Verbal jokes and cartoons.To a considerable extent, verbal jokes and cartoons are interconvertible: the set-up of a joke (“Three nuns come into a bar”) can often be depicted rather than described; and a cartoon can often have its crucial background elements described in words rather than depicted.

So it is with #1, which can be done with text only:

A hotel guest comes up to the desk clerk and says: “Hi, I’ve forgotten what room I’m in.”

The clerk replies: “No problem, Sir. This is called ‘The Lobby’.”

Context, context, context. An old theme here. From my Language Log posting of 5/1/07, “Context, context, context”:

The title of this posting is a favorite saying of my friend Ellen Evans.  It’s scarcely original with her, as you can see by googling on it.  Googling will, in fact, yield “context, context, context” as an explicit instance of the X3 snowclone

… But with Ellen Evans you get more: a CafePress shop, Ellen de Sui Generis, with merchandise featuring characteristic Evansian sayings: Piffle; Er, no; FSVO (an acronym for “for some value of”, and pronounced like “fizzvo”); and of course Context, context, context.  There you will find two items with CCC on them: a classic thong for $7.99 and a mug for $10.99.  The mugs make excellent presents for your friends in semantics/pragmatics and sociolinguistics (or computer science or postmodern criticism or …).  (Disclosure: I have no connection, financial or otherwise, with the shop.  I’m merely a Friend of Ellen, and of Lars Ingebrigtsen, who set the shop up.)

The mug:

(#2)

I have one myself.

Chip Dunham’s Overboard strip from December 28th:

(#1) Captain Crow and his dog Louie

An exercise in both syntax/semantics and semantics/pragmatics: on syntactic constructions and their semantics, and on the indirect conveying of meaning in context.

Above, what will become example (c) in the syntactic discussion:

(c) I don’t think I’ve told you today what a wonderful dog you are

which will lead to a related example, Sir Van Morrison’s song line in (d):

(d) Have I told you lately that I love you?

(Hat tip to Geoff Nathan.)

Warning: even when stripped to the barest of skeletons, what I have to say about syntax, semantics, and pragmatics has an irreducibly technical core. Do not despair. (On the other hand, I have deliberately avoided much technical terminology and virtually all careful conceptual analysis, in favor of merely suggestive exposition, designed to give a feel for the ideas rather than an academically respectable presentation and cutting corners everywhere. Semanticists, forgive me.)

Syntax 1: NEG-Raising with THINK. Some complement-taking verbs of mental action (THINK among them) allow an alternation between occurring with a negative direct object and having the negation “raised” to their own clause:

[with NEG-Raising] I don’t think that’s ethical ≈  [without] I think that’s not ethical

The ≈ sign indicates near-equivalence. (The sentences are certainly not mutually substitutible, without consequences, in all contexts. At the very least, the NEG-Raised examples are muted in effect, conveying weaker or hedged assertions.)

Then, with TELL in the object clause , more generally:

[with NEG-Raising] I don’t think I’ve told you X ≈ [without] I think I haven’t told you X

Syntax 2: WH-Exclam with TELL. Meanwhile, exclamatory WH clauses are in alternation with plain declarative variants; for what-a WH-Exclams:

main clause: [WH-Exclam] What a wonderful dog you are ≈ [Decl] You are a wonderful dog

object clause: [WH-Exclam] I’ve said / revealed today what a wonderful dog you are ≈ [Decl] I’ve said / revealed today that you are a wonderful dog

object clause of TELL: [WH-Exclam] I’ve told you today what a wonderful dog you are ≈ [Decl] I’ve told you today that you are a wonderful dog

and a negated version of such a clause: [WH-Exclam] I haven’t told you today what a wonderful dog you are ≈ [Decl]  I haven’t told you today that you are a wonderful dog

Syntax 3: putting the two together. With that negative clause as an object of THINK:

(a) I think I haven’t told you today what a wonderful dog you are ≈ (b) I think I  haven’t told you today that you are a wonderful dog

Then, from the above discussion on NEG-Raising,

(c) [with NEG-Raising] I don’t think I’ve told you today what a wonderful dog you are ≈ (a) [without]  I think I haven’t told you today what a wonderful dog you are

and (a) ≈ (b), so

(c), the sentence in the cartoon, ≈ (b) I think I haven’t told you today that you are a wonderful dog

From semantics to pragmatics. That is, the sentence in the cartoon literally conveys (b), but, as Louie the dog observes (in his thought balloon), his owner Captain Crow hasn’t actually complimented him on being a wonderful dog, because (b) is, technically, not a compliment, but a report of a mental state, the state of Captain Crow’s thinking something, that something being that he hasn’t told Louie something, that something being that Louie is a wonderful dog — and that‘s the compliment.

Getting from what Captain Crow actually says to what he implicates — conveys by indirection — takes several steps. Compressing things a great deal:

(i) I think X implicates X; asserting that you think something is so indirectly asserts that it is so

(ii) I haven’t done X implicates that I should have done X (in the case at hand, that I should have told you that you’re a wonderful dog)

(iii) and that, in turn, indirectly does X — in this case, tells Louie that he is a wonderful dog

Each of these steps is backed by a kind of commonsense reasoning, based on (Gricean) relevance: Why is the speaker telling us what he thinks, what he hasn’t done, what he should have done? Surely not just to inform us about his mental state, his failure to act, his obligation to act; all this talk on his part must somehow be relevant to the situation he’s in. He tells us what he’s thinking because he wants us to share these thoughts, and he chooses indirection over flat assertion because that’s more polite (more face-saving for the person he’s talking to), though he could have chosen the more direct

I haven’t told you today that you are a wonderful dog

Introductory I think is one way to moderate the assertion; an interrogative variant is another way:

Have I told you today that you are a wonderful dog?

(implicating that I haven’t — but I should have, so you’re a wonderful dog). (This interrogative example has the same crucial features as the song line in (d), to which I’ll return below.)

In outline, that’s how (i) works; (ii) and (iii) can be similarly unpacked.

Now, no one thinks people work through such reasoning in real time as they process what other people say; like pairings of syntactic form with semantics, implicatures are conventionalized, automatized, and can be processed in a flash. Kids have to learn how to understand this stuff, and how to wield it themselves, and that takes a while .

One more semantic twist: the presuppositions of TELL. Now compare three complement-taking verbs:

REVEAL: I revealed (to them) that I’m a Martian.

SAY: I said (to them) I that I’m a Martian.

TELL: I told them that I’m a Martian.

For REVEAL, the verb brings with it the semantic content of its complement, pretty much no matter what you do to it.

I revealed (to them) that I’m a Martian ⊃ I’m a Martian

I didn’t reveal (to them) that I’m a Martian ⊃ I’m a Martian

Did I reveal (to them) that I’m a Martian? ⊃ I’m a Martian

If I revealed (to them) that I’m a Martian, I was stupid ⊃ I’m a Martian

So it’s inconsistent to deny this content, as here:

✘ I revealed (to them) that I’m a Martian, but I lied

The verb SAY has no such baggage:

I said (to them) that I’m a Martian⊅ I’m a Martian

and there’s no inconsistency in denying it:

✓ I revealed (to them) that I’m a Martian, but I lied

Verbs like REVEAL, with baggage, are called factive verbs; those like SAY, without it, non-factive.

And then — surely you saw this coming, since why would I be telling you about factivity? — there’s the verb TELL, which is ambiguous between factive and non-factive. Now, there are circumstances in which TELL is just factive, period. In particular, if it lacks a direct object, it seems always to be factive:

(They suspected I was a Martian, so) I told (them) ⊃ I’m a Martian

But otherwise, TELL can go either way, acting like REVEAL or like SAY, though there seems to be a considerable bias towards factive uses. (I hope someone has investigated this, but if no one has, someone should.)

factive: [Uncle Martin, the title character in the American tv sitcom My Favorite Martian:] The Army came by this morning on a sweep of Martians in the area, but I didn’t tell them I’m a Martian.

non-factive: [bullied kid at school:] The kids were razzing me about my funny looks, so I told them I’m a Martian.

non-factive: My latest draft was a piece of crap, but to cheer me up, everybody told me it was brilliant.

The base assumption seems to be that TELL is factive unless there’s a good reason in the context for a non-factive use, but that idea needs to be refined and investigated.

To get back to Captain Crow and Louie: in the strip, Louie might have been satisfied that Captain Crow has said that — uttered words to the effect that — Louie is a wonderful dog. That might be enough of a compliment for him; insincere compliments can be issued for any number of reasons, including politeness as well as flattery, and we don’t always want to inquire into the the sincerity of compliments. But Louie might think that Captain Crow has committed himself to a belief that Louie is in fact a wonderful dog (so that the compliment is a heartfelt one); that’s a matter of the interpretation of the verb TELL, which is ambiguous on just this point. But I think that Louie was hoping for a heartfelt compliment.

“Have I Told You Lately (That I Love You)?” From Wikipedia:

(#2) The Van Morrison cover art; note: singing this song can get you a knighthood (Morrison and Stewart, both in 2016)

(#3) The Rod Stewart 1991 version, with lyrics, which you can listen to by clicking above

“Have I Told You Lately” is a song written and recorded by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison for his nineteenth studio album Avalon Sunset (1989). It is a romantic ballad that is often played at weddings, although it was originally written as a prayer.

… Rod Stewart covered the song for his album Vagabond Heart (1991). A live version from his album Unplugged…and Seated (1993) was released as a single, becoming a number-five hit in the US and the UK.

Lyrics for verse 1:

Have I told you lately that I love you?
Have I told you there’s no one else above you?
Fill my heart with gladness, take away all my sadness
Ease my troubles, that’s what you do

Clearly, factive TELL is intended; this is a heartfelt protestation of love.  Meanwhile, as sketched above, the interrogative conveys (indirectly) that the singer hasn’t told the person he’s singing to; but that he should have; and that consequently he’s now doing so. Awww.

On Overboard. The strip was new to me. It has a wondefully goofy premise; from Wikipedia:

Overboard is Chip Dunham’s daily newspaper comic strip about a shipload of incompetent pirates. It debuted in 1990 and is distributed by Andrews McMeel Syndication.

Overboard derives much of its humor from having its characters anachronistically placed in modern times. For instance, they put quarters in dockside parking meters, order pizza by cellphone, and have a company health insurance plan.

These pirates are much less fearsome than their ruthless predecessors. In the early years of the strip, much of their activity involved standing around on deck drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. Recent strips feature golf, pet care and gardening. Their enemy is the Green Ship and its rival band of pirates, but giant rabbits attacking the garden, sharks, octopuses, and the Internal Revenue Service also are threats.

Competence is also an issue. While the Overboard crew carries cutlasses and makes raids, most often their treasure is stolen by disgruntled shipmates or by more able pirates. The captain has made a horrendous mess of the investments for their pension fund (at one point, he adjusts his failed investment strategy by flushing cash straight down the toilet).

The pirates actively pursue dates with women but instead repulse them with poor hygiene, fleas, disgusting table manners, immaturity, cheapness, and a lack of interest in the arts.

… Captain Henry Crow — the bland skipper of their ship, the “Revenge”. Crow seems a little smarter and more sophisticated than the crew, but he is far too decent to be a successful pirate, even if he were otherwise capable. Regularly participates in large battles but, curiously, reacts to duels with cowardice.

… Louie — Captain Crow’s pet dog. He doesn’t speak but rather projects thought balloons, in the manner of Snoopy or Garfield. … He is a yellow Labrador Retriever, … and many of Louie’s behaviours are considered stereotypical of the breed.

(OPAs, for short.) The contrast is to inconspicuously playful allusions, what I’ve called Easter egg quotations on this blog. With three OPAs from the 4/20/19 Economist, illustrating three levels of closeness between the content of the OPA and the topic of the article: no substantive relationship between the two (the Nock, Nock case), tangential relationship (the Sunset brouhaha case), and tight relationship (the defecate in the woods case).

The three cases also illustrate three degrees of paronomasia: the Nock, Nock case involves a (phonologically) perfect pun; the Sunset brouhaha case an imperfect pun; and the defecate in the woods case no pun at all, but whole-word substitutions.

I’ll start in the middle, with Sunset brouhaha. But first, some background. Which will incorporate flaming saganaki; be prepared.

Background: EEQs and OPAs. From my 4/13/19 posting “Easter egg quotations”

If you catch the quotation [from Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, about fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency] — not every reader will — that doesn’t contribute substantively to your understanding, but it does provide a kind of side pleasure, not unlike that afforded by Easter eggs in video games and the like. So I’ll refer to them as Easter egg quotations.

For the most part, the Economist deploys allusions ostentatiously, as jokes that are meant to be seen as jokes. The Vaccine X allusion to Monty Python, however, can be read straightforwardly and literally, merely asserting that unexpected viruses elicit fear and surprise and are ruthlessly efficient.

The contrast is between the publication’s usual practice, which is deep in OPAs, and its occasional inconspicuous deployment of quotations as a small gift to appropriately plugged-in readers, in the form of Easter egg quotations, or EEQs (pronounced like eeks) for short.

Digression: the placement of playful allusions. Playful allusions (of both types) are not sprinkled through articles, but occur mostly in just three places of prominence: in the framing of a story, in a head(line); at the beginning of a story (or a substory framed by a title), in its first paragraph; and at the end of a story or substory, in its last paragraph.

Kicker heads. From the Merriam-Webster site:

[noun kicker-1:] a line of newspaper type set above a headline usually in a different typeface and intended to provoke interest in, editorialize about, or provide orientation for the matter in the copy heads [I’ll call them kicker heads.]

The prime location for playful allusions in the Economist. All three of the OPAs featured in this posting are in this position.

On p. 28, Sunset brouhaha, here in all of its glory because of the photo placement, on-line:

(#1) Kicker head + main head (in print: “Worried by declining salaries, Hollywood’s writers sack their agents”) + subhead

On p. 31, Nock, Nock, in print and on-line:

Nock, Nock
Republican state legislatures are overturning ballot initiatives

And on p. 71, defecate in the woods:

Do tapirs defecate in the woods?
[in print] It seems they prefer burned-out scrub. And that may help regenerate forests.
[on-line] They prefer burnt-out scrub. And that may help to regenerate forests

Opening lines. In the lead sentence, or at least in the lead paragraph. From my 4/7/15 posting “Allusion in the Economist”

in a report on Peru: “A jarring defeat: The loneliness of Ollanta Humala”, the story leads with:

To lose one prime minister might be considered a misfortune, but to lose six in less than four years in office, as Peru’s president, Ollanta Humala, has done, must be seen as carelessness.

Referring to losing six prime ministers, and then to these frequent changes of government as carelessness, is preposterous, but then we hear Lady Bracknell’s voice and realize it’s a playful allusion, in fact an ostentatious one.

Closing lines. The EEQ from the Spanish Inquisition sketch came in fact at the very end of the Economist‘s story; my original 1/25/19 report of the example was entitled “Pythonic curtain line in the Economist”. As it happens, there’s now journalist lingo for remarkable curtain lines. Alas, that term is kicker, so there’s an ambiguity avoidance problem (which is why I labeled the earlier use kicker-1 and suggested the usage kicker head). From the Merriam-Webster site again:

Recently, another meaning for kicker has emerged [kicker-2], referring to a surprising or poignant revelation that concludes an article. It’s an example of the inside language of editing and journalism that is used even when intended for a broader readership. [I’ll call them punch-line kickers]

This journalistic use of kicker in a ‘surprise’ sense is just a special case of a wider ‘surprise’ use  recorded in both NOAD:

noun kicker: 2 North American informal an unexpected and often unpleasant discovery or turn of events: the kicker was you couldn’t get a permit.

and AHD5:

noun kicker: 2 Informal a. A sudden, surprising turn of events or ending; a twist.

(neither of which requires that the kick come at the end of something).

[Further kicker notes. AHD5 has another extended sense:

b. A tricky or concealed condition; a pitfall: “The kicker is that the relationship of guide and seeker gets all mixed up with a confusing male-female attachment” (Gail Sheehy)

None of this is (yet) in the OED. And none of these sources has the extended sense ‘ingredient or component that provides the kick to something’, where kick is as in NOAD here:

noun kick: 3 informal [a] [in singular] the sharp stimulant effect of something, especially alcohol. [b] a thrill of pleasurable, often reckless excitement: rich kids turning to crime just for kicks | I get such a kick out of driving a race car.

As in this comment on the Top Secret Recipes‘ “Roy’s Hawaiian Martini”:

(#2) “do be careful of the pineapple. It’s the kicker in the cocktail.”]

Digression on OPA. Further into the weeds. The acronym OPA, pronounced /ópǝ/, evokes two homonyms (and any number of initialistic abbreviations, for example OPA the US Office of Price Administration).

First, there’s German Opa ‘Grandpa’, the counterpart to Oma ‘Grandma’. Affectionate names, as in this folksy company name:

(#3) Opa’s Smoked Meats in Fredericksburg TX: “Traditional German Recipes Since 1947”

Then there’s the (Modern) Greek exclamation Opa! (which I’m very fond of). From Wikipedia:

(#4)

“Opa!” (Greek: Ώπα) is a common Greek emotional expression. It is frequently used during celebrations such as weddings or traditional dancing. In Greek culture, the expression sometimes accompanies purposeful or accidental plate smashing. It can also be used to express shock or surprise, especially when having just made a mistake. Opa is also used in Italy (similarly to mazel tov in Jewish culture), by some of the South slavic nations, like Serbians, (to express shock or surprise), by Israelis and by Arabs in the Eastern Mediterranean, who sometimes pronounce it as “obah”, especially when picking up or playing with children. In Russian culture it is used during the short phase of concentration on a action, the expectation of successful process during the action and the subsequent completion of it, for example, when throwing a basketball into the basket, getting off the bike or picking up a child. It is used in Russia also in enthusiastic atmosphere and surprising moments. It’s also an expression in Brazilian Portuguese.

The expression was popularized in American culture by the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

And it fits ostentatiously playful allusions very well:

Sunset brouhaha … opa!

But wait! There’s more! Consider the Greek fried cheese dish saganaki. From Wikipedia:

In Greek cuisine, saganaki (Greek σαγανάκι) is any one of a variety of dishes prepared in a small frying pan, the best-known being an appetizer of fried cheese [using a salty Mediterranean cheese].

The dishes are named for the frying pan in which they are prepared, called a saganaki, which is a diminutive of sagani, a frying pan with two handles [cf. paella, similarly named for the pan it is cooked in, which resembles a patella (Lat. ‘kneecap’)]

… The cheese is melted in a small frying pan until it is bubbling and generally served with lemon juice and pepper. It is eaten with bread.

Now the local variant:

(#5) Flaming saganaki in preparation

In many United States and Canadian restaurants, after being fried, the saganaki cheese is flambéed at the table (sometimes with a shout of “opa!”), and the flames then usually extinguished with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. This is called “flaming saganaki” and apparently originated in 1968 at The Parthenon restaurant in Chicago’s Greektown, based on the suggestion of a customer to owner Chris Liakouras.

Back in the mists of time, at some Chicago Linguistic Society event at UICC (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Circle), Jim McCawley led an expedition to The Parthenon so that we could all experience the original flaming saganaki (and grilled calamari, taramosalata, dolmades, pastitsio, souvlaki, etc. — there were a lot of us, so we passed bits of stuff around; meals with Jim were always tremendous fun.).

The Partenon has a short YouTube clip with flaming saganaki + opa!, but this video from Joe Feta’s Greek Village in St. Catherines ON is better:

(#6) Saganaki cheese on fire! Opa!

Maintenant, revenons à nos moutons:

The three 4/20 OPAs. I’ll start in the middle.

— Sunset brouhaha, shown in #1 above, involves an extremely imperfect phonological relationship (source) boulevard / (pun) brouhaha — the sort of distant pun you can get away with only if the full source expression is very familiar, as Sunset Boulevard is, especially if it’s also visually signaled, as it is by the photo in #1 of Gloria Swanson and William Holden in the movie Sunset Boulevard. (Of course you have to recognize the photo to get the relationship.)

This one is also mid-scale with respect to the relationship between the content of the OPA and the topic of the article. The article is about a pay conflict — loosely, a brouhaha — between Los Angeles movie writers and their agents; and the thoroughfare Sunset Boulevard, which cuts through Hollywood, serves as a common metonym for the L.A. movie industry. See my 3/26/17 posting “On the boulevard of broken dreams with Kip Noll” for its section on Sunset Boulevard. The association between the movies and the boulevard was firmly fixed by the movie. From Wikipedia:

Sunset Boulevard… is a 1950 American film noir directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, and produced and co-written by Charles Brackett. It was named after the thoroughfare with the same name that runs through [Hollywood] and Beverly Hills, California.

The film stars William Holden as Joe Gillis, an unsuccessful screenwriter, and Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a faded silent-film star who draws him into her fantasy world, where she dreams of making a triumphant return to the screen

A side note: on brouhaha and its variants, see my 4/26/16 posting “Brew-ha-ha”.

— Nock, Nock. Phonologically, this one is perfect. The source is the noun knock in knock-knock joke, and the pun has the proper name Nock, both AmE /nak/.

On the other hand, the article is about Republican state legislatures overturning ballot initiatives, out of a distrust for the instincts of the masses, a topic utterly unconnected to knock-knock jokes. The only thing that unites them is the /nak/ of political writer Albert Jay Nock’s name.

About the source expression, from Wikipedia:

(#7) Four knock-knocks from the Language of Desires site’s 100 knock-knock jokes

The knock-knock joke is a question-and-answer joke, typically ending with a pun. Knock-knock jokes are primarily seen as children’s jokes, though there are exceptions.

The scenario is of a person knocking on the front door to a house. The teller of the joke says, “Knock, knock!”; the recipient responds, “Who’s there?” The teller gives a name (such as “Noah”) or a description (such as “Police”) or something that purports to be a name (such as “Needle”). The other person then responds by asking the caller’s surname (“Noah who?” “Police who?” “Needle who?”), to which the joke-teller delivers a pun involving the name (“Noah place I can spend the night?” “Police let me in—it’s cold out here!” “Needle little help with the groceries!”).

And the Economist article featuring Nock:

In his autobiography, “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man”, Albert Jay Nock had this to say about America’s system of self-government: “I could see how ‘democracy’ might do very well in a society of saints and sages led by an Alfred or an Antoninus Pius. Short of that, I was unable to see how it could come to anything but an ochlocracy of mass-men led by a sagacious knave.” Nock was among the first writers to call himself a libertarian and, via William F. Buckley and the National Review, exercised significant influence on American conservatism. Given that the Republican Party, the closest thing to a vehicle for the promotion of conservative ideas, is in the business of gathering votes, the equivocal feelings of some conservatives about the demos are usually kept quiet. Occasionally, though, they break cover.

This is what seems to be happening around the country in state legislatures with Republican majorities.

— defecate in the woods. The full kicker head:

Do tapirs defecate in the woods?

This one is no kind of pun, but  a version of the conventional speech-act idiom

Does a bear shit in the woods?

(used to convey assent or affirmation). The formal relationship between source and playful variant is one of lexical and syntactic replacement: words substituting for semantically related words, and syntactic structures altered to fit.

On the other hand, the Economist article is actually about tapirs and their defecatory habits, though the topic is not whether tapirs defecate in the woods — of course they do — but what kind of woods they defecate in (burned-out woods vs. undamaged woods). So the content relationship is certainly tight, but not perfect.

On the speech-act idiom and the family it belongs to, from GDoS:

does a bear shit in the woods? Is the pope (a) Catholic? phr. (also do beavers piss on flat rocks? does a bird have wings? does a chicken have lips? do I know my grandmother? do sheep wear sweaters? has a dog a nose? is the pope a guinea/polack?) [see Maledicta I:1 (Summer 1977) pp.77–82 for discussion of these ‘sarcastic interrogative affirmatives and negatives’] (orig. US) a rhetorical phr. of which the implication is, ‘Don’t ask me stupid questions. Of course… .’ [or: ‘Of course not.’]

Specifically for shitting bears, the example:

1970 G.V. Higgins Friends of Eddie Coyle… ‘Is it going to be hot?’ ‘Does a bear shit in the woods?’ [conveying ‘yes; of course’]

(In principle, any yes-no question whose answer is blazingly obvious could fulfill this function, but a small number of these have become conventionalized; hearers no longer need to work out the implicatures involved in understanding these. The first two listed in the GDoS entry — both providing a positive response — are certainly of this type. I would suggest that Do chickens have lips? has been conventionalized as a negative response. For most of the rest I’m not so sure, and it’s not easy to see how such judgments can be tested.)

Then, a brief note on tapirs, from the Wikipedia entry:

(#8) Illustration from the Economist

A tapir (/ˈteɪpər/ TAY-pər, /ˈteɪpɪər/ TAY-peer or /təˈpɪər/ tə-PEER, /ˈteɪpiːər/ TAY-pee-ər) [AZ: the last is my preferred pronunciation, but I have no idea where I got it from] is a large, herbivorous mammal, similar in shape to a pig, with a short, prehensile nose trunk. Tapirs inhabit jungle and forest regions of South America, Central America, and Southeast Asia. The five extant species of tapirs, all of the family Tapiridae and the genus Tapirus, are the Brazilian tapir, the Malayan tapir, the Baird’s tapir, the kabomani tapir and the mountain tapir. … The closest extant relatives of the tapirs are the other odd-toed ungulates, which include horses, donkeys, zebras and rhinoceroses.

And then from the fascinating Economist article:

An obvious response to deforestation is to plant more trees. But this is no easy task. Sowing the right mix of seeds and ensuring that saplings survive long enough to establish themselves is complicated, time-consuming and expensive. Things can, however, be simplified to some extent by recruiting the local wildlife. And in a South American context, according to a study published in Biotropica by Lucas Paolucci of the Amazon Institute of Environmental Research, in Brazil, that means looking after the local tapirs.

The role of bats and birds in reseeding damaged areas is well known. These flying animals often defecate pips and stones from fruit they have eaten in places distant from where the food were consumed. Much research has therefore been devoted to luring them into damaged areas — sometimes with success. There is a limit, however, to the size of seed that a bat or a bird can carry, and that constrains which plants can be regenerated in this manner.

Lowland tapirs suffer no such constraint. They are the region’s biggest herbivores and swallow lots of large seeds. Dr Paolucci thus wondered to what extent tapirs were transporting seeds from pristine to damaged areas. To try to find out he and a team of colleagues set up a study of tapirs’ defecatory habits. [Details of the experimental set-up omitted here.]

…  Dr Paolucci calculated that tapirs pass an average of 9,822 seeds per hectare per year in degraded rainforest, compared with 2,950 in pristine forest.

The camera-trap data suggested that this might be because the animals preferred to spend time in the burned areas, rather than because they actually preferred to defecate there.

… Why tapirs would gravitate towards disturbed zones is [still] a mystery.

All this, and more, in two recent One Big Happy cartoons, from 7/2 (I broke a finger — the determiner cartoon) and 7/4 (Where was the Declaration of Independence signed? — the locative cartoon). Both featuring Ruthie’s brother Joe.  I’ll start with the locatives.

The locative cartoon:

(#1)

The question in the second panel is ambiguous, as between two understandings of locative where: where within the document is the signature located? vs. where did the event of document-signing take place? What I’ll call, faute de mieux, position location (within some domain) vs. event location.

The distinction is a metaphorical extension of a semantic distinction I’ve discussed in a series of postings on this blog, involving location on the body — an especially concrete and immediately available sort of position location — vs. location of an event, as in the ambiguous Where did you hurt yourself?

On this special, central kind of position location, five postings on this blog:

— a 2/27/19 posting “Body-location, event-location”, with its #2 I broke my arm in two places, exemplifying the locative ambiguity

— a 3/5/19 posting “Another 100k spams”

— a 3/8/16 posting “Where?”

— a 4/5/19 posting “Science, charity, and adverbial ambiguity”

— a 4/16/19 posting “She got pinched in the As … tor Bar”

Several of these postings relate the locative ambiguity to (in)alienable possession and to attachment ambiguities. More on alienability (and its relevance to determiner selection in English) to come below, but first a digression on another facet of #1, having to do with the pragmatics of the where question in it. In which it becomes important that the question-asker in #1 is the announcer on a tv quiz show and that the question-answerer is a kid, Ruthie’s brother Joe

Asking questions and giving answers. The title of a 8/21/18 posting of mine, which I’ll now quote from extensively; it was about

a significant ambiguity in the use of interrogative sentences: between information-seeking interrogatives (infoseek questions, I’ll call them), … and examination interrogatives (test questions, I’ll call them; they’re also known as quiz questions)

… Infoseek questions are the pragmatically prototypical interrogatives, acquired first and statistically dominant in conversation and texts. In its simplest variant, the speaker lacks some piece of information I (or is unsure about it), wants to acquire I, believes the addressee might be able to supply I, and is requesting the addressee to do so. Infoseek questions are a basic tool in coping with ignorance about things in the world; we are all ignorant of a great many things, small children especially so — so once they have the linguistic resources, they ask an enormous number of infoseek questions.

In test questions, the speaker has the relevant knowledge about I and is asking the addressee to perform by displaying the extent of their knowledge. This performance might be intended as part of a learning routine (the assumption being that the addressee should have I and so needs practice and correction), as an evaluation exercise (about the addressee’s knowledge), as part of a competition, whatever.

Infoseek questions can be directed at a wide range of addressees, but test questions are heavily loaded socioculturally: only certain speakers can direct them at only certain addressees, and only in certain contexts. One of the burdens of being a child in our culture is that all sorts of adults subject you to barrages of test questions, to which you are expected to respond cooperatively. (Similarly for people in an assortment of interview circumstances — for jobs, for school admission, to receive awards, in medical evaluations, etc. — where infoseek questions and test questions are likely to be mixed together.)

… Learning to cope with test questions involves a great deal of (quite culture-specific) learning about what, precisely, the questions are asking about and what, precisely, would count as an answer.

Joe is supposed to understand that the test question on the tv show requires an event location answer, not the position location answer he comes up with. His answer is deficient because it requires no specialized knowledge (beyond the knowledge that documents are customarily signed at the bottom). Indeed, his answer can’t be the right one because it takes the announcer’s question to be insufficiently challenging; test questions are supposed to be tough.

Just as some offers are too good to be true, some answers are too easy to be right.

It’s not easy being a kid.

The determiner cartoon:

(#2)

The indefinite article a in panel 2 by default conveys inalienable possession (on alienable vs. inalienable possession, see my 7/27/18 posting “Are you my bottom?”): we expect Joe to be talking about his finger (I broke a finger here conveys ‘I broke my finger, one of my fingers’), though an alienable reading (referring to a finger Joe merely has in his possession or has some relation to) is available, and Joe takes advantage of that possibility in an attempt to distance himself from responsibility in finger-breaking.

(I broke my finger would also be taken by default to convey inalienable possession, though it could be understood inalienably, to refer to, say, a mummified finger that you display in a vitrine. But not to a finger as someone else’s bodypart.)

In English, articles with bodypart names — indefinite, as above, or definite, as in He hit me on the shoulder — are conventionally available to convey inalienable possession, as alternatives to explicit possessive determiners (He hit me on my shoulder). The patterns of usage are complex, but they’re not my topic here. It’s enough to note the connections with body-location constructions (which involve inalienable possession) vs. event-location constructions.

And that these alienability facts extend to position-location constructions in general: back in #1, Joe could have answered in panel 4, At its bottom, as an alternative to At the bottom.

In an advertising poster, for actual apples:

(#1)

and on a tongue-in-cheek sticker, reproducing a gloat:

(#2)

Both incorporate phonological reductions of casual speech — ’bout for about, d’ya  ([djǝ] or [ǰǝ]) for do you — and also one feature of “demotic American” (a collection of linguistic features widespread in working class speech): determiner them (in place of standard those). But even without the phonological reductions we’re left with two formulaic expressions —

How about them apples? What do you think about them apples?

that are available for English speakers in general (not just working class speakers), not as opinion-seeking questions like

How about those apples? What do you think about those apples?

but as conveying one or the other of two types of gloats (directed by the speaker against the addressee).

Assembled from material on the Free Dictionary site, on the idiomatic expressions How do you / d’ya like them apples? and How about / ’bout them apples?

(a) A phrase used to draw attention to one’s cleverness or superiority to the one being addressed, especially after a recent triumph. You remember how you said I would never get into law school? Well now I’m valedictorian. How do you like them apples? [similarly, What do you think about them apples?]

(b) Used after telling somebody an unpleasant fact or truth, to say that they should accept it: Either you deliver the dresses for the price we agreed on, or I’m going to go someplace else. How do you like them apples? [similarly, What do you think about them apples?]

From NOAD:

verb gloat: [no object] contemplate or dwell on one’s own success or another’s misfortune with smugness or malignant pleasure.

noun gloat: [in singular] informal an act of gloating.

Ordinary opinion-seeking wh questions can be pressed into service as indirect gloats — How about that? What do you think about that?, or How do you feel about that?, What are you going to do about that?, and so on. But with the idiomatic direct object apples in combination with the determiner them instead of those, the expressions can be imported from working class speech (where they’re ambiguous between opinion-seeking questions about apples, on the one hand, and gloats, on the other) as a kind of quotation in standard speech, interpretable there only as gloats. That’s the way they work for me.

Use (a) is straightforwardly gloating. Use (b) is somewhat more complex: the speaker presents the addressee with some observation the addressee will find unpleasant and then rubs it in, insisting that the addressee accept it. Conventionalized Schadenfreude.

History of the two gloats. This seems to be quite murky, and tracking phrase origins and histories is not my thing, so for the moment, this 10/27/08 posting from the Phrase Finder site is the best I can dredge up:

[query from reader:] Does anyone know the origin of the phrase “how do you like them apples?”. I saw (or rather heard) the phrase in the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’ and while I understood the sentiment that was conveyed, the actual meaning eluded me…

(#3) Clip from Good Will Hunting

[Phrase Finder response:] I cannot find an authoritative source, but various sites on the web have it that the original “apple” was a mortar-fired bomb used during WW I…

The 1959 Howard Hawks film “Rio Bravo” is said to have a scene where the character “Stumpy” (played by Walter Brennan) lobs a stick of dynamite and says the phrase in question.

This came up before — also from someone watching Good Will Hunting. All I could find was that the phrase has been used since the 1920s.

[Added 8/7/19: See the comments section for some explorations into the history, in which the catchphrases appear to have their root in them apples being used as a conventional example of grammatical error (because of determiner them).]

Demotic American. Putting aside phenomena of casual speech that are widespread for English speakers generally, there are tons of sociolectal features, features distributed in particular varieties of English according to region, social class, sex, race/ethnicity, age, and so on — and then some features that are widespread for North American working class speakers, tending to run across region and other social factors. A brief inventory of some of these:

negative concord (aka multiple negation): I didn’t see nobody nowhere

specific verb forms: PRS 3 sg don’t (She don’t like it); PRS 1 sg says (So I says to them...); PST seen (I seen them do it), done (She done it); auxiliary verb ain’t

PSP identical to PST: I have ran

anyways for standard anyway

pronouns: determiner them (for deictic those); AccConjSubj (Him and me went together)

A working class speaker won’t necessarily have all of these, but there’s a strong tendency for them to co-occur.

(Regularly skirting or confronting sexual matters, so perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)

Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes us back to the Garden of Eden:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

The bit of formulaic language for this situation is a catchphrase, a slogan with near-proverbial status (YDK, for short):

YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE IT’S BEEN

The leaves are conventionally associated with modesty, through their having been used to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve in the Garden — a use that then associates the leaves with the genitals, from which the psychological contamination spreads to the entire plant, including the fruits. You don’t know where that fig has been.

From the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs, 2002:

You don’t know where it’s been: Do not touch something or put it in your mouth, because you do not know where it has been and what kind of dirt it has picked up. (Most often said to children.) Mother: Don’t put that money in your mouth. You don’t know where it’s been. Bill: Okay. Take that stick out of your mouth. You don’t know where it’s been.

YDK is the second part of a two-part speech act, crucially involving a taboo object. The first, set-up, part is an injunction — typically an admonition against doing something with the taboo object (not to touch it or, worse, put it in your mouth or, still worse, take it into a sexcavity) — but it could be an instruction to stop doing something with the taboo object (put it down, let go of it, spit it out of your mouth).

The second part is the pay-off, some version of YDK, which provides a conventional reason for the injunction, appealing to contamination by association: the taboo object is unclean (hence dangerous), by virtue of a history involving its association with something that is conventionally unclean (dirt, unwashed hands, genitals, bodily fluids, excrement, and so on).

A whimsical version in an ecard:

(#2) The relay race; the baton has of course been in many other hands, most of them sweaty

The penis as taboo object. The penis is conventionally unclean, dirty, so it is the object of YDK warnings: you probably don’t know where that penis has been before it comes to you — to be stroked, sucked, or taken into a sexcavity — so you might be contaminated by it. (In this case, The News for Penises might not be good.)

That makes it fodder for YDK jokes. As in this chirpy ukulele song written by actor William H. Macy:

(#3) Macy at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, performing “You Don’t Know Where That Dick Has Been”; the words are very hard to make out (I haven’t found any site with the lyrics), but the chorus is clear

Notice that in a sufficiently rich context, YDK could stand by itself, leaving the hearer to reconstruct an injunction by implicature. As a result, You don’t know where that dick has been can be understood on its own as a warning not to have anything to do with it. In fact, Do you know where that dick has been? can be read as implicating that you don’t know (a separate implicature from the YDK one, seen in examples like Do you know that your hair is on fire?, implicating that you don’t know, and informing the addressee of that fact), which in turn can be read as a warning not to engage with it.

The wider field of cultural contamination. YDK is just one item in a much larger field of contamination by association. From my 2/11/11 posting “Cultural contamination”, starting with a woman who said

that after she read that the “Ode to Joy” was Hitler’s favorite piece of music, the work lost all of its attraction for her.

It had become contaminated by the association with Hitler.

This is an extreme version of the mechanism by which some people are put off artistic creations (art, literature, music, film) because of the character, personal beliefs, behavior, or actions of their creators…

An example of cultural contamination from a different domain. Some years ago I was shopping in at hardware store at the same time as a woman with a young son, maybe 4. The child was examining, touching, and picking up various objects, including some housewares. No problem until he picked up a toilet brush — at which his mother shrieked at him to put it down, it was dirty!

Mind you, this was brand-new, unused toilet brush, objectively as clean as anything else the child had touched. But its cultural function was to brush out excrement, and that function contaminated it.

(In a similar vein, some people are disgusted when others use toilet paper — perfectly clean toilet paper, fresh off the roll — to blow their noses.)

In still another domain, many have noted that the intense distaste that some people have for same-sex sexual relations (especially between men, especially anal sex) contaminates everything associated with homosexuality: people who have come out as gay (and so are to be avoided), displays of same-sex affection (even just holding hands), pride events and lgbt organizations, symbols like the rainbow flag and the pink triangle, all of it. To the point where I have seen complaints about the flying of a rainbow flag in a neighborhood where children could see it (and so, in the minds of the complainants, be exposed to same-sex sexual acts).

The fig leaf chronicles. Returning to fig leaves and figs in #1, there’s a wide-ranging treatment of the topic in my 5/20/15 posting “Fig time”. The relevant bit of Genesis 3 (in the KJV):

¹ Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LordGod had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

² And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

³ But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

⁴ And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

⁵ For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

⁶ And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

⁷ And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

And inside those aprons, the offending bodyparts.

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo is also a cartoon meme combo: Desert Island + Psychiatrist:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)

You notice the empty clinical couch, with its colorful pillow, because it’s the biggest thing in the drawing, and it’s right in the middle of it. You notice the psychiatrist, because he’s a human figure, of some size, with a significant face (our attention is drawn powerfully to faces).

Only then do you follow the therapist’s gaze and take in the little figure in the lower righthand corner: the tiny castaway under a miniature palm tree, on a desert island — charmingly presented as being in a colorful planter, so that it’s also one of the plants in routine office decor, matched by the ornamental foliage in the planter in the opposite corner.

We are both in a Desert Island cartoon and also in a Psychiatrist cartoon (where the therapist is doing shrink-talk), set in a stereotypical psychiatrist’s office (notably medical, down to the framed diplomas on the wall).

Another take on Desert Island + Psychiatrist. On this blog on 6/11/18, in “In case of cartoons, see therapist”, a John Deering Strange Brew cartoon:

(#2) This time the whole physical setting of the desert island, palm tree and all, has been transported onto the therapist’s couch

Talk therapy is popularly presented as having the psychiatrist proceed entirely by drawing the patient out through questions, which are often covertly highly directive, not merely exploratory at all. In #1 the therapist’s question indirectly conveys an order to him to stop waiting to be rescued (and face up to his plight); in #2 the therapist’s question indirectly conveys his judgment that the patient is suffering from survivor’s guilt (by asking, “Ted, are you familiar with a syndrome called survivor’s guilt?”).

Another desert therapist combo: Desert Crawl + Psychiatrist. In my 5/1/16 posting “Between the desert and the couch”, a Bizarro combining Psychiatrist with another desert cartoon meme, involving a man (or, more generally, people) crawling, parched and hallucinatory, across a seemingly endless desert — call it Desert Crawl:

(#3)

From that posting, this passage from Dan Piraro’s Bizarro blog:

Crawling Through Cliches: As I’ve said before on this blog, I enjoy doing cartoons within the canon of popular cartoon tropes like the desert island, the shrink’s couch, the man crawling through a desert, etc. Here I combine two of them and use another trope: the self-referential cartoon. Self-referential cartoons can be dangerous because if they’re too easy –– a character simply noticing he is in a cartoon without anything more substantial to say about it –– it can elicit a groan. I hope not too many people groaned at this one. I thought it was fun.

Although Desert Crawl is a very popular cartoon meme, the New Yorker seems to be especially fond of it. Four examples from New Yorker artists I’ve written about earlier on this blog, in chronological order:

(#4) Jack Ziegler, 7/11/11

(#5) Joe Dator, 2/2/15

(#6) Liana Finck, 3/14/16

(#7) JAK (Jason Adam Katzenstein), 4/4/16

In the 9/14/19 One Big Happy, Ruthie wrestles with a workbook question, apparently something along the lines of “Does 4th Street come before 6th Street or after it?”:

(#1)

There’s a lot packed in here. Crudely. the strip is about what before conveys, and that turns out to be dependent on the context. Ruthie takes before to refer to the ordering of a particular 4th and 6th Street in her own actual neighborhood, taking herself to provide the point of view for the spatial ordering (every spatial ordering via before rests on some point of view). But what’s the point of view of a workbook exercise? Who’s asking the question? For what purpose?

Now we’re out in the pragmatic weeds. Crucially, Ruthie has to understand that the workbook question is not an attempt to elicit useful information from her, but instead aims to get her to perform in a test of her sociocultural knowledge.

Previously on this blog:

— on 7/31/19 in “Locatives, inalienability, and determiner choices”

(#2)

The question in the second panel [Where was the Declaration of Independence signed?] is ambiguous, as between two understandings of locative where: where within the document is the signature located? vs. where did the event of document-signing take place? What I’ll call, faute de mieux, position location (within some domain) vs. event location

(featuring Ruthie’s brother Joe), about asking questions / giving answers, quoting  this earlier posting:

— on 8/21/18 in “Asking questions and giving commands”, about Ezra Beavers, age 3 and his question, to his mother, Do boy and toy rhyme?; and the question, from his mother, Do “boy” and “man” rhyme?: about

a significant ambiguity in the use of interrogative sentences: between information-seeking interrogatives (infoseek questions, I’ll call them), … and examination interrogatives (test questions, I’ll call them; they’re also known as quiz questions).

… Infoseek questions are the pragmatically prototypical interrogatives, acquired first and statistically dominant in conversation and texts. In its simplest variant, the speaker lacks some piece of information I (or is unsure about it), wants to acquire I, believes the addressee might be able to supply I, and is requesting the addressee to do so. Infoseek questions are a basic tool in coping with ignorance about things in the world; we are all ignorant of a great many things, small children especially so — so once they have the linguistic resources, they ask an enormous number of infoseek questions.

In test questions, the speaker has the relevant knowledge about I and is asking the addressee to perform by displaying the extent of theirknowledge. This performance might be intended as part of a learning routine (the assumption being that the addressee should have I and so needs practice and correction), as an evaluation exercise (about the addressee’s knowledge), as part of a competition, whatever.

Infoseek questions can be directed at a wide range of addressees, but test questions are heavily loaded socioculturally: only certain speakers can direct them at only certain addressees, and only in certain contexts. One of the burdens of being a child in our culture is that all sorts of adults subject you to barrages of test questions, to which you are expected to respond cooperatively. (Similarly for people in an assortment of interview circumstances — for jobs, for school admission, to receive awards, in medical evaluations, etc. — where infoseek questions and test questions are likely to be mixed together.) Ezra has (apparently) not yet twigged to this fact: he asks infoseek questions and expects that others are doing the same. So if his mother asks if boy and man rhyme, that must be because she doesn’t know whether they do, which means that there’s a lot about rhyming that she doesn’t know.

In #1, Ruthie is confronted with a classic test question, but doesn’t treat it as such: she takes it to be an infoseek question, and answers in terms of her personal experience. In so doing, she’s failed to appreciate that a workbook question requires her to view things as without personal context, but to respond only in terms of the larger, impersonal, sociocultural context. This is how she’s supposed to be acculturated.

The joke, which was new to me and entertained me enormously:

(#1)

Then, passed on my a friend yesterday, from Facebook, the joke supplied with a photo, the result then labeled as a “meme” (in my terms, since the text is the crucial element, this is a texty creation, or just a texty, a cousin of cartoons):

(#2)

The joke turns on an ambiguity in the communicative intent of This is a library, which is merely an assertion that the place the two conversants are in is a library. The question is why the librarian asserts this to the patron. Surely the patron knows that already.

However, we are to understand the librarian’s response as reproachful. But for what reason?

Here, we need to supply some sociocultural background, about the nature of libraries,  as places where, in addition to borrowing books and other materials, patrons sit and read to themselves, a practice that normally calls for quiet, so it’s common for librarians to remind patrons of that requirement — stereotypically, by shushing patrons who speak too loudly. That is, we would normally suppose that a librarian would be reproaching a patron for the form of their speech: her response would convey ‘that’s not the way we use our voices in a library’.

However, the content of the patron’s speech in #1 and #2 is quite remarkable in the context of a library: he appears to expect to find access to hookers and booze there. Now, in the real world some libraries have on occasion been afflicted by both drinking and sexual activity in the stacks, but no library provides these as actual services. Given that, the librarian is clearly reproaching the patron for his preposterous expectation: her response conveys ‘that’s not what a library is for’.

The patron, however, disregards the clear communicative intent of the librarian and chooses to respond as if it were a shush, so repeats, verbatim, his preposterous announcement that he’s looking for hookers and booze — but in a whisper. Absurdly, fixing the form but not the content.

Apparently, he’s so much in need of booze and hookers that he’s lost his grip on how libraries work. That makes him a stock figure of jokes, and comedy in general: the narcissistic fool — insensitive to his surroundings, responsive only to his own aims and desires. A figure of fun. (Of course, in the real world, such people are moral monsters, and they’re dangerous.)

From the American tv series Emergency! S7 E11 “The Convention” (from 7/3/79), a tv movie following the regular series. Two women end up serving as a paramedic team together — female paramedics were a new thing at the time, only grudgingly accepted, and they were normally paired with a male partner — so a male paramedic tells them the watch commander wouldn’t approve of the women teaming up. One of the women good-naturedly but pointedly snaps back at him:

(1a) How would you like a thick lip, to go with your thick head? No offense.

With the idiomatic tag No offense — a shorter version of No offense intended — literally meaning something like ‘I intend/mean you no offense by saying this’, but almost always conveying something more complex than that.

The tag is very often introductory, and followed by but, rather than appended:

(1b) No offense, but how would you like a thick lip, to go with your thick head?

Quite commonly the speaker does in fact intend to offend, criticize, or insult the addressee, but piously disavows these intentions so as to deflect negative reactions by the addressee. What’s going on in (1a) is, however, a bit more indirect than that.

The show. On the (complex) episode of Emergency!, from the IMDb plot summary:

San Francisco firefighters and paramedics rescue a man trapped on the rigging of a schooner. A paramedic convention brings [Los Angeles paramedics] [John] Gage [Randolph Mantooth] and [Roy] DeSoto [Kevin Tighe] back to San Francisco, where they assist a choking victim in a restaurant, then deliver a baby while two female paramedics [Gail (Patty McCormack) and Laurie (Deirdre Lenihan)] treat a sniper’s shooting victims. [more action follows]

It’s a nice touch that John and Roy deliver the baby, while Gail and Laurie treat the shooting victims.

The idiom. Then from the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary site:

no offense idiom — used before a statement to indicate that one does not want to cause a person or group to feel hurt, angry, or upset by what is about to be said // No offense, but I think you are mistaken. // “No offense, but you’re nutty as a fruitcake.”— Carl Hiaasen

The first example is a simple softening of unwelcome news, but the Hiaasen is a deliberately offensive no offense, with the tag serving as mere deflection. Merely deflective no offense is so common in actual practice that some take it to be the norm, as in this meme:

(#1)

And on the net, merely deflective no offense is so common that it has an initialistic abbreviation:

(#2)

But earnestly softening no offense (as in Merriam-Webster’s first example) isn’t rare, as in this touching example from FOUND magazine:  “No Offense Intended”,  found by Sam in San Francisco:

Just saw this note on the ground after leaving a coffee shop at 18th Ave. and Geary Blvd., and thought it was a pretty fair and balanced proposition for a casual “dudes only” hookup.

(#3)

[Digression on if you’re down (for a hookup). From NOAD:
adj. down: … 4 [predicative] US informal supporting or going along with someone or something: you got to be down with me | she was totally down for a selfie | “You going to the movies?” “Yo, I’m down.”.]

The note-writer did his best on the task of attempting to negotiate a sexual connection while not knowing how his offer would be taken — while recognizing that many straight guys are enraged on learning that some other men might find them sexually desirable. (Presumably because being an object of other men’s sexual desire is being “treated like a woman”, and that’s a deep threat to their masculinity.)

But back to (1a), which is neither earnestly softening nor merely deflective, but something in between. The female paramedic who uttered (1a) was in fact wielding no offense to bring her male colleague into line, by telling him the hard truth that he was behaving badly, but doing this with enough empathy for him as a colleague that he should be able to see that her words weren’t a matter of personal animus against him, and doing this with some humor (the mock-threatened thick lip). She was teaching him a lesson. In the actual story, it seems to have had the appropriately sympathetic but chastening effect. A very nice example of female assertiveness, cleverly and humanely deployed.

(I should note that this episode comes very close to the end of the show, which for years was extraordinarily male-oriented, with only the head nurse Dixie McCall (played by Julie London) playing a major role, as the highly empathetic tough broad at Rampart General Hospital — though she was a truly wonderful character. Now, it’s not fair to criticize this show in particular for its heavy male orientation, since that was pretty much the style of the time, and the show was actually quite good at depicting male friendship, male competition, the sexual marketplace, and symbolic displays of masculinity, all with some subtlety and good humor. But until the late episodes, the character Dixie McCall pretty much had to carry the weight for more than half of humanity.)

Deflections. No offense (intended) is frequently deployed as a deflection, and it’s just one in a whole armamentarium of deflections, among them: I don’t mean to critcize/complain, but … ; Not to criticize/carp, but …; and so on — all going on to express criticism, complaint, and accusation, while at the same time refusing to accept responsibility for these judgments and so trying to avert the weight of their targets’ pain and outrage. The strategy is sometimes referred to as “politeness”, but it’s rarely experienced as such.

The 11/27 One Big Happy strip, which came up in my comics feed recently:

The father’s question, asking for a choice, appears to be an opinion-seeking question, of a sort that adults often exchange amongst one another to make pleasant small talk or as a kind of game. But note the father’s open laptop: the opinion-seeking question is being used here as a form of test question, in which the kids are supposed to display their knowledge of culturally significant people. And the kids are perfectly aware that the exercise is some kind of test.

There is, unfortunately, another variable here: the father’s question offers choices at two points: what person (that’s the question he’s intending to ask) and living or dead (which the father intends to be clarifying the range of persons that could be possible answers, but which the kids take to be the question at issue.

Yes, it’s preposterous. But the environment of test questions of all sorts is highly artificial, especially for older children, like Ruthie or Joe: who knows what sort of absurd questions, ostensibly asking for an opinion, might be thrown at you as a test?

So they opt for the living or dead question as the one at hand, and disagree about what the “right” answer should be.

Earlier on this blog: infoseek vs. test questions. In my 8/22/16 posting “Asking questions and giving commands”, which begins with an exchange between Ezra Beavers, age 3, and his mother, Janice Ta:

Ezra: Mommy, do “boy” and “toy” rhyme?

Janice: Yes, they do! You’re very good at rhyming. Do “boy” and “man” rhyme?

Ezra: No. You’re not very good at rhyming.

Ah, a significant ambiguity in the use of interrogative sentences: between information-seeking interrogatives (infoseek questions, I’ll call them), like Ezra’s do “boy” and “toy” rhyme?; and examination interrogatives (test questions, I’ll call them; they’re also known as quiz questions), like Janice’s do “boy” and “man” rhyme?

(These aren’t the only uses of interrogative sentences. There are plenty more, including several types of “rhetorical questions”: (positive assertion) Am I angry? (You bet I am!); (negative assertion) Can you have ice cream for breakfast? (Hell, no!); (assent) Is the Pope Catholic? (= Yes.))

Infoseek questions are the pragmatically prototypical interrogatives, acquired first and statistically dominant in conversation and texts. In its simplest variant, the speaker lacks some piece of information I (or is unsure about it), wants to acquire I, believes the addressee might be able to supply I, and is requesting the addressee to do so. Infoseek questions are a basic tool in coping with ignorance about things in the world; we are all ignorant of a great many things, small children especially so — so once they have the linguistic resources, they ask an enormous number of infoseek questions.

In test questions, the speaker has the relevant knowledge about I and is asking the addressee to perform by displaying the extent of their knowledge. This performance might be intended as part of a learning routine (the assumption being that the addressee should have I and so needs practice and correction), as an evaluation exercise (about the addressee’s knowledge), as part of a competition, whatever.

Infoseek questions can be directed at a wide range of addressees, but test questions are heavily loaded socioculturally: only certain speakers can direct them at only certain addressees, and only in certain contexts. One of the burdens of being a child in our culture is that all sorts of adults subject you to barrages of test questions, to which you are expected to respond cooperatively. (Similarly for people in an assortment of interview circumstances — for jobs, for school admission, to receive awards, in medical evaluations, etc. — where infoseek questions and test questions are likely to be mixed together.) Ezra has (apparently) not yet twigged to this fact: he asks infoseek questions and expects that others are doing the same. So if his mother asks if boy and man rhyme, that must be because she doesn’t know whether they do, which means that there’s a lot about rhyming that she doesn’t know.

Then there are opinion-seeking questions, which kids use (of course) amongst themselves much as adults do. But the landscape shifts seriously when opinion-seeking is wrenched into the test-question context, and Daddy is taking your answers down on his laptop..