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..

From my comics backlog, a One Big Happy strip that turns on the distinction (in the philosophy of language) between descriptive statements (about what is)  and normative statements (about what should be) and shows Ruthie and Joe’s mother exploiting normative statements for her own parental ends — using one to convey injunction or prohibition: saying that this should be the case implicating that you should — or must — act to make it so.

Oh yes, there’s also the third-person reference to her addressees, framing an injunction on them specifically as a kind of normative universal — a manipulation of address terms that the kids simply fail to comprehend (in the last two panels of the strip)

Joe and Ruthie are in fact tearing through the grocery story like wild animals. Ellen Lombard, their mother, asserts that her children do not act like that, meaning this statement normatively. Conveying, in fact, that not only should her children not act like that, but that they must stop acting like that.

(Note: in this posting I’m going to be unrelentingly careful about the way I frame descriptions of linguistic phenomena (not falling back on the descriptive language of school grammar, which would be familiar to readers but which I believe to be fucked up beyond repair). So there will be a lot of technical talk here; please try to play along, but I don’t think there’s any way to do this right without re-thinking everything from the ground up.)

This is about a perfectly common expression — Who am I kidding? — that went past me in a flash on Facebook this morning but caused me (as a student of GUS — grammar, usage, and style / register) to reflect on the pronoun case in it. On the interrogative human pronoun, appearing here in what I’ll call its Form 1, who, rather than its Form 2, whom.

The pronoun in this expression is the direct object of the verb in the expression, KID, appearing in sentence-initial position (appearing “fronted”) in the WH-question construction of English. There’s nothing at all remarkable about this: in general, both forms of this pronoun are available as syntactic objects (of verbs or prepositions) in the language, differing only in their style / register (very roughly, formal whom vs informal who), with the special case of an object pronoun actually in combination with its governing preposition, which is  obligatorily in Form 2:

Who / Whom did you speak to? BUT *To who / ✓to whom did you speak?

So there’s nothing remarkable about Who am I kidding? It’s just informal.

What’s remarkable is the unacceptability of Whom am I kidding? The stylistic discord between the formality of object whom and the informality of the idiom WH-Pro am I kidding? is unresolvable. To put it another way, the choice of the Form 1 pronoun here is part of the idiom. Just like the choice of the PRP form of the verb KID, conveying progressive aspect: Who do I kid? lacks the idiomatic meaning.

Background: the idiom (and a closely related one), from The Free Dictionary by Farlex (edited by AZ for form):

Who am I kidding?: an expression of self-doubt. Oh, who am I kidding, running for mayor — I’ll never win. | Taking art classes at my age — who am I kidding?

Who is (someone) kidding?: Would anyone really believe anything so ridiculous or obviously untrue? A: “I’m going to be super rich and run my own company once I’m on my own!” B: “Who are you kidding, Tom? You’re so lazy that you’re barely even going to graduate high school.” | He shows up at these public events with teary eyes, but who is he kidding?

Note: the present-tense verb form is not part of the idiom; both idioms are fine in the past tense: Who was I kidding? Who was he kidding?

(Yes, the idioms are conventionalized rhetorical questions.)

A parallel. Involving the choice of what I’ve called the shapes of forms rather than the choice of forms. From my 11/21/17 posting “??That is aliens for you”, in a section about Auxiliary Reduction (AuxRed) in English (in, for example, who’s versus unreduced who is):

certain words — “little” grammatical words — are especially accommodating hosts for AuxRed: expletive it, expletive there, demonstrative that, interrogative what, who, where, and how, personal pronouns I, you, it, she, he, we, they, complementizer and relativizer that. With these, unreduced auxiliaries are likely to convey either notable formality or emphasis.

As a result, an informal-style idiom that has one of these accommodating hosts followed by the very easily reducible auxiliary is is very likely to be frozen in its AuxRed version: the formality of the unreduced auxiliary would conflict fatally with the informal style of the idiom as a whole. So we get “obligatory AuxRed” idioms like these two:

How’s the boy? ‘How are you?’ (a greeting from a man to a male familiar)

What’s up? ‘What is the matter?’ or ‘What is happening?

“And …:

That’s NP for you ‘That’s characteristic of NP’, ‘That’s the way NP is/are’

So: That’s aliens for you ‘That’s the way aliens are’, but ??That is aliens for you.

That is, in these cases the choice of the reduced shape is (again) part of the idiom.

A Peanuts strip, featuring Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty:

(#1) But wait! Patty’s Don’t ask! is not a request for Charlie not to ask about her feelings (which would directly contradict her requesting Charlie to ask about her feelings); instead, it’s an exclamation (in Yiddish English) conveying Patty’s dismay at feeling really crappy

We have been through this use of Don’t ask! previously on this blog, in the aptly named posting of 1/31/21, “Don’t ask!”:

Today’s morning name, but it comes with crucial context. The Don’t ask! in question is not the neutral use of the negative imperative, advising the addressee not to ask someone about something (Don’t ask them about the ducks in the kitchen; that just makes them crazy), but instead is a formula of Yiddish-influenced English, normally used only by (American) Jews (or gentiles culturally close to this community), when someone has in fact just asked about the matter in question (the tsuris / tsores ‘troubles’); the speaker doesn’t go on to avoid this sensitive matter, but instead embraces it, launching into kvetching‘complaining’ about it.

The formula Don’t ask!  then serves as an announcement — a kind of alarm bell, if you will — that the speaker is about to go off on a (perhaps extended) kvetch. [so that it serves to convey that the situation in question is in fact dire, a mess or a disaster]

Two examples, both illustrating attitudes towards male homosexuality (specifically, in a woman’s son), the second exemplifying another feature of Yiddish-influenced English (not previously discussed on this blog), the mildly derogatory lexical item feygele(h) / faygele(h) ‘gay man’.

— from Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, by Michael Wex:

(#2)

— from a blog posting“Some of My Favorite Jewish Jokes” (whose author, to judge from its link, might, or might not, be Lawrence Attard Bezzina):

(#3)

As a bonus for this blog, the second feygele son is named Arnold.

The One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed on 12/7/18 — the Ramona St. posting mill grinds slowly, very slowly — is all about pragmatics, in particular what we take to be the point of questions we’re asked. In the strip, Ruthie asks her father what you can do to stop hiccups. Her father doesn’t inquire into why she’s asking, but assumes that she’s not merely asking an information question (she might, after all, be researching the matter for a presentation at school), and it never occurs to him that she’s asking a quiz question (to which she already knows the answer, but is checking his paternal competence at everyday medical care, should the occasion arise). Instead, he assumes that she has a personal interest in the answer to the question — this turns out to be so — indeed, that she has the hiccups and wants to know how to stop them — that’s a good guess, and it’s close, but it’s wrong — so instead of answering Ruthie’s question, by describing an appropriate remedy, he leaps to supplying the remedy himself:

(#1) A well-intentioned action misfire that follows from the various (literal) meanings of questions; practical reasoning about which ones are likely to be relevant to the situation at hand; the calculation of meanings that can be indirectly conveyed given a literal meaning — most pressingly the calculation of Ruthie’s intentions in asking this particular question, so that her father can respond to those intentions; and then his short-circuiting his reaction to all of this by dispensing with a verbal reply and going right to the action it would recommend

Why is she asking? That’s the crucial point, where it would be easy to go wrong.

A much transformed story from real life. A friend phoned me to ask, “What’s the difference between a garter snake and a rattlesnake?” A question I was well-prepared to answer, having spent a considerable part of my childhood on farms and on suburban streets right next to fields and forests, with substantial experience with garter snakes (memorably, in half-light on the way to the outhouse on one of the farms) and with rattlesnakes (in fetching firewood from wood-piles in the suburbs, also encountered sunning themselves on rocks at the edges of woods). The problem is that garter snakes have stripes, but some rattlesnakes have stripes too.

I held back on practical tips for telling them apart, to inquire, “Why are you asking?” In particular, was my caller confronted at close quarters by a snake of unknown species? Was this a herpetological emergency?

Well, no. They had recently seen photos of some garter snakes (there are several species, but the stripes are their garterish characteristic) and thought they looked a lot like rattlesnakes (there are several species of rattlesnake, some of them striped), and wasn’t that a problem?

Generally not, garter snakes being slender and rattlesnakes much heftier, and rattlesnakes having significant patterns other than stripes. You just don’t want to come on a rattlesnake unawares; those wood-piles take some caution.

More problematic questions. From the same time-period as #1, this web meme passed on to me by Tyler Schnoebelen:

(#2) From 1/11/19

The reduced alternative question Coffee or tea?  In the context of a flight attendant serving hot beverages to a passenger, normally understood as a question about the addressee’s preferences (‘Do you want coffee or do you want tea?’), and therefore as an indirect way of offering these alternatives to the addressee (‘Should I serve you coffee or should I serve you tea?’).

But it could also be as a question about the identity of the drink being served (“Is this coffee or is this tea?’) — understood either as an information question (the speaker doesn’t know which it is, and is asking for the addressee’s judgment on the matter); or as a quiz question (the speaker knows which it is, and is testing the addressee’s knowledge on this point), both of which are bizarre in the airplane context.

An old One Big Happy strip, one in a long series in which Ruthie or her brother Joe is confronted with some type of test question (rather than an information-seeking question):

Ruthie is laboring at a workbook — a culture object that subjects a student to test questions, in this case a question requiring the student to demonstrate their understanding of the culturally appropriate grounds for publicly assessing the characteristics of other people: industriousness is an appropriate ground for assessing a farmer (because it’s relevant to his doing his job), while a conventionally attractive appearance is not

Even though she’s filling in questions in a workbook, Ruthie falls back on treating busy-or-pretty? as a question about her opinions, rather than her knowledge of cultural appropriateness. In fact, for all we can tell from the workbook picture, Farmer Brown might not be at all busy; he might be sitting upright in a stationary tractor, daydreaming about what’s for supper. But he could perfectly well be busy, while even if was drawn to look like a handsome film star, his looks would be culturally irrelevant to his job. (Subtle point: they would, however, be culturally relevant in general, since men judged to be conventionally good-looking have a social edge over other men in various contexts.)

Here, Ruthie personalizes her response by giving her opinions. In other OBH test-question strips she looks situations from her point of view or takes her own experiences as background for answering questions. But test questions demand a depersonalized stance — and then regularly plumb very fine points of sociocultural awareness. Fine points that for the most part aren’t treated in the workbooks, aren’t explicitly taught in schools. I’ll give one further example from an earlier posting of mine below.

Workbooks. From Wikipedia:

Workbooks are paperback [auxiliary] textbooks issued to students. Workbooks are usually filled with practice problems, with empty space so that the answers can be written directly in the book.

Very often, the workbook pages are scored so that they can be easily torn out and handed in as homework.

Queens. From my 2/2/19 posting “Better than ABC order”:

And then we get to nuggets of specific information that kids are tested on. These I often find deeply mystifying, for a variety of reasons.

First, there’s the difference between information-seeking questions and test questions, a tricky business that takes kids a while to cotton to; some discussion of infoseek vs. test questions in my 8/21/18 posting“Asking questions and giving commands”.

Then there are conventionally expected answers to particular test questions, which kids are expected to induce from their classroom experience; see my Language Log posting of 12/2/09, “What is this question about?”, about the range of expected answers to the test question, “What color is a banana?” (note: WHITE is a wrong answer, even though the edible part of standard bananas is white; and RED is a wrong answer, even though the standard bananas in many parts of the world have reddish skins).

Finally, there’s the raw choice of test questions, which often look they’re just pulled out of a hat; we ask this question because we can. (Kids are supposed to know things, so let’s test some stuff.) In this vein is a test question — with a really clever answer marked wrong (as a general rule, truly clever answers are wrong, from the point of view of the devisers of tests) —  that’s been making the rounds of the net as an image of an actual test item. Surely invented, but a good joke, and not far from examples you can collect from real life:

Name one popular queen.  Freddy Mercury  ✘

A wonderful answer: Mercury was the lead singer of the rock band Queen, and his performance persona was wildly flamboyant, worthy of the label queen. But not, of course, in the ‘female monarch’ sense the test question intends to ask about. RuPaul is certainly a popular queen, but again not in the sense the test question intends to ask about  (and RuPaul wouldn’t have been as clever a wrong answer as Freddy Mercury). Andrew McQueen — also a queen, in the flamboyant sense, but nowhere near as popular as Freddy Mercury and RuPaul — would have been a cute answer, if only for the contrast with butch / macho Steve McQueen. Then there’s Queen Latifah, the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen, the Queen of Darkness, Dairy Queen, and Speed Queen, plus prom queens, welfare queens, drama queens, opera queens and rice queens (see my 12/19/15 posting “X queen” on the snowclonelet pattern).

In an English-speaking context, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, and Queen Elizabeth II would be correct answers, and possibly the only acceptable correct answers; it all depends on what’s intended by popular. I assume Queen Juliana and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands (and other comparable modern European female monarchs) were insufficiently popular in English-speaking lands, that Catherine the Great of Russia and Queen Isabella of Aragon were powerful but not popular, that Mary Queen of Scots was too unsympathetic to be popular, and that Queen Anne and the Queen Mary of Williamanmary were more sympathetic but still a bit short in popularity on the street. Leaving three prime answers.

Maybe the question should have asked about famous queens of England. Certainly the question seems designed to tap high cultural currency or something similar — so it really is a lot like the banana-color question, a probe about mass enculturation.

So, I ask again, why ask this particular question? What do we expect kids to know, and why?

To cope with a day when I’m overwhelmed with e-mail to answer, an old Calvin and Hobbes strip salted away for just such days:

They exchange greeting hellos, and then the caller, detecting that the phone has been answered by a child, shifts to an indirect speech act designed to have the child get an adult — the caller specifically asks about their mother — to come to the phone: instead of (directly) asking Calvin to call his mother to the phone, they ask (politely) if his mother is home, assuming that Calvin will understand that they’re asking this because they assume she’s home and they want to talk to her, so they want him to turn the call over to her

The overall story here doesn’t depend on the phone being answered by a kid. It’s enough that the caller recognizes that the person answering the phone is not the one they want to talk to. In which case they could ask for them indirectly: Is Marcia home / in? (this being one big step of indirection beyond the conventionally indirect question May / Can I talk to Marcia?).

The crucial step in dealing with the yes-no question Is X home? is recognizing that because a literal understanding of it would be bizarre — why would some random caller need to know if X is home? — the caller must have some other motive in asking it. And on from there. But that’s where Calvin runs aground.

Well, that’s a lot for a little kid to work out in less than a second on the phone (and Calvin is not a patient or especially cooperative child). I actually remember being taught, explicitly, that if a phone caller, or someone at the door, asked if my mother was at home, that meant they wanted to talk to her, so I should get her. I imagine I could have worked this out eventually, but it might have taken some misfires for me to get the point.

An old One Big Happy strip that’s been hanging around on my desktop for a couple of years. When you go to explain why it’s so weirdly funny, it turns out to be a complex exercise in what’s known in the linguistics trade as quantity implicature: someone uses a quantity expression, like 6 people or 18 years old, and we understand the speaker’s intentions to be to suggest exactly that quantity, or at least that quantity, or no more than that quantity — in technicalese, we take the speaker’s words to implicate one of these things — depending on the context and our assessments of the speaker’s reasons for mentioning that quantity in the context.

The standard discussions of quantity implicature are about reports of states of affairs. If, for example, a well-intentioned speaker tells you that there were 6 people at their birthday party, you take them to be conveying that there were exactly 6 people. I mean, if there were 8 people at the party, it would be true that there were 6 people; but then it would be uncooperative to say that there were 6 people, because if you knew there were 8 you should and would have said so, therefore saying there were 6 implicates that there were exactly 6. (This would be a good time to take a deep breath and rest for a moment.)

Now to the OBH strip. To start with, it’s not about reports, but about requirements, about stipulated criteria — things like

You must/should be this tall [pointing to a measure stick or mark] to get on the ride.

Which absolutely does not require that you be exactly that tall, instead that you be at least that tall: that tall or more (it sets a lower bound), Similarly,

They have to be 18, or it’s statutory rape. [18 or older]

You need to have four pieces of identification. [at least 4]

There are stipulated criteria that we understand to be exact, but they need very special contexts. As in a likely understanding of:

You must be born on September 6th to collect the birthday jackpot.

And finally, there are stipulated criteria we take to be requiring that something be at most some quantity: no more than that quantity (they set an upper bound):

You may/can (only) take 4 pieces of baggage with you.

(which permits you to take, say, 2 pieces of baggage, but not 5). Or in a negative formulation:

You can’t take 5 pieces of baggage with you. [but 4 or less would be ok]

The criterion in the cartoon,

Men in their 40s shouldn’t be skateboarding.

is of this third, or upper-bound, type, negatively formulated: men in their 40s or older shouldn’t be skateboarding. But then the cartoon:

Here, Brad totally screws things up, goofily taking in his forties in his doctor’s advice to convey an exact quantity — the decade of one’s 40s, not before and not after — so that Brad felt entitled to resume skateboarding when he turned 50

Brad’s idea is goofy because he’s disregarded why his doctor would have advised men in their 40s not to skateboard: because they’ve gotten too old for it, and it’s now become dangerous. All of that unsaid, because the doctor assumed Brad could figure it out.

Yes, that’s compressed, and there are lots of details, but the key idea is that stipulated criteria have reasons for being, and the nitty-gritty of these reasons governs when a criterion will be understood as lower-bounding, stipulating exactly, or upper-bounding.

Firecrackers! For a prize from the Swedish royal academies, something  you might think of as a Nobel Prize’s little brother, awarded to two colleagues in linguistics and philosophy, one an old friend (and exact contemporary) of mine. From the website of the Swedish royal academies, “Science, art and music meet in the Rolf Schock Prizes 2024”, a press release of 3/14/24:

2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy is jointly awarded Hans Kamp, University of Stuttgart, Germany and Irene Heim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

“for (mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.”

Natural languages are highly context-dependent – how a sentence is interpreted often depends on the situation, but also on what has been uttered before. In one type of case, a pronoun depends on an earlier phrase in a separate clause. In the mid-1970s, some constructions of this type posed a hard problem for formal semantic theory.

Around 1980, Hans Kamp and Irene Heim each separately developed very similar solutions to this problem. Their theories brought far-reaching changes in the field. Both introduced a new level of representation between the linguistic expression and its worldly interpretation and, in both, this level has a new type of linguistic meaning. Instead of the traditional idea that a clause describes a worldly condition, meaning at this level consists in the way it contributes to updating information. Based on these fundamentally new ideas, the theories provide adequate interpretations of the problematic constructions.

Kamp was born in the Netherlands in 1940. He received his PhD from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968 and has been a professor at University of Stuttgart, Germany, since 1988.

(#1) Hans Kamp (photo: Kerstin Sänger)

Heim was born in Germany in 1954. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1982 and has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA since 1997.

(#2) Irene Heim (photo: Philipp Heim-Antolin)

About the prize.

The Rolf Schock Prize is unusual in that it rewards both logic and philosophy, mathematics, visual arts and music. The laureates are selected through a unique collaboration between three Swedish royal academies: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The final decision is made by The Schock Foundation.

Hans Kamp. A friend since we were fellows together at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1981-82. Now, from John Beavers (chair of the UT-Austin linguistics department) on Facebook on 3/18, we hear that HK has been able to continue presenting his ideas in courses at Texas:

Huge congrats to our colleague and friend Hans Kamp on this amazing award! Hans was full-time faculty at UT Philosophy in the mid-1980s, and since 2009 has been with us in Linguistics as well as Philosophy as a Visiting Professor. This prize is richly deserved, a recongition of the foundational work he has done on formal semantics and the modeling of discourse. Working closely with Hans over these years has been a highlight of my time at UT, and it’s wonderful to see his life’s work recognized in this way. … our announcement from Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin:

Please join us in congratulating our colleague Professor Hans Kamp, who has just been awarded the prestigious Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy by the Royal Swedish Academies of Science, Music and Fine Arts!

Hans shares this year’s prize with Prof. Irene Heim (MIT). … the prize is for Hans’s creation of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), a landmark in formal semantics. Alongside Irene Heim’s File Change Semantics, DRT was one of the first serious attempts to build a model of semantics that takes discourse into account and thus handle meanings across sentences, and it’s something Hans has continued to develop in the intervening years, with many important papers and a textbook. It is fair to say that there is not a single working semanticist in the world who is not intimately familiar with DRT, and there are many who continue to actively use the framework.

Coincidentally, Hans arrives in Austin today for his annual visit to the UT departments of Linguistics and Philosophy, and so all of us here in Austin will be able to congratulate him in person. He will be teaching a 5-week intensive course on Speech Act Theory, to which all are welcome.

three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:

(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”

Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.

turn on a dime. From NOAD (under the noun dime), a somewhat too-specific definition for the idiom on a dime:

phrase on a dime: North American informal used to refer to a maneuver that can be performed by a moving vehicle or person within a small area or short distance: boats that can turn on a dime.

stop on a dime and turn on a dime are both common instances of the idiom; pivot on a dime and reverse on a dime are both attested, and I’m sure there are more. But on a dime is also used used for actions performed in a short period of time (rather than space), as in the well-attested respond on a dime ‘respond almost immediately’.

The idiom is metaphorical, based on the dime’s being the smallest-sized US coin, so you can use it to refer to tiny amounts of space or time.

Easter + April Fool’s. My 4/1/18 posting “Easter Fool’s” was about 4/1/18’s being simultaneously Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day. In 2024 they’re consecutive; we’ve turned on a dime from Easter to April Fool’s Day. Both occasions come with rabbits, hence the relevance of Maria Scrivan’s wonderful pun.

The yellow flowers of April. Les jaunes d’Avril. It’s the season for yellow crocuses and yellow daffodils, and eventually yellow tulips. With yellow as the color of early spring, in April. Treated in my 5/1/19 posting “The May flower” — about white muguets as the flower of that month, but with a long look backward at yellow April.

April and the color yellow, as put together by Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1893 poster of the can-can dancer Jeanne Louise Beaudon, whose stage name was Jane Avril:

(#2) Jane Avril, a vision in yellow

(I) love what you’ve done with X. The format for a family of exclamatory compliments, of which I love what you’ve done with your hare in #1 is an instance. The syntax of these expressions is fairly complicated, but their meanings and uses are deducible from their syntax; they are not idioms. They do, however, have something special about them: they come easily to hand; they are, so to speak, at the front of the shelf of expressions for these purposes; they are stock expressions.

I’ll refer to this family as LWYDW, after the words in the format:

the main verb love;

with an interrogative-clause object introduced by indefinite what representing the direct object in that clause;

with the addressee pronoun you as the subject in that clause;

with activity do as the verb in that clause;

and with the preposition with marking an oblique object (referring to material used for some purpose) in that clause.

Now, comments on a few of the parts of LWYDW (with no pretensions to completeness).

The main verb love (or its less extreme variant like) is conventionally used in exclamations of admiration, hence normally has a 1st-person subject there (though of course reports of other people’s admiration can have other subjects):

Love your hat! Love how you walk! Love the furniture arangement! Like that bathing suit!

Omissible subject I. In informal registers in English, a main-clause subject I is generally omissible — in a type of informal “subject-drop”. As in the examples just above, and in:

Hate to tell you this, but your photos are all upside down.  Knew right away that we’d be friends.

Exclamatory reinforcement. Exclamations can occur with the reinforcing adverb just ‘really’ (vs. just ‘only, merely’):

Just love your hat! ‘I really admire your hat!, What a wonderful hat!’

and in LWYDW examples like:

Just love what you’ve done with your hair!

Objects of activity do. This verb freely occurs with indefinite objects:

do something / nothing / everything / (negated) anything / (interrogative) what / a little / little / a lot / much

As in:

I can’t do anything with my hair. I can do a lot with my hair. What have you done with your hair? I love what you’ve done with your hair!

Objects of the preposition with in LWYDW. These are

— the / this / your place

— your N, where N is hair, makeup, an item of apparel (belt, shoes), a household furnishing (rug, quilts), a dwelling (house, apartment) or room in one (kitchen, bathrooms), or anything else that can be (re)designed or decorated or otherwise artfully arranged or altered

Then, given the stock expression, you can fool around with the format for other purposes, as I did in my title for this posting:

Love what Scrivan did with the rabbit pun!

xx