Well, strictly speaking, it was sarcasm in the form of a suggestion:

There’s a collection of why- and how-interrogative forms that, in addition to their literal question-asking meanings, can be conventionally used to make suggestions, and suggestions can be uttered sarcastically to reverse their polarity, as in the following set:

Why don’t you like me?  [literal information question]

Why don’t you have dinner with me? [suggestion, for joint dining]

Why don’t you just jump off the fuckin’ roof, you moron?! [sarcasm, conveying that it would be stupid of you to jump off the roof (or to do something relevantly like jumping off the roof), hence suggesting (strongly) that you shouldn't do that]

I’ve overloaded the last example with features (including the orthographic device ?! to indicate the very high rising-falling final intonation of an emphatic interrogative that might be intended to convey sarcasm) that point to sarcasm, but in actual life things are very often not so dramatically underlined by linguistic features.

Faced with utterances that could be unclear as to the speaker’s intent, the hearer might just fail to get the sarcasm and interpret an utterance like Jeremy’s as a suggestion. Or, more deviously, the hearer can reject the intent behind the speaker’s sarcasm and affect not to get the sarcasm, by treating the utterance as a simple suggestion. We can’t be sure which route Jeremy’s mother has taken, so the strip might be “about” the cluelessness of parents or “about” their resistance to their kids’ (unreasonable) opinions in opposition to their (of course, entirely reasonable) requirements. Or both.

On the NYT‘s op-ed page yesterday, a hilariously wry piece by Thomas Vinciguerra about apologies by public officials for sexual misbehavior of various sorts: 24 quotes, from Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, Newt Gingrich, John Ensign, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, Mark Sanford, Larry Craig, Jesse Jackson, John Edwards, Christopher Lee, James McGreevey, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The stories have different plot lines. Many, like Weiner’s, follow the cycle of Revelation, Denial, Contrite Admission, and Apology. Some involve law-breaking, of several different sorts, others do not. (In the sexual sphere, these are complex matters. What counts as law-breaking depends, of course, on what the law is in a particular jurisdiction at a particular time. For many years, virtually all of my sexual experiences with other men violated the law within the jurisdictions where they took place. This was a source of some anxiety for my man Jacques and me as we drove back and forth between Ohio and California — especially in central Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle.)

The episodes of Denial involve flat-out lying, or at least calculated obfuscation; that’s bad for the denier.

Some of the stories involve the imposition of a powerful person on a less powerful person (usually, man on woman). Some have no actual physical connection in them, but only sexually tinged (or saturated) communications.

The stories are significantly different. Some are appalling, some sad, and some unremarkable.

Still, they all get their punch from a general belief that public figures should be sexually exemplary, according to very strict standards (even to the point of refraining from masturbation, in private). This is a very silly idea, but a powerful one in our culture — a fact that should make any sexually complex person disinclined to have anything to do with public service. (Even if I were interested in running for the Palo Alto city council, say, my life history, easily available, would be the kiss of death; the reasoning is that someone would do X, how could they be trusted to serve the public? These days my having had a husband-equivalent wouldn’t necessarily be a bar, in local politics, in this place, but all the rest of it would.)

Read the apologies — many of them classic non-apologies — and reflect both on human folly and on our expectations of public servants, and try not to see every story as just like every other.

Today’s Rhymes With Orange takes up indirect speech acts, in particular the complex case of interrogatives in the form of declaratives (with interrogative intonation), but in fact serving the function of exclamations (with imperative force):

It starts with the declarative You’re really going out dressed like that, with really signalling emphasis, surprise, or disbelief, and rising final intonation signalling a question. So, roughly, ‘Is it really true that you’re going out dressed like that?’

Then this question — like yes-no questions in general — can function as a “rhetorical question”, conveying an assertion with the opposite polarity (‘You’re not going out dressed like that’), having judgmental or directive force (‘You shouldn’t go out dressed like that; don’t go out dressed like that’).

All these steps are conventionalized in English, so that the recipient of the original can move seamlessly from question to judgment. Compare the title of Deborah Tannen’s 2006 book You’re Wearing that?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation.

Then of course there’s the portmanteau qudgment (question + judgment). The literature on indirect speech acts includes discussions of the whimperative (wh-question + imperative -- Why don’t you kiss me? ’Kiss me!’) and queclarative (question + declarative – Is that necessary? ‘That isn’t necessary’), from Jerry Sadock in 1970 and 1971, respectively.

The first of two old Dilberts I’ve recently come across. This one (from 11/14/93) about Dilbert’s response to the annual performance review:

Dilbert wields managerspeak like a pro here, and takes a bow for his, um, performance. As far as I can see, none of the managerspeak is necessary, and much of it is merely ornamental.

In the last panel, Dilbert responds, not directly to the question his boss asks (which is a straightforward yes-no question), but to a presupposition of the question, which is that the boss doesn’t know whether Dilbert’s performance was sarcastic in intent.

From Jim Drew, this query from (oh, alas) 2009:

It’s April, so naturally my boyfriend started singing Christmas songs.  (Who doesn’t?  <grin>)  He was singing “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas” — Julio Iglesias, I think? [almost surely José Feliciano] — and I kept responding “But what?!”  The line seems to demand a followup (other than “From the bottom of my heart”), something like “I  want to wish you a Merry Christmas, but it’s April, so I can’t” or “I  want to wish you a Merry Christmas, and I’m going to do so now” or “I  want to wish you a Merry Christmas, so forgive the repetition in this song.”

It’s fine as it stands. But it’s indirect, conveying a speech act indirectly by saying that you want to perform it (or would like to perform it), and thereby softening the bald performance somewhat.

The Feliciano version of Feliz Navidad:

This sort of indirection is common is other contexts, for example in the offering of thanks at award ceremonies:

I want to thank my film crew and my family.
I would like to thank everyone who helped in this enormous project.

Both have the effect of thanking people, just as

I want to wish you a Merry Christmas

wishes Merry Christmas to the addressee.

In a comment on my recent Pogo posting, Bob Richmond gave a link to a posting of his (“Hum a few bars and I’ll fake it”) on the joke template that begins with the question “Do you know X?” and has some variant of the “Hum a few bars” reply as the punch line. (Several of these are from comic strips.) The joke turns on the ambiguity of the verb know, a use-mention ambiguity, and the speech-act ambiguity of Do you know? questions.

The examples from Richmond:

– [something close to the original]

There’s a noisy party with a guy playing the piano real loud. Another guy walks up to him and says “Do you know there’s a little old lady upstairs trying to sleep?” And the piano player says “No, but hum a few bars and I’ll fake it!”

– [an elaborate Pogo version]

CHURCHY: Playin’ the pinanna all brawly and grrr an’ a guy come in an’ say, “Do you know there’s a li’l ol’ lady sick upstairs?” – An’ the piranno plyer say, “Hum a li’l bit of it an’ I’ll give it a rally ho!”

– [a different elaboration]

In another version the piano player has a monkey. An ancient Druid wheezes up to the piano player and asks, “Do you know your monkey dreed in my weird?”

– [Dagwood Bumstead in Blondie (Chic Young)] In 1977 the hippies had finally come to Dagwoodland.

HIPPIE: Sir, I’m a strolling troubador. For a dollar I’ll sing a song of your choice. DAGWOOD: Do you know you’re a disgrace to humanity? HIPPIE: No, but if you’d hum a few bars, maybe I can fake it.

– [a family story]

My sister wields a mean fake book and can sight read the bunny raisins on the bottom of a rabbit cage. Sometimes she plays piano – like Twenties Top Forty and Forties Top Twenty – for a music therapist at nursing homes. She recalls a memorable occasion when she started playing for a room full of little old ladies lined up in wheel chairs when from somewhere in the center of the room an ancient voice piped up “Do you know I’ve gotta get out of here and go to the bathroom?” And my sister wheels around on the piano stool and she’s like – No, but hum a few bars and I’ll fake it!

– [from Mutt and Jeff (Al Smith)]

JEFF: Yes? STRAIGHT MAN: Didn’t you hear me pounding on the floor upstairs? JEFF: Oh, that’s OK, we’re making a lot of noise ourselves! STRAIGHT MAN: Do you know we’re trying to sleep? JEFF: Hey, guys, do we know that number – “We’re trying to sleep?”

There are several contributions to the joke. First, the verb know, which has at least three relevant senses:

‘know that’, as in “I know (that) 2 x 2 = 4″

‘know how to’, as in “I know how to multiply single-digit numbers”, or (in an extended sense) “I know the multiplication table”

‘be acquainted with’, as in “I know Noam Chomsky”, or (in an extended sense) ‘know of/about, know who/what X is’, as in “I know who Noam Chomsky is”

(It’s often pointed out that these senses are frequently expressed by distinct verbs in other languages.)

In know X, where X is the name of a song — I know “Happy Birthday” — there’s a range of possible understandings, going from ‘know of X’ through ‘know how X goes’ through ‘know how to sing/play X’. This is true even when X is a clause, say some day my prince will come.

But when X is a clause, there’s an ambiguity in speech between mention (‘I know “Some Day My Prince Will Come” ‘, involving the ‘be acquainted with’ or the ‘know how to’ sense of know — which sense will be determined by which is most relevant in context) and use (‘I know (that) some day my prince will come’, involving the ‘know that’ sense of know). In the joke, the questioner intends use, but the musician understands mention.

But it doesn’t stop there. There’s a further ambiguity in a Do you know X? question, where X is a clause, according to whether it’s to be understood as a straightforward yes-no question or as a rhetorical question informing the addressee that X is the case. So, “Do you know (that) the old lady upstairs is trying to sleep?” could be meant as a literal question about the addressee’s state of knowledge, but it is more likely to presuppose that the answer to the literal question is “no” and so to implicate that the addressee should have known that the old lady upstairs is trying to sleep — which has the effect of informing the addressee that the old lady is indeed trying to sleep and that the addressee should have realized that his actions were preventing that, so that the addressee is being enjoined to stop his actions. That’s a lot of reasoning, but in fact it’s done tacitly and quickly, because questions of the form Do you know X? (and its cousins Do you realize X?, Are you aware X? etc.) have become conventionalized for these purposes, as in:

Do you know/realize (that) you’re standing on my foot? Are you aware (that) you’re standing on my foot?

(which is very quickly understood as a reproachful protest  – ‘you’re standing on my foot, dammit!’ — combined with an insistent request — ‘get off it!’).

In the joke, the questioner intends use (with ‘know that’), but the musician “hears” mention (and so misses the reproachful protest and the insistent request), and then everything else follows from that.

A letter to the NYT on the 28th, under the heading “Church Abuse Sentencing”:

Re “Church Official in Philadelphia Gets Prison in Abuse Case” (news article, July 25):

At his sentencing for child endangerment, Msgr. William J. Lynn said to relatives of an abuse victim, “I hope someday that you will accept my apology.”

I hope that the victims wait for an actual statement of apology before they consider whether to accept it.

WINNIE BOAL 
Charlevoix, Mich., July 25, 2012

Quite likely, Msgr. Lynn thinks that what he said was in fact an apology. Winnie Boal doesn’t think so.

The art of the non-apology apology is a perennial subject on Language Log; see, for example, this 2008 posting of Mark Liberman’s (with cartoon instructions on how to apologize when you’re not sure what you did wrong). For a proper apology, the apologizer has to recognize and name the offense and take responsibility for it, without hedges. This Msgr. Lynn did not do.

Instead, what he did was say something that he took to be equivalent to the totally non-specific (though direct) “I apologize” or “I’m sorry”. But it wasn’t phrased that directly. In fact, it was two steps away from such direct speech acts.

One step away would be something like “(Please) accept my apology”, which counts as an offer of an apology (and so implicates the apology), just as “(Please) accept this free gift” counts as an offer of the gift. But Msgr. Lynn then hedged on that, saying “I hope you will accept my apology” — an expression of his wishes, which implicates a request to accept an apology, which then implicates the (minimal) apology.

So the whole business is a doubly indirect speech act, conveying a non-specific apology. Scarcely an act of genuine contrition.

Today’s Zippy:

You know what X? is a scheme for opening a conversation, or a new segment of a conversation:

You know what I hate / think? You know what I’m thinking / gonna do? You know what scares / annoys me? You know what pisses me off?

Framed as a question, but not seeking information; after all, how could the addressee know what’s in the speaker’s mind?. The speaker is going to answer the question, in any case, and the most that’s expected of the addressee is an encouragement for the speaker to go on: No, what? or something of the sort.

And then there’s the bonding of men through mutual insult and contention, giving in this case “new best friends”, as the strip’s title says.

As for Lippy, the Zippy site tells us that he’s

Zippy’s twin, yet diametrically opposite, brother. Lippy dresses in black and thrives on misery– his own as well as others. He only enters Zippy’s life for one purpose: to try and make him unhappy. Good luck, Lippy.

Here he’s out on his own, where he comes across the sociopathic Mr. the Toad.

From the Best of Calvin and Hobbes site, three strips: on inattention and question-answering; on phone answering as a linguistic routine; and on indirect speech acts.

The dangers of inattention:

Entertaining that Calvin, trying to cover his bases as he returns from being Spaceman Spiff, reels off five answers to questions that Mrs. Wormwood might have asked.

Next, Calvin imitates an answering machine:

He’s got the verbal part of the routine down pat, but doesn’t quite get the point of the exercise (or chooses to ignore it).

Finally, Calvin’s mother uses an indirect speech act, asking “What are you doing?” but conveying ‘What have you done?!’, i.e., ‘You shouldn’t have done that!’

To Calvin, the answer to the question, understood literally, should have been obvious.

(Note that Calvin’s question is also rhetorical: a yes-no question conveying ‘This is some sort of trick question, right?’)

(Only a little bit of language in this one.)

Long obituaries for Elliott Carter this week, celebrating a very long career — he was still composing almost up to his death at 103 — characterized by, among other things, great independence of mind. The New York Times gave Allan Kozinn a huge amount of space to reflect on Carter’s life and works (“Elliott Carter, Composer Who Decisively Snapped Tradition, Dies at 103″), including some anecdotes (it’s easy to catalogue the Pulitzer Prizes and other awards, not so easy to give a feel for what someone was like and what moved them).

Which brings me to a story that was in the print version of the obit but was snipped out of the on-line version. Carter and Igor Stravinsky are joined by a third man…

From the print edition:

Speaking to a Bloomberg.com reporter in 2012, Mr. Carter told a story in which he was having dinner, and speaking French, with Stravinsky and Stravinsky’s wife at La Côte Basque when a man approached and said – “in rather good French” – “Will the maestro please give me an autograph?”

Note 1: The reader is expected to understand the significance of La Côte Basque. From Wikipedia:

La Côte Basque was a New York restaurant. It opened in the late 1950s and operated until it closed on March 7, 2004. In business for 45 years, upon its closing The New York Times called it a “former high-society temple of French cuisine at 60 West 55th Street.”

… Famous patrons included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Babe Paley and Frank Sinatra.

The Bloomberg.com original provided a bit more context:

[Interviewer:] What was your favorite restaurant?

Carter: La Cote Basque, now sadly closed. I took Igor Stravinsky and his wife there. We got a table in the middle of the room, speaking French, and a man came in, and said in rather good French, “will the maestro please give me an autograph?”

Note 2: Either Carter didn’t recognize the man, or he was concealing his knowledge from the interviewer (perhaps to improve the story). Of course, this wasn’t just some random guy off the street, but another patron of the elegant restaurant, so Stravinsky might have been expected to treat him politely.

Note 3: The man was speaking “rather good French”, and this was in some way notable in the context. Speaking French at La Côte Basque would hardly have been remarkable, but something in the man’s manner or appearance suggested otherwise to Carter.

Stravinsky was bluntly dismissive: “Certainly not.”

The Bloomberg.com version quotes Carter on what ensued:

His wife did a great deal of talking in Russian and finally he agreed, but took forever to write out his name. The man waited and waited and by this point the whole room was watching.

In the NYT, Kozinn boiled this down to:

After first refusing, and as the whole room watched, Stravinsky relented.

After that the two accounts don’t differ in any significant way. From Bloomberg.com:

Finally Stravinsky was done and the man thanked him and walked away. We asked Stravinsky if he knew who he was and he said, “Certainly, I see him on television all the time.” The man was Frank Sinatra.

(Recall that Sinatra was a regular patron of the restaurant.)

My first reading was that Carter didn’t recognize Sinatra, and that surprised me, given Sinatra’s fame and Carter’s background as a protégé of the American modernist Charles Ives and as someone with distinctly populist leanings (and an occasional patron of the restaurant himself). I would have thought that Carter would have been an admirer of Sinatra’s performances.

But then I saw the possibility that in asking Stravinsky if he knew who the man was, Carter wasn’t asking for information on his own behalf, to remedy his own ignorance of the facts, but was asking about the state of Stravinsky’s knowledge, to find out if Stravinsky’s knowledge matched his own. Do you know questions can go either way: they merely ask about what the addressee knows, but that inquiry can have different reasons or purposes, depending on the speaker’s state of knowledge.

So now I think Carter’s question to Stravinsky could have been reported with an interrobang: Do you know who that man is?!

Yesterday’s Dinosaur Comics:

T. Rex maintains he just wants to warn people about doors hitting them — this strikes me as dubious indeed — so he has to rephrase an expression that has been lexicalized as “sassy/sarcastic” (conveying ‘Get out of here!’ or something of the sort) by one that has only the literal meaning he intends. Similarly for “What do you want me to do about it?” (conveying unwillingness to do anything about it) and “Welcome to the real world!” (conveying that things are generally tough in life, so you should stop complaining). Not a fully successful strategy.

On Facebook, Jeff Runner took great pleasure in the strip, noting that he especially liked “the part about words being filed under “sassy molassy” in the lexicon!”

Today’s Zippy:

So the strip is “about” hair(s), but it’s also “about” How ’bout them Cubbies?

(On a personal hair and holiday note: I’m watching Hairspray for Mothers Day.)

1. Speech acts. Let’s start with How about those Cubs? — illustrating an idiomatic construction in which a sentence in the form of an information question (in how about) functions as mild exclamation about the focus of the sentence (the Chicago Cubs baseball team) and an invitation to the addressee to talk about that focus. This a conventionalization of a specific question form for a specific speech act — something that you have to learn if you are to be competent as a speaker of vernacular American English.

2. Background knowledge. If you don’t know about the Cubbies, then the question will misfire. Apparently Zippy (“Are they imaginary?”) and San Bruno (“I don’t care for synchronized diving”) don’t get it.

3. Social context. Things are more complicated than that, since the question is usually addressed by men to men, typically in an attempt to initiate a conversation between guys who are not socially close. Neither of these clauses is a rigid condition on use, but follow from the social fact that sports talk is stereotypically a “masculine” province and so can serve as neutral social grease for men without much shared experience.

4. Cubbies. Then there’s the affectionate diminutive for Cubs – conveying an emotional attachment to the team.

5. ’bout. And the casual-speech reduction of about to ’bout — further marking the sentence as informal, vernacular.

6. Demonstrative them. But the big point — note Glutina’s “I don’t think that’s grammatical” — is demonstrative them in them Cubbies (instead of those Cubbies). This is a very widespread non-standardism.

MWDEU has a nice entry on demonstrative them (pp. 897-8), though it doesn’t solve the puzzle of the form’s source. It’s attested since the end of the 16th century and is pretty clearly not a continuation of the Old English definite article.

It went largely unnoticed for about a century, and then began appearing in literary texts in the 19th century, but almost entirely in representations of speech. By the middle of the 19th century, it was regularly criticized in schoolbooks as a barbarism. Then:

Perhaps because of the efforts of two centuries worth of schoolmasters, the demonstrative them is now largely restricted to the speech of the uneducated and the familiar speech of others. It has been in use for four centuries, and has still not reached respectability.

But where does it come from?

A number of syntacticians have pointed out that for 1st and 2nd persons, the pl personal pronouns are used as demonstrative determiners: we linguists, (vernacular) us linguists, you linguists, (dialectal) youse linguists. Then, on the model of the vernacular us linguists, we get vernacular  them linguists.

Then, given the vernacular and informal features of how about questions, it’s natural to use them as a demonstrative in them. How (a)bout those Cub(bie)s?  isn’t infelicitous, but it’s on the stiff side; them is more colloquial.

Posted by Jonathan Stover on Facebook:

Well, it might or might not be genuine, but it’s entertaining. And notice that it has a characteristic feature of many notices prohibiting acts: its indirection. It dosn’t say “Don’t masturbate in the showers”; it tells you instead that doing so violates a code. And then it tells you to masturbate in your own room, meaning, instead of in the showers — you’re supposed to work that out from the context — but it doesn’t say that, so it can be understood as an instruction to go and masturbate in your own room. Now.

I haven’t found anything on the UMass Housing Code, outside of this notice. And I’m dubious about the semen buildup in the drains. I do like the instruction to see your RA with any questions you might have. Do RAs give advice about jacking off?

Today’s Pearls Before Swine, with a type of language play I have no ready name for:

(The human in the last panel is the cartoonist, Stephan Pastis. And Rat’s question is rhetorical, conveying ‘the word shame means nothing to you’.)

In this form, you pile up phonologically identical words or parts of words to make a gigantic expression that is almost impossible to parse (without the context that sets up the expression): pen the writing implement, the pen- of penultimate, Sean Penn the actor, and Penn the university; the ultimate ‘final’ of penultimate, ultimate ‘very best’, and the ultimate of Ultimate Frisbee. (On penultimate, ultimate, etc, see this posting.) The effect of the set-up is to license what sounds like a massive attack of stuttering.

Today’s Zits:

The dad’s “I don’t know” conveys that he’s unsure of his opinion on the subject (whatever that is), so he says “Ask Mom”, meaning ‘Ask Mom what she thinks”, with ellipsis of the Wh-clause object of ask, but with understood reference (within that object) to the mother. But Jeremy takes the other possible reading, involving reference to the father — i.e., ‘Ask Mom what I think’ — which, though possible, is unlikely in context (how should the mother know what the father thinks, when he doesn’t know himself?).

In today’s Pearls Before Swine, Rat tricks Goat into saying something that gets him in trouble:

Shades of the mantra “Oo watta na Siam”.  (There used to be a Thai restaurant called Watana Siam in Park Slope, Brooklyn, but it seems to have morphed into a completely different Thai restaurant.)

In any case, is asking someone if they want to get high a punishable offense? Does it count as an offer of drugs?

An assortment of short items on various topics, beginning with three from the July 22nd New Yorker. Portmanteaus, New Jerseyization, oology, dago, killer whale, and Gail Collins on Bob Filner.

1. Monster portmanteaus. On p. 25 of the New Yorker, Tad Friend in a Talk of the Town piece about horror moviemaker Roger Corman and his wife Julie:

Lately, the Cormans have been producing films for the Syfy channel. The titles are fairly self-explanatory: “Dinocroc,” “Supergator,” “Piranhaconda.” I balked at “Sharktopus,” Corman said. “I told the network, ‘You should go right up to the acceptable level of insanity in a title, but if you go over it, the audience turns against you’ — and then ‘Sharktopus’ was one of their biggest hits.” Coming soon, therefore, is “Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda” — not to be confused with last week’s succès d’estime “Sharknado,” produced by one of Corman’s many imitators.

From “More dubious portmanteaus”:

The world of portmanteaus is crowded with playful formations that are unlikely to survive for long (Higgsteria), including many that are just for ostentatious display (Piranhaconda and Sharktopus).

2. A prize -ize. On p. 45, in John Seabrook’s “The Beach Builders: Can the Jersey Shore be saved?”:

Orrin Pilkey, a distinguished coastal scientist and author from Duke University, calls the state’s approach to coastal engineering “New Jerseyization.” The term is not complimentary.

I have a sizable file on innovations in -ize, often inside nouns in -ization, including some based on proper names: Gitmo-ize, Cape Codization, Atkinize, Nascarization, Wal-Mart-ization, iPodization, Iraqization, Keplerize, Anderson Cooperization, Vermontize, Politico-ization, Walkenize. In older -ize words, there is a resistance to -izing words ending in vowels and words with accented final syllables, but these constraints are generally lifted for proper-name bases: New Jerseyization, Cape Codization.

3. And an excellent -ology. On p. 52, in Julian Rubinstein’s “Operation Easter: The hunt for illegal egg collectors”:

Oology — the study of eggs — is “one of the most exciting areas or ornithology and, in many respects, one of the least known,” Douglas Russell, the curator of the egg collection at [the Natural History Museum at] Tring [north of London], told me.

Oology is in NOAD2, but I don’t recall having seen this wonderful word before.

4. Another portmanteau. From Thib Guicherd-Callin on Facebook yesterday:

Today is my 12th Ameriversary. (Re-read this word carefully.)

America + anniversary.

5. A slur and a mythetymology. From the NYT on July 23rd, “Barbecue Vendors Ejected From Saratoga Over an Ethnic Slur on Their Food Truck” by Thomas Kaplan:

Andrea Loguidice and Brandon Snooks thought they had won the sandwich lottery when they were awarded a spot to sell barbecue at the Saratoga Race Course this summer. To prepare for the crowds, they developed a special menu, bought a six-foot smoker and cleared their calendar.

But on Friday, opening day at Saratoga, their dream went up in smoke. Complaints came in, not about the cooking, but about the name on the side of the food truck: Wandering Dago, which Ms. Loguidice and Mr. Snooks had thought was cheeky and clever, but which racetrack officials deemed simply offensive. The truck was banned from the grounds.

… Ms. Loguidice and Mr. Snooks, who are both Italian-American, started their food truck about a year ago in Schenectady; their best-seller is the HomeWrecker, which features pulled pork, brisket, smoked bacon, barbecue sauce and melted provolone on a toasted ciabatta roll. She said they meant no offense by using the word “dago,” a slur that the Oxford English Dictionary says is derived from the Spanish name Diego, but which they understood to refer to Italian immigrants who were day laborers, and were paid daily, or as the day goes.

“Our daily pay depends on what happens that day, so we just thought it was a fun play on words,” Ms. Loguidice said. She added: “We didn’t think it was derogatory in any manner. It’s self-referential. Who would self-reference themselves in a derogatory manner?”

Anthony J. Tamburri, dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, which is part of the City University of New York, said that regardless of the word’s origin, it was not appropriate for a food truck. He described it as “the most offensive term one could use with regard to an Italian-American.”

An inventive etymology, which removes most of the offense from the word. But it’s a mythetymology, and the word is indubitably offensive. From NOAD2 :

dago  noun ( pl. dagos or dagoes ) informal, offensive   an Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese-speaking person.

Whether dago is the most offensive term for an Italian-American depends on what you think of wop. From NOAD2:

wop  noun informal, offensive   a contemptuous term for an Italian or other southern European.

origin uncertain, perhaps from Italian guappo ‘bold, showy,’ from Spanish guapo ‘dandy.’

There’s a mythetymology for this one too, an acronymic one: from WithOut Papers.

6. Killer whales. From the NYT Science Times on July 30th, in “Smart, Social and Erratic in Captivity” by James Gorman:

[Diana Reiss of Hunter College said] she does not see ambiguity about killer whales. “I never felt that we should have orcas in captivity,” she said. “I think morally, as well as scientifically, it’s wrong.”

The animal in question, Orcinus orca, is actually the largest dolphin. Its name apparently came not because it was a vicious whale, but because it preyed on whales.

That would make killer whale a very odd compound, conveyong ‘whale killer’.  Wikipedia tells a different, though still somewhat confused, story:

The killer whale (Orcinus orca), also referred to as the orca whale or orca, and less commonly as the blackfish, is a toothed [marine mammal] belonging to the oceanic dolphin family. Killer whales are found in all oceans, from the frigid Arctic and Antarctic regions to tropical seas. Killer whales as a species have a diverse diet, although individual populations often specialize in particular types of prey. Some feed exclusively on fish, while others hunt marine mammals such as sea lions, seals, walruses, and even large whales. (link)

Oceanic dolphins are members of the cetacean family Delphinidae. These marine mammals are related to whales and porpoises. They are found worldwide, mostly in the shallower seas of the continental shelves. As the name implies, these dolphins tend to be found in the open seas, unlike the river dolphins, although a few species such as the Irrawaddy dolphin are coastal or riverine. Six of the larger species in the Delphinidae, [including the killer whale (orca),] … are commonly called whales, rather than dolphins (link)

So killer whales are (in common usage) whales, and some of them hunt (and kill) marine mammals, so killer whale isn’t a bad common name.

7. A dubious vow. From Gail Collins’s op-ed column in the NYT, “Things to Skip in August”, on the 15th:

You may remember that, in July, Mayor Bob Filner [of San Diego] was charged with sexual harassment by some of his former supporters who claimed that, among other things, he grabbed female workers around the neck and whispered lewd comments in their ears. That was the moment when the nation first became aware of the term “Filner headlock.”

Initially, the information was all secondhand, and Filner vowed that “the facts will vindicate me.” Even then, things looked ominous. For one thing, the facts-vindication defense had been preceded by a vow to behave differently. It was sort of like announcing that you’re innocent but will definitely never do it again.

Definitely an odd sort of speech act.

From a Stanford student, this xkcd:

What I said to this student:

What makes the xkcd so challenging is that it’s an instance of a kind of conversational exchange that has been very little studied (if at all) — called in American street language, “messing with someone’s mind” or “yanking someone’s chain” (closely related: British “having someone on”). It involves saying something that is thought-provoking but not perceptibly appropriate to the situation at hand (so, on the face of it, just false) — often communicated with a formulaic expression (like “no pun intended” or “pardon my French”) attached. It’s a form of aggressive teasing… [ I just hate aggressive teasing]

In the xkcd case, the recipient has been tricked into spending hours fretting to make real sense of the original.

The Stanford course has developed to the point where the students are exploring old topics in new ways and introducing new topics and examples. In general, I don’t feel comfortable writing about these on this blog, at the moment and without the student’s permission. Maybe later. But in this case, I’m relaying some of my advice, not exposing a student’s ideas.

Some bounty from the Stanford Linguistics in the Comics freshman seminar, a collection of xkcd cartoons with subheaded metatext “My Hobby”, searched out by Kyle Qian. Kyle found about 1,300 xkcd cartoons online, 36 of them subheaded this way, and he posted 7 of them with discussion. (I’ll put off posting about his comments until he gives me permission. The cartoons are in some sense public, but Kyle’s analysis is certainly not.)

One of the MHCs (My Hobby Comics) has appeared on this blog before: on “no pun intended” (the metatext). Another, on the reinterpretation of things like sweet-ass car (intentionally) transformed to sweet ass-car is discussed, but not reproduced, here:

(#1)

Then the new ones, reproduced here without comment:

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)

(#5)

(#6)

From an esurance commercial on tv, entitled “Hank” (the key bit is boldfaced):

Hank: My daughter thinks I’m out of touch. So I asked her how I saved 15 percent on car insurance in just 15 minutes.

Neighbor: Huh. (shakes head)

Hank: (looks at phone) “IDK?” What does that mean?

Neighbor: “I don’t know.”

Hank: And I’m the one who’s out of touch. LOL.

The neighbor is answering Hank’s question, a request for information, asking about what “IDK” means. Hank understands this instead as an assertion, by the neighbor, that he doesn’t know what “IDK” means. (Hank then thinks the neighbor is out of touch.)  Both understandings involve assertions, but about different aspects of the conversational exchange.

Readers will recognize this ambiguity as a cousin of a famous speech act ambiguity, in the Abbott and Costello comedy routine “Who’s on first”. A video of the routine, along with a brief analysis, here:

The premise of the sketch is that Abbott is identifying the players on a baseball team for Costello, but their names and nicknames can be interpreted as non-responsive answers to Costello’s questions. For example, the first baseman is named “Who”; thus, the utterance “Who’s on first” is ambiguous between the question (“Which person is the first baseman?”) and the answer (“The name of the first baseman is ‘Who’”).

Not the same thing as the “Hank” ambiguity, but like it involving aspects of the conversational exchange.