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Sarcasm
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...
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Apologies
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...
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Maternal qudgments
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...
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Dilbert 1: managerspeak
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...
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Ask AZ: I want to wish you a Merry Christmas
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...
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Knowing
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...
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Apologizing
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...
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Rhetorical questions as openers
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 /...
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Calvin x 3
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:...
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Three musicians walk into La Côte Basque…
(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,...
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Sarcastic and literal
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...
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How ’bout them Cubbies?
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...
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Pub(l)ic notice
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....
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Word avalanche
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...
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don’t know
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...
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Language trickery
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...
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Odds and ends 8/18/13
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....
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Messing with my mind
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...
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My Hobby Comics
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...
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Speech act ambiguity
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....
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