Book Review - You're My Dawg, Dog: a Lexicon of Dog Terms for People

by Donald Friedman with illustrations by J.C. Suarès 

I would say I was as happy as a clam while reading You're My Dawg, Dog, but a dog with two tails fits the bill better. As a person who loves playing with words almost as much as I love playing with my dog, I had a feeling I would enjoy this book when I opened it to this wonderful  introductory paraprosdokian and its adorable accompanying illustration:

Outside of a dog,

a book is man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

- Groucho Marx

The book continued to entertain throughout with over 140 canine-based terms, metaphors, idioms and proverbs, and numerous charming illustrations. Having written my master's essay in a large part about animal metaphors, I was surprised that the book even included several terms and expressions that were new to me. Here are a few that I enjoyed:

Doggo (adv) To be still and quiet (lying like a dog) in concealment. "Herb and Sally, nearly caught in flagrante delicto, lay doggo in the thick foliage until the other guests had passed by."

Dog shelf (n) The floor in sarcastic usage. "Hang it on the dog shelf, Herb!' Sally yelled to him indicating that he should throw his coat on the floor, as was his habit."

Why keep a dog and bark yourself? Don't arrange for a task to be accomplished by another and then do it yourself - that's the message of this ancient proverb, found in a 1583 treatise.

In addition to definitions, the book also includes numerous etymologies and several amusing quotes from famous individuals.

Overall, I would call You're My Dawg, Dog a delightful romp in a doggy word park. And Stanley agrees too. Here he is reading his already dog-eared copy.

Illustrations © 2013 J.C. Suarès. www.welcomebooks.com/dawg

Pragmatics - Down to the Wire

Or wireless, in this case.

Via the Unschool Bus brought to my attention by Simon Taylor.

A Room Full of Idioms

John Atkinson sure knows how to have fun with language.

And Wrong Hands is definitely my new favorite comic.

Tim Hortons Gets Brownie Points for Word Play

Tim Hortons is advertising a limited-time Caramel Chocolate Brownie Iced Capp Supreme. The tagline for the campaign is "Brownie Points for Caramel".

The above image is from the Tim Hortons website which includes this description of the beverage: "It's our famous Iced Capp made with creamy caramel flavor, rich chocolate whipped topping and a decadent brownie crumble."

I noticed one of the campaign billboards a week or so ago and, I must say, the tagline is one of the best I have seen in quite a while.  I absolutely love the fact that Brownie points is open to both the figurative and literal interpretation.

Brownie points: a notional mark of achievement, or kudos for performing some creditable act.

toast points: triangular pieces of toast, often without the crust, used as the base of hors d'oeuvres and canapés.

Okay, so the brownies may not actually be points, but I can certainly imagine that some of the crumbles are in the shape of triangles.

Always Your Flavorite

Burnett's Flavored Vodkas may have launched the "Always Your Flavorite" advertising campaign over a year ago, but I just saw one of the billboards for the first time last week. Perhaps the campaign is new to Michigan.

The company's press release stated that "the campaign includes a large scale consumer and trade advertising and outdoor campaign." This makes me wonder why, even if the campaign is new to Michigan, I couldn't find one image from the campaign on the internet.

Either way, something about the slogan didn't sit right with me.

I get the portmanteau of  flavor + favorite; that doesn't bother me, though it is nothing spectacular. So, it must be something to do with the adverb always or the possessive determiner your.

I will start with the possessive determiner your. Flavored or not, I have never had Burnett's vodka so nothing about it has to do with me. The same idea applies to the adverb always. Having never had Burnett's, it could not always be anything to me. Even if I had had the vodka, the history on Heaven Hill's website indicates that they did not launch Burnett's Vodka until 1991. I was of the legal drinking age before then and I have always preferred Absolut or Stoli (both of which have long made flavored vodkas).

Off the top of my head, I came up with a couple of alternatives (mind you, I have not done any trademark research).

Retaining the deictic nature of the message but adding an appropriately suggestive spin  -

Your New Flavorite 

And another playful, idiom-based suggestion -

Play Flavorites

Which can easily incorporate a positive reminder -

And Play Safe; Don't Drink and Drive.

A Trite One-Liner Gets a Visual Rebirth

As much as the expression grates on my nerves, I couldn't help but chuckle when I saw the following image.

Image credit

Favoring Language Change - Idioms

This topic seems to be more controversial than a simple dictionary definition would lead one to believe.

At issue: If a man is favoring his right leg because of an injury, which leg was injured, his right leg or his left?

Idiomatically speaking, dictionaries seem to favor the interpretation that the the right leg is the injured one.

Here are the pertinent entries from merriam-webster.com and dictionary.com respectively:

favor verb

1. a : to regard or treat with favor
b (1) : to do a kindness for : oblige (2) : endow
c : to treat gently or carefully <favored her injured leg>

and

14. to deal with, treat, or use gently: to favor a lame leg.

However, consider these responses from a similar question posed on Yahoo:

"When you favor a leg, you give it more work. example: if you injured your left leg, you would favor your right leg so you didn't have to use your left as much." - Lackadaisical.One

"Essentially the same thing here. If you favour your right leg, that means it is your favourite leg to use, i.e. you prefer using it to your left leg. That means you put MORE weight on it." - Amanda

And my favorite:

"my advice would be to ask a question that makes sense next time" - bluffenw/maimuffin

The analogy I have always used when told that I have it all wrong is this -

A teacher's pet is a favorite; therefore, the teacher favors that student by calling on said student more frequently than other students.

For this reason, I call on my right leg more frequently when my left leg is injured.

Either way you look at it, I believe that the examples of language in use coupled with the way language is constantly changing allow for both versions to be favorable.

You are Such an Idiomatic Luck-Out

I have been meaning to add my two cents to the topic of some posts about the phrasal verb "luck out" that have been making the rounds. The gist of the posts is the question of whether "lucking out" is a good thing or a bad thing.

Here is the background:

Language Log's "Lucking out"

Language Log's "More lucking out"

Superlinguo's "Lucking out"

TYWKIWDBI's "'Lucking out' can be good -- or bad."

The answer to my semantic interpretation of "luck out" can be found in my response to Superlinguo's post, which follows:

"Lucking out" was always a positive in my youth. Its use was so common in Michigan that many people turned the phrasal verb into a noun. "You got a pony for your birthday...you are such a luck-out."

Upon further analysis, I thought to compare "luck out" to some other idiomatic phrasal verbs that end in "out".

Here is what I came up with:

crap out

drop out

poop out

run out

stamp out

wipe out

wash out

For some reason, I could not think of one example that carries a positive semantic interpretation.

I wonder if that could be part of the reason that some people think of lucking out as a negative.

The Summation of Bodily Idioms

Thank you Grea.

Reversing Idioms

Love this t-shirt that my son brought home from camp this summer. It is a wonderful example of having fun with words, idioms and graphics. Unfortunately, the graphics illustrate the opposite of the idiom.

Absent Punctuation = Semantic Possibilities

Last year I shared some 6-Word Stories written by 9th graders with reading disabilities. I was recently sent another collection of these stories and would like to share one in particular.

We search so much for nothing.

Because there is no internal punctuation, my dialectical background allows me to interpret this story in two different ways.

We search so much...for nothing. (We search all the time for nothing in particular.)

and

We search...so much for nothing. (We search/ed and it wasn't worth the effort because we never found what we were searching for.)

The second reading is based on the fact that "so much for nothing" was used as an idiomatic expression in my youth. The kids in my neighborhood would shout it out anytime they were disappointed in the outcome of an action.

Go Climb a Syntax Tree

A syntactician's alternative to GO FLY A KITE.
If you would like to order this tree on a t-shirt or mug, please click here.

A Pseudo-Mondegreen for Linguists

Do you remember the Prince song Automatic from the album 1999?


If not, here is a video from youtube of a live version of the song -



And the chorus -

A-u-t-o-matic

Just tell me what 2 do

A-u-t-o-matic

I'm so in love with U

Well...


whenever I hear the song, I want to sing -



I-d-i-o-matic


Another favorite is Carly Simon's Anticipation, to which I sing -



Alliteration

Variation on an Idiom

As the two frogs sat on a lily pad, one commented to the other,

“Time sure is fun when you’re having flies.”

-Mike Ridley

Of course it is also true that...

Time flies when you're having fun.

And viewing these idioms concurrently presents a perfect example of why lexical categorizations should not rely on semantic definitions.

In the first sentence "fun" is an adjective and "flies" is a noun.

In the second sentence "fun" is a noun and "flies" is a verb.

Thanks for the laugh Mike.

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Alternate Number Idioms

Wordplay for Phoneticians

Following is a rebus-like variation of a well-known idiom. Can you guess what it is?

ull ou all the sos.

Here is a pictographic hint.

And the answer is:

Pull out all the stops.

In phonetics, a stop is a sound that is made by completely stopping and then releasing airflow in the vocal tract. The first version of the idiom in this post is written without the alphabetic letters that represent the stop sounds.

These are the sounds that the IPA classifies as stops: /p,b,t,d,k,g/.

The idiom "pull out all the stops" is defined by thefreedictionary.com as:

"to do everything you can to make something successful."

The Phrase Finder notes on the origin of the phrase include:

"The popular belief is that this phrase derives from the manner of construction of pipe organs. These instruments have stops to control the air flow through the pipes and pulling them out increases the musical volume. This seems to be the type of casual easy answer that is the hallmark of folk etymology. In this case, the popular belief isn't a fallacy but is in fact correct."

Etymologically, this idiom has more to do with phonetics than the uninitiated might picture at first glance.

Language and Brain Regions - Use the Right Side of Your Brain

There was an interesting article published last fall in e! Science News that reviewed a study about how the brain recognises idioms.

Researcher Dr Alice Proverbio summarized the findings as follows:

"Though the interpretation of language involves widespread activation bilaterally, the right hemisphere has a special role in the comprehension of idiomatic meaning."

For more details about the study and how results were determined, click here: e! Science News

(Check it out. Don't let the left side of your brain keep the right side from having fun.)

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Happy Labor Day Weekend

From the Rooter to the Tooter

I read a wonderful memoir this summer called "Same Kind of Different as Me". The book is about a millionaire art dealer named Ron Hall and his relationship with a homeless man and former sharecropper named Denver Moore. I won't get into any more details about the book but I wanted to mention an idiom that Denver Moore used in the book when talking about eating the meat from pigs.

"From the rooter to the tooter."

What a beautifully poetic way to describe eating the parts of pigs that most people would rather not even think about.

Apparently this is a well known idiom (probably more so in the southern United States) but it was new to me and I really got a kick out of it. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and its accurate portrayal of dialects too.

More Fun with Idioms

Television writers sure have been getting creative with idioms lately and I love writing about idioms, so here we go:

I wasn't born yesterday became I remember yesterday and I wasn't born during it on an episode of Desperate Housewives.

I could give a rat's ass became where did I put that rat's ass I could give on an episode of Pushing Daisies.

You can't beat a dead horse became he must be from the dead horse beating department (don't remember where I heard this one).