Language Log

From today's Doonesbury:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Cauchy-Lorentz: "Something alarmingly mathematical is happening, and you should probably pause to Google my name and check what field I originally worked in.""

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "The <x> that is held by <y> is also a <y><x>, so if you go to a food truck, the stuff you buy is truck food. A phone that's in your car is a carphone, and a car equipped with a phone is a phonecar. When you play a mobile racing game, you're in your phonecar using your carphone to drive a different phonecar. I'm still not sure about bananaphones."

See Mark Liberman and Richard Sproat, "The Stress and Structure of Modified Noun Phrases in English," in Lexical Matters, Sag and Szabolcsi, Eds., 1990.

Update — How about other XY/YX English compound pairs, written with or without internal space? There's cat house and housecat; fish-bone and bonefish; index-card and card index; ball game and game ball; dozens if not hundreds of others; how many can you think of within a minute or so?

Today's SMBC:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "At least we can all agree on the enormity of this usage."

See "Begging the question: We have answers", 4/29/2010.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "If you study graphs in which edges can link more than two nodes, you're more properly called a hyperedgelord."

By Allie Brosh:

Update — apparently this is a meme derived from Allie Brosh's art, but not created by her. See the comment below.

The first two panes of today's Non Sequitur:

Today's SMBC starts this way:

From the first panel of the most recent Scenes From a Multiverse, an example of what Wikipedia calls "Type 2 Zeugma" or "semantic syllepsis":

Today's Dumbing of Age features Amber performing a daring physical feat in order to help her friend Walky:

The mouseover title is "let's set realistic limitations for ourselves", and in the last panel, Amber remarks about what she's doing that "It's rough, sure, but it's not impossible, like calling anyone on the phone".

I'm about to head to Poland for Speech Prosody 2018, and then to Helsinki for a CHIST-ERA committee meeting, so today's SMBC is especially meaningful to me:

This strip was recently reposted (colorized) in Danielle Corsetto's webcomic Girls With Slingshots: