More recombinant idioms
The following bit from an old Dr Who episode popped into my head this morning: Seventh Doctor: Time and tide melt the snowman. Mel: Doctor, "wait for *no* man." Doctor:...
Archive for Funny
What They Did II: The Movie Breakup
I've always been fond of my 1997 Words & Stuff post What They Did: The Movie, featuring short, silly, and surreal bits of fiction and drama consisting entirely of movie...
Analyzing Benedict Cumberbatch name variants
Back in December, linguistics grad student Gretchen McCulloch analyzed joke variants on Benedict Cumberbatch's name to see what the underlying patterns are. She gave more statistical detail in a post...
My favorite Unicode character name
My favorite Unicode character name is LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH SQUIRREL TAIL (U+A755). The character itself is pretty cool too. If you're viewing this page in one of the...
Unfortunate Forever Stamps
I'm guessing most Americans know by now that the US Postal Service sells “Forever Stamps”; you buy a Forever Stamp at today's first-class one-ounce stamp price, and it will be...
Death Metal English
The editor of the heavy metal website Invisible Oranges provides a guide to Death Metal English. A couple of sample translations from the article: Normal English: “Commuting to work” Death...
Fake Ludlum titles
Nice list of winners of Slate's 2012 Fake Robert Ludlum Title contest, along with notes on Salman Rushdie's Ludlumization of Shakespeare plays....
Some puns
Uncle Dobe passed along a list of puns, many of which (to my surprise) I hadn't seen before, and some of which made me laugh out loud. Here's an abridged...
Who’s On First, updated
Joe Posnanski recounts the dialogue that would ensue “if someone traded for Who and What and other players.” Funny for fans of Who's On First even if you're not a...
Recombinant metaphors: smoking duck
A Reuters article about the Higgs boson provides a lovely mixed metaphor from Oliver Buchmueller, one of the CERN researchers: If I were a betting man, I would bet that...