Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Miscellanea

Wisconsin has a state budget. Woo hoo. It contains money for the university, and even for the Law School. Still trying to get some clarity on what this means for the UW, but it's not terrible.

A while back the Log had a piece on a SoCal hip-hop group called the Linguistics. Now there's a member of a hip-hop band named Linguistics. See here.

Completely missed it but the Sunday paper had a set of Wisconsin tourist slogans, including a couple on language: "Wisconsin: Hey there once then!", etc. Sadly, the most accurate ones were different, like "Wisconsin: We used to be progressive." But then, "Wisconsin: At least we still have cheese." A lot were familiar, like the one in the image (from here, but other versions of the slogan on t-shirts are out there.)

Read something yesterday talking about the impopularity of an idea. I thought it was a Spanishism (Hispanicism? That doesn't sound right either.) since the adjective would have that form in Spanish, but it actually gets some hits. I notice lots of variability on these and have a lot myself, but this one sounds utterly impossible to me. It's maybe an inevitable, irresistible analogy.

And hat tips all around … I'm being flooded with ideas, it seems like.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The budget is not terrible for the UW, but one prominent Republican Assembly leader was actually
quoted as referring to the UW as the "economic engine of the state". If that is so, why would we scrimp on support to the UW, but spend lavishly on other things, such as Corrections? Corrections would be less burdened by far if we invested more in education.

Anonymous said...

It would seem tat un- is the default prefix, since you can get Germanic + Romance prefix-word combinations but not the reverse:

unpopular, unpredictable

but not

*inlucky, *infriendy

No doubt this has to do with the number of syllables, since we can not expect that speakers of English know the etymological origin of words and affixes.