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Questions related from Don L. F. Nilsen
Voladamir Zelinsky started out as a comedian and satirist. As a man of the people, he even entered a dancing with the stars competition. So when Ukraine was invaded by Putin, Voladamir Zelinsky...
01 January 1970 3,576 99 View
Since the 1800s, linguistics have been using Reed-Kellogg diagramming to teach about English syntax, but in 1916 we have Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Langue vs. Parole.” In 1954 we have John Gumpers’s...
01 January 1970 1,275 20 View
Carl Jung said that there are archetypes and shadow archetypes related the end of the journey (the ruler, the magician, the sage, and the wise fool). The Ruler moves from taking responsibility for...
01 January 1970 8,235 2 View
Democrats buy most of the books that have been banned somewhere. Republicans form censorship committees and read them as a group. Democrats name their children after popular sports figures,...
01 January 1970 6,309 14 View
Old Comedy of the 6th & 5thCenturies BC often made fun of a specific person and of current political issues. Middle Comedy of the 5th& 4th Centuries BC made fun of more general themes such...
01 January 1970 3,142 3 View
Much of the humor on “America’s Got Talent,” and on “Britain’s Got Talent” is Physical Humor. So also is the humor of Italy’s Commedia dell’Arte,” France’s “Comédie Française,” “Punch and Judy”...
01 January 1970 6,728 10 View
Whenever there is a paradigm shift because of changing technology, religion, politics, culture, etc., new concepts are brought into the language. And when there are no words to talk about these...
01 January 1970 1,409 11 View
LINGUISTIC HUMOR AND LANGUAGE PLAY There are many different types of linguistic humor: phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. There are Oxymorons (Civil War), Metaphors...
01 January 1970 6,159 8 View
Linguistic or conceptual body-part metaphors relate not only to Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, Knees, but also to Eyes, Ears, Mouth and Nose and other human body parts. Here are a few English...
01 January 1970 4,061 6 View
In discussing the History of English, we must consider such terms as assimilation, dissimilation, umlaut, ablaut, Grimm's Law, Verner's law, and in the case of Old English becoming Middle English...
01 January 1970 7,954 19 View
CASE GRAMMAR: A MERGER OF SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS Charles Fillmore’s Deep Cases are determined not by syntax, but rather by semantics. Rather than having Subject, Indirect Object and Direct Object,...
01 January 1970 4,706 15 View
01 January 1970 9,467 0 View
HUMOROUS ARCHETYPES, AND SHADOW ARCHETYPES Northrup Frye said that the Romance presents an idealized world, the black-and-white world of our desires, where good things are really good, and bad...
01 January 1970 4,078 0 View
AFRICAN-AMERICAN HUMOR The contributions of African Americans to the overall humor of the United States—and to the world—has been very significant, especially if we consider the elements of...
01 January 1970 7,950 0 View
ANIMAL BEHAVIOR AND ANIMAL PLAY Animals have their own behaviors, and their special ways of playing. Compare and contrast the behaviors and play of canines, felines, equines, primates, etc. More...
01 January 1970 9,313 0 View
HUMOR AS IT RELATES TO RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, AND DISCOURSE The classical rhetoricians of ancient Greece and Rome were concerned with the “five canons of rhetoric: 1. Invention, 2. Arrangement, 3....
01 January 1970 1,851 8 View
01 January 1970 7,909 0 View
HEALTH, MEDICINE, AND HUMOR Humor is often used to get people through tragic events, so it is no surprise that humor was used to get us through the Covid 19 pandemic. Here are a few...
01 January 1970 4,433 0 View
01 January 1970 6,503 9 View
Ambiguity AMBIGUITY PARADOX: “Everything is ambiguous; however, nothing is ambiguous.” Almost all words and sentences are ambiguous, if they are not seen or heard in the larger context. However,...
01 January 1970 290 13 View
PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, AND HUMOR John Morreall says that when laughter is mentioned in the Bible, it is associated with one of three things. In descending order, they are: Hostility, Foolishness,...
01 January 1970 3,033 6 View
PHYSICAL HUMOR AND PLAY Much of the humor on “America’s Got Talent,” and on “Britain’s Got Talent” is Physical Humor. So also is the humor of Italy’s Commedia dell’Arte,” France’s “Comédie...
01 January 1970 385 2 View
HUMOR IN MUSIC AND THE PERFORMING ARTS Humor in classical music has a long tradition as shown by such playful vocabulary items as the French gavotte, which like the Irish and English gigue or jig...
01 January 1970 6,652 23 View
01 January 1970 7,646 4 View
It is amazing how many ways we have of displaying and presenting various types of lexical and pragmatic information. These displays and presentations are at various levels of abstraction, detail...
01 January 1970 2,195 7 View
01 January 1970 7,948 0 View
HUMOR AND AGING In order to commemorate her 79thbirthday, Julie Andrews made a special appearance at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall for the benefit of AARP. One of the musical numbers she...
01 January 1970 919 4 View
American Slang Slang is constantly changing, and so is jargon. This is because both slang and jargon are used to determine which people can use it properly, and which people can’t. Slang is the...
01 January 1970 824 3 View
THE HISTORY OF HUMOR Old Comedy of the 6th & 5thCenturies BC often made fun of a specific person and of current political issues. Middle Comedy of the 5th& 4th Centuries BC made fun of...
01 January 1970 9,674 5 View
LEGAL ISSUES AND HUMOR The Media Law Journal (April 24, 2013) stated, “it’s not that the law clearly protects humorous speech and satire. The question is a bit vexed.” “With cases involving...
01 January 1970 4,534 4 View
THE BREAKING OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES (RULES OF POLITENESS) Here are H. P. Grice’s rules of politeness (conversational implicatures), while other social groups tend to break or flaunt these...
01 January 1970 6,569 4 View
GERONTOLOGICAL HUMOR In order to commemorate her 79thbirthday, Julie Andrews made a special appearance at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall for the benefit of AARP. One of the musical numbers she...
01 January 1970 3,559 19 View
HUMOROUS GENRES, ARCHETYPES, AND SHADOW ARCHETYPES Northrup Frye said that the Romance presents an idealized world, the black-and-white world of our desires, where good things are really good, and...
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Children’s songs tend to be lively and playful, but as we grow older we try to be more serious. It’s therefore important that we rekindle our childhood sense of fun, creativity, and play. Some...
01 January 1970 5,145 4 View
01 January 1970 3,456 0 View
INTERNATIONAL HUMOR A world-wide telephone survey was conducted and the only question asked was: "Would you please give your honest opinion about possible solutions to the food shortage in the...
01 January 1970 7,391 1 View
01 January 1970 2,963 11 View
CREATIVITY AND HUMOR In his The Act of Creation (1964), Arthur Koestler suggests that there are three types of creativity: Type I: Artistic Originality: A work of art is a distortion of reality...
01 January 1970 6,873 0 View
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01 January 1970 8,321 12 View
PSYCHOLOGY AND HUMOR Many psychologists use Traits, States, and Behaviors in contrasting seriousness with playfulness. Serious people tend to engage; while playful people tend to...
01 January 1970 9,023 4 View
Solopova, O. A., Don Nilsen, and Alleen Nilsen. “The Image of Russia through Animal Metaphors: A Diachronic Case Study of American Media Discourse” Russian Journal of Linguistics 27.3 (2023), pp....
01 January 1970 8,659 0 View
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GALLOWS HUMOR: A VERY DARK FORM OF WORD PLAY Gallows Humor in Real Life: Sometimes gallows humor is grounded in reality. In 1883 Judge M. B. Gerry sentenced Alfred E. Packer to death for...
01 January 1970 2,777 0 View
SOCIOLOGY AND HUMOR Humor “breaks the ice” between strangers, and unites people in different hierarchical positions. It creates a sense of “shared conspiracy” as when gossiping or joking about...
01 January 1970 500 2 View
DISCOURSE HUMOR Tough language (Aristotle's Ethos) is the language of the novel. It tends to be written in a first-person (I, me, mine, we, us, our) narrative; it is subjective and informal or...
01 January 1970 8,304 4 View
01 January 1970 5,364 3 View
Accidental Humor Yogi Berra was the catcher for the New York Yankees baseball team. He said: “I want to win 100 or 105 games this year—whichever comes first.” “It’s déjà vu all over again.” “It...
01 January 1970 633 0 View
In his The Act of Creation (1964), Arthur Koestler suggests that there are three types of creativity: Type I: Artistic Originality: A work of art is a distortion of reality ranging from dada to...
01 January 1970 8,573 12 View
RADIO AND TELEVISION HUMOR In the 1950s, many people purchased TV sets just so as not to be left out of the fun of the sit-coms on television. Water pressure in New York City was influenced by...
01 January 1970 3,529 2 View
SARCASM More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian concluded that there three types of irony or sarcasm. These occur whenever the literal meaning of a statement does not fit with...
01 January 1970 5,613 0 View
SATIRE The word satire comes from the Latin satura meaning a dish filled with mixed fruits. This was the usual dessert tray after a banquet, and an early meaning for the word was “to be well fed”...
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LAUGHTER Robert Provine says that most laughter is not a response to jokes or other formal attempts at humor. Salvatore Attardo adds that laughter may be caused by all sorts of non-humorous...
01 January 1970 2,226 4 View
01 January 1970 9,524 0 View
JOKES AND JOKING BEHAVIORS Very often jokes occur in joke cycles. Consider the following joke cycles. Acronym jokes are often found on vanity license plates or bumper stickers: 10SNE1 (tennis...
01 January 1970 3,485 5 View
01 January 1970 4,512 0 View
In his Ethnic Humor around the World, Christie Davies charts the joking targets in 28 different countries. The ones given below are the most recognizable: Americans consider Poles, Italians, and...
01 January 1970 999 2 View
01 January 1970 6,549 0 View
STANDUP COMEDY Standup Comedy has a long history. During the Renaissance, the royal jesters were chosen by the king, and he chose people who looked ridiculous; they had bug-eyes, and humped backs,...
01 January 1970 5,049 0 View
RELIGION AND HUMOR John Morreall says that when laughter is mentioned in the Bible, it is associated with one of three things. In descending order, they are: Hostility, Foolishness, and Joy. For...
01 January 1970 7,284 4 View
Embodiment and the V.A.R.I.E.S. Model of Language and Culture Variation Don and Alleen Nilsen are suggesting the VARIES acronym to explain how embodiment affects language variation. The VARIES...
01 January 1970 2,824 4 View
01 January 1970 1,483 2 View
MOVIE HUMOR Because they are not language-dependent, silent movies have a universal appeal that the talkies don’t have. For example, every year in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, there is a humor festival in...
01 January 1970 7,281 0 View
JEWISH HUMOR In 1978, psychologist Samuel Janus conducted a study which found that although Jews constituted only 3 percent of the U.S. population, 80 percent of the nation’s professional...
01 January 1970 7,305 2 View
01 January 1970 625 3 View
POLITICAL CARTOONS Caricatures are probably the oldest form of pictorial humor, where caricare in Latin means “to overload, or exaggerate.” The main stylistic devices here are distortion and...
FIGURES OF SPEECH The MASTER TROPES include: 1. Metaphor (Seeing Something in Terms of Something Else): Using “my lover is a rose” to represent the beauty and pleasure of my lover; 2. Irony...
01 January 1970 3,291 4 View
IRISH HUMOR Like Jewish humor, Irish humor developed out of pain and tragedy that resulted in a diaspora. Irish humor like Jewish humor contains much word-play, and like Jewish humor much of Irish...
01 January 1970 1,971 0 View
01 January 1970 5,722 0 View
TELEVISION HUMOR In the 1950s, many people purchased TV sets just so as not to be left out of the fun of the sit-coms on television. Water pressure in New York City was influenced by when the...
01 January 1970 6,143 4 View
COMPARE AND CONTRAST CHILD PLAY, ADULT PLAY, AND ANIMAL PLAY! Babies play peek-a-boo, and tickle games. Children use language play, and toilet humor. But we teach children to be serious, so by the...
01 January 1970 5,136 0 View
PRAGMATICS AND HUMOR It is amazing how many ways we have of displaying and presenting various types of lexical and pragmatic information. These displays and presentations are at various levels of...
01 January 1970 8,206 0 View
SCOTTISH HUMOR The Scotch-Irish Hillbillies made stills and brewed “moonshine.” They used words like “afeared,” “damnedest,” “chaw u’ tabacker,” “hex,” “plum right” or “plum crazy.” And they’re...
01 January 1970 8,985 0 View
HUMOROUS NAMES IN J. K. ROWLING’S HARRY POTTER BOOKS In the Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling uses new spellings and different names to establish the fact that she is taking readers to a world...
01 January 1970 4,371 0 View
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01 January 1970 4,039 1 View
PARODY In the New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs wrote that parody is the hardest form of creative writing because the style of the subject must be reproduced in slightly enlarged form, while at the same...
01 January 1970 2,821 4 View
01 January 1970 618 4 View
LDS (MORMON) Humor This PowerPoint investigates some of the stereotypes that are prevalent in Mormon culture and Mormon humor. Patty Perfect lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she is married and...
01 January 1970 5,843 3 View
01 January 1970 4,655 0 View
Humorous English Syntax. There are two kinds of ambiguity—lexical ambiguity and syntactic ambiguity. All of the following sentences are syntactically ambiguous: Smoking grass can be...
01 January 1970 3,472 8 View
01 January 1970 7,118 3 View
HUMOROUS ENGLISH SEMANTICS “There’s glory for you!” “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory.’” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s...
01 January 1970 528 2 View
01 January 1970 5,442 0 View
HUMOROUS MORPHOLOGY In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Gryphon used the word “uglification,” and Alice asked the Gryphon what the word meant. The Gryphon was amazed that...
01 January 1970 1,549 2 View
01 January 1970 7,644 4 View
Phonetics and Phonology: Which English Sounds Are Funny, and Why Words like “snap,” “crackle” and “pop” are funny because they are onomatopoeic. In Germany, these words become “schnap,” “Krakkle,”...
01 January 1970 8,461 4 View
01 January 1970 6,888 4 View
ONOMASTIC CREATIVITY IN THE LEMONY SNICKET BOOKS Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events is filled with sarcasm, condescension, parody, and smart allusions. The rhetorical...
01 January 1970 149 2 View
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Pulitzer Prize Winning Political Cartoonists Lalo Alcaraz: 2021 Nick Anderson: 2005 Tony Auth: 1976 Darrin Bell: 2019 Clay Bennett: 2002 Steve Benson: 1993 Barry Blitt: 2020 Herbert Block:...
01 January 1970 7,157 0 View
01 January 1970 1,304 1 View
SPANISH-AMERICAN CONTACT HUMOR L. Dabène said that in the case of the first generation, Code Switching is often used as a remedial strategy to not knowing the correct English word. However in the...
01 January 1970 2,602 0 View
01 January 1970 5,155 3 View
PARADOX This PowerPoint begins with the Ambiguity Paradox: Everything is ambiguous; however, nothing is ambiguous.” Perhaps all words and sentences are ambiguous, if they are not seen or heard in...
01 January 1970 9,791 2 View
Metaphors We Live By George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner suggest that literary metaphors and linguistic metaphors are not the same. In many ways they are opposite of each other....
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REGIONAL AND SOCIAL DIALECTS This PowerPoint discusses phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic differences in New England, the South, the South West, California (Valley-Girl, and...
01 January 1970 1,838 0 View
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HUMOR AND PHILOSOPHY There are many philosophical conundrums in American culture: Why does "slow down" and "slow up" mean the same thing? Why does "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same...
01 January 1970 1,231 0 View
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Humorous English Spelling Our English alphabet has only 26 letters to represent 45 different sounds. And some of our letters (like C, Q, H, and X) aren’t very useful. English has five vowel...
01 January 1970 406 6 View
01 January 1970 8,381 3 View
Archetypes, Shadow Archetypes, and Stereotypes Related to the Beginning of the Journey: Northrup Frye says that the Romance presents an idealized world, the black-and-white world of our desires,...
01 January 1970 9,387 2 View
Archetypes Related to the Journey: The Seeker, The Creator, The Destroyer, and The Lover Archetypes Related to the Journey include the Artful Dodger, the Billionaire, the Bourgeois Gentilhomme,...
01 January 1970 8,718 0 View
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NATIVE AMERICAN HUMOR In Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Smoke Signals), James Many Horses signs his letters as “James Many Horses III.” He’s the only James Many...
01 January 1970 6,496 0 View
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Humorous Archetypes, Shadow Archetypes, and Stereotypes Related to the End of the Journey: The Sage, The Ruler, The Magician, and the Wise Fool Carl Jung said that there are archetypes and shadow...
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English Animal Metaphors Linguistic or conceptual animal metaphors in English and other languages fall into three categories: 1. Domestic (Cats, Chickens, Cows, Dogs, Donkeys, Goats, Horses, Mice,...
01 January 1970 8,657 2 View
Compare and Contrast Body-Part Metaphors in English and Other Languages Linguistic or conceptual body-part metaphors relate not only to Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, but also to Eyes, Ears,...
01 January 1970 3,563 5 View
“Irony and Paradox” Linguistic irony is based on language, and requires both a sender and a receiver, while situational irony requires only an observer with a clever mind, as when Lily Tomlin buys...
01 January 1970 4,161 0 View
OPTICAL ILLUSIONS Psychologists know that we see as much with our brains as we do with our eyes. That’s why psychologists are interested in Rorschach Tests, and they’re also interested in Optical...
01 January 1970 8,324 1 View
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Clothing Metaphors in English and in Other Languages There are many linguistic or conceptual clothing metaphors in English. The outskirts and skirting an issue are marginal. “Girdle” relates to...
01 January 1970 5,321 4 View
