Tenser, said the Tensor

Re: Jizz

"The packaging of the recent Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes action-figure 5-pack refers to the band's music as 'jazz', which may indicate that 'jizz' is being phased out of Star Wars canon or more likely that Hasbro did not want the term on a toy package."  (from here)

Don't Forget the Robots

"They are used for competition and popular Sports Entertainment and in some cases they are featured alongside Motocross races, mud bogging, tractor pulls and car-eating robots."  (from here)

Biden's Throbbing Network

"So Senator Biden's neural network for America wasn't just activated, it was throbbing."

(From this Language Log post.)

It's a measure of how much more dignified a writer Mark Liberman is than I that he did not follow this sentence up with, "Hell, it was more than throbbing, it was downright engorged.  It was turgid with activation, I tell you what."  I think this calls for a CafePress bumper sticker that says "Joe Biden's Network for America"—it's what all the fashionable linguists are displaying on their cars this election season.

So Smooth

"It's so smooth.  It's like a future machine, but it's not."   - Actress Laura Harris, plugging Honda's new hydrogen fuel cell car, after having been flown to Japan for the rollout ceremony.  Well said, Actress Laura Harris, well said indeed—I'm sure Honda's not regretting the price of your plane ticket now.

Moose and Jelly

"As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly."  (An actual sentence spoken aloud in the wild, as recounted in this post—thanks to Deanna Hoak for pointing it out to me.)

Green Smurf and Smurf Green

"In Schtroumpf vert et vert Schtroumpf, published in Belgium in 1972, it was revealed that the village was divided between North and South, and that the Smurfs on either side had different ideas as to whether the term smurf should be used as a verb or as a noun: for instance, the Northern Smurfs call a certain object a bottle smurfer, while the Southern Smurfs call it a smurf opener."  (from here)

Has anybody read this story?  I wonder if the two smurfalects also differed in other ways.  Did the position of nominal modifiers vary, as the title seems to imply?  And what's the structure of the title—is schtroumpf vert a variety of smurf and vert schtroumpf a shade of green?  Is either of the diasmurfs consistently smurf-initial or smurf-final, or do they have relatively free smurf-ordering?

Melting the Babbitt

"Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called 'babbitt') connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable."  (from here, and don't miss the related video)

Meat and Blood

"I miss meat and blood very much.  Not vegetables because they are food for a woman."  (from here) (BTW, I'm pretty skeptical of the authenticity of the article.  How often do the sports pages in the Grauniad invent stories out of whole cloth?)

Orthophonic?

"Living Stereo, played on a record, through the all-new, two-in-one, RCA Victor stereo orthophonic high-fidelity Victrola."  (from this, via)

I guess it has pretty good sound, then?

Pym for Poe

"The 1969 novel A Void, notable for not containing a single letter e, contains an e-less rewriting of Poe's 'The Raven' that is attributed to Arthur Gordon Pym in order to avoid using the multiple e's found in Poe's name."  (from here)