whipping words

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:41 AM -0500 12/10/09, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>Can you rule out that it's the imperative?

I think we can given the intonation.  Plus the general cultural context:
The form of the statement is precisely that of the bumper sticker
meme, as in the classic:

RUGBY PLAYERS DO IT WITH LEATHER BALLS

where the statement is invariably generic (not imperative), X denotes
a class defined by occupation or some other relevant property, and Y
is a manner adverb or prepositional phrase.  Let's see--ah, good,
here's a web site with countless examples of such "actual" bumper
stickers, with double entendres ranging from the subtle to the
strained to the obvious to the gross:
http://www.devonavenue.com/entertainment/humor.htm
(Linguists are included in a fairly predictable way--I'd have gone
with "with recursive embedding" myself--but you'll have to supply
your own bumper stickers for how dialectologists and lexicographers
do it.)
No entry for Dominatrix (singular or plural), but there are a few
indirectly relevant ones:

COMPUTER SCIENTISTS DO IT ON COMMAND
PROGRAMMERS DO IT ON COMMAND
SOLDIERS DO IT ON COMMAND

(Not officers, you'll notice.)

Plus, as I mentioned, one doesn't give commands to a dominatrix--that
would pretty much defeat the whole point of a dominatrix and turn her
into a submittrix.

LH

>"Dominatrix, do it on
>command!"  Possible, given Larry's next-to-last sentence (a question)
>below?  Is there a command to the dominatrix?
>
>Unlikely, I assume, but mustn't we eliminate all other hypotheses?
>
>At 12/10/2009 12:09 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>>From a current TV commercial for, it appears, "Wonderful Pistachios":
>>
>>A woman dressed in a dominatrix outfit with a pistachio-green bustier
>>(if that's the right word)
>
>and don't play innocent with us!
>
>Joel
>
>>holds a coiled whip in her hand and places
>>a nut on the seat of a straight-back chair. She then stands back at
>>arm's length from the chair and nut, presumably a pistachio.
>>Voice-over:
>>
>>"Dominatrix do it..."
>>
>>[she unleashes the whip, which neatly cracks the nut in half with a
>>loud snap]
>>
>>"...on command.  Wonderful Pistachios.  Get Cracking."
>>
>>The interest is, of course, not just another run-of-the-mill
>>S&M-infused nut commercial but the reanalysis of "dominatrix" as a
>>plural. Of what, one wonders--"dominatrick"?  And don't dominatrixes,
>>or dominatrices, standardly make *others* do things on command rather
>>than doing things on command themselves?  Clearly, mangling the
>>morphology is just the first step on that slippery slope...
>>
>>LH
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------
>>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org