Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A Ceci disavowal

April 24, 2019

From Jeff Bowles on Facebook on the 12th, this Magritte-based composition:

(#1)

Apparently a Magrittean disavowal (there’s a Page on such disavowals here), playing on Magritte’s wry late 1920s painting La Trahison des images (The Betrayal / Treachery of Images) — which shows a pipe, with the painting labeling itself Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’. Here we get Louis Flint Ceci, on the left, objecting in astonishment that what’s on the right is not (a) Ceci; instead, it’s (a) Davisson.

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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Music, Paradoxes, Poetic form, Poetry, Semantics, Writers | 2 Comments »

The Easter egg in the salt mine

April 22, 2019

From the 3/30/19 issue of The Economist, in “Reflecting on past sins” about “the clamour to return cultural treasures taken by colonialists” (from Africa), this photo on p. 62 (as captioned here), presumably included to illustrate the cultural, political, and legal issues involved:

(#1) Getting back to where it once belonged.

First, there’s the photo in #1. What does it show? Why this picture — are we supposed to recognize the elements in the picture, or is it just intended as a generic representative of a certain type of situation or event? And what is it doing in a story on the restitution of African art objects removed by colonial powers (mostly in the 19th century)?

Then there’s the Easter egg quotation in the caption, from the Beatles’ song “Get Back”. That’s what caught my eye first (unsurprisingly, given my interests in ludic language in general, and Easter egg quotations in particular), but then I cast a puzzled eye on the photo itself.

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Posted in Art, Language play, Music, Quotation | 2 Comments »

Let’s have a kiki … in me

April 21, 2019

(Men’s bodies, clicks, mansex, dactyls, homowear, eggcorns, street talk, and more. Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

The Daily Jocks mailing of the 15th, with a studiedly homo-smouldering ad for crop tops from the fetish-wear company Barcode Berlin. Plus a foul derangement of (heavily enjambed) dactyls as a caption.

(#1)

Kiko the crop-top kid,
Impudent pussy boy,
Butch faggy target for
Amorous arrows — a

mazing for festivals,
Parties with gangbangers,
Mid-drifting kikis with
Quatrains of dactyls

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Posted in Address terms, Captions, Eggcorns, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Phallicity, Poetic form, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | 2 Comments »

Two evolutions

April 21, 2019

Two sharp cartoons on human evolution, one from the viewpoint of gender (by Eduardo Saiz Alonso, apparently from several years ago), one from the viewpoint of climate change (by Kevin Kallaugher (KAL) in yesterday’s Economist):

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Posted in Evolution, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Will the real Zippy please stand up?

April 20, 2019

Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to Littleton (NH, not the more famous CO — or, for that matter, IL, IA, KY, ME, MA, NC, or WV), where our Pinhead falls into an identity crisis:

(#1)

Everybody, including the counterman, is Zippy, or at least a Zippy. And the strip begins with a stretch that is both two panels, each with a Zippy in it, and one full-diner-view panel, with two Zippys in it. We’re in the nightmare world of clones — who am I?

Then there’s the observation in the last panel: No one brings small problems into a diner. Certainly, an interpretation of what happened in the strip before this, though as that it’s crucially ambiguous. But maybe also a moral that we should take away from those events, a piece of advice about what we should or should not do.

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Posted in Diners, Identities, Movies and tv, Music, Pragmatics, Semantics, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »

The white and the red

April 19, 2019

The (Christian) liturgical colors for the season: white for Easter Sunday, red for today, Good Friday, the day of crucifixion (and for some churches, red for all of Holy Week). White the color of purity and perfection, and so of Jesus as Christ. Red the color of blood and sacrifice, and so of the crucifixion.

As it happens, yesterday’s events included a visit to the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, where I encountered two especially notable flowers, one white, one deep red. First, the flowers, not (at first) identified:

(#1) Blanchier

(#2) Rougier

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Posted in Color, Holidays, Language and plants, Language and religion, My life, Names, Signs and symbols, Taxonomic vs. common | 3 Comments »

Le Pingouin aux Parapluies Roses

April 18, 2019

Umbro, the ceramic horticultural penguin, gay lover of wild strawberries, who lives in the shade of a pink cocktail umbrella:

(#1) Umbro, shaded by his pink cocktail umbrella and luxuriating under the spreading spathyphyllum tree and the watchful eye of the llama Glama Grrl

Cross the novel La Dame aux Camélias with the movie Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, cast a cocktail-loving penguin as the protagonist, and you get Le Pingouin aux Parapluies Roses, one of the famously bibulous singing penguins of Cherbourg (seen here visiting in Palo Alto).

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Movies and tv, Technical and ordinary language | 5 Comments »

The last Peepshow

April 17, 2019

The calendar rolls on towards the sacred holiday of Easter — today is Holy Wednesday, marking (among other things) the shame of Judas, his 30 pieces of silver — while in the parallel secular world, swarms of marshmallow chicks and bunnies infest homes and public places. I bring this year’s coverage of the annual Peepsocalypse to a close with a report on two masterworks from the crowded world of Peeps dioramas: marshmallow tributes to, and affectionate parodies of, two pop-chart-topping art works, Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music | 2 Comments »

She got pinched in the As … tor Bar

April 16, 2019

A celebrated example of word breaking or splitting (from the 1959 movie High Society), giving a joke turning on an ambiguity in how the the first part of the split word is to be understood: on its own, giving the off-color She got pinched in the ass; or as merely the first part of the split word, giving the less risqué She got pinched in the Astor Bar (in one or another sense of pinched).

Then I note that the first understanding has the in of body location, the second the in of event location — a distinction I’ve explored in three previous postings. This is the fourth, with some illumination in it, I think.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Homosexuality, Jokes, Lexical semantics, Movies and tv, Music, Puns | Leave a Comment »