Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A Zippy about Pancake Circus:

But: yes, Nestor, there is a Pancake Circus. In  Sacramento CA; photo by Tom Hulse here:

From a Yelp review:

Pancake Circus isn’t a place you visit for the food. It is about the ambience, which is something like a cross between a Tom Waits fever-dream, and a senior-home casino trip gone wrong.

It’s unintentionally ironic, and a wee bit creepy. But, simultaneously, it’s sentimental and authentic in the best possible ways. The waitresses call the regulars by name, and know their orders by heart.

Griffy and Zippy’s kind of place. And it’s a circus of sorts.

Pancake Circus is a N+N compound with the head N, circus, understood metaphorically, as in a circus of pancakes ‘(a place supplying) a great number or variety of pancakes’.

This entry was posted on January 7, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Compounds, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.