Zippy continues on his quest for something different to eat:
Archive for August, 2011
Zippy subs, take 2
August 24, 2011Satanic fast food
August 23, 2011Roz Chast in the August 15 & 22 New Yorker:
As Mark Liberman observed in his recent LLog discussion of Satan sandwich in the political news, Satan here is a shit-avoidance term, with demonic overtones as a bonus. Chast has taken this and run with it.
In connection with the state fair food-on-a-stick theme, note Satan-on-a-stick among the offerings. There’s also a Satanburger, with the common libfix -burger; along these lines, Chast could have included a Satan dog (a hot dog wrapped in Satan) on the board.
Isn’t it bromantic?
August 23, 2011
Corndogs and their ilk
August 23, 2011It’s been a while since I posted about phallicity — though the recent Zippy-inspired riff on submarine sandwiches and their ilk ventures into this territory. But now it’s state fair time, so there’s a rich source of images of phallic food.
Zippy makes a sandwich
August 22, 2011… but he’s not sure what to call it:
The idea of taking a long roll of bread (like a French baguette or an Italian ciabatta), slicing it lengthwise, and filling it with an assortment of meats, cheeses, vegetables, condiments, and sauces must have occurred to many people in many places over the years, but in the United States such sandwiches have been associated with Italians since the early 20th century.
The ingredients vary from community to community (the New Orleans version the muffuletta has olive salad as a crucial component, for example). And the names are, for the most part, equally local. The Wikipedia page takes submarine sandwich (or sub) to be the closest thing to a generic term for the family, though it lists many local variants. So do Dave Wilton’s article “A Hoagie by Any Other Name” (Verbatim 28.3, Autumn 2003) and Barry Popik’s blog entry for “Submarine Sandwich (Sub Sandwich)” (April 5, 2008).
[I first knew these sandwiches as Italian sandwiches (in the Reading PA area in the 40s and 50s) — vulgarly called by their near-rhyming name wop jobs — but then cultural influences from southern New Jersey and Philadelphia gave us hoagies, and from New York City, submarine sandwiches or subs. At Princeton, we consumed grinders, using a name we associated with grinding (studying hard) — there was a Student Grinder Agency that delivered the sandwiches to men studying in their rooms — though that connection is surely historically inaccurate.]
The miracle of human speech
August 22, 2011Via Chris Waigl, this Wondermark cartoon:
Ah, a coding problem.
Facial expressions
August 22, 2011… in Dingburg: What do they mean?:
It’s all so inscrutable.
A little while ago, I posted an example on my X blog (here) where the action is mostly in the eyebrows.
Last night’s dreamanteau
August 21, 2011Last night I dreamed about a new version of Facebook that concentrated on videos. It was called ZuckerTube. A cross between Mark Zuckerberg and YouTube. I can’t wait.
It might be that I’ve been thinking too much about portmanteaus recently.
(No, I doubt it had anything to do with German Zuckertube ‘sugar tube’, though it could have been an offshoot of a sex dream.)
Haefeli on NomConjObjs
August 21, 2011I have it on display in my living room, but apparently I didn’t post it: William Haefeli’s New Yorker cartoon of 8/30/10 on between you and I:
(Most recent NomConjObj posting here; most informative one here.) As I’ve noted before, (just) between you and I has become a fixed expression for many people, including some who otherwise use NomConjObjs very sparingly.
