In the background, my random iTunes produced Chita Rivera singing “An English Teacher” from the original Broadway cast album of Bye Bye Birdie. A little masterpiece: the earnest middle class aspirations of Rivera’s character Rosie; the complex angularity of the text-tune relationship (lyrics by Lee Adams, music by Charles Strouse); the extraordinary performance by Rivera (I have now listened to another dozen versions, and nothing comes close to the first Rivera). I tried to find a YouTube version of the cast album, but no dice; instead, something even better: Seth Rudetsky deconstructing Rivera’s performance of this first number in the show, here.
Archive for 2013
An English teacher
January 4, 2013Rhyme, rhyme, I need a rhyme
January 4, 2013Today’s Zits has Jeremy boxing himself into a corner:
Oh my, a musical book report. On The Great Gatsby. Jeremy should have thought ahead.
Popular belief is that words without (perfect) rhymes are extraordinary, but in fact they’re pretty common, as Mark Liberman noted on Language Log several years ago.
Paternity
January 3, 2013Today’s Bizarro, in which two commercial icons confront one another:
That would be the young Poppin’ Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy, claiming the equally white and puffy Michelin Man as his progenitor. Who could have missed that?
Tiptoe
January 3, 2013Today’s Zippy has our hero producing yet another burlesque of popular music (for a survey of burlesques, parodies, and playful allusions on this blog, look here):
The song is “Tiptoe Through the Tulips”, made famous by the Tiny Tim performance of it on the ukelele (hence Griffiths’s title “Tiny Whim”) in the 1960s.
The dobro
January 3, 2013NYT obit (by Bill Friskics-Warren) for Mike Auldridge on the 1st:
Mike Auldridge Dies at 73; Lent Dobro Fresh Elegance
Mike Auldridge, a guitarist who became one of the most distinctive dobro players in the history of country and bluegrass music while widening its popularity among urban audiences, died on Saturday at his home in Silver Spring, Md.
Ah, the dobro. I assumed that it was originally a folk instrument, from some Slavic land, with a name in the local language. Well, not quite, as the obit went on to explain:
A resophonic (or resonating) acoustic guitar, the dobro produces sound by means of one or more spun metal cones instead of a wooden sound board. (The instrument’s name is a contraction of Dopera and brothers. Dopera was the surname of the Slovak-American brothers who patented an early version of the instrument in 1928.)
The name is what Ben Zimmer has labeled an acroblend, a combination of acronym and portmanteau (Ben uses blend to cover intentional combinations as well as inadvertent ones), for which I’d prefer the label acromanteau, or — naming the type from a prominent example — Nabisco (originally from National Biscuit Company)
Twigs, grahams, and puffs
January 2, 2013An experiment in earnestly healthful food: Kashi® GOLEAN® cereal (from “Kashi: The Seven Whole Grain Company”). From the back of the box:
the perfect choice to help you achieve your healthy lifestyle goals. Just one serving supplies 40% of your daily fiber needs ad 20% of your daily protein needs.
… All natural GOLEAN cereal is a lightly sweetened mix of honey toasted whole grain puffs, crispy soy protein grahams and crunchy fiber twigs.
Puffs, grahams, and twigs. On the front of the box:
Naturally Sweetened Fiber Twigs, Soy Protein Grahams and Honey Puff Cereal
Twigs, grahams, and puff cereal, the last being a variant of puffed cereal, aka puffs. All three terms are “semi-technical terms” from the world of advertising, not terms of ordinary language; twigs seems to be an outright invention in the food context, a metaphorical extension of the arboreal term. In any case, the choice of labels provides a serious tone to go along with the nutritional earnestness of the product.