Today’s Zippy is about newspapers, their decline, and Griffy’s prediction that they’re about to come back into fashion, as a retro thing. The title — “Valiant Prints” — is a play on the name of the comic strip Prince Valiant (with the words inverted, plus the prince/prints pun). But then there’s another diner, in Bill Griffith’s endless series of them:
Every so often I post on dubious, regrettable, and even pointless portmanteaus; as I said in “More dubious portmanteaus” (here),
The world of portmanteaus is crowded with playful formations that are unlikely to survive for long (Higgsteria), including many that are just for ostentatious display (Piranhaconda and Sharktopus). Then there are those that appear to be meant to be useful, but are awkward and unlikely to succeed: for instance the dubious portmanteaus Innovatrium, womance (and femily), and twunk. Two more have recently been logged on ADS-L: mediot(s) and preglimony.
(And since then, Ab-vengers.) Now, in today’s Scenes From a Multiverse: (archive copy here):
Lawsages: useless in any context.
In ad copy for the Michael Lucas raunchy gay porn film The Wetter the Better, this summary of some hot-hot man-on-man action (not perhaps to everyone’s taste, but this posting is about syntax and semantics, not watersports, as piss play is delicately referred to in some contexts):
Morgan Black spices up his sex life with Christopher Daniels by soaking him in piss before fucking each other.
Two sentence-final subjectless predicational adjuncts there, and they both need something to supply the referent of the missing subject (they are SPARs): by soaking him with piss, which picks up a referent for its missing subject from the subject of the main clause, Morgan Black; and before fucking each other, which the writer of the copy clearly intended to pick up a referent for its missing subject from the *combination of* the subject of the main clause (Morgan Black again) and the oblique object in that clause, Christopher Daniels. The first exercise in referent-finding is just the default Subject Rule for these things, so there’s no issue. The second exercise in referent-finding is non-default, requiring before fucking each other to be interpreted as ‘before they fuck each other’, where they refers to the set-theoretic union of Black and Daniels (and the semantics of each other then tells you that Black will fuck Daniels and Daniels will fuck Black, as indeed happens in the flick — this is called flip-fucking in the trade). I understand the writer’s intent, but the non-default SPAR is beyond my comfort zone in this case. A dangler too far.
Michael Quinion returned yesterday to his weekly World Wide Words column (#813, 1/5/13) after a month’s absence, offering us (in the “Sic!” section, on errors and infelicities of all kinds) this entertaining item:
The London Mail online was visited on [December 14th] from New Zealand by John Neave, who found this report: “He told Cardiff Crown Court that he suffers from ‘sexomnia’ and has a history of trying to sleep with partners while asleep.”
What makes this funny is the juxtaposition of euphemistic sleep ‘have sex(ual relations) with’ and literal asleep, producing an effect similar to oxymoron.
And as a bonus we get the technical term sexsomnia (in the spelling variant sexomnia, orthographically recognizing the phonological reduction of medial /ss/, with one /s/ from sex and one from the base somnia, to a single /s/).
The New York Times coping with problematic vocabulary continues to provide amusement and amazement. Two recent adventures: ostentatiously avoiding the least problematic of George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words; and talking at length about the relaxation of taboo avoidance in women’s magazines — without mentioning any of the items finding their way into print.
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.
Today’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.
Today’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?
Today’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.