Today’s, groan, Bizarro:
An elaborate play on the title of E. L. James’s 2011 erotic romance novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, with a rhyme substitute for each of the content words — shifty for fifty, grades for shades, Fey for grey — with the whole business worked into a fresh scenario.
The James title has been endlessly re-worked by simple word substitution:
Fifty Shades of X, for X = Snail, Greek, Manipulation, Kale, Beauty, …
Fifty Xs of Grey, for X = Dates, Skills, Shirts, Squares, States, Accents, Waves, Frames, Scales, …
(but granting that a lot of these substitutes have the vowel /e/ of shades and grey).
Some of the substitutes for grey are rhymes: Bey, Whey, They, Wray, J.
One of the substitutes for shades is phonologically very close to it — sheds, with /ɛ/ instead of /e/ — and in fact the Fifty Sheds books are broad parodies of the Fifty Shades books.
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s 1 in this strip — see this Page.)
May 30, 2015 at 12:45 pm |
This cartoon satisfies my sudoku neurons, because of this verbal sudoku, or magic square:
|——————————–|
| Fifty | Shades of | Grey |
|——————————–|
| Shifty | Grades of | Fey |
|——————————–|
| Grifty | Fades of | Shey |
|——————————–|
Is there another cartoon about corrupt painting contractors at Shea stadium using sub-par paint? Probably not outside of my mind.
May 30, 2015 at 2:44 pm |
Not just a rhyme substitution but a spooneristic permutation, as Andy Sleeper implies. Three-way spoonerisms like this are few and far between — here‘s a report of a naturally occurring one: tip-sharing scheme -> ship-scaring team.
May 30, 2015 at 2:50 pm |
Members of the National Puzzlers’ League take this game even further (though they call it a “spoonergram”). In the NPL’s puzzle-writing guide, there’s a *five*-way example given: cold sailor rowed the tipping boat -> bold tailor sewed the ripping coat.
May 31, 2015 at 12:59 pm |
Wow, spoonergrams! Thanks, Ben. Here’s a link to someone with examples of four- through ten-level spoonergrams:
http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1162&context=wordways&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bing.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dspoonergram%26form%3DAPMCS1#search=%22spoonergram%22