Today’s Zippy returns to Elgar Durwin Poboy and perhaps his most famous poem, “Once upon a bowling alley”, ultimately about those campfire treats s’mores:
We last heard about Elgar Durwin Poboy in a January 7th posting, which had only a bit of the Edgar Allan Poe poem “The Raven” that E. D. Poboy pays homage to here.
Lots of word substitutions, repeated references to bowling, plus some place names (Hoboken, West New Haven) and a figure (Charlie Callas) from pop culture.
A recent image accompanying a Daily Jocks ad for a special offer, featuring an underwear model in low-rise TeamM8 briefs:
My caption:
Tomás has perfected
Sultry Seductive with sides of
Latino Muscle and
Football Jock Sweat – gets a
Steady stream of johns at his
Hustler stand, with its handy
Sex alcove.Actually he despises
Football, he’s a gamer not a
Jock – still, he puts on a
Fine show, then goes home for
Scrapbooking and the
Affections of Los
Gatos Perversos, the black tom
Blanca and the white female
Moreno.
Or: a trip to Brazil.
Yesterday my server for lunch at Reposado in Palo Alto was the excellent and genial Nilton. When he first started working at the restaurant, I asked whether his name was accented as Nílton (that would be the default accentuation in Spanish) or as Niltón (which would usually be written that way, to indicate the exceptional accentuation — but people often leave out the diacritics, especially in an English-speaking context). The first, he told me.
Then this week it occured to me to ask where his name came from, since I didn’t recall ever having heard it before. Ah, he said, until recently the only Nilton he’d ever run across was the grandfather for whom he was named (crucial fact: the grandfather was Brazilian). Then recently an elderly customer looked startled when he heard Nilton’s name, explaining that his name was Nilton and that he’d never come across another Nilton; would my Nilton consent to being photographed with him, to commemorate the meeting? Crucial fact: the elderly gentleman was Brazilian.
I still haven’t found anything about the origin of the name, beyond the fact that it’s surely Brazilian. And I’m now able to speculate that neither my Nilton nor his elderly customer is a fan of Brazilian football, since players named Nilton have been prominent in the sport for more than 50 years.
[Added a bit later: the Reposado Nilton reports that he found sources saying that Nilton was just the Portuguese version of Newton. And that he found a map of the distribution of Niltons in the world, with this giant mass in Brazil, plus a few in Portugal and South Africa.
Oh yes, a Brazilian basketball-playing Nilton, Nilton Pacheco de Oliveira,
And then of course I found some Japanese-Brazilian Niltons. Not as yet any Japanese-Brazilian baseball players, but I’m hoping.]
The menswear guy, especially coats and footwear (shoes, boots, even Varvatos Converse sneakers — high end sneakers, at $100 to $140 each), though now he’s branched out in other directions: men’s fragrances and recordings, in particular. You can view a short commercial for the John Varvatos Fall 2015 Menswear Collection here. It’s a pas de deux between two beautiful fashion models (beautiful in two different ways), Nick Rea and Jonas Kesseler, left and right in this still at the end of the ad:
(#1)
The ad focuses on their coats and, in frequent shots, their boots. And it has a haunting sound track, “Old Bones”, performed by Tyler Bryant and the Shakedown (on, yes, John Varvatos Records).
The Zits from the 21st takes up a recurrent theme in the strip:
Over the years, Mark Liberman and I have posted about the Chatty Girls trope on the strip, retailing the (basically false) stereotype that women, and especially teenage girls, chatter on ceaselessly, overwhelming guys (with their laconic ways). One guy sandwiched between two girls doesn’t have a chance.
Over the past three months, contributors to ADS-L have been looking at a series of English examples involving of in English modifier constructions, in what I’ve called EDM (Exceptional Degree Modification) and closely related constructions. (ODM — Ordinary Degree Modification — in a very big dog, EDM in [-of] how big a dog and [+of] how big of a dog.) Most of the examples are ones I’ve discussed in ADS-L or Language Log postings over the years and then posted about on this blog, but this history seems to have vanished from the group’s memory, so we get fresh reports of old phenomena, sigh. I have now assembled a Page on this blog with an inventory of some postings on EDM and related phenomena, along with quotes from and comments on the postings. Unfortunately, people can’t consult this resource if they don’t know about it. I don’t know any way to fix that, but I’m not going to repeat discussions of EDM from my publications and postings over the past 20 years. Instead, I’ll make brief references to this material, reminders that this stuff is out there (and easily accessible).
Jonathan Lighter on ADS-L yesterday, under the heading “Re back-forming again”:
This past Monday’s Supergirl had someone explaining that Martian J’onn J’onnz had “shape-shifted” to get into Maxwell Lord’s technofortress.
Yes, this is an example of a 2pbfV (two-part back-formed verb), but not at all a remarkable one; to shape-shift was an early item in my inventory of 2pbfVs, and examples of the verb are very thick on the ground. But the subject is entertaining, so I’ll play with it a bit.
Billy Green asks me on Facebook if I’ve noticed that Dan Piraro has been occasionally recycling some of his old cartoons from the 80s and 90s. The new versions are very nearly identical to some of his earlier ones. Maybe, Billy wonders, if he’s revisiting some old favorites as he winds down towards his announced retirement.
[Added later, from Billy: It could just be that he wasn’t 100% happy with the originals and thought he could improve them.]
He’s unearthed five of these now. Here they come, new on the left, old on the right:
Yet another cartoon — and there are more in the queue.
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with a cute play on the ambiguity of toy:
