Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Two from the 2/29/16 issue, one from the 3/7/16 issue, all having to do with language, but in different ways. Michael Maslin (who’s appeared here twice before) on the 29th, with the opposite of giddyup:

(#1)

(A horse in a tree! How can that be?)

David Thompson (new on this blog) on the 29th:

(#2)

— a cartoon you very much need to be tuned into popular culture to understand.

And Harry Bliss (who already has a Page here) on the 7th:

(#3)

— not a question at all, but a loud complaint (in a sushi restaurant) by a customer who seems to have expected guacamole.

Each of these has a serious bit of absurdity in it, the Maslin most of all.

The Maslin. The brief story on giddy-up, from NOAD2:

giddy-up (also giddap) exclam. used to get a horse to start moving or go faster. ORIGIN 1920s ( as giddap): reproducing a pronunciation of get up.

One surprise here is the recency of the expression. More details in OED2, from 1972:

giddap, int. and v. Also giddy-ap, giddy-up. (Chiefly in imp.) colloq. (orig. U.S.).

int. first cite 1925 (Dreiser, American Tragedy)

v. first cite 1938: D. Runyon Furthermore xiv. 293   Princess O’Hara..tells Gallant Godfrey to giddap, and Gallant Godfrey is giddapping very nicely.

These entries hardly do justice to the extent of spelling variation, which you can sample on the net. First, the spellings are sometimes separated (giddy up), sometimes hyphenated (giddy-up), sometimes solid (giddyup). The first element is variously spelled giddy, giddi, gitty, gitti (note the alternative spellings for the intervocalic voiced tap in American English); the second element is spelled up, ap. (The spelling I recall from my childhood, in which our play involved lots of urging imaginary or toy horses, is gittiap, so it took me a little while to find the dictionary entries.)

Then I go back to the horse in the tree, and I giggle.

A bonus: a Giddy Up t-shirt design, with a unicorn instead of a mere horse, from FluffyCo (www.fluffyco.com):

(#4)

The Thompson. To make any headway at all with this cartoon, you need to recognize an allusion to the line in which Agent 007, James Bond, introduces himself (first in Casino Royale, I believe): the original and the formula (taken over by many others):

Bond…  James Bond. (that is:  LN…  FN + LN.)

(The ellipsis dots represent a pause.)

In the Thompson we’ve got:

bonds… municipal bonds.

The Bliss. Here we go into the world of twisted speech acts. You believe that someone has represented something as an X, but it seems clear to you that it’s not an X. So you take a declarative sentence conveying your understanding of the claim:

You call this an X.

and you query the accuracy of this claim with a question intonation spread over the declarative (similar to situation in reclamatory questions):

You call this an X?

And then, as in so many situations, pointedly questioning the accuracy of a claim implicates that you believe the claim is false. (“You think you’re so smart?”, conveying that you’re not smart at all.) So the diner in #3 conveys his belief that what he has in front of him is not in fact guacamole (as it most surely is not). What’s so goofy about the whole business is that he seems to have expected guacamole in what is transparently a sushi restaurant, when what he’s picking up with his chopsticks (who supplies chopsticks for customers to eat guacamole?) is hosomaki.

To be fair, you could easily make guacamole hosomaki (Id imagine Harry Bliss didn’t know this), and indeed there’s a recipe for spicy cucumber guacamole sushi rolls here. Some rolls:

(#5)

(Note for American sports fans: when the Superbowl is over, this is something you can do with that leftover guacamole dip.)

This entry was posted on March 11, 2016 at 2:52 am and is filed under Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Pragmatics, Quotations, Speech acts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.