(Mostly about art, rather than language.)
Today’s Zippy:
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Giant chairs are something of a theme in public art. The one in the cartoon is no doubt (given Bill Griffith’s proclivities) a real one, but I haven’t located it. However, there are plenty of others around; here, Geneva, Switzerland; Washington DC; Hampstead Heath in London; Dartmoor, Devon; and Denver CO.
On the Comics Kingdom blog on Tuesday, for National Escargot Day (May 24th), ten cartoons on snails, all of them new to this blog. Some turn on the snail cartoon meme (having to do with slowness), many have to do with the slowness of postal services (snail mail, in the rhyming retronym), the rest deal with other gastropodal matters.
The cover of the May 30th New Yorker, “Commencement”:
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A standard exercise on this blog: what do you have to know to understand what’s going on in this drawing? To see why it might be funny? (It could, of course, just be an affectionate portrait of an event of the season, not meant to be funny.)
In a sense, a re-play of an earlier posting, “spunk” of 3/16/11, which was about spunk ‘spirit, mettle, courage, pluck’ vs. spunk ‘semen, seminal fluid’. Now spunk appeared as a morning name for me a few days ago, along with the ‘pluck’ context of the interview between Mary Richards (played by Mary Tyler Moore) and Lou Grant (played by Ed Asner) in the first episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show: Grant: “You’ve got spunk … I hate spunk.”
That led me to NOAD2, where I found a single noun entry with three subentries:
1 informal courage and determination.
2 tinder; touchwood.
3 Brit. vulgar slang semen.
(Note: seminal spunk might be more common in BrE than AmE, but it is scarcely unknown in AmE, as a search will readily confirm.)
Speaking informally, this dictionary presents these three as a single word with three different uses (all of which ae available in my speech), while I would have thought these were three different words which just happened to be identical in spelling and pronunciation. What could possibly unite them?
Like Thurber, Sendak, Briggs, and some others I’ve written about, another cartoonist / illustrator not generally accounted to be a Real Artist (perhaps at best a “graphic artist” like Bechdel) — especially since his work is funny, and meant to be. But he was a delight, the clear standout in the specialized field of cartoonists / illustrators / humorists who focus on the world of music. The occasion is my unearthing my copy of The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra (originally published in 1955, reprinted in 1984), with its enormously enjoyable combination of hilarious exaggerated drawings of symphony musicians at work and preposterous invented instruments. A third vein of humor comes in some other books of his, especially Musical Chairs of 1958, with its hybrid concoctions of animal plus instrument (a cat playing on its whiskers as a violin, for example).
Seven examples follow. I had to exercise severe forbearance to keep from swamping you with Hoffnungiana.
James Thurber drew stuff, all the time. Some of this stuff was published as single-panel cartoons in the New Yorker (indeed, went a long way towards defining the New Yorker style in cartooning). Other stuff served as illustrations to his writing. In at least one case — The Last Flower, which I’ll look at below — the text and illustrations are fused, in the fashion of a graphic novel.
All of this you can appreciate in a single volume, Thurber: Writings & Drawings (1996), from the estimable Library of America (contents selected by Garrison Keillor), which has the complete My Life and Hard Times (1933), The Last Flower (1939), and The 13 Clocks (1950) — for an appreciation of this last book on this blog, see my 7/29/13 posting — and substantial selections from most of the rest of his output, from Is Sex Necessary? (White & Thurber, 1929) to The Years with Ross (1958).
… in the comics. Specifically in today’s revival of a Calvin and Hobbes strip:
Just what sort of description is called for? It depends on the context.
(Not much about language.)
The Daily Jocks ad from yesterday, with a caption of mine:
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His name was
Drogo, after the legendary
Horseman, but everyone called him
Oxo, because he was so
Beefy.
A brief visit to the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto on Monday (brief in part because my joints weren’t up to much walking), with Juan Gomez. Some things we could admire from afar, as lush spreads of gorgeous blooms, including annual sweet peas (Lathyrus odoratus), in an extraordinary range of colors, trained on wooden teepees. We tarried mostly in the California native plant section, which had lots of wonderful things, three of which I’ll report on here: two species in genera I’ve reported on, and one brand-new genus (in a recently created plant family).
