Arnold Zwicky's Blog

This month’s winner — meriting the November trophy, the  Silver Fook of St. Andrew’s Day — was committed by Stephanie Shih:

(#1) Steph in her tuturo, singing “I love it when I get to live out a pun. 🎶tutu-ro tu tu ro“

A punmanteau, tutu + Totoro. Steph is in a tutu, wearing a Totoro jersey. If you know about Totoro as well as tutus, it’s a massive, satisfying November groan.

If you don’t know about the Japanese anime character Totoro, check out my 1/11/17 posting, with this image of Totoro (#2 there):

(#2)

The Silver Fook of St. Andrew’s Day recognizes November 30th, Scotland’s national day, in the form of a small papier-mache mockup of the Silver Rook, Andy Scott’s steel sculpture in Edinburgh:

(#3)

Bits of background: on the sculptor, from Wikipedia:

Andy Scott (born 1964) is a Scottish figurative sculptor, working in galvanised steel, fibreglass and cast bronze.

…  Scott is noted for his monumental public art, found mostly in the UK

And on the sculpture, from Scott’s commercial site:

The Rook is now installed at George Street in Edinburgh, in front of the Hamilton & Inches showroom and workshops. This large scale equine chess piece is intended as a speculative precursor to a full landscape art installation: an entire chess set of monumental equine pieces, each adorned and posed to represent traditional chess pieces.

… The sculpture partners our equally exclusive small-scale sterling silver chess set

Well, fook the precious sterling silver, we’ve got papier-mache! Right here in California!

This would be the time to point out that Steph Shih is not only a phonologist, cognitive scientist, photographer, musician, pan-California academic (UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Merced, and soon USC), and chef — some of these accomplishments noted in earlier postings of mine — but also an Edinburgh enthusiast. So it’s especially fitting that she should earn the The Pun of the Month® trophy for November 2017.

This entry was posted on November 29, 2017 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Language play, Portmanteaus, Puns. 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.