Today’s Bizarro/Wayno collab:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
The disaster to be averted:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
Meanwhile, HD is bedeviled. From NOAD:
verb bedevil: [a] (of something bad) cause great and continual trouble to: inconsistencies that bedevil modern English spelling. [b] (of a person) torment or harass: he bedeviled them with petty practical jokes.
A Tom Gauld New Scientist cartoon:
(#1) (Hat tip to Chris Waigl)
Gauld’s version starts with real hazard pictograms and then veers into the fanciful.
(Note: the DEPRESSING pictogram is a black cloud, not a version of the poop emoji.)
From Larry Horn on ADS-L yesterday under the subject line “Navigating those islands”, noting that in this case “the relevant islands are (i) in Florida and (ii) in the morphosyntactic context below”:
Background: a(n adulterous) couple lands at Tampa Airport en route to a supposed “ecotourism” adventure-cum-real-estate promotion (i.e. scam) through the islands of the Everglades and stop at the bar for a drink…
The landing in Tampa was bumpy. At the airport, Eugenie Fonda charged into the first open bar in the concourse. “Margaritaville” was playing over the sound system, so she ordered one. — Carl Hiaasen (2006), Nature Girl, p. 116 (beginning of Chapter 11)
That’s ONE-anaphora “going into” the complex proper name Margaritaville (the name of a song) to find its antecedent, the common noun margarita:
noun margarita: a cocktail made with tequila and citrus fruit juice. (NOAD)
The anaphor takes a moment to process and strikes most people as a joke (Hiassen’s novels are wryly jocular, though not usually in this particular way).
I’ve posted about one related example, on 8/11/12 in “Proper anaphoric islands” (discussion to follow). And in e-mail discussion an informal group of anaphoric islanders (researchers on the phenomenon) has invented a series of further examples of anaphoric elements that find their antecedents inside proper names — examples that go one step beyond the ordinary anaphoric island examples (which can usually be contextualized) by playing on the use of the antecedent expression (to refer to a kind of cocktail, as in There was a margarita mixologist behind the bar, so she ordered one) vs. its mere mention (as in the Hiassen example: “Margaritaville” was playing over the sound system, so she ordered one.).
It appeared on Facebook today, with this note from Chris Hansen:
(#1) CH: From another list we have a cartoon that takes a heckuva lot of background knowledge to understand. Arnold may want to deconstruct it, if he hasn’t already. I don’t know the cartoonist.
Well, I certainly wanted to deconstruct it, but not without knowing who the artist was. Quickly, however, Chris himself, Brian Guerrero-Kane, and Roger Phillips all supplied that information — Leigh Rubin (who has a Page on this blog) — and led me to fuller versions of the cartoon, with a title that considerably aids understanding. But the stripped-down version in #1, though challenging, is soluble, so I’ll do that first.
(There are sandpenises, but the gay porn ad is penisless and amiable, though extremely heavily muscled. So raunchy but goofy; use your judgment.)
Late August, and summer is drawing to a close in the Northern Hemisphere. Three things: botanical markers of the end of the season; for some, the last occasions for holidays on the beach (this will yield another bulletin in the endless News for Penises series); and for many, back to school (in this case, celebrated by a TitanMen sale on gay porn — put some mansex in your backback, boys!).
A 2012 playful creation of self-styled “Grammar Girl” Mignon Fogarty, reposted back on the 8th on the Our Bastard Language Facebook page:
(#1)
Yes, of course, it’s garmmra, not grammar, not about the grammar of English at all, but mostly about word choice, and then a lot of spelling and punctuation. (On garmmra, see my 2/22/12 posting “It’s All Grammar” and its successors.) Things like the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and named frameworks of formal grammar(Transformational-Generative Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Gramar, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, etc.) live in another world entirely.
(The Dirk Diggler section has some plain talk about men’s bodies — penises here, penises there, penises everywhere — so some readers might want to skip that section.)
Yesterday morning, the cheap men’s aftershave of the 1960s, Hai Karate, with an ad campaign that’s hard to forget (nerdy guys karate-chopping away hot models who were irrestistibly drawn to them by the powerful fumes of their Hai Karate). And then this morning, at the tail of an elaborate character-rich dream, the dream me discovered he was actually the son of Dirk Diggler, the supremely porn-named porn star character in two movies (the mockumentary The Dirk Diggler Story and the dramatic narrative film Boogie Nights).
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm takes us through the murky realms of cartoon understanding:
(#1)
At the surface level, the fortune teller offers a preposterous prediction about how Grimm will be reincarnated, and Grimm says he doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Entirely comprehensible (so long as you know about fortune tellers, and can recognize a stereotype of one — woman in gypsy costume with crystal ball — and so long as you know what reincarnation is), but not funny, unless you also know about Carnation brand evaporated milk (sweetened powdered milk that comes in cans). It’s a joke, son.
From the Australia in the United States Facebook page (of the Australian embassy to the U.S.), this image of a double cheeseburger pie and comment on it:
(#1) “There’s nothing more Aussie than a pie and there’s nothing more American than a burger. Put the two together and you have… #Mateship?!”
First, rainbow: from Andrew Winnard on Facebook, a photo of a rainbow-lit Metro escalator in Stockholm.
Then, sharks: in my posting earlier today “Central Shark”, about Sharknado Week on the SyFy channel (Trailer Park Shark (2017) is just about to begin!).
Which led me to the Italian clothing company Paul & Shark, with its sharky logo — and its line of rainbow shark t-shirts. And to a slew of artworks depicting rainbow sharks. And to a popular aquarium fish, the rainbow shark.