… from a hundred years ago. Two items that popped up on Pinterest a while back after I posted about things Swiss:
(#1) Pilatus Railway poster (unknown artist for Burlingham Travel Pictures, 1918)
(#2) Swiss military “Flag Guard” poster from 1914, the year the Great War began
Tennis, anyone? Croquet, monsieur? Croquette, madame?
I begin in medias res, with croquet monsieur, as used in this announcement on the specials board recently at the King’s College Cambridge servery:
(#1) (photo by Bert Vaux, of King’s, posted on Facebook today)
The staffer who made up the board was presumably unfamiliar with the croque part of the food name croque-monsieur, so they went with the closest thing they knew: croquet. (Well, it was all French to them.) Go With What You Know is the eggcorning strategy of Ruthie in the cartoon One Big Happy, reported on regularly in this blog.Here it is in an adult variant.
You’re familiar with cookie fortunes, and possibly with coffee-cup bible verses, now there are tea-tag aphorisms:
(#1) A cup of inspiration from the Yogi company
Today’s morning name surfaced from the depths of the ocean: benthic, especially in the phrase benthic worm. No, I don’t know why.
(Insert here a note about the salty fellow Benthic Worm, a denizen of the abyssal plain, who bristles at the epithet dirty.)
(more…)
The One Big Happy from October 12th, a dialogue between Joe and James in which we experience a tiny bit of the fabulous flexibility of the English verb have:
(#1)
James seems not to have registered the noun hobby (‘an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure’ (NOAD)) and so takes hobbies in have hobbies to be the name of a disease, infection, or medical condition, like (the) mumps. For him, chickenpox and the mumps, but not hobbies is just an ordinary coordination, but for the rest of us, it’s prime-grade zeugma, like (I had) asthma and artistic inclinations — with the extra wrinkle that though both chickenpox and mumps end in a plural-resembling /s/ (and so superficially resemble the PL hobbies), both are grammatically SG:
chickenpox / (the) mumps once was / *were a common childhood disease, but vaccines have nearly eliminated it / *them [SG for subject-verb agreement and also for anaphor selection]
Two notes: on the morphosyntax of disease names; and on the extraordinary versatility of have (which just invites zeugmas and zeugmoids).
From Steven Levine on Facebook on the 15th:
(#1) “Classic Pride Rainbow Eco-Friendly Leather Boots” from DealClever.com
Look what Facebook showed me as an ad. They are leather and 50% off … I know they are meant to be “Pride boots” but I like them because they seem like something from a Dr. Seuss illustration.
The error, as reported in HuffPo (among many other news sources) on the 13th: by Jenna Amatulli,
New Zealand Newspaper [the Gisborne Herald] Flubs Stan Lee’s Obituary, Writes ‘Spike Lee Dies’
(#1)
Inadvertent errors in retrieving words are common, especially in speech. Some are primarily motivated on phonological grounds, some primarily on semantic grounds, but typically both effects are relevant (some details in a moment). Inadvertent errors in retrieving proper names are particularly common, because everyone experiences a monumental number of proper names, with new ones popping up on a daily basis. In this context, Spike Lee for Stan Lee would be an entirely unsurprising error in name retrieval.
In the latest (11/26/18) New Yorker, this Ali Solomon cartoon presents a test in cartoon understanding:
(#1) “Oh yes. Definitely a forgery. Hope it didn’t cost you much.”
If you recognize the loin-clothed hunkering figure with the big eyes, you’ll understand what’s happening in the cartoon and why it’s funny. Otherwise, it’s just baffling.
A Roz Chast New Yorker cartoon from 11/22/10, “The Last Thanksgiving” — how could I possibly please them all? — and now her cover for the latest (11/26/18) New Yorker, “Thankfulness”, for the Technology Issue of the magazine.
Two recent One Big Happy strips in which the analysis of words into parts plays a role: one from 10/14 with a Ruthian eggcorn (treating archive as ark + hive); and one from 10/23 in which Joe puzzles over the consequences of appreciating that nobody is no + body.