Arnold Zwicky's Blog

At some point, someone looked at an ordinary soup ladle, probably one with a hooked end for hanging it up, like these stainless steel spoons:

(#1)

and realized it looked rather a long-necked animal (with the bowl as its body and the hook as its head), perhaps a long-necked dinosaur — a terrestrial brontosaur or apatosaur, or (since the bowl dips into a liquid) a marine creature, say a plesiosaur:

(#2)

Or, even better, the folkloric creature Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster:

(This posting is unusually compact, for me anyway; I’ve been sick and am struggling not to be drowned in unblogged postings because of that.)

(#3) Lari Don’s Treasure of the Loch Ness Monster (2018), a children’s adventure book

Which has resulted in Nessie soup ladles offered by the Bonavita Living company, seen here on sale on the Groupon site:

(#4)The plastic ladles come in (neon) green, (bright) pink, and (turquoise) blue, and in three sizes (Mamma Nessies, Nessies, and Baby Nessies); and there are also Nessie colander spoons and pasta spoons

What makes them come metaphorically alive are the eyeholes in the heads and the four feet, which serve the useful culinary purpose of keeping the utensils upright inside or outside of a pot.

(Some websites sell these ladles under the name Samson rather than Nessie.)

Background: ladles. Ladles belong to the SPOON category of kitchen utensils. From NOAD:

noun ladle: a large long-handled spoon with a cup-shaped bowl, used for serving soup, stew, or sauce

(Note that the definition locates ladles in the higher-order SPOON category and refers to characteristics of both form and function.)

Background: Nessie. From Wikipedia:

In Scottish folklore, the Loch Ness Monster or Nessie is a creature said to inhabit Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands. It is often described as large in size with a long neck and one or more humps protruding from the water. Popular interest and belief in the creature has varied since it was brought to worldwide attention in 1933. Evidence of its existence is anecdotal, with a few disputed photographs and sonar readings.

The creature commonly appears in Western media in a variety of ways. The scientific community regards the Loch Ness Monster as a phenomenon without biological basis, explaining sightings as hoaxes, wishful thinking, and the misidentification of mundane objects

The literature, as in Wikipedia, focuses heavily on the question of whether Nessie is real or not, but my interest here is the roles the creature plays in popular culture.

This entry was posted on January 6, 2019 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Books, Language and animals, Language and food, Pop culture. 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.