Archive for January, 2020
January 21, 2020
On Facebook recently, this supermarket snap, presumably from a store in Quebec, with a notable offering highlighted:
(#1) Five parts to the labeling: the name of the product in French (ailes de lapin); the name of the company (Canabec, a Quebec distributor of game — gibiers — and exotic meats; cf. elsewhere Plaisirs Gastronomiques, a Quebec company offering gourmet food, and Gaspésien, another Quebec fine food company); the name of the product in English (rabbit wings); the weight (in grams); and the price (in C$ / CA$ / CAD)
Much FB merriment over ailes de lapin ‘rabbit wings’, to which I responded:
Um, these are rabbit legs, right? Metaphorical? They resemble chicken wings and can be cooked in all the same ways. (Chinese rabbit wings are yummy.) M. Lapin: “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! for then I would fly away, and be at rest.” (Psalm 55) — later adding: “Oh, that I had wings like a rabbit! for then I would bound away, and be at rest.”
It’s a metaphor, son! A metaphor! Apparently one that is dead in Quebec, and so unremarkable in Quebecois — cf. Fr chauve-souris ‘bat’ (lit. ‘bald mouse’), Engl head of lettuce (where are its eyes and mouth?), and other dead metaphors that become entertaining when you attempt to breathe life back into them.
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Posted in Catchphrases, French, Language and food, Mascots, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Silliness | 3 Comments »
January 19, 2020
(Eventually, significant talk about the lexicon of men’s genitalia, so not to everyone’s taste.)
From the annals of remarkable commercial names, this name of — surprise!* — a gourmet grocery store in Toronto, in the news recently because it closed after 24 years in business. [* Note: a surprise, of course, only to non-Torontonians; to locals, it’s not only familiar, but semantically unremarkable (see below).]
Two things here: the relatively straightforward playful half-rhyme meat – beach: /mit – bič/, with stop /t/ vs. affricate /č/ (both voiceless coronal obstruents); and the complex playfulness of the name — with possible sexual double entendres involving meat and with the carefree associations of beaches, often evoking sex as well (and giving rise to the cocktail name Sex on the Beach).
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Posted in Figurative language, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language play, Names, Rhyme | 1 Comment »
January 19, 2020
That’s the head:
Rent Spikes
Stoke Dread
By the Sea
The subhead:
Coney Island Businesses
Fear Being Priced Out
The story is that increases in rents have promoted anxiety on the part of seaside business owners on Coney Island.
This from the national print edition of the NYT on the 15th (p. A19), story by Aaron Randle.
A story I have then playfully travestied:
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Posted in Headlines, Music, Parodies, Poetry, Rhyme, Style and register | Leave a Comment »
January 19, 2020
A quirky Joe Dator cartoon from the January 20th issue of the New Yorker:
(#1) “We’re not a seafood restaurant–this building has a pretty severe lobster infestation.”
NOAD‘s account of the everyday usage of infestation (with notes added by me in square brackets):
noun infestation: the presence of an unusually large number of insects or animals [not plants or microbes] in a place, typically so as to cause damage or disease [of concern to human beings]: infestation with head lice is widespread | efforts were made to deal with an infestation of rats in the building.
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Posted in Form and function, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor | 5 Comments »
January 17, 2020
(Queer linguistic playfulness, but with plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so probably not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
From the latest avalanche of comments spam on my blog this morning (thousands a day at the moment, traceable to Russia, though knowing a bit about the source is not at all useful), what happens when programs randomly paste together personal names, family names, and small chunks of text all assembled from truly gigantic databases: sometimes you get goofy gay porn scenarios.
So it was that my morning was improved by the appearance in this gigantic spam queue of the obviously massively queer Amado Spears, the bearer of a wonderfully two-barreled porn name, with the following eccentric message from him about his racy adventures with his husband and a phallic friend:
My husband and i have been absolutely fulfilled when Peter managed to finish up his investigations from the precious recommendations he had from your own weblog.
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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body, Names, Phallicity, Pragmatics, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »
January 16, 2020
(About other things as well, but centrally about my life, which some readers might just find annoying and want to avoid.)
January 16th today. At the very rim of the Mournful Valley. From my 1/21/15 posting “Antonio Soler and the Mournful Valley”
Not long ago, WQXR [NYC FM radio station specializing in classical music] played some keyboard sonatas by Padre Antonio Soler, a favorite composer of mine since my student days at MIT but one not especially widely known. That tweaked bittersweet memories of those days in Cambridge MA, especially powerful at this time of the year, in what I’ve come to think of the Mournful Valley of Mid-Winter, in between January 17th, the anniversary of Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s death ([in 2020, the 35th anniversary; she died at age 47]) and January 22nd, my man Jacques Transue’s birthday ([in 2020, his 78th]; Jacques died in 2003) — and with celebrations of love, for Valentines Day, very much in the air.
In the context of the Mournful Valley, VDay is definitely bittersweet. On the one hand, I’ve been alone since 1998, when J went into a dementia care facility. On the other hand, VDay is Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s birthday, and that makes the holiday a very big thing.
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Posted in Art, My life, Poetry | 1 Comment »
January 13, 2020
(Lots of off-color jokes, some of them gay-inflected, along with a number of peanut cartoons. So: crude, and perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange — entertaining if you get the crucial pop culture allusion, incomprehensible if you don’t:
(#1) An elephant at the doctor’s office, with an x-ray showing the contents of his stomach to be a top hat, a monocle, and a cane; in the face of this evidence, the doctor asks the patient if he’s sure that all he ate was one peanut (presupposing that the patient has claimed just that)
How does this even make sense, much less be funny? Even granting the poploric association between elephants and peanuts — which is actually pretty baffling (see below) — why do peanuts come up in #1 at all? We have a trio of men’s accessories and no visible peanuts.
There’s a hint in the bonus commentary on the left: elephant to elephant, “It’s a medical Mister-y”, where the clue is Mister. But the clue is useless if you don’t know your way around the symbolic figures of American commerce.
You have to be a friend of Mister Peanut.
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Posted in Double entendres, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and the sexes, Language in advertising, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Puns, Signs and symbols, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »
January 11, 2020
(On appallingly bad taste in menswear, also about men’s underwear and its contents, but without dwelling on the anatomy and without any mansex at all — so tasteless, but not over-the-line raunchy.)
From the bottomless annals of preposterous men’s underwear: transparent polyester beach shorts. To add to see-through mesh underwear and many much more outrageous garments chronicled in my postings over the years (see my Page on underwear postings).
An illustration:
(#1) MaverickSwim brand “Berlin Transparent Waterproof Shorts” ($26.99) with neon orange trim (also available in neon lime trim), shown here worn over minibriefs for modesty (but in matching orange, as a fashion statement)
They look hugely uncomfortable, whatever their value as crotch display cases. As Ellen Evans advised on Facebook:
plastic clothes: just say no
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Posted in Clothing, Language in advertising, Underwear | 3 Comments »
