Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The One Big Happy cartoon from 5/21, in which the word tenor (which is apparently unfamiliar to Ruthie) leads Ruthie to a word with a similar pronunciation, whose meaning she knows (at least approximately) — tenure:

(#1) I got tenure at Ohio State in 1970, but the singing boyfriend didn’t come along until years later

That’s an error taking us from tenor to tenure. Meanwhile, on the comedy stage, a pun takes us from tenner to tenor.

From Wikipedia:

Lend Me a Tenor is a comedy by Ken Ludwig. The play was produced on both the West End (1986) and Broadway (1989). It received nine Tony Award nominations and won for Best Actor (Philip Bosco) and Best Director (Jerry Zaks). A Broadway revival opened in 2010. Lend Me a Tenor has been translated into sixteen languages and produced in twenty-five countries. The title is a pun on “Lend me a tenner” [BrE ‘a ten-pound note’].

(#2) Playbill for the Music Box revival

… A Broadway revival began performances at the Music Box Theatre on March 13, 2010 in preview and officially opened on April 4, 2010. Directed by Stanley Tucci, the cast starred Anthony LaPaglia (Tito Merelli), Jay Klaitz (Frank the Bellhop), Justin Bartha (Max), Jan Maxwell (Maria), Mary Catherine Garrison (Maggie), Jennifer Laura Thompson (Diana), and husband and wife couple Tony Shalhoub (Saunders) and Brooke Adams (Julia). The revival closed its limited run on August 15, 2010.

Bonus: a wonderful find. While I was setting up the file for this posting, I came across this list in the posters’ areas of WordPress:

podocarpus seed
what is the correct past tense of text
joelle zwicky
oiks
michael keaton in underwear

Quite a grab-bag of stuff. What unites them?

These are the top five searches on this blog today. I was a bit astonished to see only one sex-related search term — and that one was merely looking for Michael Keaton in his underwear, not a naked Keaton (with his private parts cleverly concealed one way or another). The fact is that naked men, kissing men, men in their underwear, men having sex with other men (tastefully, of course), and the like are a major portion of the searches on this blog.

And yes, there is a Swiss Joëlle Zwicky, who works at the International Watch Company in Schaffhausen, and I have indeed posted about her. And about podocarpus trees, the inflectional morphology of the verb text, and oiks. And on Michael Batman Keaton as a hot hunk in a superhero suit, but not, alas, in his underwear (or, even more regrettably, au naturel).

This entry was posted on June 15, 2021 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, My life, Puns, This blogging life, Word confusions. 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.