The One Big Happy from 6/5, in which Ruthie struggles, eggcornishly, to rationalize an unfamiliar name with familiar parts:
Mary, Susan, whatever.
Meanwhile, I now have “Honey Bun” from South Pacific in my head:
Her hair is blond and curly,
Her curls are hurly-burly.
Her lips are pips!
I call her hips
‘Twirly’ and ‘Whirly.’
On the device and its name, see my 2/17/11 posting “Chinese lazy Susan”. The name is originally American and so, it seems, is the device, though the object has a complex history ending up with its being associated with Chinese restaurants (especially in the US). From OED2:
Lazy Susan n. (also lazy susan) originally U.S. a revolving (wooden) stand on a table to hold condiments, etc.; a muffin stand. [1st cite 1917]
Then there’s Ruthie’s engaging association of female names and revolving devices: lazy Susan and (as Ruthie has it) Mary-go-round (for merry-go-round). The historical distinction between (lower, more open, shorter, laxer) [ɛ] in merry and (higher, more closed, longer, tenser) [e] in Mary has been steadily eroding (in favor of [ɛ]) in American English (similarly in other pairs, like ferry – fairy and Kerry – Carey), and that makes Mary-go-round a natural understanding for Ruthie.
(Meanwhile, in a separate development, [æ] in marry, Barry, parry etc. has been falling together with [ɛ] in merry, berry, Perry etc. in large areas of the US. Combined with the [e] – [ɛ] collapse, that gives us homophonous hairy and Harry (both with [ɛ], in the varieties I’m talking about here) and the wonderful homophonous triple Mary – merry – marry (all with [ɛ]). I have all three distinct.)
[Addendum 8/4: alert readers might have noted the poetic form of the verse from “Honey Bun”: it’s a limerick: four lines of iambic tetrameter, written as five; lines 1, 2, and 4 rhyme and are all short (with a rest as their 4th beat); line 3 has a different, internal rhyme.]
August 4, 2021 at 7:27 am |
Merrie Christmas Park in Miami https://www.miamigov.com/Residents/Parks-Directory/Merrie-Christmas-Park
was named for a real person, the daughter of a political family. Locally, people would speak of “[Former] Mayor Christmas and his daughter Mary” and I assumed she spelled it ‘Mary’. That did not feel like a near-miss in the pronunciation that would ruin the pun. But apparently when they recorded it as ‘Merrie’ they thought it was necessary.
(I am trying to find again a source I once saw which asserted her name at birth was something else and changed to Merrie.)
August 4, 2021 at 8:37 am |
It’s really hard to tell just *what* was going on here. We don’t know how the relevant people pronounced the words in question (I know a bit about their pronunciation in the Deep South, but southern Florida is a different dialect area entirely); people who have homophonous Mary and merry are still capable of playing with spelling; and in any case, imperfect puns are quite enjoyable as they stand, and some are judged more clever than perfect puns (turning on homophony).
August 5, 2021 at 7:01 am
For what it’s worth, the narrator of Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, whose given names are Mary Catherine, is nicknamed “Merricat”.
August 4, 2021 at 10:23 am |
Merrie Christmas lived 1954-1969, when Miami was a sleepy deep-south town. I moved to Miami in 1972, and the predominant accent at that time (aside from the Jews of Miami Beach) was a southern drawl – the town was My-am-uh. The Christmas family was from Ocilla, GA, so I’d think that a deep-South pronunciation was likely.