Archive for September, 2022

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Outrageous POP

September 30, 2022

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate September; tomorrow the inaugural rabbits of October will bound in

In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, set in the Schmancy auction house — think Christie’s or Sotheby’s — a Mötley CrĂŒe cruet POPped (phrasal overlap portmanteaued) to  Motley CrĂŒet (somehow the first röck döt got lost in the compression process):


(#1) Wayno’s title: “Tinny Aftertaste”, combining the metal of heavy metal with the taste of a cruet’s contents (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

To understand this, you need to know about fancy-schmancy auction houses and how they operate; about cruets and their function in dining; and about heavy metal music and the heavy metal band Mötley CrĂŒe and their reputation for vulgarly outrageous behavior, which clashes with the civility of oil-and-vinegar dressings for salads, so yielding the humor of anomalous juxtaposition.

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Spelling, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

On Facebook at Michaelmas

September 29, 2022

By happy accident, my Facebook feed is celebrating the day of the archangel Michael with food and drink artworks. Two in particular: a miniaturist composition I think of as Bisonini Doing Power Crunches:


(#1) From Greg Morrow on FB 9/24 (though it didn’t filter down to me until today), with his own work, which he describes as: “Die kleinenbĂŒffel and their shy friend take a needed break for a snack” (see below; note German der BĂŒffel ‘the buffalo’)

And this socially multilayered appreciation of coffee-sipping:


(#2) From Tim Evanson: “September 29 is #NationalCoffeeDay!!!”; TE says he’s had the image for years, doesn’t know its source

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and religion, My life, Race and ethnicity | 1 Comment »

On the interview watch

September 28, 2022

From recent American broadcast news interviews, yielding notable examples of familiar phenomena: the 2pbfV (2-part back-formed V) family-plan ‘do family planning’; and the phrase-final truncation of a formulaic expression, not give a rat’s ass ‘not care at all’, in the truncated not give a rat’s.

Both phenomena illustrate a drive towards brevity of expression (which makes life easier for the speaker), balanced against the hearer’s need for clarity of expression: to work out what the speaker intended to convey, the hearer must be able to supply crucial background knowledge (they have to know the compound noun family planning, with its specialized sense; they have to know the negative-polarity idiom (not) give a rat’s ass ‘not care at all’ and appreciate the zing in its vulgar minimizer rat’s ass), so the speaker must assess those abilities and craft their speech to suit their audience. It’s a complex dance, and like social dancing, it happens in the moment, on the fly, using practiced patterns while collaborating to make something new.

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Posted in Back formation, Brevity vs. Clarity, Formulaic expressions, Synthetic compounds, Truncation | Leave a Comment »

FUBU, fubu, FuBu

September 27, 2022

(Content warning: the F-word and the F-act (especially between men) figure prominently, though not vividly, in what is to come. So do hiphop clothing and tofu burgers, but if you’re uncomfortable with the harder-core F-stuff, you should skip this posting.)

Caught in passing on Facebook, a guy reporting something he heard from his FUBU, which baffled me; I was dimly aware of a FUBU clothing line, but this guy must have been talking about something else.

I realize that many of my readers will have recognized the (complex) acronym immediately and so think I must be dim-witted, but I had to go look it up. The acronym is a distant cousin of FUBAR, and its abbreviatum is something I have fairly often written about on this blog, but always spelled out in full.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Acronyms, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language in advertising, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

The news for wieners

September 26, 2022

(Phallic preoccupations abound in this posting, sometimes in street language — I mean, look at the title above —  so some readers may want to skip over it)

Passed on by a friend on Facebook yesterday, this German grocery-store snapshot plus a joking double-entendre intro in English (together making what appears to be a a fast-spreading meme):


(#1) HĂ€hnchenschnitten Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style chicken cutlets’ from the (German) Vossko company, the name of the product including the German phrase Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ — that is, prepared like Wiener Schnitzel / Wienerschnitzel); meanwhile, the English-language intro alludes to wiener art, in the sense ‘penis art’, referring to artworks in which penises are significant elements (or, in an hugely extended sense, to any artworks in which human penises are visible) — the label wiener art involving the (mildly racy) AmE sexual slang term wiener ‘penis’

German Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ (a) leads to English Wiener art ‘Viennese art’ (b) and then to four AmE slang uses of wiener art: (c) ‘sausage / frankfurter art’; (d) ‘dachshund art’; (e) ‘penis art’; (f) ‘weenie art’. All will be illustrated below.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Double entendres, German, Language and food, Language and the body, Metaphor, Metonymy, Parodies, Parody, Phallicity, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

The refuse joke

September 25, 2022

Passed on, back on 7/21, by a friend on Facebook, a dumpster texty (of murky origin) with a (N vs. V) pun that works in spelling (REFUSE) but not in pronunciation —

N /ˈrefˌjus/   vs.  V /rəˈfjuz/

— plus, as commentary, Dylan Thomas expanding on the improbable (not to mention grotesque) V reading of the text (as opposed to the obviously intended N one). Which will then take us to Harry Diboula’s “Je refuse”, a French zouk song of lost love, which ended up in romantic Paris from the Kingdom of Kongo by way of the French Caribbean.


(#1) Like all right-minded people, I reject the idea that I — or, more precisely, my bodily remains — should be stored in black plastic sacks and placed in dumpsters. Ick. Je refuse!

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Puns, Race and ethnicity, Signage | Leave a Comment »

Microphallic symbols from Pretzelvania

September 24, 2022

(Content warning: considerable phallic talk, but with distanced vocabulary and no vivid images.)

It started back on 7/22 with a Facebook ad for the pretzels.com (hereafter, P.C) company, a page of (highly flavored) pretzel sticks looking routinely rod-like and therefore phallic — plus, you put them in your mouth, and they’re salty, like, whew, semen (for some of us, this is in fact a plus, but de gustibus non est disputandum).


(#1) In other words: eat me!

I sent away for some P.C pretzel sticks to see what they were like — brief answer, variously yummy (I tried the beer cheese, buttermilk ranch, and green chile bbq flavors), but tiny and cute (like 1.5in long), so if phallic, then microphallic (see below) — and then more recently ordered in some everyday pretzel rods (from Snyder’s of Hanover (PA)), which turn out to be of gay-porn standard length (just over 7in, significantly above the American phallic mean, which is roughly 5.5in, with a standard deviation of roughly .5in, so that most of us are between 5 and 6 inches, and about 95% of us between 4.5 and 6.5 inches).

Then, P.C makes a lot of being “baked fresh in “Pretzel Country” Pennsylvania, home to the very first commercial pretzel company”. Pretzelvania turns out — unsurprisingly — to be pretty much Pennsylvania Dutch Country (PaDuCo), which is where I was born and grew up, just up the road from a third southeastern PA pretzel company, Tom Sturgis Pretzels (“America’s First Pretzel Baking Family”), in the Reading area.

So, to come, the three Ps: pretzels, penises (real and symbolic), and PaDuCo.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and food, Language and the body, Language in advertising | Leave a Comment »

Thilopyrus flamminips Wants YOU!

September 23, 2022

(Content warning: men’s bodies, references to sex between men, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest. On the other hand, there will be some delightful birds.)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks sale ad (for harnesses, plus accompanying jockstraps and athletic socks) via e-mail, featuring the model I’ve called Reggie. In the ad, we see Reggie in character as Thilopyrus flamminips, the fire-nippled flit, performing his mating ritual; note the characteristic cruising facial display (narrowed eyes, intense direct gaze) and the inflamed party plumage (rainbow harness and jockstrap), but especially the left nipple actually on fire (when both tits ignite, the flit spontaneously ejaculates, at the same time producing his climax cry, a fierce, drawn-out whoop: “Fuuuuck”)

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Posted in Clothing, Facial expressions, Gaze, Language and the body, My life, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | 4 Comments »

The Monster and the Minotaureador

September 21, 2022

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with an instance of one of the house specialties — the Psychiatrist cartoon meme — rich in mythic resonances, and incorporating a bovine Nietzschean pun:


Not just any old ruminant on the couch, but the chimeric monster the Minotaur, reflecting guiltily on, oh, the young people sacrificed to him in the Labyrinth, and now confronted with a Theseus figure, in the form of his therapist (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

Wayno’s title, another pun, but a perfect one this time: “Bull Session”.

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Posted in Catchphrases, Comic conventions, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Myths, Portmanteaus, Puns, Quotations | 3 Comments »

Briefly: exocentric V + N

September 20, 2022

(Warning: a vulgar term for the primary female sexual anatomy will end up playing a big role in this posting.)

Where this is going: to an alternative name for an American President (#45, aka TFG); and to an alternative name for a classic American novel (by J.D. Salinger) — both names being exocentric V + N compound nouns, the first in English, the second in French. (I’ll call them exoVerNs for short.)

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Posted in Architecture, Art, Books, Compounds, Derivation, French, Language and gender, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language in politics, My life, Synthetic compounds, Taboo language and slurs, Writers, Writing | 1 Comment »

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