Archive for 2022
July 26, 2022
… What a delicious Tweety you are!
The 7/24 Mother Goose and Grimm strip, with a police line-up of cartoon cats, for little Tweety to pick out the threatening pussy cat that he thought he saw:
(#1) The potential pussy predator perps on parade, left to right: 1 the Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss picture book), 2 Stimpy (Ren & Stimpy tv animation), 3 Sylvester (Looney Tunes film animation), 4 Catbert (Dilbert strip), 5 Attila (MGG strip — note self-reference), 6 Garfield (Garfield strip)
The number of domestic cats in cartoons is mind-boggling — there are tons of lists on the net — and then there are all those other cartoon felines: tigers, panthers, lions, leopards, and so on. Out of these thousands, the cops rounded up the six guys above — all male, as nearly all cartoon cats are, despite the general cultural default that dogs are male, cats female — as the miscreant. (It might be that male is the unmarked sex for anthropomorphic creatures in cartoons as for human beings in many contexts; females appear only when their sex is somehow especially relevant to the cartoon.) And that miscreant, the smirking Sylvester, is the only one of the six known as a predator on birds, though in real life, domestic cats are stunningly effective avian predators, killing billions of birds annually.
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Posted in Alliteration, Books, Child language, Comic conventions, Constituency, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Nonsense, Parody, Phonology, Poetry, Syntax, Understanding comics, Variation | 2 Comments »
July 25, 2022
(Obviously not to everyone’s taste: consider the title and #1 below.)
This morning’s genital surprise from Daily Jocks, the Alpha Swim Trunk for the alpha dog, the big dog on the beach:
(#1) [ad copy:] ALPHA SWIM TRUNK: Available in 3 colours [black, white, blue]. Like a little more coverage but still want to show off your assets? The Alpha Swim Trunk [from Elia beachwear] has you covered.
Obviously enhanced somehow, but nowhere I could find on the DJ site is there any information about how the Elia company achieves its codpiece swim trunks. Way past moose-knuckling and into massive hood-ornament territory.
I find codpieces entertaining, because they’re so earnestly blatant: pure display, giving no hint as to the size of the equipment within, in fact hinting that the codpiece is entirely compensatory. That huge bulge in #1 doesn’t look life a gigantic penis, it looks like a big pillow. Obviously, what it needs is some metal spikes, as singer Adam Lambert projects here:
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Phallicity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
July 25, 2022
From Benita Bendon Campbell yesterday, a delightful plant, new to her, that had just come into her life. Her photo:
(#1) A white Scaevola aemula cultivar, in a hanging pot; the plant grows as a garden shrub, but hangs or drapes quite satisfyingly, as here
The scaevola plant was new to me as well; it was hard to believe that I’d never come across a plant whose common name is fairy fan-flower and has cultivars that are intensely purplish-blue:
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Posted in Dance, Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Movies and tv, My life, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »
July 22, 2022
We might as well just give them numbers. (This particular joke is 2/3 of a devil.) From Verdant on my Twitter on 7/15/22, this old Shoe strip:
(#1) Body-location (of the tattoo) vs. event-location (of the tattooing); Verdant provides this as a comment on my 2/27/19 posting “Body-location, event-location”, where #444 appears in a One Big Happy strip and is traced back at least as far as the antique Joe Miller’s Jest Book
To which Verdant adds yes-I-said-yes Molly Bloom’s:
confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Modifier attachment, Possession, Semantics, Syntax | 1 Comment »
July 20, 2022
(There will be a just barely not-naked moose-knuckled underwear model, plus references to male raunchy bits and man-on-man sex in plain terms, so, alas, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Three items on my computer screen this morning: today’s Zippy, in which the Pinhead totters from stress in a world of (historical) roadside seafood joints in New England, the last of which leads to today’s Daily Jocks swimwear ad for the Elia company; meanwhile, Zippy’s succumbing to stress leads to National Stress Awareness Day, and a Private Eye cartoon by Vilnissimo for the occasion (posted today on Facebook by John Wells).
(#1) Stressed-out Zippy shacking up with the shad, Chad going to the beach to spawn in Elia swimwear, Vilnissimo keenly aware of stress in Private Eye
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Posted in Ambiguity, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Prosody, Underwear | 5 Comments »
July 19, 2022
My morning name of 6/5, which came to me, not in my head on awakening (the way morning names usually do), but on Facebook upon my firing up my computer, from John Wells, who was exclaiming with surprised delight: “I’m now a panjandrum“.
JW had just come across a 1/29/19 piece on Tony Thorne’s language and innovation site, “Mockney, Estuary — and the Queen’s English”, in which Thorne referred to “the Linguistics and Phonetics department at UCL [University College London] under the panjandrum of phonology Professor John Wells”.
(#1) Not JW, but the Great Panjandrum of Randolph Caldecott’s 1885 picture book, on its cover (on the book, see below)
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Posted in Books, Language play, Linguists, Morning names, My life, Nonsense, Quotations | 2 Comments »
July 17, 2022
In recent days, occasions to re-play previous postings: one on pre-cut walker balls, one on Jill Brailsford’s stylized drawings of native Australian plants.
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Posted in Art, Language and plants | 1 Comment »
July 17, 2022
Another adventure in dubious commercial names and slogans. In the past few days the hyperkinetic tv pitchman Phil Swift — the id of the Flex Seal company, the Billy Mays of liquid rubber — has been assaulting my senses with a slogan that annoys me every time — just the way it was supposed to — because I get the sleazy sense of the commercial’s slogan
Take it from the man on the can
(‘from the guy sitting on the toilet (doing his business)’) instead of the innocent sense ‘from the man whose picture is on the label of the can (of Flex Seal)’. (In passing, I note the mini-festival of metonymy here: the man isn’t on the can, his picture is; well, not on the can itself, but on the label affixed to the can.) Let me start with a photo of an exemplary Flex Seal can:
(#1) You will note the absence, on the label, of a face of any person whatsoever, much less Phil Swift; as far as I can tell, the labels are all like that, and that’s no accident: Swift’s face is entirely beside the point — you’ll see that plenty in the commercials — because the ad’s all about taking your thoughts, memorably, into (or onto) the toilet
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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Language in advertising, Metaphor, Metonymy, Puns, Slang, Slogans | 1 Comment »
July 16, 2022
Today’s Zippy strip takes us to triple Dinerland in Rockford MI (as it was before it closed in 2011), in a celebration of the rule of three — a narrative principle that favors trios of events or characters in all sorts of contexts:
(#1) The Three Musketeers (in the Dumas novel and the movies), the Three Little Pigs (vs. the Big Bad Wolf in the fable), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (the 1966 epic spaghetti Western), and the Three Stooges (the vaudeville and slapstick comedy team best known for their 190 short films)
The rule of three in a little while, but first, the diners of Rockford MI (a town of a few thousand people about 10 miles north of Grand Rapids).
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Posted in Diners, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Narrative, Slogans, Snowclones | 4 Comments »
July 15, 2022
(underwear, swimwear, plus references to men’s raunchy bits and one (edited, but decidedly hot) image of gay male pronging — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
The day started with some Elia beachwear in gayboy-themed patterns, in my posting “Hey, buddy, we’ve been waiting for you!” While I was posting that, among the swarm of swimwear and underwear ads that infest my Facebook page came a deeply goofy ad for Skull and Bones underwear (and related apparel), set in a subway car:
(#1) Not your usual premium underwear ad: floral designs for such underwear have become common, but this one is based on Dutch masters; potently sexy ads are all over the place, but this one is framed instead as a kid just horsing around — still it manages to be sweetly sexy (don’t you want to nuzzle that adorable belly?); and, yes, check out the subway car cards
As it happens, flagrant man-on-man sex in a moving subway car is a subgenre of gay porn, one I find strangely moving, so the ad came with an extra resonance for me. (Example soon to come.)
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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and race, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Masculinity, Music, Underwear | 3 Comments »
