Promised on 10/3 (yes, 19 days ago), in my posting “coming soon, two pun cartoons” (by Kaamran Hafeez and Tom Chitty), now realized: the puns hìp replácement (from KH, on the model híp replàcement) and you look like you’ve seen a goat (from TC, on the model you look like you’ve seen a ghost) — both of them (phonologically) imperfect, but close.
(Both KH and TC have Pages on this blog: KH here; TC here.)
KH: the bedside surprise. The patient is disgruntled to discover that though he was expecting a híp replàcement, he’s been given a hìp replácement:
(#1) Two different structures, two different accent placements
The model expression is hip replacement — a N + N compound noun meaning ‘(surgical) replacement of a hip’ (and with the primary accent on the first element, the bodypart N hip). Like blackbird referring to species of American birds in the family Icteridae. The pun is hip replacement — an Adj + N nominal with the adjective hip (and with the primary accent on the second element, the N head replacement). Like black bird ‘a bird that is black’.
From NOAD on the Adj in this Adj + N nominal:
adj. hip-3: [a] informal following the latest fashion, especially in popular music and clothes: it’s becoming hip to be environmentally conscious. [b] understanding; aware: he’s trying to show how hip he is to Americana.
Source of the cartoon. The cartoon was passed along to me on Facebook, without any information about its source (other than Hafeez’s signature). A certain amount of rooting around led me to the CartoonStock copy, which said this is a KH cartoon from the 7/1/23 Narrative magazine. From Wikipedia on the magazine (which was unfamiliar to me):
Narrative is a non-profit digital publisher of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art founded in 2003 by Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian. Narrative publishes weekly and provides educational resources to teachers and students; subscription and access to its content is free.
TC: consumed by the omnivore. A young man returns from an encounter with a goat, which has indulged its fabled enthusiasm for eating every damned thing by savaging the bottom half of the guy’s trousers, his shoes and socks, half of his briefcase and its contents — and a (conventional) apple:
(#2) From the 10/9/23 New Yorker
The model family of expressions is
someone look like / as if pro have (just) seen a ghost
(for example, Tom looks as if he’s just seen a ghost; but more to the point here, you look like you’ve seen a ghost) conveying ‘look very shocked / scared / terrified / pale from fright’ — treated as an idiom (family) by a number of on-line dictionaries, but it looks like a bunch of related stock expressions with entirely compositional meaning, but conventionally used to convey not only this compositional meaning but also some of the typical real-world situational concomitants of it (in this case, how one looks when one has seen a ghost). The pun in #2 is you look like you’ve seen a goat, with goat (/got/) for ghost (/gost/), conveying that you look the way you look when you’ve encountered one of those fabled omnivorous goats.
The omnivore caper. Wikipedia’s very cautious approach to the goat-as-omnivore tale:
Goats are reputed to be willing to eat almost anything, including tin cans and cardboard boxes. While goats will not actually eat inedible material, they are browsing animals, not grazers like cattle and sheep, and (coupled with their highly curious nature) will chew on and taste just about anything remotely resembling plant matter to decide whether it is good to eat, including cardboard, clothing and paper (such as labels from tin cans).
Aside from sampling many things, goats are quite particular in what they actually consume, preferring to browse on the tips of woody shrubs and trees, as well as the occasional broad-leaved plant. However, it can fairly be said that their plant diet is extremely varied, and includes some species which are otherwise toxic.
October 23, 2023 at 6:11 am |
Indeed, I have read of communities/institutions that use goats to control/suppress poison ivy, which they apparently eat willingly and without ill effects.