Archive for May, 2024
May 26, 2024
Schroeder to Lucy in a Peanuts comic strip from 1/27/73 (passed along on Facebook yesterday by Jeff Bowles), providing a motto that speaks to me very deeply:
“The joy is in the playing”. As it was once for me (my right hand has long been too disabled for piano-playing). Meanwhile, in Sacred Harp singing, the joy is in the singing, which I can still sort of do, and in the joining with others to sing, which I can now do only remotely, but it’s a great pleasure anyway,
Sacred Harp singing brings with it an explicit ethic of doing for its own sake and of community; the joy truly is in the singing. Which (in our ordinary custom) we do with and for one another, not for an audience (which would provide external appreciation and perhaps a kind of fame) and not for monetary reward.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »
May 25, 2024
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a little treasure chest of interesting morphosemantics, all from a pun on marine biologist, whose everyday use is to refer to a scientist specializing in marine biology:
But instead we get, unexpectedly, a biologist who is a marine, assigned to duty monitoring aquatic animals (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
The pun has the USMC noun marine; its base has the sea adjective marine. But that’s just the beginning of the fun.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Constructions, Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Morphology and syntax, Puns | 3 Comments »
May 23, 2024
On Pinterest this morning, this entertaining vintage ad, from the site Envisioning the American Dream (“A visual remix of the American Dream as pictured in Mid-Century media”), in “Unintentionally Gay Ads — Does He or Doesn’t He?” by Sally Edelstein on 6/12/13:
(#1) A 1944 ad for Wilson Wear pajamas and shorts; SE’s comment: Boxers, bedrooms and pajamas were a natural setting for a romp among “roomates”
What makes this one so funny (because unintentionally gay) is something the ad agency surely never considered. They wanted to advertise a Wilson Wear line by showing both the pajamas and the boxer shorts. So they depicted two guys in intimate menswear in the same pattern — suggesting that they’re boyfriends in His and His clothing, guys who are, as they say, in each other’s pants.
Me, I think it’s sweet.
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language in advertising, Movies and tv, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
May 23, 2024
Caught on Pinterest this morning, this hot man-on-man kiss, from the illustrator Noah:
(#1) One of a great many of Noah’s gay cowboy drawings; the flowers in the holster are an especially nice touch
Regular readers of this blog will know that images of men kissing men are some of my favorite things; meanwhile, cowboys are a major theme of gay male fantasy. Noah celebrates the fact that, as Ned Sublette’s song has it:
Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other
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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Male art | Leave a Comment »
May 23, 2024
Stability was the theme of my 5/15 appointment with Luis Alvarez (my nephrologist — who, since advanced kidney disease is my most salient affliction, has been in effect serving as my main physician). He was delighted with the most recent lab tests (everything holding at a good level) and with what he saw by examining and feeling various parts of my body and by observing my speech and behavior. He said to go on doing what I was doing and get an appointment in, wow, six months.
I allowed that I’d gotten used to the idea that death wasn’t very far off (every day is a surprising gift, to be treasured; my motto has been the Pythonic Mary Queen of Scots cry: Not Dead Yet), and he said that was reasonable before, but not now, since I probably had a long life still in front of me. And then we chatted for a while about the nature of diagnosis and prediction, as he and I are inclined to do.
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Posted in Language and medicine, My life, Quotations | 1 Comment »
May 22, 2024
Breezed past me on Facebook this morning, this Benjamin Schwartz cartoon (from the 5/6/19 issue of the New Yorker) that made me laugh out loud at its absurdity:
(#1) So festive! Transform any cocktail, in any kind of cocktail glass (the one in the cartoon is a coupe /kup/, a good glass for, say, a daiquiri), into a shrimp cocktail, by hanging some shelled, chilled cooked shrimp (such as anyone might just happen to have a pocketful of on them — this is where I dissolved in laughter) all around the lip of the glass
Even better: the classic shrimp cocktail is already an antic hors d’œuvre, a preposterously elaborate presentation of shrimp, sauce, and sourness (most often, from a lemon slice) that might have been served more simply on a tasty bit of bread, or in a small bowl or cup. With a name — shrimp cocktail — that’s a pun.
So what we see in #1 is in fact goofy-squared.
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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor | 2 Comments »
May 21, 2024
Passed along by two friends on Facebook recently, this Manchild Manor cartoon, deploying Kix breakfast cereal in a pun on the title (of the theme song for a tv show) “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”:
(#1) If you don’t know the song, this cartoon is incomprehensible
(I don’t know where or when this cartoon first appeared, and I couldn’t find it on the (sizable) Instagram page for the strip; I’ve appealed to the cartoonist, but in my experience, most artists view such queries as just a nuisance drag on their time, so they’re not inclined to reply. If he gets back to me, I’ll add his information to this posting.)
[Added on 5/22. Never assume. The cartoonist — Tim Thavirat, now living in San Diego CA after some time in Austin TX — has now replied, and even thanked me for sharing his work on my blog. This cartoon is from 10/25/18, early in the days of his cartoon page — a silly pun that tickled his fancy.]
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Posted in Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Photography, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
May 20, 2024
The seasons come and go, but rather erratically, as indicated by the plants in my little patio container garden. Normally, the winter rains cease around the beginning of April and summer heat arrives here in the Bay area early in June, and then the flowers on my cymbidium orchids (which are winter blooming plants, in flower from January through May) gradually turn brown and drop to the ground, and the plants go into dormancy until December, when new flower shoots begin to appear; and at the same time my big-leaved hydrangea (H. macrophylla) sends up its flower stalks, to bloom in mid-summer.
This year has, on average, been warmer than usual, with occasional one- or two-day bursts of high heat. So, even though it’s not particularly hot at the moment, my plants have switched into summer mode. Quite spectacularly.
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Posted in Language and plants, My life | Leave a Comment »
May 20, 2024
Joel B. Levin has sent me e-mail from a stopover in Reykjavik, where he enjoyed a tour “to see and smell sulfurous hot water at the original Geysir” and was treated to a viewing of the wrestlers statue outside the Geysir Glíma Restaurant. So, knowing my interest in artworks and also in men’s bodies, JBL sent me his photos of the sculpture:
(#1) Side view of the Glíma wrestlers
(#2) Front view of the Glíma wrestlers
At least four things here: the Viking sport of Glíma; the statue’s association with the restaurant; the statue as artwork; and the problematics of intimate contact between men’s bodies in wrestling.
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body | 1 Comment »
May 19, 2024
Today’s Sunday Bizarro by Dan Piraro, yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with a guy in need of a shrink ‘act of shrinking’, appealing to a shrink ‘headshrinker, psychotherapist’ (so it’s a pun cartoon too):
shrink ‘psychotherapist’ has become so ordinary a term in American English that its connection to the change-of-state verb shrink and the noun headshrinker is no longer salient to many speakers, with the result that the pun has some genuine surprise value (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Etymology, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Puns | Leave a Comment »
