Arnold Zwicky's Blog

… in one sense / use of yes: ‘yes, I select this one’. Which came up yesterday as I was ordering an Original Italian Sub from the Jersey Mike’s Subs in Mountain View CA, just south of Palo Alto (they’re a huge national chain, offering a wide range of submarine sandwiches that are, in my experience, excellent examples of their kind — and Grubhub delivers from them); it turns out that their on-line menu software involves this positive selection-X, which took me a moment to get used to, especially since I’d posted not long ago on associations of the letter X, which included the X of NO — of prohibitions, bans, and denials — but not the X of YES. Well, X is a symbol, it’s just stuff (as I say) and can accumulate any number of uses, even ones that look contradictory.

The Jersey Mike X is the X of election ballots: an alternative to a check-mark ✓ or a plus-sign + in a box or circle (or to filling in an oval) to indicate selecting an item.  In a use that was initially confusing to me, since the JM X is in contrast with the JM +, which turns out to convey something like ‘this is one of the available choices’; I eventually figured out how JM deploys X and + through a certain amount of trial-and-error fiddling with the menus. Yes, I’ll illustrate all of this in a little while.

But first, one more groaner penguin-pun joke, on the occasion of my consuming, at lunch today, the last of my birthday McVitie’s Penguin bars.

Why do penguins stay in pairs? This I ask not because my affectional and sexual history famously involves a threesome, but because that’s the set-up line for today’s chocolate-biscuit penguin joke. What I said yesterday, in my posting “Retreat into penguin puns and Generic Soup”:

I retreated into my birthday present to myself: a McVitie’s Penguin bar, imported from the UK. Their virtue — beyond their being pleasant chocolate-covered chocolate biscuits [and reminders of my times living in the UK] — is that each one comes with a genuine penguin fact [the penguin being one of my totem animals] on the wrapper, plus a groaner penguin-pun joke, with a question on the wrapper and the answer just inside.

Today’s joke, from the valedictory Penguin bar, in full:

Q: Why do penguins stay in pairs?

A: Freezer crowd.

That’s freezer (crowd), a pun on three’s a (crowd) conveying ‘because three’s a crowd’ — a pun that’s phonologically better in non-rhotic varieties of English (like most British varieties), still better in Cockney, where, in addition, [θ] is generally replaced by [f], so that three’s a is homophonous with freezer [frizǝ].

The X of NO. The background on this blog, in my 9/24 posting “Gimme a Z, gimme an X”, where I wrote that the possible associations of the letter X are many, including:

the unknown; the risqué; missing, dead; NO; X marks the spot; a kiss; Christ, the cross; Satan; the Roman numeral X ‘ten’

This is the X of NO, of prohibitions, bans, and denials. On particular:

(#1) The No Entry X, an alternative to two other negative symbols:

(#2) The Prohibition Slash

(#3) The Prohibition Slash in a No Smoking sign

(#4) The No Entry Bar

The X of YES. The Jersey Mike X is the X of election ballots: an alternative to a check-mark ✓ or a plus-sign + in a box or circle (or to filling in an oval) to indicate selecting an item. Here’s my sandwich selection for dinner yesterday, showing the things I picked from the list of available choices for an Original Italian Sub (a selection of meats and cheeses comes with the territory; lettuce and tomato slices are customary, but Jersey Mike’s is aware that there are minimalists like me among their customers):

(#5) In my childhood in the Philadelphia culture zone, growing up among plenty of Italian-American kids in the western suburbs of Reading PA, these were known simply as Italian sandwiches (or, in a deliberate insult to Italian-Americans, wop jobs); Jersey Mike’s produces an entirely satisfying reproduction — the oregano and the peppers are important — of the Italian sandwiches from my childhood (which I later learned to call subs, or at Princeton, grinders)

So X marks the things I selected; it’s the X of YES. But then there are all those unselected items marked with a plus-sign +, which obviously cannot be the + of YES; the + of YES (marking items you need or want or like) is clearly a real thing, but that’s not the way the symbol + is used in #5. I’m not sure where JM’s usage comes from, but you can see from the blank slate of choices before you’ve picked anything that all that it indicates is that this is an option, a choice you can make:

(#6) Notice that No Cheese is an option, but No Meat is not (an Italian sandwich is, crucially, a cold sliced luncheon meat sandwich); the + is just a place-holder, providing something that you can convert to the X of YES

This entry was posted on October 9, 2024 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Dialects, It's Just Stuff, Jokes, Language and food, My life, Names, Penguins, Puns, Signage, Signs and symbols. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.