Archive for June, 2026

The seeds of rye bread lie deep in 19th-century England

June 2, 2026

(not the cartoonist’s fault, but my discussion veers occasionally onto fellatio, in vulgar street language, and that’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)

The Pearls Before Swine strip of 5/31, Stephan Pastis’s farewell to the month of May, devoted to one of his outrageously complex jokes (it’s so off-the-wall intricate that Rat, one of his characters, takes to protesting against it):


Three contributions: (1) the joke genre (the setup / payoff formula pun); (2) the English verb succeed, homophonous with suck seed; and (3) the familiar proverb, popularized by William Edward Hickson in 19th-century England: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again — all the while skirting (4) the sexual collocation suck seed (with seed ‘semen, cum’), a variant of suck cum

On to the four contributions.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Rhyme, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Four difficult childhoods

June 1, 2026

… all fictional, unimaginably different, each one moving in its own way; welcome to the queen of the months, here in the northern hemisphere, where, on this celebratory day, the rabbits — 🐇 🐇 🐇 — come to play

Ir starts with a burlesque of the nursery rhyme “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” in yesterday’s posting “The server’s absurd attentions”, which led Benita Bendon Campbell to Kipling’s heartbreaking short story with that title. That led me to Saki’s black-comic short story “Sredni Vashtar”. And that to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel of healing and the overcoming of adversity, The Secret Garden.  Finally, Bergman’s long masterpiece movie, Fanny and Alexander, which pretty much has everything, including some early luminous scenes of  family joy, then wrenching scenes of abuse, and finally horrific dream death made real, freeing the children. (There are two versions, a shorter one made for tv, then the full, epically long, theatrical release. Watching the long version is like packing up your mind and moving to another — fabulous but perilous —  country for some undetermined number of years; it took me several days to recover my bearings.  The only thing I can compare it to is reading García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.)

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Posted in Books, Childhood, Movies and tv | 1 Comment »