Two recent One Big Happy strips:
(#1) Can you say … “cat”… um, “sheepshank”?
The Mister Rogers trope Can you say X? ‘Say X’ (in a pedagogical tone); idiomatic go/get (all) X on Y
(#2) Can you spell “cat”?
Spanish sí ‘yes’ vs. English /si/ C (the letter of the alphabet); linguistic and natural mean; and more.
On the 23rd, “The pumpkin spice cartoon meme”, with a variety of developments of pumpkin spice ‘spice for pumpkin (pie)’ to concrete uses for the flavor of such spice and the scent of such spice and then to figurative uses ‘special, extraordinary’ and from there ‘top-grade’. Now, some further developments:
The possibility that Pumpkin Spice might be a Spice Girl (Michael Palmer asks on Facebook, “Which of the Spice Girls is Pumpkin Spice?”).
More generally, the rule of thumb: if spice, then pumpkin spice, as in this playful e-card:
(#1) The verb spice up > pumpkin spice up
And, as also illustrated in #1, the metonymical extension of pumpkin spice to ‘autumnal’ (thanks to the association of the spice with the fall).
… in the September 8th issue of the New Yorker. Both presenting the usual challenges to understanding — there’s a lot you have to know to make sense of them — and both playing on language.
(#1) by Jeremy Nguyen
(#2) by John McNamee
Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
An ambiguity in the verb cut, combined with two metonymically related uses of the noun bill.
(Well, yes, men’s bodies, sex talk, and man-man sex. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)
A friend request on Facebook, from someone using the name Nick Petersucker (some time ago, FB obviously ceased to care a great deal about its policy of insisting that posters use their real names; now, all sorts of remarkable names come past me on FB). His profile picture, a selfie of someone, first posted in 2012:
(#1)
(It starts with dough and cross-dressing and eventually touches on several sexy topics. So: definitely racy, but probably not enough to frighten the horses in the street.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange portrays the kinky side of the Pillsbury Doughboy, Poppin’ Fresh (the advertising icon and mascot of the Pillsbury Company):
(#1)
The Doughboy cross-dressing in an adorable pink skirt — a fluted cupcake liner, from the set on the kitchen counter.
Now: some remarks on cupcakes; a note on sexual undercurrents in the Poppin’ Fresh ads; and extensive discussion of sentient, speaking figures (often anthropomorphic, as here) in advertising, cartoons, or fictions of other kinds, figures that are in fact foodstuffs.
Today’s morning name (welling up during my sleep from who knows where) was mille-feuille, the pastry.
(#1)
