Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
An ambiguity in the verb cut, combined with two metonymically related uses of the noun bill.
Archive for the ‘Metonymy’ Category
cut the bill in half
August 20, 2017News for penises: a friend request
March 11, 2017(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)
Poppin’ Fresh in a pink dress
January 22, 2017(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.
The Adventure of the Morning Napoleons
July 6, 2016Today’s morning name (welling up during my sleep from who knows where) was mille-feuille, the pastry.
(#1)
Substance massification on the golf course
September 15, 2015In another watching of the GEICO “Kraken” commercial (posting here), I caught a nice everyday example of the sort of conventionalized metonymy that I called in a 2008 LLog posting substance massification, a particular type of conversion of a C (count) noun to a M (mass) use.
In their in-play commentary on a golf game in progress, one reporter says to another, about a golfer attempting to cope with a sea-monster:
(X) Looks like he’s going to go with the 9 iron. That may not be enough club.
(Golf) club is C, but here is used with M syntax, according to this generalization (from the LLog posting):
C>M: substance massification. A C noun denoting an individual has a M use to denote a generic substance or totality, usually in construction with a quantity determiner (“That’s a lot of horse”, “That’s more elephant than we can handle”). [So: horse / elephant (roughly) ‘amount of horse / elephant material or substance’ (considered as a whole)]
Or in the case of (X), enough club, with club (roughly) ‘amount of club substance or material’.
