Today’s Rhymes With Orange, a Psychiatrist cartoon in which a ketchup squeeze-bottle treats a mayonnaise jar:
with a surprising pun on the verb hold, a pun that’s possible only because of the nature of this particular analysand (a sentient jar of mayonnaise)
Barbara Partee on Facebook yesterday, on the English noun AI [èáj], historically an initialism for the nominal artificial intelligence, but with a lexical life of its own, writing about:
— the new use of AI as a count [C] noun, as in these examples I heard on the NPR program 1A this morning about the use of AI bots in psychotherapy: “Would you use an AI?”, “AIs don’t have hangups, they don’t…” etc. The same conversation had the familiar [mass [M]] noun use as well: “Is there a chance that AI would be better than a trained psychotherapist?”
[Chris Waigl noted that the C usage has been common for a while in some sci-fi subgenres.]
(In contrast to some of my postings on notable found expressions, this one builds hardly at all on my previous work, and I feel uneasily out of my depths here. But I have pressed on, into several areas I’d never before contemplated, trying to make sense of things as best I can.
From Ana Cabrera Reports on MSNBC, on 5/23, about Tina Turner (on the occasion of her death):
She wanted to sell out like Mick Jagger. (call this example TT)
(Packed with raunch of several varieties, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
A digression from one of the topics of yesterday’s posting “Moments of rebirth” — the lunar new year yesterday, the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese calendar. Here celebrated by this homoerotic digital image created by Vadim Temkin:
(#1) My caption: Ride the Wild Rabbit!
Aside from the smiling young hunk, the image taps two springs of raunchiness: rabbits (and their fabled sexual licentiousness — fucking like bunnies, as the idiom has it) and riding (and its similarity to insertive intercourse, to fucking). So it’s all about fucking: metonymically, in the association of rabbits with prolific breeding; and metaphorically, in the resemblance of riding to intercourse.
My caption just packages the rabbit raunchiness and the riding raunchiness together in the phrase ride the rabbit, adding the wild for a whiff of unchecked abandon, the whole thing then evoking wild pony rides, as celebrated in popular song.
🐇 🐇 🐇 the rabbits of December take us to the hidden spot in the tropical jungle where ottomans rule among the palm trees, as depicted in this John McPherson Close to Home cartoon of 2/14/15:
(#1) A pun on Ottoman Empire, the Turkish realm, and ottoman, a kind of footstool
(Phallic preoccupations abound in this posting, sometimes in street language — I mean, look at the title above — so some readers may want to skip over it)
Passed on by a friend on Facebook yesterday, this German grocery-store snapshot plus a joking double-entendre intro in English (together making what appears to be a a fast-spreading meme):
(#1) Hähnchenschnitten Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style chicken cutlets’ from the (German) Vossko company, the name of the product including the German phrase Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ — that is, prepared like Wiener Schnitzel / Wienerschnitzel); meanwhile, the English-language intro alludes to wiener art, in the sense ‘penis art’, referring to artworks in which penises are significant elements (or, in an hugely extended sense, to any artworks in which human penises are visible) — the label wiener art involving the (mildly racy) AmE sexual slang term wiener ‘penis’
German Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ (a) leads to English Wiener art ‘Viennese art’ (b) and then to four AmE slang uses of wiener art: (c) ‘sausage / frankfurter art’; (d) ‘dachshund art’; (e) ‘penis art’; (f) ‘weenie art’. All will be illustrated below.
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, requiring a boatload of popcultural knowledge to understand:
(#1) The easy part: these are three anthropomorphic peanuts, M, M, F from left to right, and they are sitting at a bar, with drinks in front of them (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Somehow the meeting of these three exemplifies the N1 + N2 compound N wingnut / wing-nut / wing nut (which has 4 senses in NOAD, plus a bunch more you can imagine). But how?
Another adventure in dubious commercial names and slogans. In the past few days the hyperkinetic tv pitchman Phil Swift — the id of the Flex Seal company, the Billy Mays of liquid rubber — has been assaulting my senses with a slogan that annoys me every time — just the way it was supposed to — because I get the sleazy sense of the commercial’s slogan
Take it from the man on the can
(‘from the guy sitting on the toilet (doing his business)’) instead of the innocent sense ‘from the man whose picture is on the label of the can (of Flex Seal)’. (In passing, I note the mini-festival of metonymy here: the man isn’t on the can, his picture is; well, not on the can itself, but on the label affixed to the can.) Let me start with a photo of an exemplary Flex Seal can:
(#1) You will note the absence, on the label, of a face of any person whatsoever, much less Phil Swift; as far as I can tell, the labels are all like that, and that’s no accident: Swift’s face is entirely beside the point — you’ll see that plenty in the commercials — because the ad’s all about taking your thoughts, memorably, into (or onto) the toilet
