Archive for the ‘Figurative language’ Category

Dizzy Zippy zigs at Zzyzx

November 9, 2024

… and, instead of taking the Zzyzx exit, catches a ride with a guy in a SYZYGY car to the end of the road, where one-point perspective takes you (so we are both out in the desert in San Bernardino County CA; and also in the artist’s meta-world, where perspective lines converge in a vanishing point, and that is truly the end of the road). All this in yesterday’s Zippy strip, which is rich in Z, Y, ZY / ZI, and ZYG. plus the occasional antic X:


(#1) Three things: Zzyzx Road; one-point perspective; and the word SYZYGY (the ZYG of which took my mind to the word ZYGOTE; while the concept of syzygy took me to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a wedding-feast of syzygy — of counterparts, contrasts, conflicts, and oppositions)

And then there’s zig; from NOAD:

noun zig: a sharp change of direction in a zigzag course: he went round and round in zigs and zags.

(which can then be verbed to yield to zig ‘to take a zig’, as in my title)

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Hexagonal French

November 7, 2024

In an on-line notice of a journal article, a language name that I don’t recall having come across before, but one I understood after a moment’s thought: Hexagonal French, the French spoken in the hexagon of France — that is, Metropolitan French, or more plainly, the French of France, France French, French French (occasionally referred to as European French or Continental French, but those terms would take in Belgian French and Swiss French, which are outside the hexagon). Meaning, of course, the standard, Paris-based, varieties of this language; there are plenty of provincial varieties in the country, plus other Romance languages related to French, and, even further afield, non-Romance languages within the hexagon, like the Celtic language Breton in Brittany.

From Wikipedia:

French of France is the predominant variety of the French language in France, Andorra and Monaco, in its formal and informal registers. It has, for a long time, been associated with Standard French. It is now seen as a variety of French alongside Acadian French [in the Maritimes], Belgian French, Quebec French, Swiss French, etc.

Lots to unpack here, starting with the hexagon. Which will lead immediately to names of regions, including those that constitute the land masses of political entities. including countries like France.

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Swim Meat, the video

October 30, 2024

(Publicity for a gay porn video, entertaining in its way but absolutely off-limits for kids and the sexually modest)

🎃 🎃 🎃 three jack-o’-lanterns for penultimate October, Halloween Eve (that is, the day before the day before the day of the dead) — in my house, the day when the pussyboys go out to seek their phallic prey

Into this scene comes this morning’s e-mail from the Falcon | NakedSword Store, offering:

Hot House movie download discounts — full movies $11.95 each

With, right at the top, the crudely pun-titled video Swim Meat and its cover illustration, offering four fine pieces of swim meat, one (Johnny V’s) just barely concealed by his swimwear; plus three proudly jutting tubesteaks that I’ve had to suppress for WordPress modesty (but here you can view the uncensored cover, along with the publicity text):

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Briefly noted: the new Caligula

October 25, 2024

Posted to Facebook yesterday. I had been recalling Albert Camus’s play Caligula (adapted into English by Justin O’Brien), which I happened to see in February 1960, during its famously brief — one month long — run at the 54th Street Theatre in NYC — which led me to investigate Wikipedia’s long and intricate entry on

Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (31 August 12 – 24 January 41), better known by his nickname Caligula …, Roman emperor from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41.

and then to write on FB:

Was just musing on TFG as the new Caligula (vengeful, unclear on the separation of his personal fortune and the state’s coffers, declaring himself a god, etc.) when I thought to look for parallel uses in the press. I bring you

the Daily Beast in 2011, Benjamin Netanyahu as the new Caligula; the Times (of London) in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, the new Caligula; the Irish Times in 2016, [Helmut Grabpussy], the new Caligula?; POLITICO.eu in 2020, Boris Johnson the new Caligula

(there are probably more)

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Idiom come to life

October 12, 2024

A cartoon by Suerynn Lee in the New Yorker issue of 10/14/24:


(#1) We’re … we’re … like two peas in a pod!

Those peas really know their idioms.

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Ambiguity day in the comics

September 26, 2024

Complex ambiguities in the 9/25 comics: a Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange turning on the ambiguity of sham; and a Wayno / Piraro Bizarro turning on the ambiguity of tom:


(#1) sham conveying fraud, hence illegality; vs. sham for a decorative pillow cover (being manufactured in a small workshop, though note the suggestion in the title panel that the place might be a cover — ambiguity alert! — in the sense ‘an activity or organization used as a means of concealing an illegal or secret activity’ (NOAD) —  but why are these pillow coverings called shams?


(#2) Personified, talking animals: two toms, a tomcat and a tom turkey, presented as characters named Tom, who work for the same company and are encountering one another over coffee, hence Wayno’s title “Breakroom Encounter” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

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Formulaic happiness

September 2, 2024

In today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange, the clams are tenting tonight on the old campground, but find today’s experience to be unaccountably joyless; for some reason, the formulas just aren’t working:


To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize two similarity-based formulaic expressions of English: the metaphor happy camper and the simile happy as a clam; yet neither is overt in the cartoon, though both are alluded to indirectly (we’re campers and we’re clams)

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Annals of commercials music

August 30, 2024

It appeared a few weeks ago, and then was often repeated on tv stations I get. At first, I heard it out of the corner of my ear, got the brassy women’s voices  singing what was not quite “We Built This City”, but was instead, “We Quilt This City”. So a commercial for something. Quilted puffy jackets for the coming fall weather? Beautiful bedquilts, pieces of folk art? Well, something quilted as in this NOAD entry:

adj. quilted: (of a garment, bed covering, etc.) made of two layers of cloth filled with padding held in place by lines of stitching: a blue quilted jacket.

Then I listened a bit more closely and pieced out:

We quilt this city on a comfy roll. 

Whoa, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. What kind of rolls are quilted? Oh… So the song goes on:

Say it doesn’t matter, say it’s all the same,
But we are here to change your toilet paper game.

Ah, quilted toilet paper. It’s 3-ply — so, though it doesn’t fit the NOAD definition of quilted, it’s analogous to quilted stuff as in the NOAD definition. It’s a natural metaphorical extension.

What we have here is a sales-pitch parody of Starship’s “We Built This City”, in fact a whole production number built around that parody. In a one-minute music video (first used on 7/29/24) that opens with the three Quilted Queens — three women of varied age and racioethnicity (most toilet paper is bought by women) — taking over a grocery store in “Keep It Quilted” puffer jackets; the store then turns into a neon-colored set, while the three sing their sales pitch. (As it happens, I find the Starship original really annoying — probably a minority taste, but there it is — so I find its being hijacked for a paean to toilet paper refreshing.) You can experience the whole thing on a YouTube video here.

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Bijlert, Leonardo, parody magnets, and the Priapic-Apollonian opposition

August 5, 2024

The July 26th opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympic games included a tableau — of drag queens posed as presiding over a banquet — that vaguely resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting:


(#1) The Olympic drag pose


(#2) The Leonardo original

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Puns, clever and raunchy

July 28, 2024

Sunday (7/28) is once again Punday, with a clever pun from the PunHub site and a couple of raunchy puns in a gay porn ad on the Gay DVD Empire site. (Warning: the raunchy section is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

Part 1: rounding up the sheep. (Let us sing: Bringing in the sheaves / Rounding up the sheep) Passed on to me this morning by Virginia Transue, this cartoon / meme from the PunHub site (whose name is itself a play, on PornHub — there’s also a PubHub, about UK pubs):


(#1) A little festival of phrasal verbs: round up ‘approximate (a number) by altering it to the next larger round number’ vs. round up ‘collect (animals) together for some purpose’

The lexical story from NOAD:

verb round: [with object] …  2 alter (a number) to one less exact but more convenient for calculations [AZ: especially in the PHRASAL VERBS round off / up / down]: we’ll round the weight up to the nearest pound | the committee rounded down the figure | let’s just round it off to an even ten dollars.  PHRASAL VERB round up [a] drive or collect a number of people or animals together for a particular purpose: in the afternoon the cows are rounded up for milking. …

with the direct object of the collecting verb round up understood metonymically, in the sheep-counting context, as the numerical size of the flock (rather than the flock itself).

The PunHub site is an enormous collection of puns (and dad jokes) with various accompaniments, including a store — at which you can order their 2023 book

Is This a Joke? No, It’s a Book!: 100 Puns and Dad Jokes from Instagram’s Largest Pun Comic Creator
by Conor Smith.

Part 2: bred & breakfast at the All the Way Inn. (Kids and the sexually modest should leave this posting NOW.) Also in this morning’s e-mail, from the Gay DVD Empire site, a sale pitch that includes this twice-punning item:


(#2) This time my association is not to a song, but to an antique dirty joke based on the question How far is the Old Log Inn? (To satisfy WordPress modesty, I’ve had to fuzz out four rock-hard pornstar dicks — but that lets us focus on their faces, their torsos, and (for three of them) their (interestingly varied) thigh muscles), plus the  breakfast items, all of which are intended as sexual symbols

I’ll get to some of the richness of this goofy image in a little while, but first the p.r. pitch from Gay DVD Empire, with some more gay porn word play:

It’s not just the eggs that are “over easy” at the All the Way Inn, NakedSword Originals’ Bred & Breakfast. Owned and operated by handsome proprietor Heath Halo, the B&B is nestled in the heart of Venice Beach, California, and, for some reason, it seems to attract the hottest traveling men. Take road-tripper Derek Kage, for example. His piercing eyes and stunning good looks pull Heath into a wild morning of edgy sex that leaves them both dripping wet. Then there’s hotel handyman Beau Butler, who’s ready to fix guest Sumner Blayne’s enormous leaking pipe. Later, Carter Collins and Damian Night celebrate their second anniversary by sunning themselves in the property’s garden, eventually helping to relax each other with hot oil and a passionate outdoor fuck. Things get a little more intense when Drew Valentino and Ty Santana take over one of the B&B’s deluxe suites to cement their dom/sub relationship with a fiery, raw fuck-down. Finally, Sean Xavier and Hazel Hoffman serve Heath their own kind of “breakfast in bed” right in the middle of the kitchen. Welcome to Bred & Breakfast: All the Way Inn, where guests check-in to check each other out.

The central puns. The name All the Way Inn puns on the location adverbial all the way in ‘fully inside’ (the asshole, in the gay porn context), while bred and breakfast puns on bed and breakfast / b&b ‘ a guest house or small hotel offering sleeping accommodations and a morning meal’ (NOAD), with bred being the PSP of the verb breed ‘pedicate bareback’ (verb pedicate ‘ to have insertive anal sex with (a man), to fuck (a man) in/up the ass, to ass-fuck (a man)’, adverb bareback‘without a condom’).

The visual symbolism of the components of breakfast. The first man pours coffee — the stream of coffee symbolizing the stream of piss in watersports. The third man holds a plate of pancakes, pancakes usually being a vaginal symbol, but in a gay context an anal symbol. The fourth man holds up a doughnut in one hand while balancing a tray of them with the other, the doughnut being a common symbol of the anal ring. So they’re all happily enjoying their b&b breakfast — everybody’s at least smiling, and the third, très gai, guy is laughing with pleasure — while symbolically engaging in a same-sex orgy.

So in its way the ad photo is charming and funny, four explosively sexy naked studs goofing off with one another and abusing their food and drink symbolically. Everybody’s going to get what he wants, maybe even what he needs.