Archive for the ‘Figurative language’ Category

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.

 

The beetles’ Montanan wood

June 5, 2024

From Sally [Sarah G.] Thomason on Facebook yesterday, a beetle tunnel report from Montana:


(#1) ST: I’ve seen [bark] beetle galleries on logs before, but this log, which lies across a trail we [AZ: linguist ST and her philosopher husband Rich, plus their dog Yaskay] often walk on here in Montana, has a particularly exuberant and artistic bunch of galleries

Five things: the title of this posting; beetle galleries (of tunnels); bark beetles; gallery lexicography; beetle tracks (as we referred to them) on a family place out in the boonies of New Smithville PA.

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Not Super or Elmer’s, but almost

June 1, 2024

Today’s Zippy strip, with a burlesque of a 1982 Elvis Costello song, notably covered by Chet Baker in 1987:


(#1) Zippy burlesques the first lines — Almost blue / Almost doing things we used to do — and the final lines — Almost you / Almost me / Almost blue — but in the middle he goes off, not into the wild blue yonder, but, stickily, into the glue

In case you didn’t get the allusion, Bill Griffith gives us a hint with his title “Almost Chet Baker”, pointing to a remarkable performance of “Almost Blue” by the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker.

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In a frenzy

May 27, 2024

In begins with (the wildly hyperbolic) jockstrap frenzy (in an ad featuring notable male buttocks), followed by some playfulness that treats jockstrap frenzy as a laughable absurdity, turns to raw, terrifying frenzy, then the specialized zones of murder frenzy / frenzy murder and feeding frenzy, concluding with the ecstatic state of sexual frenzy (in a section not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; I’ll issue a warning when we get to the really raunchy stuff — though from the outset this posting is suffused with sexual matters not to the taste of some of my readers).

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The cocktail of the absurd

May 22, 2024

Breezed past me on Facebook this morning, this Benjamin Schwartz cartoon (from the 5/6/19 issue of the New Yorker) that made me laugh out loud at its absurdity:


(#1) So festive! Transform any cocktail, in any kind of cocktail glass (the one in the cartoon is a coupe /kup/, a good glass for, say, a daiquiri), into a shrimp cocktail, by hanging some shelled, chilled cooked shrimp (such as anyone might just happen to have a pocketful of on them — this is where I dissolved in laughter) all around the lip of the glass

Even better: the classic shrimp cocktail is already an antic hors d’œuvre, a preposterously elaborate presentation of shrimp, sauce, and sourness (most often, from a lemon slice) that might have been served more simply on a tasty bit of bread, or in a small bowl or cup. With a name — shrimp cocktail — that’s a pun.

So what we see in #1 is in fact goofy-squared.

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A Promethean hepatical

April 26, 2024

The liver. Patent medicine. Greek mythology. Advertising. The illustrator’s art. All together now.

In the hands of French illustrator Charles Lemmel (1899 – 1976), the task of devising a poster to advertise a hepatical (a patent medicine for maladies of the liver) somehow fixed on the myth of Prometheus, punished by Zeus (for having stolen fire from Olympus and given it to humans) by being chained, naked, to the side of a mountain and subjected to endless hepatophagy: every day, Zeus’s eagle feasts on the Promethean liver, which then regrows for the next day’s torture.

Not, you might have thought, an ideal theme for a medicine ad; but look what Lemmel did with the idea in the poster (from the 1930s):


(#1)  Lemmel presents Hepatior as a rest and relief from the pain of hepatic ailments, a pain like that of Prometheus’s aquiline torment; meanwhile, he elevates the real-life sufferer by depicting the suffering Prometheus as a hot hot muscle-hunk and also a curly black-haired Greek dude — who is smiling and winking at us through the ordeal, reassuring us that it’s all a joke

That’s quite an artistic performance, also soft porn at several levels (extravagant body display, proud masochism). I happen to think it’s deeply silly, but enjoyable in its crudeness.

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Briefly noted: pecker (because Pecker)

April 22, 2024

In the US news, media guy David Pecker, whose innocent but gigglefacient surname led me to realize that I hadn’t posted on the phallonym pecker. So, very briefly:

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The Tunnel of Self-Love

April 16, 2024

From the annals of cartoon understanding: about today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which an unaccompanied young man in classical Greek attire inquires about the reflectivity of the water in a Tunnel of Love:


(#1) In case you didn’t recognize (a pop-cultural version of) the figure of Narcissus from Greek mythology, the young man sports a buckle with a big N on it; meanwhile, you need to recognize another piece of pop culture, the amusement park ride the Tunnel of Love (which largely disappeared about 80 years ago as an actual amusement park phenomenon, but lives on as a trope in songs, movies, and tv shows) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

So, yes, you need to bring cultural knowledge to bear on understanding the cartoon — to seeing that it’s hilarious that a Narcissus figure would buy a single ticket for a ride through a Tunnel of Love (designed to provide about 6 minutes alone in the dark for couples to get steamy with one another) and want to know how reflective the water in it is: can I see myself in it?, he needs to know; can I become one with that beautiful man in this dark monument to love?. But all this cultural knowledge is second-hand, coming to us through the distorting, simplifying lens of pop culture: not the myth of Echo and Narcissus, but just a guy foolishly falling in love with himself; not actual amusement park rides, but their pop-cultural echoes in cartoons and the like.

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