Archive for the ‘Mantras’ Category

Stuck in the middle with you

December 23, 2024

🎄- 2: 12/23, so it’s Festivus; the last day of Saturnalia; and now, according to a front page story in today’s New York Times (“In Some Parts, It’s Christmas Adam Before Eve: Churches Are Adding Day to the Holiday, With a Side of Ribs”), it’s Christmas Adam, the day before Christmas Eve (it’s a joke, son)

Meanwhile, today’s found mantra is Zesty Pickle — repeat as needed until you reach the desired state of tangy pungency. It came to me in a commercial for Chick-Fil-A’s classic chicken sandwich:

Crispy chicken, zesty pickle, it’s tough to top the original

But then the piquant phallicity of zesty pickles pushed me onto another path, into the tale of a fickle fly:

zesty pickle
frisky pepper
pesky stuck zipper!
… no plucky pickles past this point
(#1) The pickle-pepper tale

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Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Language and plants, Language in advertising, Mantras, Music, Phallicity | 3 Comments »

CAR WASH HOT DOG

October 23, 2024

Today’s Zippy strip displays our Pinhead’s onomatomania, as he chants CAR WASH HOT DOG over and over, to his evident pleasure. I was entertained by the notion of a car wash hot dog, which struck me as ludicrous, conjuring up the image of sodden, sudsy frankfurters in buns:


(#1) But then I remembered that Zippy’s obsessively reiterated chants are never sheer inventions on his part, but are always found mantras, so car wash hot dogs must be a real thing — and so they are, on the understanding  ‘hot dogs at a car wash, hot dogs with a car wash, hot dogs and a car wash’, or, as they are sometimes advertised, car wash / hot dog sales

This was all news to me; I didn’t recall ever having heard of selling a car wash along with hot dogs and didn’t think the two things were a natural pairing. But there they were, lots of them, car wash / hot dog sales for very local causes.

Why had I never heard of them? Because they are not just an American thing (unknown in the UK, Australia, and so on, even in Canada), but a very specific regional American thing, apparently confined to a narrow band of the southeastern US, from Florida to West Virginia. (Zippy’s Dingburg is in Maryland, which is, with West Virginia, at the very northern edge of this band). I have lived in the middle Atlantic, New England, mid-America, and California, but not in the southeast, and so I missed out on C. W. H. D. (as Bill Griffith’s title for #1 has it).

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Posted in Events and occasions, Language and food, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras | 1 Comment »

Words at the Java Lanes

June 27, 2022

Today’s Zippy strip is a triple riff on masspop culture — on bowling as recreation, on the Googie style of architecture, and on Polynesian-stye “Tiki” culture (architecture, food and drink, and entertainment) — enlivened by our Pinhead’s fascination with words (and the images they call up), here with: bowl, Java, lane, cocktail, alley, ball. Cocktail, with its combination of sexual associations (plus penumbral associations with mai tais and other Polynesian-associated drinks), gets a panel all to itself, so setting the tone for interpreting the rest:


(#1) As usual, the setting is taken from real life; those are drawings of Java Lanes in Long Beach CA (3800 E. Pacific Coast Highway) — but a Java Lanes from the past, since the place was demolished in 2004, almost 20 years ago, to be turned into condos

The historical setting, first from the bowling point of view, then from the architectural and Tiki-culture point of view:

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Posted in Architecture, Art, Language and food, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras, Metaphor, Phallicity, Pop culture, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »

pit beef snow ball girl

March 28, 2022

The Zippy strip from yesterday, 3/27:


(#1) Help wanted at the pit beef restaurant: a female server for their pit beef (the house entrée) and snow balls (the dessert), with the ensuing mantra that afflicts Zippy: PIT BEEF SNOW BALL GIRL (prosodically SW SW S; add a strong fourth beat — a shout YEAH!,  a drum beat, cymbals, whatever — and you can conga to it)

So, the obvious stuff: Zippy’s onomatomania, his attraction to certain words and phrases; pit beef (especially associated with Baltimore); snow balls / snowballs, shaved ice confections especially associated with the Italian communities of Philadelphia and New York. Plus the gender stuff, a girl needed to serve guy-food: grilled meat, especially beef, being at the peak of masculinity in the American food world (with the gender association reinforced by serving it in a bun); not to mention that beef with balls is covertly phallic.

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Posted in Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Headlines, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras, Masculinity, Word aversion and attraction | 1 Comment »