Slogans | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Slogans’ Category

Many a pickle packs a pucker

July 29, 2022

O pickle, my love / What a beautiful pickle you are!

Blame it on Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy on Twitter), who took us down to the pickle plant in Santa Barbara on 7/18, citing these 5 delights, with their label descriptions:

Unbeetables (pickled beets with unbeatable heat) – pun on unbeatable

Carriots of Fire (pickled carrots to light your torch) – punning allusion to the film Chariots of Fire

¡Ay Cukarambas! (dill-icious spicy dill pickle spears) – complex portmanteau of the American Spanish exclamation ¡ay caramba! and the noun cuke ‘cucumber’

Asparagusto (pickled asparagus with a kick) – portmanteau of asparagus and gusto

Bread & Buddhas (semi-sweet bread & butter pickles) – pun on bread and butter (pickles)

(#1)

Pickles are automatically phallicity territory, and the Pacific Pickle Works in Santa Barbara CA (website here) doesn’t shy away from their penis potential, augmenting it by references to phallic carrots, asparagus spears, and unpickled cucumbers. If you have the eye for it, we all live in Penis Town.

(more…)

Posted in Alliteration, Double entendres, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language play, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Poetry, Portmanteaus, Puns, Rhyme, Slogans, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »

What I tell you three times is true

July 16, 2022

Today’s Zippy strip takes us to triple Dinerland in Rockford MI (as it was before it closed in 2011), in a celebration of the rule of three — a narrative principle that favors trios of events or characters in all sorts of contexts:

(#1) The Three Musketeers (in the Dumas novel and the movies), the Three Little Pigs (vs. the Big Bad Wolf in the fable), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (the 1966 epic spaghetti Western), and the Three Stooges (the vaudeville and slapstick comedy team best known for their 190 short films)

The rule of three in a little while, but first, the diners of Rockford MI (a town of a few thousand people about 10 miles north of Grand Rapids).

(more…)

Posted in Diners, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Narrative, Slogans, Snowclones | 4 Comments »

Stories from Sloganville

July 13, 2022

(What can I say? There will be dipsticks and dipshits, so eventually this posting will be at best borderline for kids and the sexually modest.)

News commentator explains that in citing the slogan

You can pay me now, or pay me later. (the pay-me slogan)

the day before, he’d attributed it to the wrong advertiser, adding that the right one was FRAM oil filters. The slogan conveying that you can pay some money now for a good oil filter — or you’ll pay more later when your car breaks down (though of course with wider applicability, conveying at least that you can pay for prevention, or you’ll have to pay more for the remedy).

And then added with a big grin that FRAM was also responsible for the slogan

The dipstick tells the story. (the dipstick slogan)

conveying that you should check the dipstick regularly (and change the oil when it looks dirty) and serving more generally as an exhortation to monitor the state of any important mechanism regularly — in particular, using the sexual slang dipstick ‘penis’, as urging men to check their dicksticks regularly to make sure they’re in working order.

The dipstick slogan came first, 80 years ago. By thirty years into its career, the slang uses of dipstick (for both ‘penis’ and ‘fool, stupid or incompetent person; obnoxious person’) were spreading, so FRAM switched to the pay-me slogan, which is much harder to raunch up (but not impossible, in a world in which high-end prostitutes, of both sexes, accept payment by credit card).

(more…)

Posted in Etymology, Language in advertising, Masculinity, Metaphor, Semantics of compounds, Slogans | 2 Comments »

Zippyphrases 2

March 11, 2022

Some riffing on yesterday’s posting “Catchphrases for sale”, about this Zippy strip:

(#1) Offering fresh phrases — not already in circulation as catchphrases, sayings, proverbs, slogans, famous quotations, well-known names and titles, and the like — chosen at random

Zippy’s fresh phrases sound like catchphrases — roughly, free-standing expressions that you recognize as coming from a stock of quotations widely known in your culture, which then (if you wish) can be conventionally used to make some point — but are in fact novel. The things called catchphrases are then exquisitely embedded in particular cultures (note: “widely known in your culture” and also “can be conventionally used”).

(more…)

Posted in Catchphrases, Clichés, Formulaic language, Holidays, Humor, Language and medicine, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Nonsense, Poetry, Proverbs, Psychology, Slogans | 1 Comment »

Cooking with gas: a guest posting

November 21, 2021

Grant Barrett (of the Barnette-Barrett radio show A Way with Words — and a real lexicographer, one of the lexicographers I sometimes hang out with, even though I’m not of that tribe) tried to post this as a comment on my posting yesterday, “Now we’re cooking with carrots”, but it appears to have been indigestible to WordPress, so I’m publishing it here as a guest posting. Remember: what follows below the line is Grant, all Grant, not me (except for some formatting).

(more…)

Posted in Formulaic language, Language of advertising, Lexicography, Pop culture, Slogans, Snowclones | 2 Comments »

Now we’re cooking with carrots

November 20, 2021

From Ann Gulbrandsen (in Sweden) on Facebook today, a wonderful still life of earthy carrots:

Ann wrote (in Swedish; what follows is the Google Translate version in English, which is, um, flatfooted, with one paraphrase by me):

Thought to pick up the last small harvest of carrots when it will be minus degrees next week. I clearly underestimated what was [underground]. May be cooking with carrots [Sw. matlagning med morötter] a couple of weeks ahead.

(more…)

Posted in Alliteration, Idioms, Language and food, Language and plants, Language play, Photography, Slogans | 1 Comment »

Read the message in my face

September 12, 2021

(Warning: there will eventually be a naked male pornstar, but without his naughty bits visible, plus some mention of feminism and same-sex attraction.)

Two faces that recently caught my eye. I saw them first in a rich context, including the rest of the pose they were in; a background behind the pose; information about the place where the larger photo appeared; and some knowledge about that place and the function of the photo there. Here they are, as bleached of context as I could manage: just the faces:

(#1) Call this person A

(#2) Call this person B

What personas are these two people projecting? What are they like, and what are they doing in the photos?

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Faces, Facial expression, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Photography, Slogans | 5 Comments »

Queer as Duck

August 13, 2021

(Seriously off-color and sometimes tasteless, so not to everyone’s liking.)

aka Quack in a Tank Top:

(#1) Tank top from UniTee International (through Etsy); (very light) orange duckbill mask (N95 surgical mask) from the Halyard Co.; model AZ photographed by Kim Darnell at AZ headquarters; behind model, resting on the A-E volume of GDoS (open to the page for bang), the 2015 documentary Do I Sound Gay? (the answer to which is “Well, queer as fuck”)

Advised, in the face of the Delta variant, to move up to surgical masks, I searched on Amazon for properly certified masks from American suppliers. Orange the next day, or white in two to three weeks, so orange it was. The orange turned out to be a lighter shade than in the pictures; it also turned out to be a duck’s bill. But it’s very comfortable, and my glasses don’t fog up. However, I’m so spectacularly maladroit that I haven’t yet learned to put it on by myself; but I’ll get a tutoring session tomorrow.

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, My life, Slogans | 1 Comment »

Big Fag in a buzzcut

July 27, 2021

Two late July developments: the latest in a series of ever-shorter buzzcuts (with Kim Darnell wielding the clippers), finally reaching a minimal one that satisfies me thoroughly. Shorter than the crewcut that carried me through my late high school years, and requiring no styling. A bit shorter than the easy-care buzzcut my dad settled on in the last years of his life.

Huge hoary linguistics professor, wearied but smiling with pleasure — note the smile lines at the corners of the eyes — at his buzzcut and at the pink neon claim (both amiable and outrageous) to social space for his kind (photo by Kim Darnell)