A real-life example of the LWYDW stock expression I looked at in my earlier posting today (“I love what Scrivan did with the rabbit pun”, here), in a poignant love song by the country / country pop group Rascal Flatts: “Love What You’ve Done With The Place”, on their Back To Us album (2017):
Refrain from the song, in which a guy details the touches of his lover’s presence in his place
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, 🃏 🃏 🃏 three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and 🌼 🌼 🌼 three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:
(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”
Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.
Briefly noted, this Leigh Rubin cartoon passed on to me by Susan Fischer on Facebook today:
To understand this, you need to recognize a bull and a young goat
Two stock expressions, both of them similes, lie behind the two images of creatures entering retail establishments: like a bull in a china shop, like a kid in a candy store. The two ideas can appear as an explicit comparison, in a simile with like; or in a metaphor, with the comparison implicit: you are a (veritable) bull in a china shop; they were (proverbial) kids in a candy store.
Promised on 10/3 (yes, 19 days ago), in my posting “coming soon, two pun cartoons” (by Kaamran Hafeez and Tom Chitty), now realized: the puns hìp replácement (from KH, on the model híp replàcement) and you look like you’ve seen a goat (from TC, on the model you look like you’ve seen a ghost) — both of them (phonologically) imperfect, but close.
(Warning: after the McPhail, there will be some tasteless jokes, including two sexual ones)
By Will McPhail, a delightful Ascent of Man (in this case, a self-possessed young woman) cartoon in the latest (9/18/23) issue of the New Yorker:
(This blog has a Page on comic conventions, including cartoon memes (like Ascent of Man); and also a Page on Will McPhail cartoons)
So: the cartoon meme, plus a joke meme that plays on liking long walks on the beach as a stock sentiment in American personals ad (I don’t know the history of the formulaic expression).
[Proviso: this posting is mostly about cross-dressing, but it doesn’t pretend to be an essay on the very large number of forms and functions of cross-dressing, even in the modern U.S., much less in different sociocultural contexts around the world and throughout history.]
I’ve been accumulating comic strips having to do with boys and masculinity, in particular about what they’ve picked up about normatively masculine behavior and attitudes by the age of 8 or so: the age of the character Joe in the comic strip One Big Happy, who’s the older brother of Ruthie, age 6, who’s the central character of the strip. At the moment I have 5 strips (4 OBHs, plus a Zippy), covering a wide range of themes in normative masculinity for boys. To judge from the comics (and my recollections of boyhood), an 8-year-old has an extensive and pretty fine-grained command of the cultural norms of masculinity within his social group.
Example 1, the OBH of 4/16/21, on attitudes towards transvestism / cross-dressing:
(#1) The attitude here is that male cross-dressing — prancing around dressed in women’s clothing — is ridiculous, maybe pitiful, but in any case not compatible with ferocity, that is, symbolic masculinity ; this is one step in sophistication past the attitude that it’s against nature, therefore pathological and dangerous, though possibly usable as entertainment, in the theatre of ridicule
Two linguistic side issues here: the idiomatic slang says you, expressing disagreement with an interlocutor’s remark (from Joe, to Ruthie, in the last panel); and the 2pbfV cross-dress (a derivative of the synthetic compound cross-dressing). Before that, the background of the Boy Code.
Ok, I’m leading with the meat of the story, the expression adult adjacent industry as a modifier of the noun firm ‘business company’ — an expression I believe was entirely new, and astonishing, to me (and so far seems to be attested only in the specific piece of e-mail, from what I’ll call the X Group, that brought the expression to me yesterday as a blogger and to at least one other blogger).
The expression is stunningly euphemistic, ultimately referring to a class of businesses that sell sex: adjacent is euphemistic for direct involvement in (it’s not merely near to, but digs right in with gusto), and the involvement in question is in the adult industry, a euphemism for the sex industry, in particular for the branch of it that supplies photographic and/or written pornography (hot stuff). (NOAD on the relevant sense of the adj. adult: … [d] sexually explicit or pornographic (used euphemistically to refer to a movie, book, or magazine).)
The point of the X Group’s mailing to me was to enlist my blog in a scheme of advertising and sales on behalf of the adult adjacent industry firm — call it Firm Q — with money to be made for me. The assumption of the mailing was that such transactions are the very purpose of blogging, and (to judge from the advice that the company now provides) WordPress seems to agree that blogging is all about making deals. In fact I get approached, on average, once a day — some days none, but some days three in a row — by a company that wants me to enter into some sort of advertising or sales deal with them. Nothing as spectacular as an adult adjacent industry firm (earlier today: advertise a site providing information on what to do in Wilmington NC in exchange for the site’s advertising my blog and so boosting my blog’s search engine score).
Note 1: I actually pay WordPress a fee to keep this blog free of advertising.
Note 2: I never respond to these overtures, even to say a polite no; my earliest experiences with these things was that if you replied at all, that merely encouraged the sender to think you might eventually be open to their invitation, so that they redoubled their efforts. Deletion and stony silence are the only way.
Not entirely irrelevant digression: I’m now taken with the phrase adult adjacent industry firm and have been chanting it as a tetrametrical mantra, aDULT aDJAcent INdustry FIRM (WS WSW | SWW S); repeat it three times for pleasure. It might also work to celebrate sturdy young men engaging in anal intercourse with one another on video — the sort of often-avowed interest of mine that presumably led the X Group to fix on my blog as one that might enter into an intimate relationship with the as-yet-unidentified Firm Q.
But, back to beginnings. Let me start with Margalit Fox.
About a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 5/29, which turns on the title phrase pandering to the bass being understood as a pun:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
We are to understand pandering to the bass as a pun on pandering to the base (which has become a stock expression in political contexts), and, given the image and text of the cartoon, as involving bass (/bes/ rather than /bæs/) ‘someone who plays the bass guitar in a rock band’ (rather than in one of 7 or 8 other possible senses).
Not Frog and Peach, but Elephant and Plum, in a kid joke as told by Ruthie in the One Big Happy strip from 2/22 (in my comics feed on 3/21):
(#1)
Four things: kid jokes, of which the Elephant and Plum variant above is a particular clever example; the saying about elephants on which it depends; elephant jokes, of which the joke above is not the classic Elephant and Plum exemplar; and the ambiguity of “When did you laugh at it?”, which turns on the defining property of deictic elements like the interrogative when.
