(some vulgar slang, but (I think) tolerable by kids and the sexually modest)
Today’s (4/24) morning name, the final line of a quatrain I learned as boy lore about 1950:
How’s your ma and how’s your pa
And how’s your sister Sue?
And while we’re on the subject,
How’s your old wazoo?
(#1) The family-wazoo rhyme; I didn’t know the quantity adverbial up the wazoo at the time, so I mistakenly took wazoo to be a variant of street slang dick / cock ‘penis’
In today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro, a bank teller focuses on how quaint it is that a bank robber has written his demand on paper (the way they did it in old movies), while disregarding the pressing threat of the robber’s gun:
(1) A quibbling triumph of details of form over the real threat of content (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Faced with dreadful, uncontrollable situations, people sometimes take to fretting about some minor issue that is more easily remedied.
From the latest New Yorker issue, of 3/30/26, this cartoon by Daniel Kanhai:
The energetic angelic figure of Moses, with his rather dubious angelic assistant (his brother Aaron? his successor Joshua? just an angel off some random cloud, pressed involuntarily into the frog toss?), lobs jumbo frogs down onto the Egyptians, meting out punishment to them for their Pharaoh’s offenses against the Lord and the Lord’s chosen people, the Israelites
It’s the Biblical second Plague of Egypt — not the disastrous swarming frogs of the book of Exodus, overwhelming entire cities, doomed to die in great stinking heaps; but instead adorable, perky frogs from children’s books and the cartoons (surely they are a pretty green). Moses gets them by the barrel.
In any case, the incongruity of the appalling — literally Godawful — frogs from Exodus and the cute frogs in the New Yorker made me laugh out loud.
Thoughts inspired by a comment by Robert Coren on my 3/6 posting “Checking out”, in which I responded darkly to the information from a grocery-delivery service that you can:
Add items until your shopper checks out
by understanding the intransitive phrasal verb check out in it not as the intended sense
To complete the procedure required in order to register one’s departure from a location or venue, esp. a hotel, at the end of a stay or visit. Also more generally: to leave, to depart. [OED‘s 1b for check out]
but as OED‘s 4a ‘to die’. RC offered a speculation on the etymology of the mortal sense of a different intransitive phrasal verb with out, peg out:
4a reminds me of a phrase that I encountered in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, where “peg out” is used as a colloquialism for “die”; I assume that (1) it comes from the process of being victorious in a cribbage game (which makes it a rather odd metaphor, actually), and (2) it was standard usage among some portion of the British population in the early 20th century.
Yes, yes, I am bombarded with blizzard warnings, for the terrifying storm now bringing NYC and the surrounding areas to a standstill. But, bafflingly, though I am fully aware that the warnings are about a blizzard, I keep hearing them as announcing a lizard warning — as if I must now beware of a rain of cold-stunned iguanas falling from the trees or an advancing army of marauding Komodo dragons.
Sadly, since we are now in the zone of terrifying creatures, I have to tell you that Gojira / Godzilla is a reptilian (or dinosaurian) monster, or kaiju, not a squamate one (all lizards are reptiles, but not all reptiles are lizards). You should indeed be alarmed by the news that Godzilla is on the rampage in your neighborhood — that means it’s slated for utter devastation — but such a bulletin is not, technically, a lizard warning. It would be a grievous usage error to race through the streets screaming the lizards are coming! the lizards are coming!
My morning name for 11/28: The Nairobi Trio (TNT). An instant trip back to my teenage years, the 1950s, when my friends and I were wildly entertained by Ernie Kovacs’s TNT skits on television. Today I’ll give you something like the basic facts about TNT (which involves three people in gorilla suits moving in sync with the tune “Solfeggio”) and its creator. But then I’ll ask the question: why is TNT funny? And eventually the question: why does TNT make many people feel uneasy? (One writer has declared it to be “incredibly controversial” and “completely unacceptable by today’s standards”.)
On this last question, I’ll look ahead and suggest that the twinges would vanish if the skit were called, say, “The Solfeggio Players” — no Nairobi reference — and the gorilla suits were replaced by, say, chicken suits or frog suits. Observations that take us into facts about Africa and gorillas, tons of beliefs and attitudes from common culture, assorted tropes from popular culture, and written and filmed works of imaginative fiction (King Kong! Tarzan!). I’m not sure I can do justice to all of this, but I’ll try to at least skim the surface. Just not today.
A tv commercial for the laundry detergent Tide, heard this morning:
If it’s got to be clean, then it’s got to be Tide [1]
(with the deontic modal of obligation have got to, roughly ‘must’). At this point, I’ll simplify the example somewhat by using the one-word variant have to rather than have got to:
If it has to be clean, then it has to be Tide [2]
[1] and [2] catch your attention because they’re somehow jokey, some kind of play on words. The two parallel underlined stretches are word-for-word identical, but they’re not parallel in meaning, and we expect them to be. This semantic disparity makes [1] and [2] examples of what I’ve called zeugmoids. More on all that to come, but first I want to make the phenomenon clearer.
In the latest (8/25/25) New Yorker, a Jeremy Nguyen cartoon in which some construction workers party in the sky:
(#1) A play on the well-known “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932 (which I have labeled Skylunch 1; it was followed by a series of Skylunch variants)
Nguyen has 8 men, grouped 2, 2, 2, 1, 1; they are working-class guys in casual dress (caps rather than hard hats, no harnesses), standing (rather than sitting) around with simple party fare (rather than lunch boxes) in their hands. What guy #3 finds remarkable is not that they are standing on a girder suspended far above the city streets, but that they’re getting their little party in what is for them their lunch spot. This is elephantlessness: missing the elephant — in this case, the floating girder — in the situation.
The briefest of shots. Following on my posting yesterday “A Monty Python formula pun”, Benita Bendon Campbell wrote to say that she has been reading The Autobiography of the Pythons by Chapman, Palin, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, and Jones (originally published in 2003) and reports that in it, John Cleese goes on at length about Clump of Plinths, a successful Footlights Club show at Cambridge (pre-Python); he really loves that show.
Clump of Plinths is evocative of (I think) some Scots expression that’s distressingly on the tip of my tongue but is being blocked for me by Firth of Forth. Or maybe that memory of mine is an illusion. My mind is in a whirl.
