About the British humo(u)r magazine (my cartoon/comics library has two anthologies from the publication; the second has the Ed Fisher cartoons I posted about yesterday) and about its long history (going back to 1841). The magazine was given to plays on the word punch, but so far as I can tell, not involving the quotation in the title of this posting — a 140-year-old meme, but a North American one.
To come: the magazine; uses of the word punch; and “Punch in the presence of the passenjare”.
In today’s feed, this One Big Happy from 3/7:
(#1)
The linguistic point: Ruthie’s mother’s “Ain’t it the truth?” — ain’t in the speech of someone who almost surely isn’t otherwise a user of this word. Instead, she’s playfully quoting a very widespread non-standardism, much as if she’d said “C’est vrai!” or “Veritable!”, in French, in the middle of an English conversation, conveying the equivalent of informal “That’s for sure!” or “You said it!”
The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs (2002) has an entry for “Ain’t it the truth” as a conventionalized expression, both in non-standard varieties and as an importation into informal standard speech:
Rur. or Jocular That is true.; Isn’t that true? (Used to agree with a statement someone has made.) Jane: I swear, life can be a trial sometimes. Bill: Yes, Lordy. Ain’t it the truth?
Interplay between the characters (Richard) Castle and (Kate) Beckett in a re-run from the show (season 1 epsode 8, “Ghosts”, originally broadcast 4/27/09) when they come across a suspect’s room littered with photographs of and clippings about another character:
(1) Look who’s stalking!
Ouch, the pun, on
(2) Look who’s talking!
— an expression that might remind you of the movie. From Wikipedia:
Look Who’s Talking is a 1989 romantic comedy film written and directed by Amy Heckerling, and stars John Travolta and Kirstie Alley. Bruce Willis plays the voice of Mollie’s son, Mikey. The film features George Segal as Albert, the illegitimate father of Mikey.
Today’s Bizarro, exploiting an ambiguity in pragmatics, use in discourse contexts:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Your money’s no good here has a use as a pragmatic idiom, conventionally conveying that at this moment it’s of no use in the context because the services or goods it’s being offered for are being supplied for free, are complimentary, are “on the house”. But in the cartoon, the bartender is speaking literally, saying that the customer’s money is no good here because it’s not in fact legal tender.
Yesterday’s One Big Happy has Ruthie coping with idiomaticity:
The whole idiom here is (be) out of sorts (with two somewhat different senses), and Ruthie understands something of its meaning as a whole, but she’s also trying to understand it as to some extent compositional, with the parts out of and a noun sorts (whatever that refers to). There are several possible senses for out of; the one Ruthie’s fixed on is an opposite of in (but there’s at least one other sense she might have gone for).
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:
The nouns butt and booty overlap in their uses, and so do the verbs dial and call, and so do the related nouns dial and call. However… the compound nouns butt dial and booty call (also the related verbs butt dial and booty call) are both slang idioms, and they aren’t at all interchageable.
Heard in a tv commercial for Scratch-Aide:
Let’s face it: if you’ve got wood, you’ve got scratches.
Unintendedly, with an ambiguity in got wood: the literal ‘have wood’ and the idiomatic ‘have an erection’ (of the penis), ‘have a woody / boner / hard-on’.
Over on AZBlogX, a long and fairly intricate posting about the gay porn flick Like Father, Like Son (LFLS), which came up as the focus of the Titan Cyber Monday sale. There are 19 images in the posting, all of them except the first (the image in the ad) unquestionably X-rated, so that posting is not for the kiddies or the sexually modest. (I’ll look at the first image below.) There are occasional flickers of linguistic interest, but they are scarcely the point.
The theme of the flick is intergenerational sex between men, centering on two young men who are best buddies and also sex partners, and on their fathers. The sons seek sex with older men as well as with one another, and they contrive to arrange things so that each will have sex with the other’s father, thus satisfying their desires while avoiding the incest taboo: I won’t do my dad (that would be icky), but I’ll do yours, bro (that would be hot hot hot). This sets up a complex symmetry of a sort worthy of comic opera, with the additional wrinkle that all the characters are randy gay men (with, of course, monumentally huge penises, which the sons inherited from their fathers), so everyone wants to have sex with everyone else, except for the father-son pairings.
Today’s Bizarro, with an idiom and a nursery rhyme:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
So we have Humpty Dumpty, recently fallen from his wall, but no explanation of how this terrible event could have come to pass.
Overheard at lunch a few days ago:
(1) We’re going to Puerto Rico for the holidays; I’ve never been.
My first interpretation of the (elliptical) second clause was as
(2) I’ve never been to Puerto Rico.
with what I’ll call “motion-goal BE” in the pattern:
(3) HAVE been [PP to PLACE ]
where the lexical item BE is a motion verb, roughly glossable as ‘go’, so that (3) conveys ‘HAVE gone to PLACE’. Think of Charlene singing
(4) Ooh I’ve been to Georgia and California, and, anywhere I could run
… I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me
(I’ll get to Charlene in a while. Meanwhile, you can hear her singing “I’ve Never Been to Me” by going to this YouTube site. Note: opinions about this song are strongly polarized: many people think it’s one of the world’s worst songs, while others think it provides wonderful advice about attending to your feelings. Please: I am not soliciting opinions here.)
Or with past perfect rather than present perfect:
(5) I realized that I’d been to Georgia and not eaten a single peach.
There’s a lot to be said about motion-goal BE, beyond its having BE as a motion verb.