Archive for the ‘Idioms’ Category

The potluck surprise

July 23, 2024

From Sunday’s’s (7/21) New York Times Magazine, in the section “The Ethicist: Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman”:

Angel writes: My co-worker Nick suggested we have a baked-goods potluck at work. I got excited because I have a great baked-mac-and-cheese recipe. But Nick said it wouldn’t count. He says it must be something made with a batter or dough. I disagree!
—–
Many things are baked (potatoes, Brie, Alaska), and like macaroni and cheese, they are good. But they are not “baked goods” in common usage. … In your case, most of the cooking happens outside the oven, and the baking is just a finishing touch. That said, who cares? [and on from there]

Angel has run aground on the shoals of idiomaticity; they suppose that the meaning of baked goods is straightforwardly compositional, ‘goods that have been baked’ — the meaning of the plural noun goods as modified by the meaning of the adjective baked, using the primary senses of the two words. But that won’t fly here, because the nominal baked goods has developed a specialized use, in which it refers to not just any stuff, even not just any foodstuff, that’s been cooked in an oven, but only to breads (and similar foods) and cakes (and similar foods) from an oven. The category of baked goods is expansive, but not so broad as to embrace lasagna, roasted vegetables, baked chicken, baked beans, baked ham, etc. … or mac and cheese.

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Datoro!

July 19, 2024

Two Datoro cartoons from the July 22nd New Yorker (the one with Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” — six 45s and three women — on the cover): Joe Dator offering goldfish snacks in a cat bar, Tom Toro offering a summer food pun with a dubious union between plant and animal (interkingdom breeding! quelle scandale!).

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Six Zippy balls

July 18, 2024

Zippy is known for his enthusiasm for specific words, is given to playing with them in public. Today’s Zippy strip shows our Pinhead drifting happily through six encounters with ball, in the title (In the ballpark) and five times in the text:


(#1) In four idiomatic expressions and then, in panel 3, when we’re set up to expect idiomatic drop the ball ‘make a mistake’, Zippy goes all literal on us by, just, dropping the ball

The four idioms: have a ball, keep one’s eye on the ball, the ball is in someone’s court, take one’s ball and go home.  One use of ball ‘formal social gathering for dancing’, followed by three uses of ball ‘spherical object’ in the context of playing games or sports. The effect in the text is to switch from one way of thinking to another: the social gathering image gives way immediately to three game-playing images, and then Zippy gets literal.

Now to look at the lexical resources Bill Griffith is tapping in this strip. But first, a diversion to six actual (game-playing) balls.

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The Putin-on-Ritz pun

June 28, 2024

Passed on by Susan Fischer yesterday, this item from the We Love PUNS site:


(#1) Three things you need to know about or recognize to understand the pun joke here: Vladimir Putin (depicted here without a label); Ritz crackers (this is easy, because the name Ritz is on the package, as are images of the crackers); and, crucially, the model for the pun: the song title “Puttin’ on the Ritz”

Which gives us, oh groan, the pun Putin on the Ritz. Phonologically imperfect in the Putin part: pun /pútǝn/ for model puttin’ /pÚtǝn/. You can imagine other possibilities: poutine on / in the Ritz, pootin’ on / in the Ritz, button on the Ritz, and more with Ritz; still others involving tits, fritz, Rit (the commercial dye), and no doubt others.

It turns out that this is not the first appearance, on this blog, of Vlad the Invader with Ritz crackers. Nor the first pun involving Ritz. But first a lexical note on ritz, from NOAD:

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Two cartoons on (unstated) formulaic themes

April 9, 2024

Aka: Piccolo’s bull and Rubin’s cow: cattle days in CartoonLand. A little post-eclipse diversion: cartoons that make allusion to, or illustrate a pun on, some formulaic expression, but without actually mentioning that expression, so they present challenges in cartoon understanding. Two that have come by me recently: a Rina Piccolo Rhymes With Orange cartoon of 4/5 (alluding to the idiom bull in a china shop, which is something of a favorite of cartoonists); and an old Leigh Rubin Rubes cartoon that re-surfaced in Facebook (punning on the nursery-rhyme line the cow jumped over the moon).

Oh, I’ve given it all away. Well, you can still  appreciate Piccolo’s and Rubin’s ingenuity.

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Nobody expects a baby

March 6, 2024

A carefully composed, subtle, and surprising ambiguity-driven cartoon by Mick Stevens in the New Yorker 1/1&8/2024 issue (on-line on 12/2/23):


Were we expecting a baby?, conveying not ‘Were we pregnant?” but the surprising ‘Were we expecting a baby (to appear at the door, to visit us, to be delivered to us, etc.)?’ — compare Were we expecting a special-delivery letter? Were we expecting the Spanish Inquisition? (meanwhile, there’s a Page about MS cartoons on this blog)

From NOAD:

verb expect: … [c] believe that (someone or something) will arrive soon: Celia was expecting a visit.

verb phrase idiom be expecting (also be expecting a baby): informal be pregnant: his wife was expecting again.

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Kissing the proverbial you know what

December 20, 2023

From the Raw Story site, “‘The stain is on you’: Ex-RNC chair slams GOP for silence on [GP]’s call for blood purity” by Matthew Chapman on 12/18/23 (in this story [GP] refers to (Helmet) Grabpussy), beginning:

The Republican Party at large owns former President [GP]’s increasing descent into fascistic and racist rhetoric, former GOP chair Michael Steele told MSNBC’s Katie Phang [sitting in for the host of “The Beat With Ari Melber”] on Monday.

This comes as [GP] stated at a rally that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” language that has clear roots in Nazi Germany — and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) defended it furiously when cornered by reporters.

“Michael, it is not just [GP] that’s doing the bad thing, it’s the enablers that are doing the bad thing,” said Phang. “We all know why they are kissing the proverbial you know what. And, when you have somebody like Marc Short [Republican operative, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence] saying ‘I doubt that [GP] has read Mein Kampf,’ I don’t disagree with him, I don’t think he has the capacity to read, but it is not the point. These people enable [GP] to be able to say this with zero consequence.”

In the crucial quote, boldfaced above, Phang was choosing between two idioms, both of the form kiss + object, both expressing submission to someone: the elevated idiom (with the C[ount] Sg object noun ring):

kiss someone’s ring or: kiss the ring

and the vulgar slang idiom (with the M[ass] Sg object noun ass):

kiss someone’s ass or: kiss ass

In any case, Phang chose to indicate that she was using a formulaic expression, via the formula-signaling adjective proverbial modifying the head noun of the object. She said kiss the proverbial X and not kiss proverbial X, and that would seem to indicate that she was using the elevated idiom (with ring), which comes with a definite article, and not the vulgar idiom (with ass), which is anarthrous: kiss the ringkiss the proverbial ring; kiss asskiss proverbial ass.

But we can feel pretty sure that she was aiming for the vulgar idiom, because she also used a scheme for avoiding taboo words (like ass ‘buttocks’ or ‘anus’): the filler you know what replacing the taboo item (I’m not going to kiss (his) you know what, He told me to stick it up my you know what).

The result is that at first glance she just looks confused, mixing features of the two competitors for a submission idiom. But it turns out that the syntax of formula-signaling proverbial is more complex than I had thought, and she was saying exactly what she intended.

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Packing Extreme Meat

December 18, 2023

(A lot of this posting is about the title of a Lucas gay porn movie, slated for full release in March 2024, but with its scenes being released one by one before then — the first, baldly titled “Dom King pounds Leonardo Bravo”, out last Friday (12/15), is described in one section of my 12/16 posting “Christmas days at the gay porn factories”. Before going on to an analysis of the movie’s title, I’ll unload some of the Lucas p.r. for the flick, and provide a sweet shot of the young Argentinean bottom LB in its first scene; this stuff is all about men’s sexual parts and man-on-man sex, in crude street language, so it’s entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. After that, you’ll get some sexual slang, though treated analytically; mostly there will be a lot of technical linguistics, but I’m trusting you to handle this material like adults. Relax, you can do it (as Frankie Goes to Hollywood didn’t quite say).)

Part the First: four guys with big dicks. The Lucas Entertainment press release for the whole film, in gayporntalk:

Release Date: Mar 01, 2024

Performers [alphabetically ordered by first name]: Austin Ponce, Craig Marks, Dom King, Jacob Lord, Jeffrey Lloyd, Kosta Viking, Leandro Bravo, Sean Xavier

Some guys have such huge dicks that they can barely keep them under control… that’s when you know they’re PACKING EXTREME MEAT! Dom King unleashes his huge cock on Leandro Bravo and pounds him bareback. Kosta Viking and Jacob Lord suck and fuck until they nut. Sean Xavier slams Craig Marks with his enormous piece of man meat. And Jeffrey Lloyd funds Austin Ponce with his fat uncut dick!

[Linguistic note. Most of this is familiar ornamental gayporntalk: pound and slam ‘fuck’, nut ‘ejaculate, come, shoot’. But fund (with) used like award or bestow (with) as yet another way to convey ‘fuck’ (fucking as figuratively giving your dick to another man, bestowing it on him, bestowing him with it) is new to me. Promoted no doubt by the orthographic / phonological similarity between FUND and FUCK.]

From the first-released segment, I give you, not the big-dicked muscle-stud topman DK, contemptuously pounding Argentinean ass, but his lean, hairy, and very hot, novice pussyboy LB (as a receptive / bottom, long retired from active service, I note that I view the label pussyboy as playful and celebratory):


On the beach: Leandro Bravo in basic black

Part the Second: based on a hot-cock POP. This section is about the title Packing Extreme Meat, which is a pun on Packing Extreme Heat, so I turn now to the VP pack extreme heat. Which is an unusual (but attested) type of POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau). Whose contributing phrases are figurative expressions, one conveying ‘having a big penis’, the other ‘being sexually arousing’. And whose shared (overlapping) material — heat — has different senses in the two contributors, so that the portmanteau is also a pun, a punmanteau, if you will.

Yes, it’s complicated. It just has to be unpacked bit by bit. Stay with me.

I’ll start with two general observations about POPs, one about their form (about where the shared material comes in the two contributors — in the middle, at the beginning, or at the end), the other about their interpretation (about whether the shared material has the same meaning or different meanings in the two contributors — in what I’ll call vanilla POPs vs. pun POPs). There will be generous collections of examples from real life; don’t be alarmed by all this abstract description.

— Where does the shared material come? In your everyday POP, the shared material comes in the middle, but the beginning and the end are other possibilities:

medial sharing: A B C = (A B) + (B C) — sweet tooth fairy = sweet tooth + tooth fairy; Chia pet cemetery = Chia pet + pet cemetery; Home Birth of Venus = home birth + Birth of Venus; Billy Zane Grey = Billy Zane + Zane Grey (almost all POPs are of this form)

initial sharing: A (B + C) = A B + A C — paranormoralegal = paranormal + paralegal (a minority option)

final sharing: (A + B) C = A C + B C — L. Ron Mother Hubbard = L. Ron Hubbard + Mother Hubbard (another minority option)

— Is the meaning of the shared material constant or divergent in the two contributors? There are many vanilla POPs, like sweet tooth fairy, Chia pet cemetery, and Home Birth of Venus above. But there are also a ton of pun POPs, along the lines of:

snow border collie = snowboarder + border collie; Edgar Allan po’boy = Edgar Allan Poe + po’boy

similarly: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young Frankenstein, Fleetwood Macchiato, Half a Key Largo, Pacific Rim job, iPad Thai

Yes, the really memorable pun POPs tend to be pretty outrageous; they figure in elaborate pun jokes.

Now: pack extreme heat. This is a final-sharing pun POP:

pack extreme heat = pack heat + extreme heat, with contributors:

— pack heat, a verb + object idiom (meaning ‘carry a gun’), with the slang noun heat ‘weaponry; weapon, gun, pistol’ as object

— extreme heat ‘high temperature’

On its face, that would yield an expression meaning something like ‘carry a gun that’s hot to the touch’. But then both contributors are understood figuratively, and sexually; remember that we’re working our way up to the title of a vehicle to (in elevated language) aid gay men to achieve ejaculation through masturbating to the filmed performances. It’s a gay jack-off flick, people, so its title pretty much has to be a dirty play on words; that’s why both parts now acquire dirty figurative senses: the gun of pack heat can be taken as a sexual metaphor, for a (big) penis, so that the phrase can convey ‘have a big cock / dick’. Meanwhile, there are also sexual metaphorical uses of heat, referring to sexual receptivity, sexual arousal, or the quality of being sexually arousing. so that extreme heat can convey high sexual involvement (in mind and/or body).

Voilà! Packing Extreme Heat, an excellent title for a gay porn movie: easily understood as satisfyingly down and dirty (even if you don’t understand the linguistic mechanisms that make it work); admirably raunchy, without using any off-color vocabulary at all (unlike, say, the Treasure Island Media gay porn flick Ruin the Cunt — which, like the Lucas film, is largely focused on bareback anal sex between men.)

Hold that thought about admirable raunchiness. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

But first I’ll do my duty as a linguist to fill in some of the lexicographic details on pack heat from standard sources, rather that just spouting glosses off the top of my head. (Extreme heat is, I think, entirely straightforward.) From NOAD:

phrase pack heat: North American informal carry a gun: he was busted at JFK for packing heat.

And from GDoS:

noun heat: 4 (US) weapons, arms [AZ: this is the M[ass] use, which might be better glossed as ‘weaponry’; but the entry also has C[ount] uses, glossed as ‘pistol’]

One last turn of the sexual screw. Ok, in Packing Extreme Heat, the Lucas Entertainment people had a fine title available to them. But they then decided to gild this lily with a paint gun, pushing the big-dick image hard by punning on pack extreme heat with the off-color pun meat ‘penis’ for the more innocent-seeming slang noun heat. Bringing us Packing Extreme Meat, for the holiday jack-off season (and on until March 1st, when the whole work will be officially released).

I know, I know, subtlety is not their strong point.

 

 

Fur stoles, furry boots, and f*cking like minks

November 26, 2023

(Note this posting’s title — it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

It’s all about fucking in fur: two scenes from the MEN.com gay porn flick Norse Fuckers in which men mate wildly and promiscuously, like the proverbial fur-bearing carnivores, while wearing fluffy fur stoles (which they discard as impediments when they dig into their pronging) and delightful furry boots (which stay on, even while the men, otherwise stark naked, are fucking their mates).

There will be pictures.

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The Yiddish word for shpilkes

November 17, 2023

Melinda Shore on Facebook yesterday, the wry comment “How to spot the NY newspaper”, about this passage that Ann Burlingham had posted on FB:

At Lot 77062, he started to get antsy. “I’m getting shpilkes,” he said, using the Yiddish word for shpilkes. [The paragraph continues: His hope — not unreasonable, he thought — was somewhere in the high six figures.]

To supply the context (thanks to Season Devereux for pointing me to this): it’s a New York Times article by John Leland: on-line on 11/15/23 with the headline “He Thought His Chuck Close Painting Was Worth $10 Million. Not Quite: A bittersweet ending for Mark Herman, the dog walker who was given the painting: It finally sold, but for far less than he had envisioned”: in print with the headline “Gavel Comes Down on a Chuck Close Nude and a Fantasy”.

New Yorker Mark Herman was the speaker of using the Yiddish word for shpilkes; why he didn’t say using the Yiddish word for pins and needles is something of a mystery to me — but if you can’t easily pull up the English idiom pins and needles ‘anxiety’, then Yiddish shpilkes might be all you’ve got.

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