Archive for the ‘Language and animals’ Category

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The inevitable slide into fishy fruit

December 18, 2024

First came the (pickled) herring, the tasty bounty of chilly ocean waters, also the delight of Scandinavia. Then came the (boneless) bananas, the fragrant fruit of tropical plantations, also the pride of Ecuador. When they met, there was the inevitable slide into fishy fruit, into a strange amalgam of sweet and savory; a quickie, and ill-advised, union of south and north, hot climes and cold climes, New World and Old:


(#1) From a 1963 German cookbook: bananas wrapped in pickled herring (from the Historic Photographs site on Facebook, passed along on FB on 12/15 by Michael Palmer, under the slogan: Everything’s better with pickled herring on it!)

The pimento and parsley garnishes make bananas in pickled herring a red and green Christmas surprise.Well, I’d certainly be surprised. On the other hand, we once had a cat that adored herring, even pickled in wine sauce, and savaged bananas ravenously (as well as loaves of bread and corn on the cob), so it would have found #1 to be the very apotheosis of fine feline dining (with the useless pimento and parsley batted off onto the floor, of course).

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Posted in Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food | 2 Comments »

Rabbit stew 1: Asian soup spoons

December 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month of December; for the occasion, an assortment of non-holiday-related topics — though I have to point out that Saturnalia will be upon us in a couple of weeks, so get your ass in gear for the occasion — that have come by me recently: a rabbit stew for your pleasure

rabbit stew. From Wikipedia, some bare facts:

Rabbit stew, also referred to as hare stew when hare is used, is a stew prepared using rabbit meat as a main ingredient. Stuffat tal-Fenek, a variation of rabbit stew, is the national dish of Malta. Other traditional regional preparations of the dish exist, such as coniglio all’ischitana on the island of Ischia, German Hasenpfeffer and jugged hare in Great Britain and France. Hare stew dates back to at least the 14th century … Rabbit stew is a traditional dish of the Algonquin people and is also a part of the cuisine of the Greek islands. Hare stew was commercially manufactured and canned circa the early 1900s in western France and eastern Germany.

Rabbit stews are characteristically rich and flavorful. Yes, even the British jugged hare.

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Posted in Color, Flags, Furnishings and tools, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, My life | Leave a Comment »

The Austria ostrich

November 15, 2024

Very briefly noted.

Passed on back on 11/9 by Michael Palmer on Facebook, this fine reworking of the map of Austria as an ostrich:


MP came across it on the Language Nerds Facebook site, but I don’t know who created the image in the first place

In English, Austria (a Latinization of the German name Österreich ‘eastern realm’) and ostrich (from a compound of the Latin avi- stem meaning ‘bird’ and the Greek struth– stem meaning ‘ostrich, big sparrow’) have only medial /str/ as clearly shared material, so are very distant puns, if they count as puns at all. Much the same is true of Spanish Austria and avestruz.  Things are even more distant in Italian (Austria and struzzo) and of course German (Österreich and Strauß).

But in French, as I pointed out on Facebook, by the accidents of phonological change, Latinized Austria > Autriche and the avi– + struth– compound > autruche, yielding a truly fine pun: Autriche is an autruche!

So Austria not only looks like an ostrich, in French it sounds like one too. This makes me happy.

 

Posted in Art, Compounds, French, German, Greek, Language and animals, Language change, Latin, Placenames, Puns, Spanish | 3 Comments »

The 16-meal Chinese takeout order

November 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the first of November — and, since this is the Day of the Dead, those are the carnivorous mutant rabbits from Night of the Lepus (see my 7/5/14 posting “Bunnies run amok”, about the (laughably inept) 1972 science fiction horror movie), not your sweet bunnies:

Today’s topic has nothing to do with the Day of the Dead, or rabbits (mutant or otherwise), but is about food, and my life, and is transparently a device for escaping current events and my bodily miseries. I am not cut off from the world — I get the New York Times every morning, and the Economist and the New Yorker every week — but I have entirely stopped following the news and commentary on the news on tv. The background for my days is re-runs (on dvd) of all six years of the tv  series Major Crimes (details in my 10/29 posting with that title); I’m partway through season 3 at the moment, hoping that this will carry me through what is still to come. I no longer have persecution dreams, and I’m not constantly frozen in panic, so the therapy seems to be working.

Now I leave all this, to return to my Grubhub food delivery order of 10/14, from the Amazing Wok in San Carlos CA, and how it ended up providing me with 16 excellent meals over a 13-day period.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Movies and tv, My life | Leave a Comment »

The anole of Palo Alto

October 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate October, aka Halloween; by the pricking of my fingers, something wicked this way lingers

Specifically, my fingers pricked out the name Anold for Arnold a little while ago, as they do with regrettable regularity (Gorgo finger not work right), but this time it was in a link on Facebook to this blog, so not self-correcting. But George V. Reilly caught the error and pointed it out to me, so that I could fix it. And then today, I had an inspiration, which I posted as a response (somewhat revised here) to George:

— AMZ > GVR: It has occurred to me to take up Anold the anold as another identity. The anold is a brightly colored arboreal lizard — a type of anole — in its rare and precious Swiss variant. Characterized by its curiosity (in several senses — “Look, Bruce, what a curious lizard!”) and its remarkable, um, snout.

This is the anold’s organ sometimes known jocularly as a Swiss nose. All noses are phallic, but some are considerably more phallic than others. (A lexical note on the noun snout, from NOAD: ‘the projecting nose and mouth of an animal, especially a mammal’.)

Meanwhile, while noses and snouts are phallic symbols, lizards (and dinosaurs and dragons) as wholes are much more impressively so. From GDoS on the noun lizard:

7 (Aus./US) the penis [1st cite 1969], with phrases meaning ‘to urinate’: bleed / drain / flog / squeeze the lizard; and phrases meaning ‘to masturbate’: bleed / gallop / pet the lizard and choke / stroke / whip one’s lizard

So now we’re deep into phallicity. Well, it’s my blog. Phallicity happens.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and animals, Language and the law, Lexical semantics, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Switzerland and Swiss things, Typos | 3 Comments »

The AMZ Serengeti mailbox

October 21, 2024

This morning’s query from Benita Bendon Campbell:

Have you “done” Flanders and Swann’s “I’m a gnu”? (León Hernández Alvarez’s I have a new brought it to mind.)

(that is, L’s report in my 10/20 posting “I have a ##”)

But of course. Among my gnu postings there’s my 3/14/12 “The news for gnus”, where I wrote:

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

I can’t think of gnus without being reminded of Flanders and Swann’s delightful Gnu Song — which you can hear here, along with photos of real-life gnus. The lyrics: [in full in the 2012 posting]

An elaborate play on silent letters in English spelling: “restoring” the G of GNU and GNASH, the K of KNOW, and the W of WHO, with the initial /g/ of /gǝnú/ spilling over onto /n/-initial nicest, nature, neither, not, even know, and, most marvelously, the climactic (a)nother. (Plus “Cockney” initial /h/ in elk and ain’t.)

Posted in Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Spelling | 2 Comments »

Anchovy and Cleopatra

October 17, 2024

Yes, I’ve given the punchline away. It’s the delicious pun on Antony and Cleopatra in this Wayno Bizarro strip from 6/21/23, which has recently been reproduced on Facebook:


(#1) A fish-headed suitor — Mark Anchovy — offers anchovies to the Queen of the Nile (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are, wow, 9 in this strip (well, there are plenty of Egyptian hieroglyphs to subvert)— see this Page)

Wayno returned to the Antony and Cleopatra theme recently, so I’ll start my discussion in Roman-occupied Egypt. Then it turns out that though I’ve often mentioned anchovies in culinary contexts on this blog, I seem not to have actually posted about them, so I’ll remedy that; there will be tiny salted fishes.

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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Tarzan of the Apex

October 7, 2024

From yesterday’s posting “Hot autumn morning”:

The torrid unpleasantness continues. Back on 10/2 the local temperature reached a brutal 102F; since then, it’s dropped into the 90s, but not by a whole lot. 96 yesterday, 96 today, 96 tomorrow, then maybe actual autumn.

In fact, yesterday in Palo Alto was 102 again, and today’s high is predicted to be 93, but relief is still predicted for tomorrow. Meanwhile, there’s a counteractive chill in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, showing Tarzan and Cheeta(h) at the intensely cold summit of Mt. Everest, claiming the peak, the apex of the mountain, for the (see the flag) Banana Republic, the chimpanzee’s native land:


(#1) A pun on “Tarzan of the Apes” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Actors, Language and animals, Language and the body, Movies and tv, My life, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Hot autumn morning

October 6, 2024

The torrid unpleasantness continues. Back on 10/2 the local temperature reached a brutal 102F; since then, it’s dropped into the 90s, but not by a whole lot. 96 yesterday, 96 today, 96 tomorrow, then maybe actual autumn.

So as soon as there was enough light, I was out on my patio watering the plants, in the containers and in the garden strip, and spray-washing the ivy on the walls of the patio, all while it was still under 70F. When I came back inside and went to work at my computer, I got a treat: a two-act show by the local creatures, squirrels in Act 1, hummingbird in Act 2.

But to appreciate the show, you’ll need to sit through the prologue, a brief September song in three parts.

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and plants, My life, Names | Leave a Comment »

Roll over, roll over

October 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to bring in October, a month that embraces: Hangul Day (10/9), a linguistic holiday (celebrating the excellent Korean orthography); NCOD, National Coming Out Day (10/11), a gay holiday (also, not accidentally, the JHT-AMZ wedding-equivalent anniversary, from the time long before same-sex marriage); and Halloween (10/31), a strange religiocultural holiday — the three occasions together in this parody of the Gunpowder Treason rhyme:

Roll over, Roll over
The first of October
Hangul, coming out, and black cat;
I have no doubt
That coming out
Is something to celebrate at!

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Posted in Allusion, Books, Holidays, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Parody | Leave a Comment »

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