Archive for the ‘Language and food’ Category

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Does he or doesn’t he?

May 23, 2024

On Pinterest this morning, this entertaining vintage ad, from the site Envisioning the American Dream (“A visual remix of the American Dream as pictured in Mid-Century media”), in “Unintentionally Gay Ads — Does He or Doesn’t He?” by Sally Edelstein on 6/12/13:


(#1) A 1944 ad for Wilson Wear pajamas and shorts; SE’s comment: Boxers, bedrooms and pajamas were a natural setting for a romp among “roomates”

What makes this one so funny (because unintentionally gay) is something the ad agency surely never considered. They wanted to advertise a Wilson Wear line by showing both the pajamas and the boxer shorts. So they depicted two guys in intimate menswear in the same pattern — suggesting that they’re boyfriends in His and His clothing, guys who are, as they say, in each other’s pants.

Me, I think it’s sweet.

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Posted in Art, Clothing, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language in advertising, Movies and tv, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

The cocktail of the absurd

May 22, 2024

Breezed past me on Facebook this morning, this Benjamin Schwartz cartoon (from the 5/6/19 issue of the New Yorker) that made me laugh out loud at its absurdity:


(#1) So festive! Transform any cocktail, in any kind of cocktail glass (the one in the cartoon is a coupe /kup/, a good glass for, say, a daiquiri), into a shrimp cocktail, by hanging some shelled, chilled cooked shrimp (such as anyone might just happen to have a pocketful of on them — this is where I dissolved in laughter) all around the lip of the glass

Even better: the classic shrimp cocktail is already an antic hors d’œuvre, a preposterously elaborate presentation of shrimp, sauce, and sourness (most often, from a lemon slice) that might have been served more simply on a tasty bit of bread, or in a small bowl or cup. With a name — shrimp cocktail — that’s a pun.

So what we see in #1 is in fact goofy-squared.

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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor | 2 Comments »

More Kix on Route 66

May 21, 2024

Passed along by two friends on Facebook recently, this Manchild Manor cartoon, deploying Kix breakfast cereal in a pun on the title (of the theme song for a tv show) “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”:


(#1) If you don’t know the song, this cartoon is incomprehensible

(I don’t know where or when this cartoon first appeared, and I couldn’t find it on the (sizable) Instagram page for the strip; I’ve appealed to the cartoonist, but in my experience, most artists view such queries as just a nuisance drag on their time, so they’re not inclined to reply. If he gets back to me, I’ll add his information to this posting.)

[Added on 5/22. Never assume. The cartoonist — Tim Thavirat, now living in San Diego CA after some time in Austin TX — has now replied, and even thanked me for sharing his work on my blog. This cartoon is from 10/25/18, early in the days of his cartoon page — a silly pun that tickled his fancy.]

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Posted in Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Photography, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Chavo con churro

May 17, 2024

… take 2. Previously on this blog (in my 5/11 posting “The gay handshake”), a quote from GoNakedMagazine and Travels, on the Medium site, “The Gay Handshake: 5 Reasons Why Blowjobs [Are] Good for Your Health” … with this wonderful photo  of a handsome young Latino character enjoying an especially long and thick churro filled with vanilla cream:


(#1) Chavo con churro (Mexican nickname Chavo ‘kid’), as I’ve come to think of him, in a photo I’ve been unable to find the source of

And then in the last few days I’ve been blitzed with tv commercials for Subway footlong snacks to accompany their footlong subs. From the Subway newsroom:

Subway® Reveals Sidekicks, an Irresistible Collection of Footlong Cookies, Churros and Pretzels

Three beloved snacks — Subway’s chocolate chip cookies, Cinnabon® churros and Auntie Anne’s® pretzels — take on a new, iconic footlong form, exclusively at Subway restaurants starting January 22.

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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Phallicity | 2 Comments »

The gay handshake

May 11, 2024

(It’s about men going down on men, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

A subtopic extracted from a posting (in preparation) on Stanley Stellar’s career in male photography (previous posting on this blog: on 5/8 in “Stanley Stellar’s couch”), during which he has amassed a trove of tens of thousands of photos, almost all set in NYC (and is still at it). One part of his work is devoted to depicting the beauty of the male body; for this he solicits men to pose for him (that’s why his e-mail address is on his website). These men are of various sexualities.

The remainder of his work he thinks of photographing the gay community:

— chronicling Pride parades (in all their complexity)

— showing street life in gay neighborhoods and at locations of gay sociability — both places populated by an assortment of lgbt+ people, plus some others

— and recording the places of cruising and tricking for men who have sex with men: what I’ve called the subterranean world of sex between men in public

This subterranean world: cruising spots in public parks, the famous trucks in NYC’s West Village back in the day, gay baths and sex clubs, t-rooms (mensrooms repurposed for sex between men), and so on — including Stellar’s special province, the West Side piers in NYC. All places where sex between men (especially cocksucking, which is quick and easy, and requires no special preparation or clean-up, so can be smoothly managed pretty much anywhere) is available in spaces that are in some sense public and are open to other like-minded men but are carefully concealed from outsiders (hence, subterranean).

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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and society, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography, Social interactions | Leave a Comment »

One of Hilburn’s puns of steel

May 7, 2024

In Pinterest this morning, Scott Hilburn’s Argyle Sweater comic strip of 9/25/20:


(#1) This from the creator of the Puns of Steel collections

#1 is a still from a sad tale of chickpeas smashed to death in a cheap Baltimore apartment, an episode of the tv drama Hummuscide: Life on the Street; meanwhile, death strikes down a rich legume in the novel The Great Garbanzo, in which the title character is murdered by a distraught husband. The grand fictions of Cicer arietinum.

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Posted in Cartoonists, Language and food, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 2 Comments »

Pizza boy moments

May 6, 2024

From Susan Fischer on Facebook today, a link to a very old (11/30/11) Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon depicting the Trojan Pizza Boy:


(#1) Pizza Boy wears a cap, and he comes bearing two pizza cartons (plus, we assume, a lot of concealed Trojan warriors)

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and sexuality, Language and society, Linguistics in the comics, Male art, Masculinity, Myths | 2 Comments »

Name that taqueria

April 29, 2024

From the annals of remarkable commercial names, a delicious punmanteau name for a Phoenix AZ taco truck, which just flashed by, without remark, in the first sentence of the piece “Motor Mouth” by Aaron Timms in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:

Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix.

Juanderful = Juan (a stereotypical Mexican name) + wonderful, so conveying something like ‘wonderfully Mexican’ or ‘wonderful in a typically Mexican way’.


(#1) The sprightly logo (you can imagine the patter: “Hi! I’ll be your carnitas tacos today! Enjoy my meat!”); the food truck has a website, here

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Posted in Grammatical gender, Language and food, Language in advertising, Libfixes, Music, Portmanteaus, Puns, Spanish, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

A Promethean hepatical

April 26, 2024

The liver. Patent medicine. Greek mythology. Advertising. The illustrator’s art. All together now.

In the hands of French illustrator Charles Lemmel (1899 – 1976), the task of devising a poster to advertise a hepatical (a patent medicine for maladies of the liver) somehow fixed on the myth of Prometheus, punished by Zeus (for having stolen fire from Olympus and given it to humans) by being chained, naked, to the side of a mountain and subjected to endless hepatophagy: every day, Zeus’s eagle feasts on the Promethean liver, which then regrows for the next day’s torture.

Not, you might have thought, an ideal theme for a medicine ad; but look what Lemmel did with the idea in the poster (from the 1930s):


(#1)  Lemmel presents Hepatior as a rest and relief from the pain of hepatic ailments, a pain like that of Prometheus’s aquiline torment; meanwhile, he elevates the real-life sufferer by depicting the suffering Prometheus as a hot hot muscle-hunk and also a curly black-haired Greek dude — who is smiling and winking at us through the ordeal, reassuring us that it’s all a joke

That’s quite an artistic performance, also soft porn at several levels (extravagant body display, proud masochism). I happen to think it’s deeply silly, but enjoyable in its crudeness.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and sports, Language and the body, Masculinity, Metaphor, Myths | 1 Comment »

Better the second day

April 24, 2024

I haven’t been coping well with daily life for a while now, but see no reason to issue fresh bulletins on my anxieties, incapacities, and infirmities in these difficult times, so I’ve been posting on things that entertain me and might entertain you, often just the wispiest of notes in the spirit of the Pythonic Mary, Queen of Scots. As here, with a report on what I had for lunch today — and yesterday too, but it was much better the second day.

Better The Second Day, a general principle for most hot soups, and a variety of other foods too. In this case, for lamb and spinach curry (with fenugreek leaves): so, palak mathi gosht plus a lot of basmati rice, from Zareens (a Z! a good omen) Indian restaurant on Broadway in Redwood City CA:

palak ‘spinach’; methi ‘fenugreek leaves’; gosht, literally ‘meat’, specifically referring to goat, mutton, or lamb

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Posted in Language and food, My life, Names | 2 Comments »

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