Archive for the ‘Language and food’ Category
August 9, 2024
The New Yorker cover for the August 12th, 2024 issue is a great big Roz Chast cartoon. With the accompanying cover story, “Roz Chast’s “Flavor of the Week”: The artist’s enticing (and not so enticing) tweaks to one of summer’s enduring pleasures” by Françoise Muhly on 8/5/24:
(#1) Along with plain Vanilla, there are strangely modified real flavors, in it for the alliteration (Microchip Mint, First Avenue Fudge); actual food names not especially attractive in an ice cream (Lard Swirl, Hardtack, the potato variety Yukon Gold); and lots of totally non-food allusive names (Placebo, Bitcoin, Tumbleweed, Amnesia, Tsunami, and the noble gas Xenon)
For the cover of the August 12, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Roz Chast — who has delighted readers since 1978 with her opinionated and peculiar takes on life’s indignities — gives ice-cream makers some suggestions for new flavors. “There are a lot of things I like about ice-cream stores aside from the ice cream itself,” Chast said. “I like looking at the different colors and patterns of all the bins. I like comparing cones: wafer flat-bottom or pointy classic? And the names of the flavors: the more preposterous and baroque, the better.”
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about Roz Chast and her work)
Preposterous and baroque naming schemes run riot in several domains: famously, for colors, especially of paints and of fabrics; and then widely in the word of ice cream flavors, where many frozen-confection firms exult in their naming practices. I’ll comment on just three US companies, with three different approaches: Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, and Ben & Jerry’s.
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Posted in Alliteration, Allusion, Art, Color, Language and food, Naming, Portmanteaus, Puns, Quotation, Rhyme, Taste, Trade names | 3 Comments »
August 3, 2024
Day-old bread, an’ we wan’ go home, as this Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 3/1/24 has it:
day-old as a pun on day-o, which then licenses the full-out substitution of day-old bread for daylight come
And so the Jamaican dock-workers’ Banana Boat Song — famously recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1956 — is hijacked for baked goods.
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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parodies, Puns | 5 Comments »
August 2, 2024
(Utterly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
E-mail this morning from the Gay Empire site with a video on demand sale, including, from the Fuckermate video site, the kitchen-sex scene “Fresh Cream Tasting” (2021) — that is, of course, cream ‘semen, cum’ — pairing Gianni Maggio and Jonas Brown, with this arresting ad:
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Posted in Effeminacy, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »
July 25, 2024
Nelson Minar writing on Facebook on 7/19 alludes to the controversial oysters vs. snails bath scene in the 1960 movie Spartacus:
Facebook has now figured out that I prefer snails to oysters so it is serving me ads featuring improbable men’s butts instead of improbable women’s butts. It hasn’t figured me out on the daddy / twink axis yet though.
I was derailed for a moment by a vision of a rock band called Improbable Butts. And, entertained by NM’s report that he’s a snail guy, derailed for a longer period by this vision of a notably phallic rainbow snail:
(#1) From the Craiyon site, an AI image generated from the prompt “A whimsical rainbow-colored snail with a trail of sparkling slime”
But now to Spartacus, after which I can return to snails as food and the verb eat.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Rainbow, Vaginality | 1 Comment »
July 24, 2024
Now we sing, to the tune of “Drunken Sailor”:
What shall we do with the leftover pie dough? … …
Cut it into slabs and then you bake them.
Do that, and you get the yummy stuff that Ann Daingerfield Zwicky called piecrust crumblies (a family term whose origin was lost to her); she used that name, so I did too, and my guy Jacques, and probably Elizabeth (Daingerfield Zwicky) as well, so maybe now Opal (Armstrong Zwicky) too. Such things get passed around.
(Spelling note: I will use the solid spelling piecrust, but many writers use the separated spelling pie crust; these are stylistic variants, and are listed as such by, among other sources, NOAD.)
Now it turns out that there’s a term of culinary art for the stuff; food writers seem to call them piecrust treats — a specialization of NOAD‘s
noun treat: an event or item that is out of the ordinary and gives great pleasure: he wanted to take her to the movies as a treat.
Whatever you call them, they’re just one possible answer to the question in my title, so let’s survey the uses of leftover piecrust dough.
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Posted in Folklore, Language and food, Music, My life, Names, Parody, Spelling | 4 Comments »
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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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Compositional semantics, Idioms, Language and culture, Language and food | 1 Comment »
July 19, 2024
From Ruth Lawrence on Facebook yesterday, a version of these meat-shoe photos, which had come to her on the net (the way things are customarily passed around, without sourcing):
(#1) The meat shoes
But since what #1 depicts is clearly the (most entertaining) referent of the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau)
beef Wellington boots = beef Wellington (the food preparation) + Wellington boots (the footwear), referring to (simulacra of) Wellington boots fashioned from beef Wellington
I could quickly track them down to a source —
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Posted in Art, Language and food, Language and the body, Names, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Shoes | 2 Comments »
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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Posted in Ambiguity, Idioms, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Puns, Trade names, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
July 13, 2024
A surprise from my tiny family this morning, as my grandchild Opal presented me with two gifts: the children’s picture book The Pengrooms by Paul Castle (Paul Castle Studio, 2022), together with an adorable plushie toy of Pringle the Pengroom — Pringle, who is grooms with Finn (both sporting rainbow bow ties, in case you missed the same-sex theme). The cover of the book, showing the couple atop a wedding cake, with the publisher’s blurb:
(#1) Follow Pringle and Finn, two penguins with big hearts, as they deliver wedding cakes to their friends in the animal kingdom. Each cake tells a story, and each [same-sex] wedding offers a challenge that Pringle and Finn must face together. The Pengrooms is an enduring tale about love, diversity, and the importance of working as a team.
Pringle is larger than Finn — couples differ in many ways — but they’re equal partners as a team. The Pringle plushie:
(#2) Pringle, with a really big bow tie
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Posted in Books, Effeminacy, Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Penguins, Rainbow, Social interactions, Sociocultural Roles, Toys | Leave a Comment »
July 11, 2024
Temporarily poleaxed by a long period of low air pressure — not dead yet, just not functioning at all well — I’m posting a little thing from the most recent issue (July 8 & 15, 2024) of the New Yorker:
Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby
Pandora’s disastrous opening, in mythical times, of the box containing all the evils that beset mankind comes round again in her opening the comments section on her laptop, thus freeing all the vileness of the human spirit. As it was once, so must it be again.
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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Myths, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »
