Archive for the ‘Language and food’ Category
February 27, 2025
It’s penultimate February. Tomorrow, tigers pounce, to devour the month. And then on Saturday, the hordes of rabbits (bearing leeks and daffodils for St. Dafydd’s Day, purely as ornaments, since both are toxic to rabbits) that have been massing at the month’s borders will stream in and overwhelm us all. Sandra Boynton has a cartoon for Rabbit Days (of course she does, bunnies are adorable, and SB is an artist of the adorable), which she last posted on Facebook on 1/31, just before the last onslaught:
Boynton writes: The new month approaches, so I am once again sharing the highly scientific fact that if you say RABBIT RABBIT! as your very first words of the month, they will bring good luck all month long. Additional irrefutable fact is that in worrisome times, the more rabbits mentioned the better.
Sing out, Louise! Now is the time to loudly chant RABBIT RABBIT RABBIT — Marche is icumen in / Lhude sing rabette — as a mantra of protection, a prayer for salvation:
From the fury of the Muskmen free us, O ye rabbits!
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Posted in Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Quotations | 6 Comments »
February 1, 2025
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to welcome the month of February, the month of Lincoln Darwin Day and of Valentine’s Day (this year, Mardi Gras doesn’t come until early in March)
It’s Rabbit Day, and what happens to be at the top of my posting queue has nothing to do with rabbits; it’s a Bizarro cartoon (from yesterday, 1/31) with a tasty culinary artmanteau:
(#1) The portmanteau Michelancho = Michelangelo (the 16th-century Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarotti, painter of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome) + ancho (the dried poblano chili / chile pepper) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
(an alternative culinary artmanteau: (Michelangelo) Anchorotti = ancho + Buonarotti)
(plus, I note that #1 is about Michelangelo the Ancho Honcho, the Man of La Mancho, also one of the lesser-known film Manchowiczes, etc.)
Now some brief notes on anchos, and then a surprise finale in which today’s rabbits get cooked with anchos, in the triumph of culinary artistry conejo en adobo with red chiles, which you can think of as Rabbit Michelancho.
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Posted in Art, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns, Spanish | 4 Comments »
January 28, 2025
The news for (symbolic) penises, following up on my previous posting about the years of the dragon and the snake in the Chinese zodiac (which ends with a promise of giggly banana couches and the buffoonish Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, a promise hereby fulfilled). It begins with a 1/18/25 posting on the Art Facebook page, with no source cited: a posting of a banana couch, passed on by a friend, who suggested that it would make suitable furniture for the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:
(#1) This sofa is one of a set of AI banana couches from Designideahub, which seems to provide AI-generated design ideas (“your one-stop place for art, creativity, AI, design and product inspiration”)
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Posted in AI, Art, Language and food, Mascots, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
January 10, 2025
(1/5 through 1/9 were days of great anxiety for me, on both medical and personal fronts; I am at my wits’ end, and I’m also now hopelessly backed up on postings in preparation, probably never to recover. So I’m just posting whatever I can get done fairly easily in the moment.)
In Facebook / Meta / Zuckie’s Litter Box (just Zuckie for short) / whatever on 1/8, Marina Muilwijk posted this diagram from the Terrible Maps site, with a comment:
[Terrible Maps caption:] Europe Divided (again)
[MM’s comment:] See that bit where couscous and herring overlap? That’s where I live [in the Netherlands] (no, I haven’t tried having both in one dish).
Now the site is called Terrible Maps, and the maps are indeed dreadful (but often thought- or laugh-provoking); in this case, having the three regions pictured via circles in a Venn diagram is utterly inappropriate for culture areas, so the picture is absurd (couscous in Wales?).
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Posted in Language and culture, Language and food, Language and geography, Music, My life, Plays, Translation | 2 Comments »
December 30, 2024
… and they’ll use the old cartoon artwork for another strip, with fresh text: a new, improved donut. Case in point: today’s (12/30, New Year’s Eve Eve) Zippy strip:
(#1) The big donut by the side of the road in York PA, advertising Maple Donuts, its store, and its coffee shop
But, but: we’ve been here before; #1 is a reworking of the Zippy strip in my 12/1/17 posting “Maple Donuts, coffee shops, and unapologetic identities”, with the old artwork merely re-colored but with fresh speech balloons:
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Posted in Cartoon conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
December 29, 2024
👴 👴 👴 three old men for antepenultimate December (3 days left), also the 5th of the 12 days of Christmas (five golden rings!) and the 5th of the 8 days of Hanukkah (so there’s still plenty of oil)
These have been difficult days — the latest rainstorm came in on a wave of low air pressure, felling me with joint pain and stopping up my ears so that I can barely hear (and I probably won’t be able to get help until sometime in the new year) — so I’m going to just randomly take stuff to post about and run with it, helter skelter.
First up: three seasonal presents from Ann Burlingham, in Pittsburgh, delivered to me yesterday by my grandchild Opal Armstrong Zwicky, who’s in town on break before their last semester at the University of Pittsburgh. In size, from the smallest to the largest:
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Signs and symbols, Toys | Leave a Comment »
December 27, 2024
🎁 Boxing Day 🎁 — also St. Stephen, with his feets uneven — coming a day late, because life has been very difficult for me, and postings have piled up so high I’m not sure I can ever get to them, so I’ve picked something I know I can get done, so that this dark, rainy, and excruciatingly painful low-air-pressure day will not be a total loss
I bring you an e-mail message from Victor Steinbok on 12/25, about this ad for Spice Tribe (website here), a San Francisco-based on-line spice store dedicated to mindful cooking:
(#1) VS wrote: Facebook has offered another example of what I used to refer to as parenthetical ambiguity. Is it [aged anchovy] [salt] or [aged] [anchovy salt]. From a culinary perspective, the latter makes no sense (aging salt doesn’t change it). But that doesn’t mean there’s no built-in ambiguity.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Constituency, Holidays, Language and food, Parsing, Semantics of compounds, Taste | 8 Comments »
December 23, 2024
🎄- 2: 12/23, so it’s Festivus; the last day of Saturnalia; and now, according to a front page story in today’s New York Times (“In Some Parts, It’s Christmas Adam Before Eve: Churches Are Adding Day to the Holiday, With a Side of Ribs”), it’s Christmas Adam, the day before Christmas Eve (it’s a joke, son)
Meanwhile, today’s found mantra is Zesty Pickle — repeat as needed until you reach the desired state of tangy pungency. It came to me in a commercial for Chick-Fil-A’s classic chicken sandwich:
Crispy chicken, zesty pickle, it’s tough to top the original
But then the piquant phallicity of zesty pickles pushed me onto another path, into the tale of a fickle fly:
zesty pickle
frisky pepper
pesky stuck zipper!
… no plucky pickles past this point
(#1) The pickle-pepper tale
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Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Language and plants, Language in advertising, Mantras, Music, Phallicity | 3 Comments »
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 »
