This is a complicated background to a mishearing posting that has itself turned out to be more complex than I first imagined — a mishearing of the title word in the song “Cardinal” as recorded in 2024 by Kacey Musgraves. This posting is about the song; the titular bird, the northern cardinal; KM the singer-songwriter; KM’s wonderful performance of the song; and the song’s moving background story, inspired by the late country / folk singer John Prine. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Language and music’ Category
My accomplishment for 2/25
February 27, 2026My signal accomplishment for this day was an hour of singing Sacred Harp hymns along with the wonderful YouTube videos of All-Ireland Sacred Harp conventions of years past. Eventually, I’ll celebrate just one song, SH276 Bridgewater, which is such a favorite that it has on occasion triggered my slipping into a state of ecstasy.
The power of a tiny prick
December 28, 2023(Vast amounts of penis-talk, and frank discussion of sexual acts, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Appearing in the last few days, a spot tv commercial for Roman — or Ro, or ro — generic ED (erectile dysfunction) medication. It goes by very fast, but involves the administration of some medication with a needle, accompanied by a breathless voiceover, approximately:
Who would have thought that a little tiny prick could be so powerful?
I’m sure about little tiny prick / tiny little prick; in the sociosexual culture that surrounds me (in which big dicks are highly valued), my dick (which is on the lower end of normal) is pegged, sometimes contemptuously, as small (I’m happy with it, and I have some fans, but I’m understandably a bit sensitive on this point); and, in addition, like most men of my advanced age, I’m erectilely dysfunctional — hardonless — and have been for about 20 years, something I’m not particularly sensitive about (since during this time all my sex has been solitary, and there’s been a hell of a lot of it — one to three times a day, prompted by my fantasies, my dick gets a bit firm, my balls get tight, and I shoot, whoopee, like Billy the Kid) — and I wouldn’t want to add a powerful drug to the roughly 20 medications I’m taking now (but I appreciate that other guys might be anxious to get it up to please their partners and ashamed when they can’t, so ED medication is a wonderful thing at the personal level, and also to be applauded as a genuine social good).
But the commercial, with its obtrusive crude pun — prick, vulgar slang for ‘penis’ and for ‘contemptible man’ — on prick ‘a piercing, puncture’, what about the commercial?
The ads for Roman products that I’d experienced up to this one had all been serious, comforting, and reassuring, offering treatments for premature ejaculation, hair loss, and more, as well as for hardonlessness. But this one had to be a joke, one that Adweek hadn’t yet gotten around to reporting on.
Well, it wouldn’t be Roman’s first ED joke ad. There’s their 2017 number “Thinly Veiled Metaphors”. It’s a hoot.
Pandering to the bass
June 6, 2021About a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 5/29, which turns on the title phrase pandering to the bass being understood as a pun:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
We are to understand pandering to the bass as a pun on pandering to the base (which has become a stock expression in political contexts), and, given the image and text of the cartoon, as involving bass (/bes/ rather than /bæs/) ‘someone who plays the bass guitar in a rock band’ (rather than in one of 7 or 8 other possible senses).
Annals of appalling food, dessert division
August 28, 2018My most recent appalling food posting — 6/20/18, “Annals of appalling food” — looked past the regrettable food of fast-food restaurants to other regrettable savory food (chicken fried bacon, in that case) for home cooking. There’s a whole subgenre devoted to appalling things to do with hot dogs. And another subgenre devoted to regrettable salads, typically combining sweet and savory elements in an uneasy union, as in the “Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise” of William Bolcomb’s satirical song.
Then there are appalling desserts, which reach beyond the usual components of sweet pastry, cake, pastry creams, jams, fruit, nuts, and sweet dessert sauces (chocolate, caramel, butterscotch) to the playful incorporation of ingredients like breakfast cereal, candy, marshmallows, Jello, whipped topping, pudding, and nut butters.
Which brought me, some weeks ago, to a recipe on the YellowBlissRoad site for, omigod, Twix Apple Fluff Salad (hat tip to Kim Darnell).
Hybrid referent, portmanteau name
July 24, 2018On the NPR word game quiz show Says You! broadcast by KQED-FM on Sunday afternoon (the 22nd): a “bluff round” over the word flumpet. One team of panelists is offered three definitions for the word from the other team, in this case (paraphrasing, since I can’t find the podcast of the original):
1: a lard-based dumpling (no doubt suggested by the /ʌmp/ and the /l/ in flumpet and dumpling)
2: a frowsy (or frowzy), loose woman, and by extension flowers that are wilted, no longer fresh (no doubt suggested by a rhyming association of flumpet with strumpet)
3: a musical instrument combining a flugelhorn and a trumpet (a portmanteau of the words flugelhorn and trumpet, which share the letter U in their spelling: FL – U – MPET)
The three panelists on the other team were each given a card; one card had a definition for flumpet from some reputable source, and the other two said BLUFF. These panelists were given some time, during a musical interlude, to make up plausible definitions. Then the first panel had to decide which definition was the right one.
Punk piano
February 7, 2017
The dobro
January 3, 2013NYT obit (by Bill Friskics-Warren) for Mike Auldridge on the 1st:
Mike Auldridge Dies at 73; Lent Dobro Fresh Elegance
Mike Auldridge, a guitarist who became one of the most distinctive dobro players in the history of country and bluegrass music while widening its popularity among urban audiences, died on Saturday at his home in Silver Spring, Md.
Ah, the dobro. I assumed that it was originally a folk instrument, from some Slavic land, with a name in the local language. Well, not quite, as the obit went on to explain:
A resophonic (or resonating) acoustic guitar, the dobro produces sound by means of one or more spun metal cones instead of a wooden sound board. (The instrument’s name is a contraction of Dopera and brothers. Dopera was the surname of the Slovak-American brothers who patented an early version of the instrument in 1928.)
The name is what Ben Zimmer has labeled an acroblend, a combination of acronym and portmanteau (Ben uses blend to cover intentional combinations as well as inadvertent ones), for which I’d prefer the label acromanteau, or — naming the type from a prominent example — Nabisco (originally from National Biscuit Company)
Bear music
July 25, 2010Joan Armatrading was on NPR’s Morning Edition Sunday today, which got me reflecting on her song “Eating the Bear”, from the 1981 album Walk Under Ladders. That led me to follow up the music of ruin (here) by attending to bear music, in particular the source of yet another formula (la, sir, how you do go on!), the one in:
Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.
(roughly ‘win some, lose some’, but with more of an edge), as in the title of the 1974 album by rock/folk singer Ian Matthews (in a variant with and between the two clauses).
In Armatrading’s version, the clauses are inverted and put in the future:
Some days the bear will eat you, some days you’ll eat the bear.
offering the hope of triumph; in fact, in Armatrading’s song the singer eats the bear, hence the title.
The music of ruin
July 23, 2010I was checking my iTunes to see if I already had a version of the “Turkish March” from Beethoven’s incidental music to The Ruin of Athens, Op. 113 (I’ll get to why I was engaged in this search later). Turns out I had four tracks with ruin in the track name or the album name:
“Ruint”, by Johnny Hodges with Duke Ellington, from Side by Side (see my ruint posting);
“Ruiner”, by Nine Inch Nails, from The Downward Spiral
“Don’t Ruin Our Happy Home”, from the “Odds & Ends” volume of Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman
“Ruination Day (Part 2)”, by Gillian Welch, from Time (The Revelator) (Have I mentioned how wonderful I think Gillian Welch is?)
And now one recording of the “Turkish March”, with more to come.
But five tracks scarcely scratch a micrometer into the surface of the ruin phenomenon; it turns out that the word is just huge in the music world.