Bubbled up recently on Facebook and elsewhere, references to two chapters in the history of American advertising: Interwoven-brand stockings as icons of male sexiness, first in the 1920s and 30s, then for Interwoven Esquire socks in the 1970s.
Archive for the ‘Language in advertising’ Category
The two ages of Interwoven sock ads
February 10, 2025Stuck in the middle with you
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
Slip into a plush penguin
November 26, 2024From Chris Ambidge (one of the Wardens of the Spheniscid Zarchives) on Facebook this morning:
(#1) [CA > AZ:] Arnold! Have you considered … penguin slippers? Keeping Feathers McGraw underfoot might be the best way to make sure he doesn’t get into mischief
From the Coddies website:
Coddies® Wallace & Gromit Feathers McGraw slippers:
Silent but villainous, Feathers McGraw is the ultimate plush slipper icon!
Slip into the soft embrace of Wallace & Gromit’s Feathers McGraw himself with Coddies’ new plush slippers, designed to capture the essence of Aardman’s criminal mastermind. They fit like a glove – not unlike the red rubber glove perched atop Feathers’ head – a disguise so brilliant in its simplicity that it once outwitted Wallace and even the local law enforcement.
JCL for Hump Day
September 18, 2024In recognition of Wednesday as Hump Day, I offer you (from today’s Pinterest mailing) a brief notice of some hump-worthy (verb hump: … 3 [with object] vulgar slang have sex with (NOAD)) young men in a vintage ad by J.C. Leyendecker (who appeared most recently on this blog in my 9/2 posting “Leyendecker Labor Day”):
A JCLÂ ad for Ivory Soap, set in an athletic homosocial space, the locker room showers (note the male buttocks, a recurrent object of JCL’s artistic — and presumably also personal — engagement).
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of checking-out going on in that shower room. No doubt dwelling on those “muscles … in perfect trim” and the “sweating skin” that has been cleansed “under the rushing water”.
Annals of mishearing: effing gee, the carpet store
September 16, 2024A frequently experienced tv commercial in recent days, encountered at first only through the audio, which I heard to be for a local carpet company called, apparently, effing gee or effing G, involving the verb F or eff /É›f/, an initialistic euphemism for fuck. Given my nature and my professional interest in taboo vocabulary, it would be fair to think of my perception as Freudian mishearing, of who knows what original. But, surely, a carpet company wouldn’t choose a name with fucking encoded in it, maybe playfully conveying that it was fucking good (though that would be a bold commercial move).
The next time I heard the ad, I understood the company name to be effigy, which is at least an English word (and not a swear), but baffling as a company name. Significantly, having heard the name originally as beginning with /ɛf/, that perception persisted.
Next time around, I shifted my perception to something more likely, in which /ɛf/ is in fact a letter name: FnG, that is F&G. This would be a common pattern in company names; a sampling of F&R companies:
F&R Auto Repair (Woodland CA), F&R Auto Sales (Hialeah FL), F&R Towing (San Jose CA), F&RÂ Engineering (Roanoke VA), F&R American Fine Fragrance (Winston Salem NC)
Finally, I looked at the screen, and saw that the company’s name was indeed initialistic, but was S&R, not F&R. /f/ and /s/ are minimally distinct acoustically, so are often confused in perception. My initial perception was skewed towards /f/ because of my bias towards fucking — and so towards fucking and effing — and once established that perception persisted, despite repetitions of /s/.
Put on some pants, ranger!
September 14, 2024Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s title: “Forestry Union Negotiations” — plays with the homophones bear and bare in a fresh way, turning on the fact that Smokey the Bear (in those American public service ads for fire safety) is in fact a National Park Service ranger (who happens also to be a talking bear), and so would be required to dress in ranger garb:
(#1) The cartoon, in which Smokey appears on duty with his shovel for fighting fires, but regrettably bare: sans hat and (AmE) pants — also shirt and boots (regulation NPS wear is a gray shirt and green pants) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Now: a little background on Smokey, followed by some other playing with bear and bare. (By the way, though these are homophones for many English speakers, including most Americans, there are English varieties in which they are distinct — but quite close phonetically, so the word play still works just fine.)
Queerios
September 8, 2024🎶 9/8 🎶, and it’s Antonin Dvořák’s birthday (in 1841); see my 1/27/24 posting “Spillville”, about Spillville IA and the Czech composer, with this note:
let me recommend the Wikipedia article on Dvořák, for its detailed telling of a remarkable life, of great talent, a lot of pluck, a fair amount of luck, generous humanity, and the benefit of champions, advocates on your behalf (in this case, primarily Johannes Brahms)
(with a reminder that tomorrow, 9/9, is Negation Day, on which we protest, in German: Nein! Nein!)
But now for something completely different, from the Gay & Fabulous site (brought to my Facebook page all the way from Oz by Ruth Lawrence this morning):
Leyendecker Labor Day
September 2, 2024From Tim Evanson on Facebook this morning:
It’s Labor Day in the United States.
Here is a Labor Day image by J.C. Leyendecker, the gay illustrator who was probably the greatest magazine cover artist of the early and mid 20th century. (Norman Rockwell blatantly copied him.)
(#1) [AZ:] JCL’s tribute to both masculinity and labor; labor is conventionally represented as a big muscular man in grimy work clothes, engaged in hard physical work, typically with a sledgehammer (as here) — as the cultural ideal of masculinity“The American Weekly” was a Sunday insert carried in nearly all American newspapers at the time.
To come: more on JCL; and more on US Labor Day images.
Labor Gay 2024
August 30, 2024(There will be nekkid guys and man-on-man sex, treated in street language, so this posting is not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Today is penultimate August (the first Emperor of Rome is about to leave the building); also the Friday before U.S. Labor Day (a day that for many people counts as the first of a 4-day holiday weekend marking the end of summer and oh yes, recognizing the labor movement); the day after we celebrate the beheading of John the Baptist (by Herod at the request of Salome, the story goes), popularly known as Head on a Platter Day; the birthday of one old friend from the late 1950s, Ellen Sulkis James; the day before the birthday of another such friend, Benita Bendon Campbell; and the occasion for the TitanMen firm to offer its annual Labor Gay sale, an occasion on which Men at Work on insertive man-on-man sex hawk gay porn (this year, we get the two stars of Breed Me Daddy), and for the GayEmpire firm to advertise its own Labor Gay sale (with an ad featuring the two stars of Hooking Up With Finn Harding). Something for everyone in there.
This year I’m going for the gay porn, mostly because it’s entertaining — there’s a lot that’s ridiculous in gay porn, so even videos I don’t find carnally moving can still be sources of pleasure — but partly because I’m in a light-hearted holiday mood, and partly because I want to lodge some accuracy in advertising complaints.