Archive for the ‘Language of advertising’ Category

Another dubious name

June 10, 2016

Passed on from Facebook posters by way of Chris Waigl, this storefront, with comments from readers about the store name Kum & Go:

(Note the use of rhyme and alliteration in the follow-ups.)

Another chapter in the annals of dubious and unfortunate names on this blog. In this case, you might have thought that a double entendre was intentional, a bit of playful naming to catch your eye and stick in your memory. But the company’s official story maintains otherwise, so (apparently)  it’s only accidentally risible.

(more…)

Two word-play cartoons

May 28, 2016

.Yesterday’s Bizarro, and a Liam Walsh cartoon from the May 30th New Yorker:

(#1)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s one in this strip — see this Page.)

(#2)

(more…)

Pebbles

May 17, 2016

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with neither Mother Goose nor any of her animals in it:

(#1)

To understand this strip, you have to  know about the varieties of Pebbles breakfast cereals — one of which is Fruity Pebbles. (And then, of course, you have to recognize fruit as an anti-gay slur and recognize the abbreviation LGBT.)

(more…)

Joe Orlando: a cartoonist and his sea-monkeys

April 22, 2016

The cartoonist’s art in a somewhat unexpected place: an ad for Sea-Monkeys from the 1960s, showing a Sea-Monkey family of three:

The ad turned up in the midst of a fascinating, intricate NYT Magazine piece by Jack Hitt on Sunday the 17th, “The Battle Over the Sea-Monkey Fortune: A former 1960s bondage-film actress is waging legal combat with a toy company for ownership of her husband’s mail-order aquatic-pet empire”. There’s a lot here, but some highlights:

(more…)

Meet the Wieners, stampeding in buns

April 18, 2016

The news for penises: dachshunds and hot dogs, in a festival of phallicity.

From AdWeek back on 2/1/16, a delightful story, “Heinz Releases the (Adorable) Hounds in This Hilarious Super Bowl Commercial: David creates ‘weiner stampede’ [on the spelling weiner, see note below] to promote ketchup” By Kristina Monllos:

(#1)

(more…)

nookie

April 13, 2016

(On sexual vocabulary and its uses, but not in street language.)

Back a few days, in my sexy-playful posting “Magnitude boys” (underwear with captions), the Rocky character calls out (to two other men), “Move over boys, Daddy needs nookie!” What he wants is sexual intercourse, but he’s saying this playfully. He could have used much earthier and more direct phrasing (and he could also have been more specific about what role he wanted to take in intercourse), but he chose instead to use the lighthearted, even sweet, word nookie (variant spellings nooky, nookey, nookee).

Three things about the word: its range of meanings (narrowly focused on sexual matters); its etymology (disputed and unclear, but culturally fascinating); and its penumbra of associations, which makes it sound “cute”, so much so that it can be used (albeit still with sexual overtones) in the name of an Australian brand of clothing for hip young women, Nookie Nation (with its cheeky mascot, the Nookie Girl).

(more…)

Color scheme

April 2, 2016

(Men in underwear, but no actual street talk or X-rated images.)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad (with a caption of mine):

(#1)

Ben ran through the
Watermelon patch in his
Fruity jockstrap, hunting for
His boy Dino, Di, Princess Di!, in
Diamond Dash Pink briefs that
Drove Ben crazy for him,
Slim on slim, take a
Bite of the fruit, baby.

Ben’s boy Di, in the Supawear Diamond Dash Brief in Pink:

(#2)

Like the caption says, slim on slim.

DO NOT WRITE ME about the problems with the image of a black man on a field of watermelon slices. I will write separately about the racist stereotype and its long, very sad, history, and about street vendors’ calls, the watermelon woman in Porgy and Bess, Herbie Hancock’s jazz standard “Watermelon Man”, Melvin van Peebles’s in-your-face movie Watermelon Man, and more. I frankly can’t imagine what was going through the DJ ad writers’ heads when they put together the image in #1, which would have been merely heavily gay-sexual (like premium men’s underwear ads in general) and playful (with its outrageous colors and its in-your-face flaunting of the anti-gay slur fruit). if it hadn’t been for those watermelon slices. I was, in fact, affronted, but I’ll put off explaining why to another posting. This one is for a fantasy pairing of two gay men, as in the caption.

(more…)

The dubious commercial names files

March 22, 2016

Following on my posting earlier today on “Dubious commercial names” (about Hand Job Nails & Spa on Castro St. in San Fracisco, whose name might be dubious but was transparently intended as a winking double entendre), two Facebook comments with other commercial names that are sexually suggestive:

from Mike McKinley: I have a niece who does “Brazilans.” I told her she should open a salon and call it “The Muff Dive.”

from Christopher Walker: Years ago I clipped a brief item from the newspaper that the Secretary of State in Illinois had refused incorporation papers to a prospective business to be called the Eat It Raw Discotheque

And then back to three earlier postings on this blog with dubious commercial names, ranging from the flagrantly transgressive to the winkingly suggestive to the possibly innocent in intent.

(more…)

Annals of dubious commercial names

March 22, 2016

Found yesterday, in a search for something quite different, a notice for a spa named Hand Job, 565 Castro St. (between 19th & 18th), SF. Yes, provocatively named, right there in the Castro:

(#1)

This is primarily a mani/pedi (or mani pedi or mani-pedi) place, offering manicures and pedicures, but with other services as well — including massage, but only therapeutic massages, not the sexual massage that might be suggested by the use of hand job ‘manual masturbation’.

(more…)

Annals of naming (and lexical semantics and libfixes)

March 22, 2016

Today’s Zippy wanders across a surreal landscape, with at least two items of linguistic interest: the name of the character Premium Cruiseline (with its modifying noun premium) and the form poodle-napping (with the libfix -nap):

These ingredients, in order:

(more…)