Archive for the ‘Alliteration’ Category
August 9, 2023
(Intimate talk about male bodies, mostly mine, in plain terms, though not so racy as to ban kids — but I will freely use the vernacular noun and verb piss, nouns dick and balls. In any case, some people will find the topic of crotch odor unsavory.)
I’d hoped to be able to post about meat dreams and crotch pong on the same day — just for the sound of the two off-color compounds together, but meat dreams took a lot longer than I’d expected (I somehow ended up in the 16th century), so crotch pong had to wait a day. So it goes.
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Posted in Alliteration, Assonance, Clothing, Compounds, Dialects, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Signs and symbols, Slang, Smell, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | 1 Comment »
July 31, 2022
On this blog, a Bob Richmond comment on my 7/29 posting “Many a pickle packs a pucker”, with an old dirty joke that turns on the line “I stuck my dick in the pickle slicer” — with Bob noting, “I’m sure Arnold can provide an appropriate grammatical analysis”. The hinge of the joke is a pun on pickle slicer, which is ambiguous between ‘a device for slicing pickles’ and ‘someone who slices pickles (esp. as a job)’. You don’t need a syntactician to tell you that, but what I can tell you is that this isn’t some isolated fact about the expression pickle slicer, but is part of a much larger pattern that a linguist like me can bring to explicit awareness for you, so that you can appreciate something of the system of English that you (in some sense) know, but only tacitly, implicitly.
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Posted in Alliteration, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Compounds, Constructions, Derivation, Jokes, Language play, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Morphology and syntax, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Syntax, Synthetic compounds | 9 Comments »
July 29, 2022
O pickle, my love / What a beautiful pickle you are!
Blame it on Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy on Twitter), who took us down to the pickle plant in Santa Barbara on 7/18, citing these 5 delights, with their label descriptions:
Unbeetables (pickled beets with unbeatable heat) – pun on unbeatable
Carriots of Fire (pickled carrots to light your torch) – punning allusion to the film Chariots of Fire
¡Ay Cukarambas! (dill-icious spicy dill pickle spears) – complex portmanteau of the American Spanish exclamation ¡ay caramba! and the noun cuke ‘cucumber’
Asparagusto (pickled asparagus with a kick) – portmanteau of asparagus and gusto
Bread & Buddhas (semi-sweet bread & butter pickles) – pun on bread and butter (pickles)
(#1)
Pickles are automatically phallicity territory, and the Pacific Pickle Works in Santa Barbara CA (website here) doesn’t shy away from their penis potential, augmenting it by references to phallic carrots, asparagus spears, and unpickled cucumbers. If you have the eye for it, we all live in Penis Town.
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Posted in Alliteration, Double entendres, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language play, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Poetry, Portmanteaus, Puns, Rhyme, Slogans, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
July 26, 2022
… What a delicious Tweety you are!
The 7/24 Mother Goose and Grimm strip, with a police line-up of cartoon cats, for little Tweety to pick out the threatening pussy cat that he thought he saw:
(#1) The potential pussy predator perps on parade, left to right: 1 the Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss picture book), 2 Stimpy (Ren & Stimpy tv animation), 3 Sylvester (Looney Tunes film animation), 4 Catbert (Dilbert strip), 5 Attila (MGG strip — note self-reference), 6 Garfield (Garfield strip)
The number of domestic cats in cartoons is mind-boggling — there are tons of lists on the net — and then there are all those other cartoon felines: tigers, panthers, lions, leopards, and so on. Out of these thousands, the cops rounded up the six guys above — all male, as nearly all cartoon cats are, despite the general cultural default that dogs are male, cats female — as the miscreant. (It might be that male is the unmarked sex for anthropomorphic creatures in cartoons as for human beings in many contexts; females appear only when their sex is somehow especially relevant to the cartoon.) And that miscreant, the smirking Sylvester, is the only one of the six known as a predator on birds, though in real life, domestic cats are stunningly effective avian predators, killing billions of birds annually.
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Posted in Alliteration, Books, Child language, Comic conventions, Constituency, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Nonsense, Parody, Phonology, Poetry, Syntax, Understanding comics, Variation | 2 Comments »
June 17, 2022
(Warning: some discussion of sexual slang in a serious but straightforward tone.)
From the annals of masculine meat holidays in my country, a Blackstone tv spot “Father’s Day: Griddle Envy” (first aired 6/1/22), in which the announcer projects macho good-buddy enthusiasm for a Blackstone griddle as a Father’s Day gift (6/19 this year, just two days away! And the next American MascMeatHol, Independence Day, aka the Fourth of July, is only two weeks away):
(#1) The envy-inciting appliance: a Blackstone 4-burner 36″-griddle propane-fired cooking station with side shelves (about $300); you can view the ad at this site
From the alliterative text:
Give him what he really wants … Your Dad can be the master of the meat, the king of the cookout, the sultan of steak
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Posted in Alliteration, Double entendres, Holidays, Language and food, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language play, Masculinity, Phallicity | 1 Comment »
November 20, 2021
From Ann Gulbrandsen (in Sweden) on Facebook today, a wonderful still life of earthy carrots:
Ann wrote (in Swedish; what follows is the Google Translate version in English, which is, um, flatfooted, with one paraphrase by me):
Thought to pick up the last small harvest of carrots when it will be minus degrees next week. I clearly underestimated what was [underground]. May be cooking with carrots [Sw. matlagning med morötter] a couple of weeks ahead.
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Posted in Alliteration, Idioms, Language and food, Language and plants, Language play, Photography, Slogans | 1 Comment »
August 9, 2021
(It’s all about penises, with mildly raunchy playfulness in content and language, so not to everyone’s taste, but requiring (I think) no more warning than that.)
A Dog Named Trouser. It begins with jocular exchanges on Facebook on 8/6:
MV: If they’d just told me there was a job where you can meet a dog named Trouser, I’d have picked that sooner. [MV has been selling her drawings of dogs and cats]
RW: Does he pant? [Imagine everyone groaning at the pun on pants ‘short, quick breaths’ vs. pants ‘trousers’.]
CC: Is there also a snake named Trouser? [first playful slang: trouser snake ‘penis’]
AO: That’s a trout, I think. [shifting right to our topic: trouser trout ‘penis’]
AZ > AO : Snake, trout, eel, they’re all adorable trouser-dwellers… [trouser eel is also possible] Entertaining, easily available, and delicious. And the Trout is lyrical [allusion to Schubert’s music].
AO: Alliterative, even! [trouser trout, tripping on TRs]
AZ [shifting from the common noun trouser trout to a proper name, and slipping into journalist register] > AO: Breaking news: Trouser Trout, acknowledged master of moose-knuckle modeling, and oldest recorded practitioner of this niche craft, died in a freak runway accident yesterday at the age of 87, according to his management agency. Mr. Trout, born Regenbogen Forelle [Gm. ‘rainbow trout’] on the Gallatin River in Yellowstone Park [the Gallatin provides excellent trout fishing], assumed his professional name at the age of 17, when a photographer, coming across him on the street, recognized the man’s potential and featured him in a spread jointly published by Look and Physique. After a private memorial service, he will be returned to the Gallatin River for interment.
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Posted in Alliteration, Language play, Phallicity, Puns, Slang, Style and register | 2 Comments »
July 30, 2020
Today’s Zippy takes us to a perished donut shop (in Niceville FL), which gives him play for his well-known fascination with the sheer sounds of words:
(#1)
In panel 1, it’s alliteration with /d/: defunct donut dispensary with dismay. In the other two panels, with /ɛks/ (or with a more reduced vowel): examined the extent of extinguished excretions … not exasperated but exuberant. (In the latter case, the choice of vocabuary items is seriously strained, to get alliterative words.)
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Posted in Alliteration, Diners, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Quotations, Stock expressions | Leave a Comment »
December 24, 2019
Yes, cheap louche wordplay, and for Christmas. Manifested in the playful and deeply carnal CGI artwork of Vadim Temkin, in his alphabet of gay sex, where the letter shapes are formed by men’s bodies and body parts, many engaged in a variety of intense sexual acts.
This material, chock-full of sex talk in street language, is massively unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest, even without the images rife with male genitalia (which are in a posting on AZBlogX, 12/21/19, “Surprise! Vadim’s gay alphabet”).
Then, though the alphabet began merely as a set of 26 images, it came to me as worked into another genre: these images on the faces of surprise cubes, a set of 8 cubes which arrived a few days ago as Vadim’s New Year’s 2020 gift.
But first, the images, especially the one for the letter X, “eXcited Xmas eXhibitionist”, showing a well-hung Santa, with a Christmas wreath hung on his thick, solid erection (fuzzed over for WordPress, but inspectable on AZBlogX), while Santa himself hangs on a St. Andrew’s Cross, welcoming restraint, abuse, and pain. It’s a complex message.
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Posted in Alliteration, Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, My life, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Toys and games | 10 Comments »
August 11, 2018
… front-accented (especially trochaic) tetrametric, in fact. Separately and in concert. Notably combined in
purple rainbow puppy pen (SW SW SW S)
which is the household name for this object, recently acquired by Kim Darnell at a local vet’s office and now added to my cabinet of curiosities display:
(#1)
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Posted in Alliteration, Ambiguity, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Poetic form, Pseudonyms, Rainbow | Leave a Comment »
