Archive for the ‘Language play’ Category
November 24, 2023
(About a gay porn flick, with naked hunky models displaying their bodies, but no actual genitals on display or descriptions of man-on-man sex, just some vulgar slang and reference to ejaculation. Still, not to everyone’s taste.)
In my e-mail on 11/22, a Falcon | Naked Sword mailing for its 2023 Christmas gay porn movie, whose title is a cheap raunchy pun:
The guys with the Xmas goodies (I’ve fuzzed out their pornstar dicks for WordPress modesty): Beau Butler (who’s been featured a number of times on this blog; here displaying his pornstar butt), Damian Night (new here), and Reign (from my 2/20/22 posting “Men’s Briefs: the locked gaze”)
My interest at the moment is not really in the flick or in the actors, but in the pun in the title. (“How like a linguist”, you are saying, “to disregard the hot stuff and focus on the wording”. As it happens, I’m entirely capable of getting off on the hot stuff while making mental notes on the wording.) But I will post Falcon’s publicity for the flick for you, because it actually describes the background plot, without the sex-act by sex-act retelling of the individual scenes:
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Posted in Conversion, Gay porn, Metaphor, Music, Nouning, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
November 20, 2023
Briefly noted, this Leigh Rubin cartoon passed on to me by Susan Fischer on Facebook today:
To understand this, you need to recognize a bull and a young goat
Two stock expressions, both of them similes, lie behind the two images of creatures entering retail establishments: like a bull in a china shop, like a kid in a candy store. The two ideas can appear as an explicit comparison, in a simile with like; or in a metaphor, with the comparison implicit: you are a (veritable) bull in a china shop; they were (proverbial) kids in a candy store.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Figurative language, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Puns, Semantics, Simile, Stock expressions | 3 Comments »
November 18, 2023
… visiopun being my coinage referring to a punning word presented visually — not actually said or printed, but alluded to by some striking image, usually with some lead-on hinting at the pun. An extremely simple, utterly flat-footed example of my own devising:
What do you call a US infantryman from World War I?
(#1)
The image is of a small male figure made of dough, so the punning word is doughboy. (Yes, the Pillsbury Doughboy. I simplified things by using an existing image.)
Now to a complex visiopun passed on to me on Facebook today by Emily Menon Bender (the source is cited in the image):
(#2)
The image is of a pie in the shape of an octopus, so the punning word is octopie (/áktǝpàj/ in my AmE variety), a play on octopi, one of the plural forms of octopus. Cute.
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Posted in Etymology, Inflection, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Usage advice, Usage attitudes | 1 Comment »
November 15, 2023
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro hinges on a bit of language play that cuts across two categories of play: it’s a pun based on a portmanteau, a punmanteau:
(#1) A cummerbund in the shape of a Bundt cake (Bundt punning on bund), with a name that’s a portmanteau of the names for those two things: cummerbund + Bundt (cake) = cummerbundt (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
(Note: The Cumberbatch is something else entirely.)
(Further note: Wayno’s title for this one is “Frosted Formalism”, alluding to the icing (aka frosting) on the cummerbundt in the cartoon — though Bundt cakes are not necessarily frosted.)
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Language and culture, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | 2 Comments »
October 27, 2023
A wonderful wordless cartoon by Liana Finck from the 10/30/23 issue of the New Yorker presents a challenge in cartoon understanding: what do you have to know and what do you have to recognize in the cartoon if you’re going to understand what’s going on in it and why that’s funny?
An intense confrontation between a doctor and a vampire: the doctor seeks to repel the vampire. while the vampire, in turn, seeks to repel the doctor; each is shielding their eyes, to avoid seeing the repellent brandished by the other (the crucifix threatening the vampire, the apple threatening the doctor); the confrontation appears to be a standoff
A full appreciation of this comical Mexican standoff requires that you recognize the two characters, one drawn from the real world, the other from a fictive world of popular culture, somehow (absurdly) joined, indeed frozen, in mortal combat — which means recognizing why the crucifix is a threat to the vampire (this requires your knowing some vampire lore) and why the apple is a threat to the doctor (this requires your recognizing the joke’s inspired mainspring, a subtle pun on a proverb in English). Truly awesome.
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Posted in Books, Fiction, Formulaic language, Implicature, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Proverbs, Puns, Semantics, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
October 22, 2023
Promised on 10/3 (yes, 19 days ago), in my posting “coming soon, two pun cartoons” (by Kaamran Hafeez and Tom Chitty), now realized: the puns hìp replácement (from KH, on the model híp replàcement) and you look like you’ve seen a goat (from TC, on the model you look like you’ve seen a ghost) — both of them (phonologically) imperfect, but close.
(Both KH and TC have Pages on this blog: KH here; TC here.)
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Posted in Idioms, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Stock expressions | 1 Comment »
October 13, 2023
In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, really wizard vases from the Harry Pottery Barn:
A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Harry Pottery = Harry Potter + Pottery: vases in the style of J. K. Rowling (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)
(plus my play on wizard in really wizard vases. From NOAD:
adj. wizard: British informal, dated wonderful; excellent: how absolutely wizard! | I’ve just had a wizard idea.
A little pun to go along with the extra POP in the Pottery Barn reference.)
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Posted in Books, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »
October 13, 2023
This remarkable photo left me dumbstruck yesterday when Monica Macaulay passed it along on Facebook, having gotten it from the Art Deco FB group on 10/10:
The Pickle Sisters, a vaudeville group from the 1920s (photo: eBay.com)
[Here I repeat a note from the last posting I was able to manage, the 10/7 posting “THE shirts”, six days ago:
Note: this is massively a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting, indeed something of a celebration of my being able to post anything at all, not to mention through enormous pain in my swollen fingers. But no details about any of that here; at the moment, I truly am pleased to be still alive and want to show that I can manage a posting.
This caution applies fully to this Pickle Sisters posting.]
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Posted in Clothing, Costumes, Folklore, Language and food, Language and gender, Language play, Music, Phallicity, Pop culture, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
October 6, 2023
(I am wretchedly sick again and in great pain, for complicated reasons I won’t explain here. Had nevertheless hoped to show that I could do a posting using only my damaged right hand. This is as much as I’ve been able to get together, but I have to admit temporary defeat on the larger project, so this is another promissory note about pun cartoons.)
Through friends on Facebook yesterday, a Chuck Ingwersen cartoon with a cascade of four flagrantly imperfect puns — with a fish theme:
The pun census: halibut punning on hell of it; cod punning on god; haddock punning on headache; herring punning on hearing
A couple of these puns are phonologically very distant, but they can be understood easily because the context provides rich clues: halibut, in particular, is in the context of the idiom ‘(do something) just for the hell of it‘.
Though the word play is intricate, it’s merely phonological: despite the piscine theme of the puns, the cartoon is firmly located in just one world, that of diners in a restaurant; the characters are not also various species of fish, interacting in a metaphorical world. This isn’t a defect; almost all pun cartoons are merely phonological. But a few are also what I’ve come to call semiotically satisfying, evoking a parallel metaphorical world that complicatedly maps onto the base world. More on this below (I’m always on the lookout for semiotically satisfying cartoons).
Posted in Comic conventions, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 2 Comments »
September 25, 2023
A brief follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Bonus letter Z!”, about a 2007 (Steve) Martin & (Roz) Chast alphabet book, with couplets by Martin for each letter and complex full-page illustrations by Chast, both of them drunk on words. The delicious words, poured out by the dozens, are one thing attracting kids. And then there are gross bits salted here and there; Martin & Chast know their audience.
Meanwhile, this is once again a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting. I mysteriously recovered, quite dramatically, from the mysterious illness that afflicted me so terribly a little while back, only to slide into nasty disabling osteoarthritism, with the lower-body joints inflamed enough to make walking painful and the joints in both hands inflamed enough to make my poor hands almost unusable (hard to pick up my morning pills, very hard to get breakfast and clean up afterwards). So: not a whole lot of typing.
But on to more pleasant things.
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Posted in Books, Language and the body, Language play, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
