Archive for the ‘Language play’ Category
March 16, 2025
After six days of foolishness, back on 1/19, in my posting “Hats off to vampires!”, Bizarro produced what I supposed to be the last of the Waynoratu Nosferamanteaus. But yesterday (3/15), two months later, the vampire arose once more, dancing across the stage of our imagination:
I suppose this was irresistible, but the TU of Nosferatu beckons far too seductively (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
We might now get
Nosferatuber, Nosferatumor, Nosferatush, Nosferatutor, Nosferatutti-fruitti, …
NosferaTurin, NosferaTuring, NosferaTurkey, NosferaTuscany, NosferaTutsi, …
And endless more, streaming out the door and flying bat-like towards the moon.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »
March 15, 2025
π 🥧 π 🥧 π 🥧 for yesterday (mammoths lumber along majestically, and they are often regrettably late for appointments), 3/14, which was Pi Day in my country, and for some years now, also — delicious pun — Pie Day in many places (so inviting a cascade of formulaic word play: pie in the sky, a piece of the pie, easy as pie, even pie chart)
I’ll jump right into things with a charming and heartfelt Facebook message yesterday from my old friend Paula Stout, who many years ago lived in Palo Alto, but has since moved to the great American Southwest — on a ranch outside Greenville TX, east of Dallas-Fort Worth:
Happy Ecstatic Friday on Pi Day (3.14)
We were in town today, where every store treated the day as a celebration. They were giving away apple pies, chicken pot pies, [pizza pies,] and even eskimo pies. With big smiles, balloons and jubilation.
And it struck me that we are seeing history unfold.
1988 was the first “Pi Day” for a marketing campaign in SF, iirc. Before that, only we geeks and friends of the wonderful Kevin McHargue (who was born on this day) partied it up
And now, here we are. A national holiday of pies!
As David Mamet, renowned playwright, once noted, “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
There’s enough stress brewing in the world, y’all, let us pray he is right and there is pie enough to combat it.
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Posted in Allusion, Events and occasions, Language and food, Language play, Mathematics, Movies and tv, My life, Parody, Puns, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »
February 23, 2025
Or: who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
A report from Monday 2/17, when in the morning, while getting breakfast, I must have knocked my right hand against something with a sharp edge to it and nicked it (without any pain, so I didn’t realize it had happened) — because, when I looked down at the first knuckle, a bright bead of blood had welled up and was about to run down my hand. I grabbed some kleenex, wrapped it around the wound, and went to the bathroom to get a bandaid to cover the wound until the blood had clotted. (Clotting takes a while because I take a blood thinner — for atrial fibrillation, which seems to have vanished — which also means I have tons of bruises where I knock up against things with one bodypart or another. Medical treatments, side effects, it’s a balancing act.)
The day ticked on. Late in the afternoon, checking my Facebook page before getting up to assemble some dinner, I looked down, and my right hand was entirely covered with blood, which was streaming onto the pad under my keyboard. Onto my mousepad. And onto the tabletop. Blood everywhere, Jesus fuck. I must have knocked the scab loose against something, again without any warning pain, it was so minor. (No, I had not lost sensation in my fingers, that would have been truly scary.)
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Posted in Formulaic language, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Language play, My life, Narrative, Quotations | 2 Comments »
February 10, 2025
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.
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Stockings, Zeugma | 4 Comments »
February 7, 2025
A Sandra Boynton turkey cartoon from 1980, showing a (polite) offer framed as a request in the form of a question, using the formula May I VP?:
(#1) The exchange — with the offer made by a turkey who appears to be an attendant at a women’s checkroom (see the window in the background, with women’s dresses on hangers in the room behind the window) — follows the polite service script (involving an attendant and a customer, female in this case) in the first two panels, then runs off the rails in the third panel, where an ambiguity in the verb take rears up; the turkey assumes ownership of the coat and walks off with it as their own, leaving a nonplussed coatless customer
Three things here: the turkeys (who are a long-standing thing for Sandra Boynton); the polite service script (which incorporates conventionalized versions of some very indirect speech acts); and the ambiguity of take (which provides a surprise shift from the sense appropriate to the service script to an outrageous and dumbfounding larcenous sense).
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Posted in Allusion, Books, Cartoonists, Jokes, Language and animals, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Politeness, Pragmatics, Semantics, Social interactions, Speech acts | 1 Comment »
February 5, 2025
A remarkable John O’Brien cartoon in the 2/3/25 New Yorker, in which a cowboy whips his lariat in pursuit of a cow, with a stark desert landscape of mesas and buttes outlined behind them:
(#1) But wait! That line in the cartoon is both the lariat — the figure — and the outline of the landscape — the (back)ground — so that looking at the cartoon, you perceive the one, then the other, shifting from one to another: what is figure, what s ground?
It’s a percept-shifting visual illusion, exploiting an ambiguous image, in particular a figure-ground ambiguity. Here done as a joke in a cartoon, a visual parallel to what I’ve called sense-shifting pun jokes.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Jokes, Perception, Puns, Visual puns | Leave a Comment »
February 1, 2025
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to welcome the month of February, the month of Lincoln Darwin Day and of Valentine’s Day (this year, Mardi Gras doesn’t come until early in March)
It’s Rabbit Day, and what happens to be at the top of my posting queue has nothing to do with rabbits; it’s a Bizarro cartoon (from yesterday, 1/31) with a tasty culinary artmanteau:
(#1) The portmanteau Michelancho = Michelangelo (the 16th-century Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarotti, painter of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome) + ancho (the dried poblano chili / chile pepper) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
(an alternative culinary artmanteau: (Michelangelo) Anchorotti = ancho + Buonarotti)
(plus, I note that #1 is about Michelangelo the Ancho Honcho, the Man of La Mancho, also one of the lesser-known film Manchowiczes, etc.)
Now some brief notes on anchos, and then a surprise finale in which today’s rabbits get cooked with anchos, in the triumph of culinary artistry conejo en adobo with red chiles, which you can think of as Rabbit Michelancho.
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Posted in Art, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns, Spanish | 4 Comments »
January 19, 2025
For yesterday, 1/18, in Bizarro, the 6th and I suppose last Waynoratu Nosferamanteau:
The male nosferatu (holding a wineglass of what is presumably blood, and chatting with his young female companion at some sort of vampiric meet-and-greet) seems to be wearing a Canadian toque (= tuque), with pom-pom, to warm his head during the cold dark nights in his coffin (yes, it’s very silly) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
The nosferamanteau is Nosferatoque = Nosferatu + toque. As for the hat, from NOAD:
noun toque: [a] a woman’s small hat, typically having a narrow, closely turned-up brim. [b] historical a small cap or bonnet having a narrow brim or no brim. [c] Canadian a close-fitting knitted hat, often with a tassel or pom-pom on the crown. [variant of tuque] [d] a tall white hat with a full pouched crown, worn by chefs.
(The heart tattoo with A B O in it, for the blood types A B AB and O, is a nice touch.)
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Posted in Clothing, Events and occasions, Hats, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, My life, People, Portmanteaus, Puns | 3 Comments »
January 18, 2025
In the 1/17 Zippy strip, Z confronts a pair of clay wraiths, lifeless in body and dead in soul, and tries desperately to interject fun — levity — into the conversation; to counterpose silliness, play, and sheer joy against the dead weight of the world’s pain, suffering, and injustice; to plead for humanity over humorlessness; to advocate for delight, even in the smallest everyday things:
In English, Belgium is a funny word, odd, darkly edgy, and absurd all at once; Lewis Carroll picked the name boojum for his ridiculously dangerous creature in The Hunting of the Snark to capture this strange blend of resonances.
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Posted in Art, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Play, Poetry | 2 Comments »
January 17, 2025
Very briefly: in entry 5 in the Waynoratu Nosferamanteau marathon, today, two anti-establishment vampires greet one another:
A 1960s-style hippie on the right (peace symbol, long hair, headband, etc.), a 1970s-style Johnny Rotten punk rocker on the left (anarchist symbol, spiky hair, studded collar. etc.)
Meanwhile, the punmanteau is a complex one: Johnny Rotten wrapped around nosfer– (representing Nosferatu)
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Posted in Clothing, Identities, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Portmanteaus, Puns, Signs and symbols, Social life | Leave a Comment »
