Archive for the ‘Puns’ Category
December 8, 2023
By Benjamin Schwartz in the 12/11/23 print issue of the New Yorker:
On first looking at the cartoon, we go to the faces, because faces are so socially important to human beings. There are two: a woman, speaking; and her male companion, the driver of the car they are in, his face turned to listen to her. She is voicing an observation (usually a complaint) that is conventionally and stereotypically taken be to common in intimate couples in our society, that the addressee is turning into — becoming, in significant ways — one of their own parents.
In any case, what we perceive at first is the passenger telling the driver: You’re turning into your mother, with inchoative turn into ‘become’.
But then we take in the rest of the drawing, where we see — surprise! — an old woman, up against the hood of the car, her hands up in the air, her cane flying into the air; the car has run into her. The passenger is in fact observing to the driver that he’s driving into the old woman, using one of the senses of motional turn into, with a complement referring to the end-point of the turn.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Argument structure, Jokes, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 1 Comment »
December 5, 2023
It’s a foggy day in Palo Alto town, on the anniversary of my return home from a Palo Alto rehab center on 12/5/20, after having given up drinking several weeks before, a decision that impelled me into Stanford hospital with alcohol withdrawal syndrome on 11/11; I was moved to the rehab center on 11/17, and then discharged into the world on 12/5, as a recovering alcoholic beginning a new life. So 12/5 is a kind of rebirth day for me.
12/5 comes in between the death days of two remarkable musicians: Frank Zappa on 12/4 and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on 12/6. This year Zappa’s death day was anticipated by Kyle Wohlmut’s posting, on Facebook on 12/3, this inspired digital creation honoring FZ:
(#1) Seeing nothing like this on the (delicatessen food company) Dietz & Watson site, I assume that the Zappa Franks billboard is the work of ingenious bots.
It occurred to me that FZ might have composed the thing himself, that would have been so FZ, but I can find no evidence that he did. So this will be our “Eat Me” homage to him now.
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Posted in Art, Death notices, Holidays, Language and food, Language and medicine, Music, My life, Phallicity, Puns | Leave a Comment »
December 4, 2023
(Rampant nakedness, juicy description of man-on-man sex, definitely not for kids or the sexually modest)
A piece of sheer raunchy frivolity. Two naked lads, a hunky bottom and a twink top, both wearing Santa caps, meet in a 12/1 mailer ad for a scene from Falcon’s gay porn flick Cum All Ye Faithful. Bottom Beau Butler has a package, a box, to offer top Trevor Brooks, who has pulled his briefs down to show what he’s got available to put into Butler’s package:
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Posted in Clothing, Costumes, Euphemism, Gay porn, Hats, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Male art, Metaphor, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
December 2, 2023
A common joke form exploits an ambiguous expression E. Prior likelihood or the preceding context in the joke favors one understanding for E, but then fresh context (in the joke) brings out another, more surprising one. The effect is that the sense of E has shifted as the joke proceeds. It’s a pun, son. Used in a sense-shifting pun joke. (Puns get used in all sorts of jokes: knock-knock jokes, one type of riddle joke, and more.)
I now offer two examples that especially tickled me, to show how such ((phonologically) perfect) puns work. Then some comments on a different joke form, formula pun jokes, which can turn on imperfect puns and involve a different kind of set-up / pay-off from sense-shifting pun jokes.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Illusions, Jokes, Language and race, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Performance, Puns, Quotations, Snowclones, Taboo language and slurs, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
December 1, 2023
(Hey, it’s Tom of Finland, what do you expect? — it’s dripping with raunchy suggestiveness; not to everyone’s taste)
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate December, and time for some seasonal sexy silliness. Meanwhile, it’s World AIDS Day, a moment of retrospective grieving and prospective hope.
For the month of December in my 2023 Tom of Finland calendar, this b&w vintage Santa (from 1982):
(#1) A pleasant smile, admirable pecs and abs, and a gigantic ToF erection
And now, three more ToF Santas, in vivid color.
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Male art, Puns | Leave a Comment »
November 27, 2023
A One Big Happy strip, recently in my comics feed:
(#1) James (mis-)takes Ruthie’s meta-commentary — her talk about what’s going on in her interaction with James — to be part of that interaction, to be her next move in the routine of the knock-knock joke, and shows that he understands that routine, by producing the appropriate next move in the routine
James might be a dirty-faced urchin, but he knows his joke routines. And, in the last panel, is probably wondering how on earth Ruthie’s going to make a pun out of jeezy-peezy-I-forgot-the-joke.
So: mastering the routine of the knock-knock-joke is one thing, but then the routine incorporates another type of joke, the pun joke, which has its own requirements. In addition, the knock-knock joke requires not just any pun, but a (phonologically) imperfect pun, the more distant the better, so that its punch line will have genuine surprise value.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Jokes, Language acquisition, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Routines and rituals, Variation | 3 Comments »
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 »
