(Eventually, significant talk about the lexicon of men’s genitalia, so not to everyone’s taste.)
From the annals of remarkable commercial names, this name of — surprise!* — a gourmet grocery store in Toronto, in the news recently because it closed after 24 years in business. [* Note: a surprise, of course, only to non-Torontonians; to locals, it’s not only familiar, but semantically unremarkable (see below).]
Two things here: the relatively straightforward playful half-rhyme meat – beach: /mit – bič/, with stop /t/ vs. affricate /č/ (both voiceless coronal obstruents); and the complex playfulness of the name — with possible sexual double entendres involving meat and with the carefree associations of beaches, often evoking sex as well (and giving rise to the cocktail name Sex on the Beach).
The 2/26 One Big Happy, riffing on /sɛns/, in idioms with sense (common sense, horse sense, nonsense), in incense, and in cents (also in an idiom, two cents):
(#1)
Which, of course, leads us inevitably to the psychedelic days of 1967, with their whiff of incense and peppermints (plus some pot).
Cue from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky yesterday, to a posting by Sandra Boynton on Facebook on the 7th:
(#1)
Day 5,347 of my quixotic project to entirely redraw my seven earliest board books. I’m doing this so that the line and colors will print better, and the layout is better balanced. I hope. (It’s really very fun, in a hyperfocused sort of way.)
EDZ recommended reading the comments, “for adorable linguistic content”. Indeed: on naming conventions and on the cot/caught merger, among other things.
And then a Boynton for Pi Day, coming up this week (on the 14th). With a celebratory pig for the occasion.
Came up in a Facebook discussion involving Ann Burlingham and Aric Olnes, the catchphrase in this bit of digital art by Methune Hively:
off like a herd of turtles, referring to a very slow start or to slow progress after an auspicious start – based on the horse-racing announcer’s They’re OFF!, plus the legendary slowness of turtles, with the rhyming play thrown in.
Yesterday morning, foraging in the Whole Foods around the corner for something to take as a food contribution for the annual Palo Alto all-day shapenote singing (we eventually settled on some truly fine smoked trout — see below), Kim Darnell and I happened to walk past the jerky section of the store — who knew there was such a thing? — where I admired some lamb jerky, and then we discovered, groan, turkey Perky Jerky:
Earlier on this blog: a 7/26 posting on the song “Despacito” and the Mikey Bustos parody of it; a 7/27 posting following up on that; and a 7/28 posting on covers of the song. Now from Norma Mendoza-Denton, a link to a Sesame Street parody of it: “Patito” (patito ‘duckie’, the diminutive of pato ‘duck’):
(Men’s underwear, sexy song lyrics, nicknames, half-rhymes, and more. Some of it raunchy enough to have been banned in Malaysia, but then we’re not in Malaysia, are we?)
(#1)
His name is Mikey Bustos, he’s (self-described) Canadian Filipino, and he rap-sings of skimpy Speedos —
My goods are protected like an armadillo
When I’m in the ocean I feel good emotion
Because all the sand causes some real exfoliation.
Four language-related strips in my comics feed on Sunday the 4th, which this year was Pentecost,
the Christian festival celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Jesus after his Ascension, held on the seventh Sunday after Easter. (NOAD2)
KJV Acts 2:3: And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them
The word came down. In One Big Happy, Rhymes Wth Orange, Zits, and xkcd.
