Archive for the ‘Rhyme’ Category
December 1, 2023
It’s December, and as the Christmas elves appear, there comes a startling elfshelfism joke (in abbreviated form), on Facebook today. I got it from Ryan Tamares, who got it from Britannic Xen Osiris Zane, who got it from someone else, and who knows where such memic material originated.
(#1) Yes, Spock on a cock: the science officer of the starship USS Enterprise, riding a monstrously large rooster (across a bleak alien landscape)
To get to the punchline Spock on a cock, you have to recognize the figure of Spock (from popular-culture tv and movie fiction) and also recall that cock — most commonly used for raunchy reference to the penis — is also a somewhat antique or specialist word for a rooster. (As a result, #1 is not only a joke, but also a slightly dirty joke.)
As described in my 12/22/22 posting “Elfshelfisms”, the elfshelfism is a riddle form presented visually, and depends on rhyme (perfect rhyme or half-rhyme), with example punchlines: lemur on a femur, Dolly [Parton] on a tamale, and sonorants on cormorants.
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Posted in Formulaic language, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Rhyme, Riddles, Taboo language and slurs, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »
May 17, 2023
That’s the punch line, right up front. I was going to post about the complex practices that attend my living in Urinal City in the Land of Diuresis, and maybe I’ll get to that some day, but today it’s pretty much just giggly stuff about English lexical items.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Movies and tv, My life, Puns, Rhyme | 3 Comments »
December 22, 2022
Two especially satisfying examples of the elfshelfism, a riddle form presented visually:
(#1) Image: a cute furry mammal clinging to a bone. Punchline: lemur on a femur. (note: like elf and shelf, lemur and femur are (perfect) rhymes; unlike elf and shelf, however, they’re rare and remarkable nouns)
(#2) Image: a buxom woman reclining provocatively on a pile of Mexican food. Punchline: Dolly [Parton] on a tamale. (note: for most American speakers, Dolly and tamale are perfect rhymes, but for a substantial minority of American speakers, and for many others, they’re half-rhymes)
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Posted in Books, Formulaic language, Holidays, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Phonetics, Phonology, Rhyme, Riddles, Toys | 5 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 »
August 30, 2021
Caught in passing on tv, a reference to heinous crimes in which the /h/ of /hénəs/ was so brief that the pronunciation came very close to /énəs krájmz/ anus crimes. I reflected for a moment on what those might be, passing over the obvious and distressing possibility ‘anal rapes’ to consider merely improper alternatives, like farting in public, or crimes that were only figurative, like anal bleaching, that crime against fashion.
But then my attention was caught by the rhyming phrase heinous anus, and I fell into musings about meanings for the expression — see below — until Famous Amos hit me (notes on Wally and his celebrated cookies further below). Oh my, now I had
the Famous Amos heinous anus
and my day was complete.
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Posted in Faces, Hats, Language and food, Language and the body, Language play, Rhyme, Silliness | 2 Comments »
May 26, 2021
In the One Big Happy strip from 4/30, Ruthie explains, impishly, that there’s a name for her grandma’s special brand of perceptiveness:
Even better, that name rhymes with the historical model for nouns in –dar, denoting ‘the ability to detect some quality’ (like having dyed gray hair)
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Posted in Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Rhyme | 1 Comment »
April 14, 2021
A lightning posting of today’s Daily Jocks ad, for the sake of the half-rhyming title (conveying ‘a crop top for a hot jock’), plus of course the hot hunk displaying his body seductively:
CROP TOPS
At [Daily Jocks] we are always on the lookout for what’s trending for men in all things underwear, activewear and fetishwear, like crop tops.
Wait! Are crop tops for men making a comeback? They never went away, shop our range of crop tops from Varsity …
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Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Language and the body, Rhyme, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
April 8, 2021
In the Zippy strip from 3/2, Beat Zippy and Beat Griffy walk MacDougal Street in 1961:
(#1) “Yowl” is Zippyish for “Howl”, Ginsberg’s most famous poem
The basics, from Wikipedia:
Reality Sandwiches is a book of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published by City Lights Publishers in 1963. The title comes from one of the included poems, “On Burroughs’ Work”: “A naked lunch is natural to us,/we eat reality sandwiches.” The book is dedicated to friend and fellow Beat poet Gregory Corso.
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Posted in Dialects, Linguistics in the comics, Poetry, Rhyme, Variation | Leave a Comment »
