Today’s Bizarro offer some transposition (spooneristic) word play, involving the exchange of the initial syllables of the two accented words in the clichéd expression pipe and slippers — giving the eminently depictable slip and pipers:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 9 in this strip — see this Page.)
My morning name from ten days ago, from a celebrated comedy routine: a double dozen double damask dinner napkins. The original was apparently two dozen double damask dinner napkins, and it sometimes is performed as a dozen double damask dinner napkins, but its tongue-twisteristic core is the double damask dinner napkins part — and the history is interesting, but what consumed me that morning was where I’d first encountered that phrase and the routine.
I was pretty sure it was at Princeton in 1959-62, in the Bendon/Daingerfield menage on Nassau St., and I recalled clearly that I was familiar with them in the fall of 1962, when Ann Daingerfield and I moved into our house in Cambridge MA and discovered we were in possession of several dozen double damask dinner napkins; we dissolved in giggles repeating the phrase. (I still have some of those napkins; they are not only handsome but durable.)
(#1) An Irish linen double damask dinner napkin, in service
Today’s Zippy is set in the Ghent neighborhood of Norfolk VA of a few years back, in a Do-Nut Dinette — whose name throws Zippy into a fit of onomatomania (aka repetitive phrase disorder) compounded with Spooner’s affliction (compulsive exchange of word elements in phrases):
(#1)
(Separately, there’s the use of dinette to refer to a diner, as a type of restaurant.)
Following on my 7/7 posting “GN/BN”, about the Good News Bad News joke routine, which the hounds of ADS-L traced back to the early 19th century (at least). Other commenters offered formuations of the idea that there’s a good side and a bad side to everything, the bad comes withthe good, and lots of other things that, however interesting, are not instances of the joke formula (in any of its variants). But then on 7/16, Bill Mullins posted about an entirely different joke formula hinging on the opposition of good and bad.
Bill wrote:
Are you familiar with Archie Campbell’s “That’s Good/That’s Bad” routines? He used to do them on Hee Haw.
And we’re off!
In the recently published The Ultimate Cartoon Book of Book Cartoons —
(#1)
edited by New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein (a regular visitor on this blog), this Ed Koren (who’s also on this blog):
(#2)
In an old New Yorker (from 7/6/15), two cartoons that especially struck me: a Mick Stevens meta-cartoon, and a Liana Finck with a playful word transposition. The second led me to a Finck from this spring that presents a real challenge in understanding.
It’s May Day, an ancient spring festival — think maypoles and all that — so, the beginning of the cycle of the seasons. (Everybody knows the Vivaldi. Try listening instead to the Haydn, here.) And it’s the first of the month, an occasion for still other rituals, including one that calls for everyone to greet the new month, upon awakening, by saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” (or some variant thereof). There’s even a Rabbit Rabbit Day Facebook community, with this page art (not attributed to an artist):
(#1)
The three-rabbit variant is the one I’m familiar with. (I got it as an adult from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky. Since she was from the South, I thought it was a specifically Southern thing. But today I learned, from an astonishingly detailed Wikipedia page, that that is very much not so.)
Today also brought a Facebook posting from my friend Mary Ballard, to whom the whole inaugural-rabbit thing was news, and, by good fortune, three cartoons from various sources: a Bizarro I’ve already posted about; a Mother Goose and Grimm with an outrageous bit of language play; and a Calvin and Hobbes reflection on the meaning of the verb read.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
A Spoonerism for playful purposes, based on the expression (a) person of interest, and using the name of the software tool Pinterest.
Reported by Joel Berson on ADS-L on the 4th:
grewd loaseness: Uttered (and soon corrected) by a radio news broadcaster about what a man who appeared nude in public, beat his fists on his head, and claimed he was God was arrested for.
Victor Steinbok noted that “genuine Spoonerisms” are rare, meaning that inadvertent word-part transpositions are rare (though he cited an example from his own experience: tissy pookler for pussy tickler ‘mustache’, and I’ve posted on inadvertent Oback Barama). Intentional — playful — word-part transpositions are extremely common, and so are inadvertent whole-word transpositions, reported on here fairly often, for instance in the porn quote:
You wanna fuck your shooting load! You wanna shoot your fuckin’ load!
