An old One Big Happy strip in my comics feed today — posted here on 3/28/14 in “OBH roundup”, but with little comment — in which Ruthie reveals her aide-memoire for the name of a fish her mother sometimes cooks for dinner:
(#1) buncher, crowder? — or flocker, packer, ganger, batcher, schooler? — but actually grouper
At this point, you’re probably thinking that groupers are so called because they travel in schools, that is, in a kind of group. But no; there’s an etymological surprise here.
Posted in Etymology, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Portuguese, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »
(Warning: the posting quickly descends into various kinds of vulgar, unsavory slang.)
From Kyle Wohlmut (from Twitter) on Facebook this morning, with the comment “good morning fuckers’:
(#1) A set of three plastic kitchen scoops, in a package designed to hang on a supermarket display hook; note the notch at the top of the package, for slipping over the hook; the back of the package has the name of the item in four languages, from four countries, the countries identified by flags (in tiny, muddy, b&w images), and as you go down the list, the referents of the names — names evidently supplied by some translation software — drift rapidly away from a kitchen scoop and get raunchier and raunchier: ‘scraping, scratching’, figurative ‘son of a bitch’ (literally ‘son of a whore’), figurative ‘fucker’ (referring to a contemptible or stupid person; to any man, to a guy; or to some unspecified object)
Posted in Flags, Italian, Metaphor, Portuguese, Slang, Spanish, Taboo language and slurs, Technology | 1 Comment »
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