Archive for the ‘Movies and tv’ Category
October 23, 2018
… well, sort of Turkish. In fact,
Taffy was a sweetmeat,
Taffy was a Turk,
Taffy came to my house
And shattered with a jerk.
From Ned Deily on Facebook yesterday, this vision of Bonomo Turkish Taffy, one of the vintage candies available at the (new) Hotel B Ice Cream Parlor on Main St. in Bethlehem PA (the place sells ice cream from the Penn State Creamery — yes, the commercial dairy division of Pennsylvania State Univ. in University Park PA):
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Affectionate childhood memories of Turkish Taffy — I remember only the vanilla variety — hard and soft at the same time, pleasantly sweet and chewy. Its relationship to (salt-water) taffy was unclear to me (beyond their both being chewy candy), and I had no idea what made the stuff Turkish (the presumably Ottoman minaret on the package might just be imaginative marketing).
So: about the candy; about the name and its semantics; and a bonus bit about Bonomo’s Magic Clown (on tv when I was in my teens).
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Posted in Language and food, Movies and tv, My life, Semantics, Subsectivity | 2 Comments »
October 11, 2018
From the most recent NYT Magazine (in print 10/7, on-line 10/4), “The Ultimate Sitcom” by Sam Anderson, about Michael Schur’s sitcom “The Good Place”:
(#1) Ted Danson and Kristen Bell
“The Good Place” is not about philosophy in the way that “The Big Bang Theory” is about science — as a set of clichés to tap for silly jokes. A sitcom is not a grad school seminar, obviously, so the philosophy is highly abridged. But it is not insubstantial, and philosophical ideas actually determine and shape the plot.
I had been tangentially aware of the show (from its availability on Netflix), but didn’t appreciate its premise or its grounding in actual philosophy — a very specific brand of philosophy, as it turns out.
As embodied in a specific book.
By — moment of sheer astonishment — one of my oldest friends.
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Posted in Art, Movies and tv, My life, Philosophy | 3 Comments »
October 8, 2018
… in the 10/3 Wayno/Bizarro collab entitled “Off the wall”:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
A little festival of formulaicity. In the title, the (informal) idiom off the wall and an allusion to the idiom fly on the wall. In the interviewee’s remark, the (colloquial) idiom fly in the buttermilk and perhaps an allusion to the song “Ole Buttermilk Sky” [10/9: but see the comment below on “Skip to My Lou”]; an allusion to a family of “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” jokes; and the idiom fly in the ointment. Plus a pair of excellently anthropomorphic houseflies on a tv talkshow; if it’s a late-night show, it could be Fly By Night (with the idiom fly-by-night).
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Posted in Books, Formulaic language, Idioms, Jokes, Language and race, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Slang | 2 Comments »
October 6, 2018
Passed on by friends on Facebook, a French dildo / vibrator in the shape of La Tour Eiffel:
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Yes, you can pleasure yourself (vaginally or anally) with a replica of this world-famous landmark. While enjoying its punning name (La Tour Est Folle lit. ‘The Tower is Crazy’, but see below — with the pun pairing Eiffel – est folle).
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Posted in French, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Language play, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Puns, Slang | Leave a Comment »
September 29, 2018
From the American tv show Gunsmoke, in the episode “Fandango” (S12 E21, first aired 2/11/67), Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness) to a man he’s taken into his custody for trial:
Mister, you’re going back pig or pork, now make up your mind!
The colorful alliterative figure pig or pork, a version of the formula alive or dead (more often encountered in the version dead or alive, with the monosyllable before the disyllable). And an excellent version it is.
(It appears to have been a creation of the Gunsmoke writers: I can find no occurrences that aren’t quotations of, comments on, or allusions to the “Fandango” cite.)
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Posted in Actors, Figurative language, Formulaic language, Language play, Movies and tv, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »
September 21, 2018
To fully appreciate this cartoon (passed on to me on Facebook), you need to have two pieces of pop-cultural knowledge, one originally American, one originally British (though it is the way of such things to cross the Atlantic culturally):
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You need, of course, to recognize — American cultural knowledge — that this is a baseball diamond, with a game in progress, and that there’s an object on first base. Then — further American cultural knowledge — you need to recognize the (note: declarative, not interrogative) sentence Who’s on first as the first move in one of the greatest America comedy routines ever. Then — British cultural knowledge — you need to recognize the thing on first base and connect it to the fact that Who’s on first, both of them elements from one of the most popular British tv shows ever.
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Posted in Humor, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »
September 11, 2018
The catch phrase of writer and performer Merle Kessler’s alter ego Ian Shoales, just a bit short of the more vernacular I’m outta here. That’s motion go. Then there’s elimination go, and an ambiguity between the two, as exploited by Calvin in this (recently re-cycled) Calvin and Hobbes strip:
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Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Euphemism, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
September 3, 2018
… with a note on the pronunciation of botanical names.
The crucial moment came in a re-run showing of the Rizzoli & Isles episode “Love the Way You Lie” (S3 E12, first aired 12/4/12), when the Boston detective (Rizzoli, played by Angie Harmon) and medical examiner (Isles, played by Sasha Alexander) pondered the significance of the fact that they had identified some pollen as coming from Solidago macrophylla, with the species name macrophylla pronounced /ˌmækroˈfɪlǝ/ (with primary accent on the third syllable). I was startled by the pronunciation: it’s Greek ‘big leaf’, so surely it should have the accent on the second syllable (as in thermometer, Hippocrates, etc.), something on the order of /mǝˈkrafǝlǝ/, and the writers had just gotten it wrong.
But no. The writers did their homework, and I was the one who was wrong.
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Posted in Actors, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Movies and tv, Pronunciation, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »
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