(Hunky male models in very little; lots of lexicography to come in later postings, but here lots of plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so not advised for kids or the sexually modest.)
The 3/37 Daily Jocks ad in e-mail — with the header Bottomless Shorts 😳 — now with a caption of mine:
(#1)
He navigated the
Corridors of the Blue
Boy Bar, savoring its
Pygian gloom, signaled
Red in the smoky
Dusk of desire, whispered
Shoot me, please,
Shoot the Moon
Yesterday at the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, a small stand of rather sparse shrubs, blooming gorgeously and giving off the heady scent of lilacs. So they were, and that was notable: you don’t see a lot of lilacs (Syringa vulgaris) in California. What you see instead are what are called California lilacs — California lilac is a resembloid compound referring to plants in the genus Ceonothus, not even in the same plant family as Syringa; see my 6/20/13 posting “Poppies, lilacs, and lilies”, with a section on Ceonothus vs. Syringa. (Of course yesterday’s flowering shrub was in fact a California lilac: subsective California lilac ‘lilac from or in California’.)
But why are lilacs rare in California? Because they’re cold-winter plants. Then why are there any at all? Because there are now some hybrids that are relatively tolerant of warm winters.
From Joelle Stepien Bailard this morning, as part of her campaign of flinging images of artworks against the dread weight of the news (I now have six or seven friends doing this systematically, on various themes, and I’m not counting the ones with dogs or cats; owls, yes, however), this 1887 painting by Vincent van Gogh:
(#1) Vase with Daisies and Anemones
It starts with a monstrously meatless “Reuben” sandwich and ends in the villages of England’s East Midlands in the 19th century. The links: Reuben the sandwich and Reuben the name, kale the leafy green and Cale the name.
From Karen Chung on Facebook a while back, this complex pun in the 9/25/15 Bizarro, illustrating (among other things) a nice contrast in accentual patterns: front stress (or forestress), the default for N + N compounds, in MOVING sale; back stress (or afterstress), the default in Adj + N nominals, in moving SALE:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
So the hinge of the pun is the ambiguity of moving: as N, (roughly) ‘the act or process of changing residence’; or as Adj, (roughly) ‘causing strong emotion, esp. of sadness’ (both senses are ultimately semantic developments from the simple motion verb move, intransitive or transitive; but they are now clearly distinct lexical items). Then from the difference in syntactic category follows the difference in accentual pattern.
… in a One Big Happy cartoon (in auditorium) and in the title of a 1998 movie (the nickname Paulie): in American English, unrounded [ɑ] for rounded [ɔ], collapsing the distinction between the phonemes /a/ in cot and /ɔ/ in caught.
(#1) Discomfort in the low back region: Polly on the left, Paulie on the right
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro cartoon:
(#1)(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)
You need to recognize that the cartoon takes place in a garage and you need to know that detailing is a kind of car care. And you need to recognize that Nick is the Devil (note horns and tail). That’s all pretty easy.
Then you need to know what detailing a car has to do with the Devil — and for that, if you don’t know the saying The devil (or Devil) is in the detail(s), you’re just stuck. You’ve missed a devil of a pun (on detail).
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.
News for penises. And fingers. And, possibly to come, buttocks.
The larger topic is the line between what counts as normal and what counts as abnormal, diseased, or morbid. Today, the discussion starts with some television commercials for the drug Xiaflex® (from Endo Pharmaceuticals), marketed as a treatment for Peyronie’s Disease.