Archive for the ‘Trade names’ Category

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You put it in your mouth and suck on it

August 2, 2023

Another chapter in the annals of phallicity. From Owen Campbell on Facebook yesterday:


(#1) Owen sucking on an Otter Pop

Owen’s comment:

At my job, teenagers deliver freezies [AZ: freezies ‘Otter Pops’]

otter pops (often no longer understood as a brand name) are also known as freeze pops or ice pops; freezies might be a regional term, but I’ve been unable to get information about it in any of the likely lexicographic sources: the OED, GDoS, and DARE. For what it’s worth, Owen’s in Winnipeg MB.

Now, two things: about Otter Pops; and (very briefly) about Owen.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Mascots, Phallicity, Trade names | 5 Comments »

The Belgian beer glass

July 1, 2023

More backlog, this time from Ernesto Cuba posting from Toronto on May 27, with this glass he was served beer in at the Prenup Pub there:


A beer glass from the Delirium Taproom in Brussels, Belgium; note the pink elephants

From my 5/27/23 posting “Puer mingens at the Prenup Pub”, about the pissing boy statue there:

the pissing boy is a replica of the famous Manneken Pis statue in Brussels, Belgium, and the Prenup Pub specializes in Belgian and German beers and food, so the statue fits right in at the pub, even though the pub’s in Toronto (ca. 6100 km or 3800 mi from Brussels, across the Atlantic).

So: not just the Manneken Pis statue replicating the Brussels original, but also the actual glassware from the Delirium Taproom there.

Posted in Language and food, Trade names | 2 Comments »

Thai Tanic restaurants

March 2, 2023

From the annals of goofy commercial names, in this case a Thai restaurant name that seems to be intended to project both playfulness — the name is a pun — and power, as in the model for the pun, the adjective titanic ‘of exceptional strength, size, or power’ (NOAD). Thai food that will blow you away.

What makes it goofy is the unfortunate echo of the proper noun Titanic; from NOAD:

a British passenger liner, the largest ship in the world when it was built and supposedly unsinkable, that struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage in April 1912 and sank with the loss of 1,490 lives.

I was made aware of the restaurant name by a Susan Fischer Facebook posting yesterday; she was passing on, from others on the net, this restaurant image:


(#1) Not identified in its net appearances, but this is a real Thai restaurant, not a piece of digital art or photoshopping: Thai Tanic at 1326 14th St NW, Washington DC (near Logan Circle)

Commenter on this image, someone who got the ship echo: This restaurant is going down.

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Posted in Language and culture, Language and food, Language in advertising, Names, Puns, Trade names | 3 Comments »

Bizarro orientations

February 12, 2023

Two Bizarro cartoons from 2021, touching on questions of sexual orientation:


(#1) A Piraro Bizarro from 11/7/21: imperfect pun on sexual (orientation): sectional, as in sectional furniture ‘furniture made in sections’ — combined with a (perfect) pun on orientation ‘the relative physical position or direction of something’ (NOAD) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are, wow, 12 in this strip — see this Page.)

#1 raises the question of how labile sexual orientation might be: easily changed, like the arrangement of furniture in a room, just a matter of style, fashion, or whim; or more enduring and resistant to change.

 

(#2) A Wayno / Piraro Bizarro from 12/2/21:  a complex (but perfect) pun,  turning primarily on turn on ‘start, cause to operate’ vs. ‘arouse (sexually)’, but secondarily involving connection in both electrical and emotional senses (Dan Piraro says there are 5 of his symbols in this strip)

#2 is also a joke about visual pornography: the artwork depicts a 9v female connector, so it appeals to the 9v battery, but not to an AA battery, which needs a different sort of connective hardware.

Then there are the brand names: Enervator, a play on the brand name Energizer; and Zap, possibly a play on the Energizer MAX family of alkaline batteries, more likely just the vivid verb zap used for lightning strikes and the like.

Finally, #2 evokes two senses of hard-wired: in computers, ‘permanent, inalterable’; in behavior, ‘inborn, instinctive’. (The connecting idea is that what’s built-in can’t be changed.)

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Puns, Trade names | 2 Comments »

Team X

January 28, 2023

The Zippy strip of 7/27/22:


(#1) At the Pig ‘N Whistle Diner in Brighton MA, immersed in the Team X snowclonelet

Two things here: the Team X snowclonelet; and Pig ‘N Whistle as the name of an eating establishment. Let’s dive right in with Team X, and look at Pig ‘N Whistle afterwards.

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Names, Rainbow clothing, Snowclonelet composites, Trade names | 1 Comment »

Dotty Zippy

November 16, 2022

The Zippy strip of 9/10, in which our Pinhead, anticipating little balls of flash-frozen ice cream, embraces dot dot dot in two ways at once:


(#1) Ellipsis dots meet Dippin’ Dots at the carnival

Two very different uses of NOAD‘s noun dot-1 ‘a small round mark or spot’ (dot-2 is an archaic noun referring to a dowry):

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Music, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

Sniff my leather, Boy!

August 7, 2022

(Racy-raunchy topic, probably not to everyone’s taste, but not actually into sexual organs or man-on-man sex.)

From the annals of commercial naming: today’s entertaining ad flashing by me on Facebook, for Leather Daddy cologne:


(#1) [ad copy:] “Dominate your day with a scentsational blend of Leather, Scotch, Vanilla, & 18 Erotic Spices 😈”

A narrowly targeted product with a carefully chosen name: not just leather, referring to a scent widely perceived as both erotic and highly masculine (so used in colognes and after-shaves from all the high-end men’s fragrance companies — Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren, Cartier, Fendi, John Varvatos, Giorgio Armani, Christian Dior — and plenty of others besides); but leather daddy, evoking the BDSM world of rough, commanding daddies (in their leather gear) and their subservient boys. That’s Way Gay that you’re soaking in, Blanche.

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Posted in Homosexuality, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Masculinity, Smell, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

Z fudge

August 1, 2022

🐇 🐇 🐇 🇨🇭🇨🇭🇨🇭 Hail, Caesar Augustus! (rabbit rabbit rabbit for the 1st day of this month, August) Hail, Helvetia, unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno!

Swiss flags for Swiss National Day, August 1st; I am of course wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts — plus a rainbow-heart tank top, since I cheer for Team Queer as well as Team Helvetica.

But wait! I also cheer for Team Z, of everything named with a Z, from zucchini and zithers, through Zerlina (là ci darem la mano) and Zippy & Zerbina, to Zoroaster / Zarathustra and Zuckerberg, with a special fondness for ZW names: zweiback, zwölf of anything, Die Zwitscher-Maschine, die sieben Zwerge (und Schneewittchen), Zwingli, Zworykin. And, in the food world, I cheer for Team Savory, embracing umami, meaty, fermented, fragrant, and flavor-intense (taking in dark and bitter chocolate). And, in the word world, I cheer for Team Fuck, embracing vocabulary from what I’ve called the profane domain (see my 5/7/18 posting with that title).

So what would catch the eye of someone who cheers for Team Z, Team Savory, and Team Fuck too?

A fudge company with a Z name.

And so, one appeared, in an ad in my Facebook feed, about a week ago. (To anticipate your unspoken query: no Swiss or queer connection I could find. Well, nobody’s perfect.) This ad, for Z. Cioccolato:


(#1) An attractive ad, for a genuinely local company, offering very traditional plain fudges (dark chocolate, milk chocolate) and fudges with nuts (walnuts, pecans, peanuts, almonds, coconut), plus entertaining inventions, eventually working out to confections that would have to be called fudge-adjacent (bottom left above: “7 layer peanut butter pie” (which I would describe as containing some fudge, but not being itself fudge)

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Posted in Books, Humor, Language and food, Language in advertising, My life, Names, Placenames, Taboo language and slurs, Trade names | 2 Comments »

The second-greatest of these is monosyllabicity

July 8, 2022

Zippy’s guide to food-buying in today’s strip: packaging, monosyllabicity (hereafter 1-icity), and collectibility, in that order:


(#1) As ever, thoroughly steeped in pop / mass culture: in the 3rd panel, not just the orange-flavored drink mix Tang, but also the astronaut allusion (“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”); it then turns out that the panel also takes us to orangutans (which are neither orange in color — ok, some reddish tones, but not orange, see #3 below — nor have a tang in their name, but but …)

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Names, Naming, Professional names, Publications, Quotations, Trade names | 3 Comments »

From the annals of commerce: Doggie and Whippy do it in a leather bar

June 18, 2022

(This is obviously going to go where no kids or sexually modest people should go, and it’s going to get there fast.)

The commercial names Doggie Diner and Mr. Whippy, both surely conceived in all innocence, but, to the prepared mind, easily evoking sexual images (as it happens, my mind is prepared for man-on-man sexual images, so that’s where I’m inclined to go): the doggie / doggy position for anal intercourse; and a leatherman master whipping a leatherman slave.

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Posted in Double entendres, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Mascots, Music, Parody, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

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