Archive for the ‘Poetic form’ Category
October 19, 2019
Today’s Zippy strip returns to the hypnotic pleasures of mantric repetition, a favorite theme of Bill Griffith’s:
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First, it’s parsed as
[ Cosmic Catnip ] [ alpine scratcher ] ‘alpine scratcher with Cosmic Catnip in it’
where Cosmic Catnip is a commercial brand of catnip and an alpine scratcher is a kind of slanted scratch toy for cats. Second, it is indeed a real thing. And third, the name is an excellent line of trochaic tetrameter, eminently usable as a meditative mantra when repeated, ideally at least three times.
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Posted in Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Poetic form | Leave a Comment »
May 29, 2019
The 5/27 Wayno-Piraro Bizarro strip, set in the Land of Dogs:
(#1) (If you wonder about the secret symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip — see this Page.)
A dog food with Quibbles in its name is of course not going to agree with you, in one sense of agree with. So you can understand the cartoon, and see that the pun on agree with in it makes it amusing — and still miss the extra joke that Wayno and Piraro threw in for you.
The cartoon would have been funny if the dog food had been named just Quibbles. But Quibbles and Fits is a lot funnier, because it’s another pun, on the name of the (actual) dog food Kibbles and Bits. But of course you have to know about this particular commercial product to get that joke.
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Posted in Conversion, Count & mass, Language and animals, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Poetic form, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
April 28, 2019
(This message is brought to you by Frolic, Romp, Frisk, Gambol, Cavort, Caper, & Prance, Ltd., purveyors of iambs and orgies.)
Today’s playful Zippy:
(#1) Drying clothes engaged in an orgy of cavorting and gamboling, playfully, sensually sliding against one another: inhale the freshness!
With one satisfying line of enigmatic iambic pentameter:
All ˈlaundry ˈis a ˈblur of ˈstatic ˈcling
Words to live by. If you can only divine their deeper lesson.
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Posted in Homosexuality, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Poetic form | 5 Comments »
April 24, 2019
From Jeff Bowles on Facebook on the 12th, this Magritte-based composition:
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Apparently a Magrittean disavowal (there’s a Page on such disavowals here), playing on Magritte’s wry late 1920s painting La Trahison des images (The Betrayal / Treachery of Images) — which shows a pipe, with the painting labeling itself Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’. Here we get Louis Flint Ceci, on the left, objecting in astonishment that what’s on the right is not (a) Ceci; instead, it’s (a) Davisson.
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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Music, Paradoxes, Poetic form, Poetry, Semantics, Writers | 5 Comments »
April 21, 2019
(Men’s bodies, clicks, mansex, dactyls, homowear, eggcorns, street talk, and more. Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Daily Jocks mailing of the 15th, with a studiedly homo-smouldering ad for crop tops from the fetish-wear company Barcode Berlin. Plus a foul derangement of (heavily enjambed) dactyls as a caption.
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Kiko the crop-top kid,
Impudent pussy boy,
Butch faggy target for
Amorous arrows — a
mazing for festivals,
Parties with gangbangers,
Mid-drifting kikis with
Quatrains of dactyls
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Posted in Address terms, Captions, Eggcorns, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Phallicity, Poetic form, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | 2 Comments »
February 14, 2019
Back on 6/4/11, in “Alligator Goodbyes”, a t-shirt with 14 instances
of a verse form that I’ll call the Alligator Goodbye, on the model of “see you later, alligator” (at the top of the shirt):
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Now, a much bigger assemblage of AGs — 27 of them — on the Language Nerds Facebook page, in b&w:
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Posted in Catchphrases, Formulaic language, Language play, Music, Poetic form, Rhyme | 2 Comments »
February 13, 2019
(Hot guys in very skimpy underwear, suggestive verse, but generally playful and not actually X-rated. Use your judgment.)
Today’s Daily Jocks sale ad, for Marco Marco Valentine’s Day homowear, with a caption in two parts, one raunchy doggerel, one Puckish:
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Lincoln Darwin Valentine
Is a cutup friend of mine
Loves the boys with all his heart
Loves them hard in every part
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
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Posted in Captions, Double entendres, Facial expression, Holidays, Language in advertising, Language play, Movies and tv, Poetic form, Poetry, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
December 7, 2018
From Kim Darnell today, a Christmas tree, which she then decorated to suit my household:
(#1) O rosemary, my rosemary
I’d admired these little rosemary bushes at Whole Foods: pretty, wonderfully scented, useful in cooking, and an excellent evergreen container plant for my patio garden (rosemary shrubs are widely used as border and filler plants locally).
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Posted in Books, Holidays, Language and plants, Music, My life, Poetic form | 1 Comment »
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