A brief follow-up to my 11/2 posting “poetite”, about the NYT’s Spelling Bee puzzle, in which I wrote:
Spelling Bee’s dictionary is mighty persnickety. Editor Sam Ezersky uses some standard dictionaries as a rough basis for his puzzle dictionary, but his judgments are strongly personal, and consequently often fiercely disputed. Grievances are sometimes unloaded in Facebook.
A comment that led to a Facebook exchange between Karen Davis and me.
Faced with this judgment on Facebook today about the Spelling Bee puzzle from the New York Times,
(#1) POETITE: not a word (in the Spelling Bee dictionary)
Dennis Baron owlishly protested with word play incorporating a pun on concrete:
It’s the stuff concrete poems are made from.
Well played, Dennis!
(Warning: much of this is heavy in male bodies and man-on-man sex in very plain language — you know me, Al — so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday’s installment — “Bunnies with baskets”, here — only got through some amiably very dirty doggerel of mine and analysis of its poetic organization, when the draft for the rest was eaten in a computer disaster. But now I’ve re-composed the whole damn thing, and added a bonus section, so today you’ll get not only stuff about the 2001 film The Fluffer (which is not at all fluffy), but also the 2011 film Going Down in LA-LA Land (which has some joyously fluffy moments).
So today it’s about the noun fluff, the verb fluff, the agent noun fluffer, and the adjective fluffy. Inspired by entertaining vrai-gai exchanges on Facebook beginning on 3/31.
Through Facebook friends, this entertaining Mental Floss piece, “All 50 States Reimagined as Food Puns” by Rebecca OConnell:
(#1)
If you had to assign one piece of food to represent each state, which item would you pick? For the good people at Foodiggity [which can be followed on Instagram], the answer is whatever is punniest.
Armed with a set of state-shaped cookie cutters and a love of wordplay, the team set out to make each state out of a food. The series, called The Foodnited States of America, features all 50 states.
The project came about when Foodiggity founder Chris Durso’s young son suggested they make states out of food. Durso almost dismissed the idea, until his son added, “But what if they like had funny names like New Pork or New Jerky?” Durso understood the value of a good pun and took on the task of shoving mashed potatoes into metal shapes.
So that was this morning’s name, and I came to consciousness in a fit of giggles. It’s a piece of word play from Monty Python.
In my posting on Padre Antonio Soler, I quoted a bit about
A fandango once attributed to Soler, and probably more often performed than any other work of his, is now thought by some to be of doubtful authorship.
and was reminded how much I enjoy the word fandango — a straightforward case of “word attraction” (the opposite of word rage). So I’ve gone on to play with the word.
Something about Hanukkah — this year, starting at sunset on December 16th — seems to invite word play, on the name of the holiday or on the name of its signature food, the latke, or potato pancake. This year we get a cross-language portmanteau (okonomi-latke), for a cross-cultural food (a Japanese-Jewish pancake). From Sam Sifton in the New York Times cooking archives:
This hybrid of the Japanese okonomiyaki pancake and the traditional Jewish latke is from Sawako Okochi and Aaron Israel, the chefs and owners of Shalom Japan in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It works beautifully in any setting where you might ordinarily serve latkes and is a fine base for caviars of any hue.
(Recipe on the site.)
The “Back Talk: A Conversation About Words” column (by Ralph Keyes) in the American Scholar for Autumn 2014 takes up two topics: “E pluribus unum”, on invented portmanteaus submitted by readers (one of which is a bit uncomfortable for me); and “The -ize have it”, on verbing via -ize, with an invitation to readers to submit their own inventions.
