Country names and food

December 11, 2023

Country names, take me home
To the place at the table where I belong

(with apologies to John Denver and his collaborators)

This posting is, first of all, about bare-bones pun jokes, typically a one-line set-up followed by the pun in a pay-off line.

In this case, on a theme (food and eating), with the puns all from a domain (of country names); the classic pun name on this theme from this domain is Hungary (punning on hungry). I will illustrate with three Hungary-based bare-bones jokes.

Then, name-domain + theme puns (in this case, country + food puns) can be arranged in a cascade, which can be performed by a single joke-teller or framed as repartee between two performers. The classic country + food cascade is triggered by Hungary (Greece, Turkey, and Chile are other possible triggers); I’ll call it the Hungary For Food Riff, HFR for short. HFR comes in many variants; here I give two repartee versions: one relayed to me by Probal Dasgupta on Facebook on 12/9, the other I found in net collections of puns on Hungary later that day.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Puns, Routines and rituals | 1 Comment »

Placebo Domingo

December 10, 2023

Not a mangled tenor, but the Sunday (12/10) Doonesbury strip, back to savaging the dietary supplements Prevagen and Balance of Nature as expensive placebos:


(#1) Both companies advertise relentlessly on MSNBC (my background source of news and commentary), so causing me to swear a lot at my television set

These days the ads seem only to have engaging older people reporting their subjective feelings — of improved memory (Prevagen) or improved energy and well-being (Balance of Nature). No more rat studies. Just placebo effects down the line.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

The profusion of names

December 9, 2023

Suppose you investigate a cultural domain, or category, with many things in it — samples of the color pink, forms of the letter T, pieces of flatware, hybrid tea rose plants, and so on. It will turn out that people distinguish a (large) number of different subtypes, or subcategories, within that domain — different shades of pink, different typefaces, different patterns of silverware, different cultivars of hybrid tea roses. And then they will need labels for reference to these subcategories. These could be given code numbers of some sorts (and for some purposes such coding is entirely adequate), but people, quite reasonably, want memorable and at least somewhat meaningful names, in a language. Flamingo pink, a Times typeface, a Shell silverware pattern, the Mr. Lincoln rose, that sort of thing.

In the real world, especially for commercial purposes, the number of subcategories in a domain can be immense, reaching into the hundreds in some domains, and (in some of them) ever-expanding. So names will have to be coined by the barrel, churned out by the yard, and often the best a name creator can do is pick a name with positive associations. It would be entirely possible for there to be an Imperial pink, an Imperial typeface, an Imperial silverware pattern, and an Imperial rose.

Every now and then, I’ve commented on this blog about the profusion of names within some domain. Most recently, in my 12/3/23 posting “Waxed amaryllis” (with lists of some named amaryllis cultivars). You can find some meaningful themes in these lists; plenty of the names for solid red cultivars are associated with Christmas (with its red and green) and Valentine’s Day / love (with a red heart). But then there are Hope, Miracle, and Grand Diva. For solid white cultivars, Amore and Festive Parade. For red with white stripes, Ambiance. For white with red stripes, Besties. At some point, names will have to be plucked out of the air.

Which brings me to Karen Schaffer posting on Facebook on 9/13 about the melons in her garden.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and food, Names, Trade names | 1 Comment »

Analogical extension as a joke form

December 8, 2023

Now for a joke type that isn’t pun-based. Instead, like snowclones, these jokes are based on formulaic expressions, and involve replacing items in the formulas by (semantically) analogous items; they are analogical extensions of the formulas. One popped up in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:


(#1) To understand this cartoon, you have to retrieve the conventionalized N + N compound dog whistle, the basis for dog tuba (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

From NOAD:

(compound) noun dog whistle: [a] a high-pitched whistle used to train dogs, typically having a sound inaudible to humans. [b] [usually as modifier] a subtly aimed political message which is intended for, and can only be understood by, a particular group: dog-whistle issues such as immigration and crime.

It’s sense a that’s relevant to #1, which shows a guy playing a tuba at a high pitch humans can’t hear (note that the other guy is struggling to hear anything at all) but dogs can (note the dog stopping up its ears in pain). So: the dog is experiencing not a dog whistle, but (preposterously) a dog tuba.

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Posted in Formulaic language, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »

A visual sense-shifting pun joke

December 8, 2023

By Benjamin Schwartz in the 12/11/23 print issue of the New Yorker:

On first looking at the cartoon, we go to the faces, because faces are so socially important to human beings. There are two: a woman, speaking; and her male companion, the driver of the car they are in, his face turned to listen to her. She is voicing an observation (usually a complaint)  that is conventionally and stereotypically taken be to common in intimate couples in our society, that the addressee is turning into — becoming, in significant ways — one of their own parents.

In any case, what we perceive at first is the passenger telling the driver: You’re turning into your mother, with inchoative turn into ‘become’.

But then we take in the rest of the drawing, where we see — surprise! — an old woman, up against the hood of the car, her hands up in the air, her cane flying into the air; the car has run into her. The passenger is in fact observing to the driver that he’s driving into the old woman, using one of the senses of motional turn into, with a complement referring to the end-point of the turn.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Argument structure, Jokes, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 1 Comment »

Penguins, one subtitled, others napping

December 6, 2023

More bulletins  from the News for Penguins department here at AZBlog. Two recent items brought to me by Michael Palmer. One about the tv and movie character Pingu, the other about living chinstrap penguins, on an Antarctic island.

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Posted in Biology, Communication, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Penguins, Science reporting | 1 Comment »

The vomiting and nauseated emojis

December 6, 2023

A posting in which I realize, once again, that an emoji (say, the vomiting (face) emoji) can look different on different platforms (in this case, Facebook vs. Microsoft Word), even though you use the same code to call it up — an effect that’s analogous to a letter of the alphabet (say, the lower-case letter whose English name is /ti/) looking different in different fonts (notably, being serifed in some, sans serif in others). And even more distantly analogous to a phoneme of a language, in a specifc position (say, /t/ after an accented vowel and before an unaccented syllable, as in battle and blotto), being pronounced differently in different social varieties of the language (as an voiceless stop in BrE but a voiced tap in AmE). Autres lieux, autres moeurs.

The emoji action went down this morning on Facebook, prompted by Gadi Niram getting set off by US Senator Tommy Tuberville’s having ceased his months-long blocking of a big pile of military promotions  (for a reason that has nothing to do with the merits of the promotions). The FB exchange:

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Posted in Dialects, Emoji, Signs and symbols, Variation | 1 Comment »

Dalla sua pace

December 6, 2023

Today (12/6: St. Nicholas Day, Finnish Independence Day, and Mozart’s death day) my morning name was the Italian phrase dalla sua pace ‘on his / her peace’. From a Mozart opera. The music playing on my Apple Music when I awoke was indeed from opera in Italian, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, so if the phrase had come from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro — Figaro being the barber in question — the appearance of that phrase in my morning mind would have been easy to explain. Alas, Dalla sua pace (On her peace) is an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, quite a different plot, entirely barber-free and Figaro-free.

It is, of course, possible that my unconscious mind is not as up on the details of opera in Italian as my conscious mind, so it made this distant operatic association. Or maybe I was just reviving an interest in the preposizioni articolate ‘articulated (i.e., articled / arthrous) prepositions’ of Italian, of which dalla — combining the versatile preposition da (expressing source ‘from’, location ‘at, on’, and goal ‘to’) with the fem.sg. definite article la — is a prime example; here it is in a display of the articled prepositions (versions of this chart are found on many sites):


Prepositions down on the left, definite articles across at the top

(Articled prepositions are found in many European languages, as in French du = de ‘of’ + le (masc.sg.) and German zur = zu ‘to, towards’ + der (dat.fem.sg.), with very different details in each language.)

But the aria from Don Giovanni, what of that?

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Posted in French, German, Holidays, Italian, Morning names, Morphology and syntax, Morphophonology, Music, Quotations | 2 Comments »

Rehab return day

December 5, 2023

It’s a foggy day in Palo Alto town, on the anniversary of my return home from a Palo Alto rehab center on 12/5/20, after having given up drinking several weeks before, a decision that impelled me into Stanford hospital with alcohol withdrawal syndrome on 11/11; I was moved to the rehab center on 11/17, and then discharged into the world on 12/5, as a recovering alcoholic beginning a new life. So 12/5 is a kind of rebirth day for me.

12/5 comes in between the death days of two remarkable musicians: Frank Zappa on 12/4 and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on 12/6. This year Zappa’s death day was anticipated by Kyle Wohlmut’s posting, on Facebook on 12/3, this inspired digital creation honoring FZ:


(#1) Seeing nothing like this on the (delicatessen food company) Dietz & Watson site, I assume that the Zappa Franks billboard is the work of ingenious bots.

It occurred to me that FZ might have composed the thing himself, that would have been so FZ, but I can find no evidence that he did. So this will be our “Eat Me” homage to him now.

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Posted in Art, Death notices, Holidays, Language and food, Language and medicine, Music, My life, Phallicity, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Naked men in Santa caps

December 4, 2023

(Rampant nakedness, juicy description of man-on-man sex, definitely not for kids or the sexually modest)

A piece of sheer raunchy frivolity. Two naked lads, a hunky bottom and a twink top, both wearing Santa caps, meet in a 12/1 mailer ad for a scene from Falcon’s gay porn flick Cum All Ye Faithful. Bottom Beau Butler has a package, a box, to offer top Trevor Brooks, who has pulled his briefs down to show what he’s got available to put into Butler’s package:

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Posted in Clothing, Costumes, Euphemism, Gay porn, Hats, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Male art, Metaphor, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

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