Ruthie meets the challenge of the unfamiliar

February 24, 2023

It’s an old theme on this blog: 6-year-old Ruthie in the comic strip One Big Happy as a constantly entertaining source of efforts to cope with unfamiliar words and larger expressions by assimilating them, in one way or another, to things that are familiar to her. Some examples surveyed in my 2/3/19 posting “Ruthian lexical items in real life”; and then, yesterday, in the posting “Ruthie goes for the donuts”, she understands windchill as Winchell’s (donuts): the unfamiliar element is the technical meteorological term windchill. and Ruthie copes with it by replacing it with a phonologically similar item that’s familiar to her (she’s fond of Winchell’s donuts):

(#1) unfamiliar windchill / familiar Winchell’s

Over the past three years or so, I’ve been accumulating One Big Happy strips in this vein and am now disgorging six of them: a similarity case, in which Ruthie copes with unfamiliar material by treating it as phonologically similar familiar material (as with windchill / Winchell’s); two ambiguity cases, in which unfamiliar material is homophonous with familiar material, so she has to cope with her mistaken interpretation of what she hears; and three more complex cases (one involving portmanteaus, one involving orthographic abbreviations, and one involving Ruthie’s own analogical creation — Ruthie is indeed ingenious).

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Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

Ruthie goes for the donuts

February 23, 2023

In my comics feed today, a One Big Happy originally from 1/6/03 (20 years ago, and that turns out to be important) in which Ruthie eggcorns the weatherman’s technical term windchill (factor) to Winchell’s (the name of a chain donut shop), which is more familiar to her — but not perhaps to most readers of the strip, even in 2003, when there were a lot more Winchell’s shops around than there are now. But the strip:


(#1) windchill / wind-chill / wind chill is a N + N compound meaning roughly ‘chill caused by wind’, but is in fact a technical term in metereology (and its connection to chill and wind might not be clear to someone who in passing hears tv reports mentioning the factor)

Especially the connection to wind, since pronunciations of wind chill in ordinary connected speech lack a [d].

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Posted in Eggcorns, Holidays, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phonetics, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

More from the Cavewoman Culture Club

February 22, 2023

The CCC — last seen in action in my 2/18 posting “A Neanderthal breakthrough”, in which an inventor cavewoman carves the first definite article out of stone — strikes again in the Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange cartoon of 5/21/21, in which a cavewoman devises a precursor of the candlelit dinner:


(#1) An announcement in Caveman Talk of the first romantic dinner for two; since these beginnings, it has evolved into a elaborated cultural practice

Cultural innovations often come with bold experiments in form at the outset (consider the history of photography and film) — in this case, apparently, in the adventure of scented fire.

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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Smell, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

Explorations in abessive clothing

February 21, 2023

(about bodies, mostly men’s, and the exposure of parts of those bodies, either by complete absence of an item of clothing, or by the absence of part of such an item; there will be plenty of male buttocks on view, and there will be discussion of men’s bodies, sometimes in street language — so not to everyone’s taste)

About items of clothing or parts of such items that are missing, lacking, absent.  (I’ll explain the adjective abessive in a moment; it does some of the work of the English derivational suffix –less or the preposition without, but is of wider applicability.) Two topics in this area are standing preoccupations of this blog: (re: absent items of clothing) male shirtlessness; and (re: absent parts of items of clothing) the assless / bottomless / backless nature of jockstraps.

The actual entry point to this posting came on Facebook on 5/9/19, when John Dorrance asked about the first use of assless chaps and Season Devereux  responded ,”Aren’t all chaps assless though?” To which I replied:

Yes indeed. The assless in assless chaps is an appositive, rather than restrictive, modifier — used to remind the hearer that chaps do in fact lack an ass, or to emphasize this fact in context — cf. appositive ‘chaps, which are assless’ vs. restrictive ‘chaps that are assless’, which is pleonastic.

It will take a little while to work up to chaps as abessive clothing: in this case, an item of clothing that lacks one of its parts (they’re assless) — in fact lacks two, since they’re also crotchless (chaps are essentially outerwear leggings of leather, held up by a belt).

Exploring abessive clothing quickly can take us far afield, and I’m not sure at this point how far I’m willing to go, so I’ll just dig in and see what happens. Come walk with me.

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Posted in Case, Clothing, Derivation, Grammatical categories, Inflection, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Morphology, Semantics, Shirtlessness, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Happy P Day, Mr. President

February 20, 2023

(men’s bodies and sex between men, illustrated just a bit shy of a X-rating and described in vivid detail in street language — tons of F for P day —  so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

It’s Presidents / President’s / Presidents’ Day — P Day, for short — in my country, and suppliers of gay porn flicks have mounted P Day sales of their wares. Their ads sometimes display an image from such a flick, ornamented with patriotic symbols (American flags, stars, plenty of red, white, and blue); the image itself usually has nothing whatsoever to do with P Day, but is an illustration of the deeply satisfying fantasy sex a man-desiring man can get off to by watching one of the flicks on sale. Often the sale ads are just gigantic displays of the covers of the merchandise, so you can search for what might work for you by scanning the titles and cover photos.

Two images from this year’s crop of P Day sale ads. One, from the Falcon company, shows an image of Flying Cowboy, an image in which a grateful citizen thanks his President by serving as the receptive partner in this acrobatic approach to anal intercourse. (The emotional landscape of the actual act is very different from this: the President is working hard to provide pleasure for his constituent.)

The other image is just one of the many covers in the Gay Empire ad for its P Day sale — a cover for a costume flick about pedication among the Norsemen.

This is the end of the careful talk in this posting. Below the horizontal line, and then the fold, is where the wild things have sex.

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Posted in Acting, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, Myths | Leave a Comment »

Far Side Neanderthals

February 19, 2023

Following on yesterday’s posting “A Neanderthal breakthrough”, on a Rhymes With Orange cartoon about the cavewoman who invented the definite article (plus Caveman cartoons from Bizarro and Scott Hilburn), I recalled a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon that I’d been saving since 2021, a cartoon in which Cro-Magnons are viewed as step up from Neanderthals:


(#1) Dining at the Restaurant La Cave, back in the days when Neanderthals shared Europe with the upstart Cro-Magnons

Larson produced a huge number of Neanderthal cartoons in the 15 years of The Far Side, 6 more of which I’ll reproduce below. They’re all set in Caveman locales, with characters that are Cavemen in appearance and dress but otherwise are engaged in social relationships and cultural practices from late 20th-century America — in #1, the two men are vying for the attentions of a woman, the old-fashioned Neanderthal (rubbing sticks together to make fire) pitted against the slick new Cro-Magnon (using a cigarette lighter).

#1 is complex in its handling of the dual nature of its characters, who are simultaneously cavepeople and modern Americans. The larger setting is in a cave (with a cave painting of a deer on the wall), but, more specifically, two of the characters are sitting at a table at a little restaurant while the third brandishes that cigarette lighter.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Evolution, Language and animals, Language and food, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »

A Neanderthal breakthrough

February 18, 2023

A great moment in fictive human history, captured in a 5/2/21 Rhymes With Orange cartoon:


(#1) Caveman quiz great inventor cavewoman, she make definite article

Well, yes, Hilary Price has her doing it in English, a specific language, which has to stand in for Human Language, because we have no way of representing text in Human Language.  And Price has her doing it in English orthography (rather than speech), because this is a cartoon (not an address) and the presentation has to be visual. And, stunningly, Price has her doing it as a sculpture, a piece of 3-dimensional artwork, rather than by making marks on some surface — possibly because women are the creators of beautiful useful things, aesthetically satisfying everyday objects. (Beyond that, Price has her cavewoman  explicitly viewing her work as potentially world-changing — an ambition usually associated, these days anyway, with males.)

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Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Origins of language, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

Today’s exercise in cartoon understanding

February 17, 2023

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s groan-punning title: “Tuffet Luck” — depends on your knowing one thing from popular culture in the Anglosphere (of, roughly, the past 200 years). If you don’t know that, you’re SOOL; the spider, curds, whey, and tuffet are just weird stuff.


(#1) The spider as ambulatory assault victim; apparently, the spider’s prey was not frightened away, but instead used what they’d learned in self-defense classes (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are (only) 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

Yes, it’s a nursery rhyme. “Little Miss Muffet”, said to have been first recorded in 1805. Traditionally, part of growing up for most children in the Anglosphere (though I wonder if that’s still true), but probably little known elsewhere. And largely opaque to the children who chant it, though I suspect that modern kids are inclined to interpret it as a tale of a male imposing himself on female, and her fleeing from him. Kids would probably understand it as a boy annoying or grossing out a girl with creepy-crawlie things. Older people will think of unwanted advances on the subway, Tyrone F. Horneigh pursuing Gladys Ormphby on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and the like.

The Bizarro version, on the other hand, is much more up-to-date: Muffet Fights Back.  Muffet, in fact, Kicks Ass.

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Posted in Figurative language, Folklore, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Poetry, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Engorged in hues of blue

February 16, 2023

(seriously phallic, so not to everyone’s taste)

The readings for the day, inspired by Max Vasilatos posting on Facebook about weird garden statues:


(#1) The Penisaurus Poems; there will eventually be acknowledgments of Edward Lear and Isaac Watts, respectively

The inspiration for these poetic eruptions was just one of those weird garden statues; from the beginning of my response to MV:

[Max wrote:] “There’s one that might land me in FB jail, though amazon thinks you can put it in your yard. I have known people with this sensibility.” — that would be the blue-headed WPODWO resin Dino-Dick (which, by the way, is clearly pretty small, though the company doesn’t say how small, only that it’s “compact”).

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Posted in Clothing, Furnishings and tools, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and religion, Language and the body, Music, Phallicity, Poetic form, Poetry | 1 Comment »

Dr. Pozzi at Home

February 15, 2023

Following on this morning’s John Singer Sargent posting on my blog — “Man Wearing Laurels”, here — Ken Rudolph reported on finding a stunning example of Sargent’s male subjects in the Hammer Museum at UCLA, and sent me a photo of it: a full-length portrait of Dr. Samuel Jean Pozzi cutting a regal figure in a bright red gown. Which I inexplicably had never posted on.


(#1) Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881)

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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Language and medicine | Leave a Comment »

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