#4 in my “Squid Pro Quo” posting is from Marcus Connor’s Brainless Tales, a new webcomic for me, but one largely devoted to language play. And immediately I came across this cartoon, with a portmanteau noun denoting a hybrid, doubly phallic, foodstuff:
(#1)
baniener = banana + wiener, denoting a decidedly louche anthromorphized banana-wiener. Hey, baby, wanna dance?
This Non Sequitur cartoon by Wiley Miller:
(#1)
squid / quid. And squid as a source of ink, squid as food. .
(Men’s underwear, but nothing hard-core.)
The Daily Jocks ad from the 9th, featuring the Marco Marco brand, with my caption:
(#1)
Maximum Marco in boxer briefs.
Middle Marco in briefs.
Minimal Marco in almost nothing,
Beyond the pecs, the abs, and the thighs,
Nothing like one another, but they’re
Totally tight —
All three for Subcomandante Marcos, the
Subcomandante for all of them.
Four things here: the Marco Marco firm, which is trés gai; the play on All for one and one for all (most famously alluding to the motto of the Three Musketeers)); the play on Marcos the plural of the personal name Marco vs. the surname Marcos; and the reference to the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. Plus a whiff of an allusion to Goldilocks and the Three Bears (Marco Midi is just right). And of course the differences in the three men’s body types.
The One Big Happy in my comics feed today:
Rockefellers / rocky fellows. How was Ruthie to know her grandmother was using a proper name? And fellers is a familiar dialect variant for fellows – and an old one (Americans have been labeling feller an “impropriety” or “provincialism”, with an “excrescent” r, since at least 1795, according to DARE).
Ruthie undoubtedly also didn’t know that the Rockefeller family has long been seen as the richest family in the world, hence as the, um, gold standard of wealth. Which gives We’re no / not Rockefellers as an idiom meaning, roughly, ‘We’re not rich’.
Informed opinion has been very positive about the appointment of Mueller as special counsel to investigate allegations in the semolina affair. Commenters are generally agreed that Mueller is a respected authority in such matters, with a long public career in the field and experience in both semolina matters and the byzantine world of elbow-cheese casseroles.
As the run-up to the American holiday Memorial Day continues (only 9 days to picnic time), Pinterest has responded with a board of playful things you can do with hot dogs — sometimes moderating their potential as phallic symbols, sometimes accentuating it. Five examples follow.
The occasion is the discovery of more photo albums from the past, in this case the relatively recent past. One had photos of two friends who shared the Columbus OH house with Jacques and me in the 1990s: Philip Miller (during a postdoc year in linguistics at Ohio State) and Kim Darnell (while she was finishing her PhD in linguistics at Ohio State). Then there’s our last housemate before Jacques and I moved entirely to Californa, our bookfriend Ann Burlingham, who was working in Columbus bookstores at the time.
After teaching in (mostly) Lille, Philip is now in Paris. After years teaching in Atlanta, Kim is now in Palo Alto. And Ann has been in Perry NY (south of Rochester), where she owns and runs Burlingham Books, for some time now.
Two cartoons — a Bizarro and a One Big Happy — in today’s feed about hiw things are presented and how they are perceived. There’s often a gap:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
(#2)
Yesterday’s posting on Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” elicited this redfaced comment from U.Mass. linguist Rajesh Bhatt:
I only knew this as an Anne Clark song until now!
To which I now reply, equally redfaced, that until Rajesh’s comment I didn’t know about the Anne Clark version, and was in fact only dimly aware of Anne Clark.
(Rajesh supplied a link to a YouTube video of a live performance, at the Berlin Metropol in 1992; you can listen to a studio recording here.)
I’ve been on break from remarking on some of the obsessions of the New York Times — its periodiphilia, its taboo avoidance, and so on — but I’m moved to return to the second of these topics because the Gray Lady has managed to reproduce, in deail, one of its previous encounters with taboo vocabulary, a tussle with poet Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”.
