In the One Big Happy of May 30th, Ruthie falls into the pit of use and mention:
There’s an adjective proper as defined by Ruthie’s mother. Then there’s the adjective proper in the idiomatic nominals proper noun / name. And that’s just the beginning of the problem.
The spur: this brief moment from the NYT obit for chef, author, tv personality, and social critic Anthony Bourdain, by Kim Severson, Matthew Haag, and Julia Moskin, on-line on the 8th as “Anthony Bourdain, Renegade Chef Who Reported From the World’s Tables, Is Dead at 61”, in print on the 9th as “Anthony Bourdain, Renegade Chef, Dies at 61; Showed the World How to ‘Eat Without Fear'”:
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He first became conscious of food in fourth grade, he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.” Aboard the Queen Mary on one of the family’s frequent trips to France, he sat in the cabin-class dining room and ate a bowl of vichyssoise, a basic potato-leek soup that held the delightful surprise of being cold. “It was the first food I enjoyed and, more important, remembered enjoying,” he wrote.
From Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown: “Miami” (S5 E2, 5/3/15), as quoted in the Eater.com site‘s “19 best quotes” from the episode:
4. [Bourdain] On the medianoche sandwich: “Many of you watching who are dimly aware of Miami and this sandwich thing they call a Cubano that you may or may not have had before, you’re thinking, ‘Yes, a Cubano sandwich.’ But you’d be wrong. This, is not a Cubano sandwich, strictly speaking. This, my friends, is a medianoche. Close. A cousin. Like a Cubano, it’s got roast pork, ham, Swiss cheese, pickles, and a little mustard. And like a Cubano it’s pressed until hot and runny inside. But:”
5. [Miami chef Michelle] Bernstein, interrupting, on the medianoche sandwich: “You see the bread? It’s darker and it’s sweeter, so you have a real contrast with the salty pickles and the pork, and the bread.”
Una medianoche, uno Cubano. Not the same, because the bread is different (and maybe the kind of pork or the kind of ham or the pickles or the mustard). I can get uno Cubano at my local Whole Foods (and often do) — “slow roasted pork, Black Forest ham, Swiss cheese, pickles, mustard” — and it seems to be pretty authentic, except that it’s on a French roll. Best not to argue names and ingredients and authenticity.
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A new series by cartoonist Bob Eckstein (who’s been around on this blog for three years now; see his Page). From the 6th, on the Weekly Humorist site, “Drunk Cartoon: Pants”:
More Pride flags, all transformed versions of existing X Pride flags, for various values of X having to do with gender or sexuality. Transformed by Laurie Raye by superimposing images of the starry sky on them. So the now-standard six-stripe Pride flag becomes:
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(Not much about language in this one.)
The title of the cover story in the NYT Magazine on the 10th, with this illustration:
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Las Vegas claims the title “Sin City”; this is New York’s bid to be “Love City” — challenging Paris, Rome, and (in the U.S.) San Francisco, where Tony Bennett famously left his heart:
CK special for Pride Month:
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(#2) Pride Trunks
In five neon colors: pink, yellow, lime green, aquamarine, dark blue.
On the 9th, from reader Timothy Young, this screen shot from the Los Angeles Times:
(#1) The original, with the verb enervated
Today’s Zippy takes us again to a hard-boiled noir-tinged land of allusion:
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Very much, as the title says, the wrong goodbye; none of the Raymond Chandler allusions are to The Long Goodbye — mostly from “Red Wind” and The Big Sleep.
The One Big Happy from May 15th:
Months, Muntz, let’s call the whole thing off.