Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with neither Mother Goose nor any of her animals in it:
(#1)
To understand this strip, you have to know about the varieties of Pebbles breakfast cereals — one of which is Fruity Pebbles. (And then, of course, you have to recognize fruit as an anti-gay slur and recognize the abbreviation LGBT.)
Female parts: relatively transparent (and stylistically neutral) name for the sexual organs of a female (person, animal, or plant), with male parts as its counterpart. But there’s also a whole world of slangier, more euphemistic, or “cuter” expressions (the effect depending on the context) for this purpose: lady parts, lady bits, girly parts, girly bits, girl parts. And most of these are up for playful manipulations in proper names.
TThis morning’s name: something anatomical, I recognized, but what? From NOAD2:
zygoma (pl. zygomata) Anatomy the bony arch of the cheek formed by connection of the zygomatic and temporal bones [aka zygomatic arch, cheekbone]. ORIGIN late 17th cent.: from Greek zugōma, from zugon ‘yoke[, join]’
Annoying of this dictionary not to give cheekbone — and not to connect cheekbone (for which it says merely “the bone beneath the eye”) to zygoma or zygomatic arch.
Two Monday comics on linguistic topics: a Calvin and Hobbes with an unfortunate ambiguity (pitch the tent), and a Zits with a portmanteau for a combo sport (dodgebowl):
(#1)
(#2)
This week’s excellent potmanteau: Armachillo clothing from Duluth Trading Co.: ARMADILLO (for its tough protective scales) + CHILL (for cooling ability), with CHILL put iside ARMADILLO (ARMA – DILL – O), replacing the rhyming DILL. Pretty much immediately understandable, and entertaining as well:
(#1)
(Note the graphic highlighting of the CHILL inside ARMADILLO.)
About the British humo(u)r magazine (my cartoon/comics library has two anthologies from the publication; the second has the Ed Fisher cartoons I posted about yesterday) and about its long history (going back to 1841). The magazine was given to plays on the word punch, but so far as I can tell, not involving the quotation in the title of this posting — a 140-year-old meme, but a North American one.
To come: the magazine; uses of the word punch; and “Punch in the presence of the passenjare”.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange (guest cartoon by Rina Piccolo) plays on double and gang, incidentally threading into a bit of etymology:
Yesterday, I posted, in “Two extravagant mani-corns”, two homoerotic photos of hunky men dressed as unicorns: #1 elaborately posed, #2 an unposed shot taken on the fly at this year’s Coachella Festival. I quickly discovered the photographer for #2, but failed to identify either the photographer or the model in #1. But that’s been remedied, in Facebook by David Preston, in a comment on my posting here by reader R: the photo comes from the studio Exterface (an obvious play on interface), and the model works under the professional name David Morgan. But both my informants noted that the shot in #1, extravagant though it was, was only the tamest in a wild portfolio of photos, three more of which I’ll post here.
Today’s Zippy takes us to an alternative (olfactory porcine) version of 1619 Broadway (at 49th St.) in NYC, where Goffni and Knig cranked out their hits:
Yes, another Zippy burlesque.
The cartoonist Ed Fisher (who now has his own Page on this blog) is most closely identified with the New Yorker (which published over 700 of his cartoons), but he drew for other publications as well, including the British weekly Punch. William Cole’s 1969 anthology The Punch Line: Presenting Today’s Top Twenty-five Cartoon Artists from England’s Famous Humo(u)r Magazine has a section devoted to him, in fact. From this volume, three cartoons of linguistic interest.