From Ned Deily, reporting from Paris on Facebook today, this shop sign, suggesting that amz is everywhere:
(#1) As you can see, this isn’t Arnold Melchior Zwicky, but Anne Marie Zahar, of LUMINAIRES DECO DESIGN ANNE-MARIE ZAHAR CRÉATION (website here); what she’s selling is lighting: a small number of high-concept (and expensive) floor lamps and ceiling lights
A Linguistic Inquiry squib of mine from 1970 (LingI 1.4.549-55) that for complex reasons hasn’t been digitally available on this site; thanks to the Indo-Europeanist Michael L. Weiss (Professor of Linguistics and Classics at Cornell), I am able to reproduce the squib here so that it will be available for inspection along with (most of) my other publications; the issue of the individuation of rules — of descriptive generalizations — is still a live one (independent of the formalisms of classical generative phonology), and then there’s the question of the useful ruki terminology, whose history MLW has been trying to trace (this squib might have been the source of its spread throughout the linguistic literature; I hope to post eventually on the history of the term).
Now: the 1970 squib, page by page:
… and we are chanting, chanting for our artificial lives … in a spasm of AI-onomatomania. It’s today’s absurd Zippy strip, arriving just in time to relieve the † dark mortality † of the day — Lincoln assassinated 1865, Titanic collides with iceberg 1912 (just wait until tomorrow, when the liner will actually sink):
Onomatomania, aka phrase repetition disorder, is a widespread affliction in the Zippyverse, triggered particularly by trochaic tetrameter phrases, as here: chatbot data mining (S S SW SW), neural network algorithm (SW SW SW SW)
There’s a Page on this blog with links to my (heavily Zippy-oriented) postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania.
Following up on yesterday’s pun cartoon by Scott Hilburn (in the posting “Out of nowhere, a rhino appeared and charged”), I looked at his (huge) portfolio of pun cartoons for others I hadn’t already posted on that were worthy of note, found several candidates I was mulling over (though I had quickly become sated with puns), and then ran aground on one I just didn’t really get:
(#1) Well, there’s evidence — the name Annie, that mop of curly red hair — that it involves Little Orphan Annie as a grown woman, with a young son, who she says can’t come out and play with the other boys today, but trills in song that her son will be coming out tomorrow, which is clearly a pun on sun, so there are all those parts, with a pun smack in the middle of the action, but it doesn’t hang together as a joke
But all the pointers are to Annie, the musical based on the comic strip, in which case it makes sense that I don’t get the joke, since I’m one of a select band of people who find the musical cloyingly unwatchable and consequently don’t recognize its songs, not even the plucky tyke’s anthem “Tomorrow” (which, it seems, is enormously popular; in preparing this posting, I have, alas, watched a number of performances of it, so that my judgment of it has crystallized to solid detestation). But, as I frequently note on this blog, if you don’t know the cultural context for the joke in a cartoon, you won’t understand the cartoon.
This time the ignorant cluck who didn’t get the joke was me. (Apparently, a large part of the Anglophone world recognizes the song.)
Alternatively, someone appeared and charged the battery. Same image, text interpreted differently. It’s a little study in collocations — material that frequently cooccurs (while falling short of being a stock expression): rhinos charge, people charge batteries. Here, in overlapping fashion, producing a wonderful pun in this Scott Hilburn cartoon:
Collocated with subject rhino, the verb charge is especially congenial to NOAD‘s sense 5b; collocated with direct object vehicle, to sense 4a — and here you get them both (rhinos are famous, of course, for never going on the road without booster cables; they are always ready to charge)
(About naughty bits — men’s testicles and women’s breasts — so not to everyone’s taste.)
From the ads of brands site, “Ad of the Day | Manscaped Gives Men’s “Boys” the Love They Deserve”, from 3/8/24:
There’s a lot of data out there about men but only one truth… 100% of men think their “groin” is the most important part of their body. [AZ: I’d like to dispute that, since I’m deeply attached to my heart and my brain; and since if I had to choose between losing my testicles and losing my arms or my legs, I’d happily give up my balls; but that’s a topic for another day] But the problem is almost all of them feel uncomfortable talking about it. Especially when it comes to grooming. [AZ: looking ahead and clarifying this murky text, what Manscaped is deprecating here is hairy testicles, not pubic hair in general or testicles in general]
The goal for “The Boys” campaign was to stop treating male groin grooming like it’s some kind of taboo. It’s 2024 afterall, we need to normalize groin grooming for the benefit of men (and their partners) everywhere.
The challenge? How to talk about men’s nether regions in a TV-safe way. Enter the visual metaphor. The spot depicts the…you know what… as a pair of miniatures identical to every full-size male character, always attached to him at hip height. The visual allowed us to showcase exactly what the product was designed to do by changing the miniatures’ hairstyles throughout the spot.
(#1) His boys before manscaping
(#2) His boys after manscapingThis visual metaphor opened up a whole world – one where every male would have two identical groomed boys. The jokes unfolded naturally as the boys behaved like men’s body parts — bobbing around whilst jogging or floating to the top of a hot tub. And the ungroomed boys, well, they had a rough time of it [AZ: they were sweaty and uncomfortable and nowhere near as cool as other men’s boys] until they finally got a little love via The Lawn Mower® 5.0 Ultra, MANSCAPED’s newest groin and body hair trimmer.
You can watch the Manscaped “Give your boys the love they deserve” 2024 Super Bowl commercial here. A shorter version has gotten lots of play on tv.
Aka: Piccolo’s bull and Rubin’s cow: cattle days in CartoonLand. A little post-eclipse diversion: cartoons that make allusion to, or illustrate a pun on, some formulaic expression, but without actually mentioning that expression, so they present challenges in cartoon understanding. Two that have come by me recently: a Rina Piccolo Rhymes With Orange cartoon of 4/5 (alluding to the idiom bull in a china shop, which is something of a favorite of cartoonists); and an old Leigh Rubin Rubes cartoon that re-surfaced in Facebook (punning on the nursery-rhyme line the cow jumped over the moon).
Oh, I’ve given it all away. Well, you can still appreciate Piccolo’s and Rubin’s ingenuity.
☀️ 🌑 for Solar Eclipse Day, Sisyphus and drive-time DJs intersect in a Venn diagram, where they generate a wonderful even-handed pun:
(#1) The hinge is the ambiguous NP great classic rock; what Sisyphus and drive-time DJs share — what’s in the area in the diagram that represents the intersection of the categories in the two circles — is that they’re people who bring you the same great classic rock every night (but in two different senses of the great classic rock)
We understand what the categories are in a Venn diagram from the labels on the intersecting circles and on the areas of their intersection, which are meant to be informative (and clear in their reference). But of course the labels are expressions in some language, which means that ambiguous expressions can be exploited for a joke. As in #1.
(#1 came to me on Facebook from from pun enthusiast Susan Fischer, the syntactician and psycholinguist specializing in sign languages; the ultimate source is the vox + stix website, on which see below)
Poignantly noted on Facebook on Friday by Earl Jackson, a just-released video of Orville Peck and Willie Nelson joined in a moving performance of “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other”, which you can view here.
Actually, you should view it before reading on with this posting, even if — maybe especially if — you’ve never heard of Ned Sublette’s wry 1981 song, which has been something of a Willie Nelson project for two decades now (he recorded a version of it in 2006) and even if you’ve never heard of the young gay country singer who performs, masked, under the name Orville Peck. Enjoy the song — which is more complex than might at first appear — and the performance, with Peck’s warm, strong country voice paired with Nelson’s raspy but equally strong country voice (a real marvel for a 90-year-old), and Orville’s deep seriousness paired with Willie’s sweet but earnest smiles. So you should listen to their performance, but you should also watch it.
(#1) From the YouTube video: Orville and Willie under a tree, out in the middle of a fenced field, singing and strumming in celebration of gay desire and coupling — urgently conveying a social and political message
No, I’m not roaming inter-war Berlin like Christopher Isherwood, passive, recording; I am not a figurative camera. But I now wield a camera, an alarmingly small digital camera that does so many things it’s hard to figure out how to just, as they say, point and shoot, and then download the pictures to my computer so I can show them to you. It’s taken me several days, but I have managed two photos on subjects of interest. A bright red amaryllis blooming on my worktable (one of five waxed amaryllis bulbs I got in a post-Valentine’s Day sale at Holland Bulbs of Holland MI). And five tiny (just over an inch long) brass castings of motos-couples getting it on in an assortment of positions (tiny, but with fingers and simple facial expressions) — entertaining artwork, shown here watched over by a fabulous portrait sketch by John Singer Sargent (which has its own sexy story). (But definitely sexy, so I suppose that #2 is off limits for kids and the sexually modest.)
Here are the shots, and then very brief commentary.
