Nightcharm.com is primarily a gay porn bundling site, offering “theaters” mostly from specific porn studios or featuring particular pornstars, but it also offers essays on topics of interest to gay men. And then there are the bonus theaters, of stuff that doesn’t fit into their main categories — so Nightcharm creates ad hoc categories with mostly playful names. A recent offer:

Alliteration in Bang Bang Boys, Tribal Twinks, Ricky Raunch, and Teens & Twinks. Allusions to formulas or titles in Amateurs Do it and Hot Desert Knights. Simple word play in cocksure. Offers of gay male “types”: amateurs, bears, Asians, twinks, straight guys. And fetishes: raunch, bukkake, gang bangs.

Two categories of special interest: Bang Bang Boys, BangBangBoys.com, offering “100% Brazilian beef” (an allusion to gauchos and the pampas) and covering the full range of Brazilian racial types; and Boykakke, which turns out to offer young Asian twinks in bukkake scenes, in which several boys shower another with cum facials. (Astonishing how many such scenes there are.)

On the last, note the very common re-spelling of Japanese bukkake (in the usual transliteration) to make it fit English orthographic conventions. The spelling bukakke is remarkably frequent, but bukkake still wins 22.5-to-1 in raw ghits.

xkcd 1814 Color Pattern:

(#1)

As it turns out, “That’s Amore” has a history on this blog, but this is a new direction.

(Hat tip to Alon Lischinsky.)

On moiré patterns, from Wikipedia:

In mathematics, physics, and art, a moiré pattern … or moiré fringes are large scale interference patterns that can be produced when an opaque ruled pattern with transparent gaps is overlaid on another similar pattern. For the moiré interference pattern to appear, the two patterns must not be completely identical in that they must be displaced, rotated, etc., or have different but similar pitch.

The term originates from moire (moiré in its French adjectival form), a type of textile, traditionally of silk but now also of cotton or synthetic fiber, with a rippled or “watered” appearance.

Antique moiré silk:

(#2)

And a painting from an “Eye-Popping Moiré Pattern Paintings by Anoka Faruqee” site:

(#3)

“That’s Amore”. Oh, those gilded words: “When the moon hits your eye /
Like a big pizza pie, that’s amore”, transformed in yet another way. Previously on ths blog:

from 3/8/12, “Lunar matters”: Scenes from a Multiverse burlesque of “That’s Amore” (“When the moons hit your eye, / Like a big pizza party, that’s polygamy”)

from 10/16/15, “Pasta fazool”: the Dean Martin recording of “That’s Amore”

from 10/17/15, “That’s a moray”: eels a-plenty

The Rhymes With Orange from the 23rd:

Language play based on wishing well, understood either as a synthetic compound (with well understood as an N: ‘a well for wishing (for something)’, specifically ‘a well into which one drops a coin and makes a wish’ (NOAD2)) or as a nominal based on the V + Adv idiom wish s.o. well ‘feel or express a desire for someone’s well-being’ (Oxford dictionaries site). The cartoon then treats wishing ill as exactly parallel, to the point of positing an N ill, referring to a well-like object into which one drops a coin and makes a wish for misfortune.

This is considerably more complex than the One Big Happy I wrote about in a 11/3/16 posting “wishing well”, where I reported

[the child] Ruthie’s take on the compound wishing well: for most of us, ‘well for wishing, for making a wish’, but Ruthie’s understanding is ‘place for wishing well, for making a wish for something good’. Her own private etymology.

Today’s One Big Happy:

(#1)

Ah, a potential orthographic ambiguity, turning on word division: MENSWEAR as MENS WEAR ‘men’s clothing’ (what the store intends) or MEN SWEAR ‘men curse’ (what Ruthie reads).

As is often the case, when there’s an ambiguity, somebody is going to play on both meanings at once. In this case, men swearing about men’s wear / menswear. There’s at least one website devoted to it, in fact:

Real Men Swear: Another Fucking Menswear Blog

in which men’s fashion shots are profanely captioned. Two examples:

(#2)

(#3)

(Reference to a dangerous sexual practice, but mostly in the spirt of fun. Use your judgment.)

Today’s alarming Bizarro::

(#1)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

Amidst much silliness about how punctuation saves lives — Let’s eat father and all that — comes this even greater silliness with the road sign STOP AHEAD (conveying that there is a STOP sign ahead on the road), alluding to a bit of language play I first heard as a child:

What’s that on the road ahead? / What’s that on the road — a head?

(or with in rather than on).

Available as a t-shirt:

  (#2)

On to the crudity. ROAD AHEAD has led to play on sexual head ‘fellatio’, as in this texty:

  (#3)

That’s road head ‘fellatio while driving on a road’. From the Broadly site on 4/29/16, “Riding in Cars with Boys and Blowing Them: True Stories of Road Head: People share their best, worst, and most dangerous experiences going 69 mph down blowjob highway” by Mish Barber Way (a woman, though that should become clear in the text):

  (#4)

Except for a Cornell Daily Sun article from last year, there are relatively few accounts of road head on the Internet. Why? The practice, especially in areas where you have to drive to get pretty much anywhere, like the Midwest and California, is not necessarily a rite of passage, but it does inspire stories: While a routine blowjob is nothing to write home about, a blowjob in a moving vehicle could kill you.

That’s part of the appeal: Not only could you get caught, but you could also crash and die. There was “The Road Head Song,” a mock rap about getting road head 24/7, but spoiler alert: The cartoon music video does not have a happy ending. It might be less dangerous than texting and driving, but it all depends on how he can handle his head. The Cornell Daily Sun article offers tips for the ideal blowjob on the go; I guess the college-kid writer had had a bad experience and needed to let the world know that, duh, sucking a dick while someone is driving requires some precautionary measures. “Pick the right car,” “get your hair under control” (this is the only time that laundry-day bun on the top of your head will be sexy), “foreplay is your friend” (even when stationary), and “when you are about to finish, you should probably just pull over.”

Stories follow, mostly from women who gave head to guys, one from a guy who got head from a guy.

And in related news: hitchhiking while gay.

(The title tells the story. Racy topic, unquestionably alluding to hard-core mansex, but indirectly and playfully. Use your judgment.)

The Steam Room Stories video that came by me yesterday morning: “Trophy Boys”, in which two good-looking, ripped gay men complain about being treated as pieces of meat, as just their bulging muscles and big dicks. There are several twists in this short scene (which you can watch here), but here I’m going to focus on the title and on one of the men’s complaints about the men who pick him up as their trophy boy:

It’s dinner, drinks, and back to their place to park the beef bus in tuches town.

(referring to insertive anal intercourse). Playful alliteration in beef bus and tuches town, — the characters in SRS are given to fanciful indirect references to all matters sexual — and then there are the specific items beef, tuches, and of course trophy in trophy boy.

(#1)

On the right, two gay trophy boys commiserating; on the left, two straight guys who (eventually) bond over admiration for intellect rather than bodies

Trophy. A trophy is an award in a contest, displayed (for admiration) as a symbol of victory. Specialized in the idiom trophy wife. From NOAD2:

noun trophy wife: informal, derogatory a young, attractive wife regarded as a status symbol for an older man.

And then extended to other compounds of the form trophy X. OED3 (March 2014) on the noun trophy in a class of compounds:

C1b. Designating people or things regarded as a status symbol; esp. in  trophy wife: a wife regarded as a status symbol for a (usu. older) man. [1973 trophy-wives, 1978 trophy-husband, 1989 trophy wife, 1997 ‘trophy’ books, 2008 ‘trophy tourism’ , 2009 trophy dining]

An example of trophy wife in popular culture:

Trophy Wife is an American television sitcom that aired during the 2013–14 television season on ABC. … Trophy Wife premiered on September 24, 2013. On May 8, 2014, ABC canceled Trophy Wife after one season.

The series revolved around Kate (Malin Åkerman), a young, attractive, blonde party girl, who marries a middle aged lawyer named Pete (Bradley Whitford). With the marriage come Pete’s two ex-wives, the stern, perfectionist doctor, Diane (Marcia Gay Harden) and the flaky, flamboyant, new age Jackie (Michaela Watkins), as well as Pete’s three children: overachieving good girl Hillary (Bailee Madison), slacker Warren (Ryan Lee), and adopted Asian-American son Bert (Albert Tsai). The series explores the marriage and generation gap between Kate and Pete, along with the modern family dynamics between them, the ex-wives, and their respective children. (Wikipedia link)

(#2)

Extension of this to trophy husband (OED above) and also to trophy boyfriend; from Urban Dictionary:

Trophy Boyfriend: A boyfriend that a girl is proud of being with. She thinks a lot of him and in some cases can feel he is superior to most. She wants to go everywhere with him so everyone can see them together and she can “show him off”. – by KandysGurl 2/5/10

In these straight-world uses, a trophy husband or boyfriend is displayed primarily for the admiration of other women: the guy is a tool in the competition between women in the romantic and sexual marketplaces.

A parallel gay sense of trophy boyfriend or trophy boy would make sense — there is certainly a competition between men in the romantic and sexual marketplace, competition for desirable young men as partners — and no doubt these expressions have been used that way, but trophy boy seems to have been specialized still further, to focus on the purely physical: the young men’s muscles and penises: their meat, in two senses. And then uberqueer underwear designer Andrew Christian got his hands on the expression, and went for the dick (and, secondarily, the ass):

(#3)

The underwear comes as jock, brief, or boxer, all with generous big pouches. A brief boy:

(#4)

All the Trophy Boy models are deeply expressionless in the ads; they are nothing but prominent cocks and, oh yes, muscles. (They might well have been the inspiration for the SRS episode.) Then there’s the 2013 AC Trophy Boy twerk video, showing two gangs in an intense twerk-off contest, all aggressive butt-shaking and dick-jiggling; you can watch it on the Underwear Expert site here. (Like most AC videos it’s simultaneously a send-up and a sexual provocation, designed to make you chuckle and get a hard-on.)

Beef. The story of sexual slang beef is pretty much the story of sexual slang meat (in the US at least, beef is the central, prototypical item in the MEAT category). In particular, slang beef is prominently used to refer to muscles (hence, beefy as an adjective for a body type and the slang noun beefcake) and to the penis (so that the Wendy’s fast-food slogan “Where’s the beef?” from 1984 worked in part because of the double entendre). A summary of the GDoS entry for beef:

1 the vagina [first cite 1538] 2 (also piece of beef) a sexually appealing man or woman [first cite c1597 Henry IV Part 1] 3 (also beef-steak) the penis [first cite Measure for Measure] 4 human flesh 5 physical strength, power, muscles 7 (US) (also piece of beef) a well-built male; used by both heterosexuals and homosexuals; thus beef on the hoof, a number of such men [first cite 1929]

A sampling of the ‘penis’ cites:

1971 Frank Zappa ‘Latex Solar Beef’: All groupies must bow down / In the sacred presence of the latex solar beef.

1980 Edith Folb runnin’ down some lines: the language and culture of black teenagers: The penis is referred to as a piece of meat: beef, meat, or tube steak.

1987 Ice-T ‘Rhyme Pays’: But whether your names’s Lucy, Terry, Laura or Cindy / Ice got beef and this ain’t Wendy’s.

Searching on prime beef gets lots of cuts of meat, raw and cooked, but also a bunch of gay porn videos, with titles or captions like:

Prime Beef (Young and Old Muscle)
Italian raw prime beef [with raw ‘bareback, condomless’]
prime Chilean beef inspected at urinals
Fabio strokes the full 9.5″ of Prime Beef between his legs

Fabio Stallone in the last (prime beef between his legs not shown):

(#5)

Searching on beef hunk gets an even wider assortment, also including lots of photos of beefy hunks, plus cans of dog and cat food.

So much for the penis, the insertive participant in parking the beef bus in tuches town. On to the receptive participant, the anus, or (metonymically) the buttocks.

Tuches. This is the Yiddish English vulgar slang noun for ‘buttocks’ (also ‘anus’) usually spelled tuches in AmE — with many alternative spellings, though tokhes (with o representing the close, short and lax vowel [O]) or tukhes (with u representing the close, short and lax vowel [U]) are closest to actual Yiddish. In AmE the first vowel is pronounced [ʌ].

The medial consonant in Yiddish is a voiceless velar fricative [x], but in AmE it’s a [k], so that tuches in AmE is pronounced [tʌkIs] or [tʌkǝs], and the tuch part rhymes with fuck, a fact that makes tuches more satisfying in sexual contexts.

A Scott Hilburn cartoon on Pinterest this morning:

(#1)

A pun on irritable bowel syndrome. The vowel letters I, A, and O are angry, throwing the letter L out of their club because he’s not a vowel. (The play on Get the hell out of here is a bonus.) Note that this is all about vowel letters, not vowels. (Depending on the dialect, speakers of English have a dozen or so distinct vowels, that is, vowel phonemes.)

This particular vowel/bowel pun has been much used (see below), and linguists have also been known to play with the Great Bowel Shift (or, better, the Great Bowel Movement) vs. the Great Vowel Shift (the change in the pronunciation of English long vowels between, roughly, 1400 and 1700, shifting [e:] to [i:], [i:] to [aj], and more).

One more cartoon (from a number). On the Fine Arts America site, “Irritable Vowel Syndrome”, a drawing by Paul Messing uploaded on 8/19/15:

(#2)

Then there are postings under the heading “Irritable Vowel Syndrome”, like one from the Cranky Linguist (Ronald Kephart) on 10/21/11, expressing irritation at how thoroughly students have been taught to understand vowel as ‘vowel letter’, so that they say that boat has 2 vowels and English in general has 5 or 6.

Finally, there’s irritable bowel syndrome. From Wikipedia:

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a group of symptoms — including abdominal pain and changes in the pattern of bowel movements without any evidence of underlying damage. These symptoms occur over a long time, often years… IBS negatively affects quality of life and may result in missed school or work. Disorders such as anxiety, major depression, and chronic fatigue syndrome are common among people with IBS.

The causes of IBS are not clear.

The latest bulletin from Pinterest featured a Reaper Jokes board maintained by Kathy-Lynn Cross. More Grim Reaper cartoons, including one that especially caught my eye because of the two idioms in the text. A Mark Parisi showing one (angry) Reaper confronting another (disconsolate) Reaper: “I’ve had it with you! From now on, you’re alive to me!”. Nice reversal of the idiomatic you’re dead to me ‘I disown you, cut you off, will never see or speak to you again’. Spoken by Death to Death, you’re alive to me conveys the same.

More on this cartoon, then two more Grim Reapers, to add to the 14 already posted on this blog; it’s a very popular cartoon meme.

(I’m not posting the cartoon here, just quoting the text, because Parisi’s lawyers insist on a fee for reproducing his work.)

Two sentences of text, each with an English idiom: in the first sentence, have had it (up to here) with sth./so. ‘not be willing to continue to deal with so. or sth., be unable to tolerate so. or sth. any longer’ (combining glosses from Cambridge and Oxford dictionary sites); in the second, you’re dead to me (as above; the idiom is sometimes extended to other subjects and objects).

An expression of the second sentiment, but without the be dead to wording: from the film The Godfather, Part II:

Michael Corleone: Fredo, you’re nothing to me now. You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend. I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won’t be there. You understand?

And then the precise wording, from the film Zoolander:

Coal miner father to male model son: You’re dead to me, boy. You’re more dead to me than your dead mother.

Earlier on this blog:

on 4/15/12,  “Cartoon matters”: Grim Reaper cartoon by Bob Mankoff

on 5/16/12, “The Reaperclone”: the “I’ve come for your X” snowclone, with 4 cartoons

on 6/14/12,  “Death at play”: 4 Grim Reaper gag cartoons

on 5/7/14,  “After Cinco de Mayo”: #2 Grim Reaper cartoon (Bizarro)

on 10/17/15, “Autumn, Halloween, and Death”: 2 Grim Reaper cartoons, one by Mark Parisi

on 12/30/15, “Five cartoons for the penultimate day”: 2 Grim Reaper cartoons

And now two more from Pinterest:

(#1)

Death on the couch

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

An instance of the Grim Reaper meme and the Psychiatrist meme.

(#2)

The Reaper and his multi-purpose pocket knife. (Another cartoon on a similar theme: Michael Crawford’s French Army Knife, #4 here.)

The artist for #2, Lonnie Easterling (and his Spud Comics website), is new to this blog. Two other Spuds with language play in them:

(#3)

The pickled peppers are there only to make the tongue twister tricky, but there are always critics who insist on looking at things logically.

(#4)

Crucial background knowledge: monkeys in zoos are famous for flinging poo at visitors; that’s Winnie the Pooh in the middle. poo / Pooh, what’s the difference?

xx

Bulletin from Max Vasilatos, who got this ad (for an eye cream) on Facebook a few days ago and did a double-take:

Yes, just a finger with a bit of eye cream on its tip. But for a moment, it takes us into the world of accidental phallicity, as in my 6/25/15 posting “The news for penises, including accidental ones”.

The title of this posting is a play on “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). See my 4/29/13 posting “Nick Danger: an appreciation”.

Today’s Zippy (for a change, not alluding in any way to POTUS):

Zippy and Griffy are headless in Hyannis, or somewhere. Headless and therefore mindless. They are briefly Zippyized in panel 3, where they are subject to Martinization and Sanforization, before Zippy urges them in the last panel to return to their everyday identities (like vampires or werewolves, they change back at dawn), and Griffy commits a very silly pun (close-minded / clothes-minded).

Posting on 8/12/12, “Zippyized”, on mercerized, Simonized, and Martinized. Then there’s Sanforized; from Wikipedia:

Sanforization is a process of treatment used for cotton fabrics mainly and most textiles made from natural or chemical fibres, patented by Sanford Lockwood Cluett (1874–1968) in 1930. It is a method of stretching, shrinking and fixing the woven cloth in both length and width before cutting and producing, to reduce the shrinkage which would otherwise occur after washing.

On Dan Piraro’s Bizarro blog on the 9th, thoughts on cartoon memes, especially the Ascent of Man meme, with this wonderful new cartoon:

The Caveman meme, with the paleo guy lounging provocatively in a men’s fragrance ad (plus the pun, of course)

Piraro writes:

I was discussing cartoon cliches last night with someone I met at a friend’s house and he mentioned that Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor at The New Yorker, recently put together a list of them. Without reading the list, the ones that come to my mind most readily are “crawling through a desert,” “stranded on a tiny one-tree island,” “two people in a bar,” “a psychiatrist’s couch,” and the famous “ascent of man” line of evolving mammals, like [the Bizarro in my 4/10/17 posting “A primate with a pipe”]. There are dozens more, of course.

Two reasons cartoonists love to use these cliches are 1) they are setups that lend themselves well to saying something about the human experience, and 2) they are a fun way in which cartoonists can engage in a sort of friendly competition. For us, it’s less about who has sold the most books or gotten the most cartoons published, it’s about putting your best psychiatrist’s couch joke out there and seeing how it stands up against your cartoonist heroes.

I’ve done quite a few “ascent of man” cartoons like the one above [dressing up the chimp]. The most famous (of mine) and the one I’m most proud of can be found [in my 8/1/15 posting “Bizarro devolution”]. As you can see…, it isn’t funny, but it’s poignant and true and I think it will stand the test of time. If there are people around in a couple hundred years and they come across that cartoon, they’ll still get it.

The one today is a little more opaque, I think. It’s a product of my belief that all humans have a sense of arrogant pride about how much we’ve created as a species –– complex language, writing, philosophy, the innumerable discoveries of science, modern technology and medicine –– yet most of us never achieve anything of note at all. A very tiny fraction of us have created the amazing world we live in, the rest of us have just learned how to use it. In short, the overwhelming majority of us have evolved to where we are now, then do nothing more than turn around and try to dress up the chimp for a cheap laugh.

I’m no different, of course. I’ve not contributed anything life-changing to the planet. I just draw silly pictures for money in an effort to stay out of an office cubicle. So far, dressing up the chimp has worked okay for me.

On Pinterest this morning, this Grim Reaper cartoon by Myke Ashley-Cooper (under the name Ashley Cooper):

(#1)

A pun on death/deaf or a mishearing, take your pick.

This cartoon led me to Ashley-Cooper’s site, which announces:

This Humor Website is about
Funny Cartoons and Funny Pictures as well as
Crazy Jokes and Animations

(many of them based on puns and wordplays).  And that led me to Ashley-Cooper’s take-off on a famous painting:

(#2)

The original of the cartoon caricature is Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler (1992):

(#3)

From Wikipedia on Vettriano:

Jack Vettriano (né Jack Hoggan, born 17 November 1951), is a [self-taught] Scottish painter. His 1992 painting, The Singing Butler, became a best-selling image in Britain.

[from the section on critical responses:] “His ‘popularity’ rests on cheap commercial reproductions of his paintings.” … Vettriano has been labelled a chauvinist whose “women are sexual objects, frequently half naked and vulnerable, always in stockings and stilettos”

Vettriano is fabulously successful with the public — one site reports that he outsells Dali, Monet, and van Gogh — though not at all with art critics. His paintings have been lovingly copied and varied by others, as in Zhaana’s Wedding Dance on the Beach (an homage to The Snging Butler) on DeviantArt:

(#4)

Another Vettriano beach painting, The Picnic Party:

(#5)

And then one indoors, The Man in the Mirror:

(#6)

Vettriano’s debt to commercial illustration (in the mold of, say, J. C. Leyendecker) should be clear, and the style suffuses everything the artist has done, including the many overtly sexual images. Eventually, although the art establishment remains cool to Vettriano, the fashion world has warmed to him. From the Elite Traveler site, “A Fitting Tribute: Stefano Ricci Honors Jack Vettriano”:

The Stefano Ricci Tribute to Vettriano exhibition will … launch the 10th International Short Film Festival Salento Finibus Terrae [2012] in Borgo Egnazia di Savelletri, Italy. The exhibition complements Stefano Ricci’s latest fashion collection, inspired by the paintings of the Scottish artist.

(Ricci is an Italian designer of luxury men’s fashion.)

(#7)

On the left, Vettriano’s painting Pincer Movement; on the right, Ricci’s re-creation.

[Puzzled note. The Elite Traveler site reports on events and locations you might want to travel to (like the Salento Finibus Terrae [the Salento Region] film festival), often with quite specific time references (today in the Vettriano Tribute story, for instance), but with absolutely no indications of the year when a story was posted, and only very rarely a month and day. I had to search around to discover that the 10th Salento Finibus Terrae festival was in 2012.

Why on earth would a travel site do this?]

An Easter gift from Kim Darnell on Sunday: a handsome purple calla lily, looking dark bluish-purple in yellow interior light, but in fact bright pinkish-purple in sunlight. Purple is the liturgical color for the Lenten season, white for the Easter season, so both white and purple flowers are appropriate for this time of year. I’ll start here with the gift calla, in two photos; move on to callas in general and their sexual symbolism, with a digression on George O’Keeffe.

(Note: the title is a play on the song “Karma Chameleon”. From Wikipedia: “Karma Chameleon” is a song by English band Culture Club, featured on the group’s 1983 album Colour by Numbers. The original has karma x5 chameleon, but I’ve cut it down to x3 to save space.)

The gift calla. Here’s the photo I took, inside on a wet, overcast day, with my iPad; the image has been color-corrected as much as possible, but it’s still way off:

(#1)

On Tuesday, in bright sun outside, another friend took this photo on his iPhone, and that gets it just right:

(#2)

About callas. I’ve posted here once before calla lilies, in the 3/17/12 posting “St. Patrick”, with a section about calla lily as a resembloid, rather than subsective compound (calla lilies aren’t lilies, in the genus Lilium); about Katharine Hepburn on the flowers (“The calla lilies are in bloom again, such a strange flower, suitable to any occasion…”), and about the calla’s connection to weddings). This posting was about the classic calla:

(#3)

From Wikipedia:

Zantedeschia aethiopica (known as calla lily and arum lily) is a species in the family Araceae, native to southern Africa in Lesotho, South Africa, and Swaziland.

Zantedeschia aethiopica is a rhizomatous herbaceous perennial plant, evergreen where rainfall and temperatures are adequate, deciduous where there is a dry season. Its preferred habitat is in streams and ponds or on the banks. It grows to 2.0–3.3 ft tall, with large clumps of broad, arrow shaped dark green leaves up to 18 in long. The inflorescences are large and are produced in spring, summer and autumn, with a pure white spathe up to 9.8 in and a yellow spadix up to 3 1⁄2 in long. The spadix produces a faint, sweet fragrance.

The spathe is the part that looks like a conical petal, but is in fact a bract; think of the petal-like bracts of pointsettia or dogwood flowers. The spadix is the central part that looks like a stamen, but is in fact a spike of very small yellow flowers.

The showy trumpet-like whiteness of Z. aethiopica makes it a suitable Easter flower, an alternative to the standard Easter lily. From Wikipedia:

(#4)

Lilium longiflorum …, often called the Easter lily, is a plant endemic to the Ryukyu Islands (Japan). Lilium formosana, a closely related species from Taiwan, has been treated as a variety of Easter lily in the past. It is a stem rooting lily, growing up to 1 m (3 ft 3 in) high. It bears a number of trumpet shaped, white, fragrant, and outward facing flowers.

I hadn’t been aware of the wide variety of Z. aethiopica sports and hybrids between this species and other Zantedeschia species, yielding an extraordinary range of spathe colors, including bicolors. Assortments from two different seed and plant companies:

(#5)

(#6)

The calla as erotic symbol. The spathe serves as a vaginal symbol, and the spadix as either phallic or clitoral symbol, so callas are pretty much drenched in sexuality.

Which brings us to Georgia O’Keeffe, whose hundreds of flower paintings strike nearly everybody as powerfully sexual (though apparently she always rejected Freudian interpretations of these works). Calla lilies were a recurrent subject, as in White Calla Lily of 1927:

(#7)

Yesterday, a posting on a mini-phal /mIni fæl/, a miniature Phalaenopsis (orchid). Which moved me to investigate names of the form /mIni Cæl/, for various consonants C: existing names and ones you can invent, using a /Cæl/ that’s an existing word (pal, gal), a clipping (phal for Phalaenopsis, Cal for California), a nickname (Cal for Calvin, Sal for Sally, Salvatore, or Salvador), or an acronym (HAL for hook and line, HAL for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer).

What follows is a mere sampling of such cases, not intended to be exhaustive.

On the title of this posting. From Wikipedia:

“You Can Call Me Al” is a song by the American singer-songwriter Paul Simon. It was the lead single from his seventh studio album, Graceland (1986), released on Warner Bros. Records. Written by Simon, its lyrics follow an individual seemingly experiencing a midlife crisis. Its lyrics were partially inspired by Simon’s trip to South Africa and experience with its culture.

You can watch the video here.

The song title has the nickname Al, short for Albert or Alfred, less often Alan, Alexander (Alex, Alec).  So of course we could have /mIni æl/, mini-Al ‘little Albert, Alfred,…’

Then: /mIni fæl/ is also available as a clipping of mini-phallus, referring to miniature carvings of phalluses. These are available in many stones (quartz, citrine, emerald, sodalite, agate, lapis lazuli) and are often quite pretty. Here’s a nice one (3 inches tall) in agate:

(#1)

mini-phall would also be available as a synonym of micropenis ‘an unusually small penis’.

/mIni kæl/ was next up. Aside from the invented mini-Cal ‘little Calvin’, there’s a possible mini-Cal in which Cal is a clipping of California, referring not just to the state (as in SoCal and NorCal), but specifically to the University of California at Berkeley (as in the Big Game, Stanford vs. Cal). Given all that, a mini-Cal would be a junior college, or community college, counterpart to UCB.

That would be Berkeley City College. From Wikipedia:

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Berkeley City College, one of California’s 112 community colleges, is located at 2050 Center Street in downtown Berkeley, in one of the world’s great education centers. In August 2006, the college moved to a newly constructed six-story, 165,000 square foot urban campus, only one-and-one-half blocks from the University of California at Berkeley. The college is part of the Peralta Community College District which includes College of Alameda, Laney and Merritt colleges.

BCC offers Associate degrees and Certificates in a number of areas.

Then /mIni gæl/, which could be an invented mini-gal ‘little lady’, but there’s an actually attested MiniGal, in which gal is a clipping of gallery. From the MiniGal website:

MiniGal is a series of dynamic PHP image galleries that aim to be simple, easy to use, good looking while still being free and open source.

So much for the velars /k g/. On to the bilabials /p b m/.

/mIni pæl/, that is, mini-pal ‘little friend’, in at least two attested usages, referring to a useful knife and a small doll.

From the Cold Steel company:

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Mini Pal: Since the one inch long blade is razor sharp, it will open delicate packages and envelopes, cut rope or punch through heavy cartons with ease.

All three of these knives (which come in convenient pouches) are quite short. But useful.

And then the doll. From the company site:

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Maru™ Mini Pal is a little darling standing tall at 13 inches! She is adorable and perfectly sized for girls of all ages. Her innocence and angelic beauty is only matched by her big personality that will continue to amaze us as we follow her story.
Maru™ Mini Pal is featured in her new candy-red taffeta dress, with a beautiful ribbed sash and bow, matching headband, textured white stockings, and black patent ballerina shoes!

/mIni bæl/. We could imagine a mini-Bal, a little Bal Harbour (as in Florida). But there’s an actually existing acronym. From a Univ. of Washington health site:

What is a Mini BAL? Mini or Blind BAL stands for bronchoalveolar lavage. It is described as blind (mini) because a bronchoscope or camera is not used to look at the lungs. A mini BAL is performed when someone suspects a patient has pneumonia.

/mIni mæl/. First, the actually attested case, Mini Mal, in which Mal is a clipping of Malibu (CA). From the Surf Science site:

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The Bilbo ‘Torpedo’ 7’6 Mini Mal Surfboard in Red (top view, side view, bottom view)

The Mini Mal surfboard design, also known as the Funboard or Hybrid board, is a great universal surfboard. It was originally fashioned after the Malibu Surfboard. A mini-mal is similar to a longboard in shape but it’s a smaller version. A Mini Mal will range from 7’0″ to 8’6″ in length.

Then there’s French mal ‘sickness’, borrowed into English in (among other things) grand mal and petit mal seizures. From Wikipedia on the latter:

Absence seizures are one of several kinds of seizures. These seizures are sometimes referred to as petit mal [ /pɛti mæl/ ] seizures (from the French for “little illness”, a term dating from the late 18th century). Absence seizures are characterized by a brief loss and return of consciousness, generally not followed by a period of lethargy

A petit mal seizure might then be referred to as a mini-mal seizure.

Two more, with /s h/.

/mIni sæl/. Beyond the invented nickname mini-Sal ‘little Sally, Salvatore, Salvador’, there’s an attested clipping. From the Oasis Diagnostics site:

Oasis Diagnostics provides the Mini•SAL™ and Midi•SAL™ DNA isolation kits for superior extraction of high-quality genomic DNA from saliva and/or buccal cells.

/mIni hæl/. Possible inventions: mini-HAL (from 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer)); mini-Hal ‘little Henry, Harry, or Harold’.  And then there’ an attested acronym; from the EOD Gear site (dealing with Explosive Ordnance Disposal), a mini HAL (hook and line) kit.

Two cartoons to end the week: a Rhymes With Orange with a four-word play and a Bizarro with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):

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The Cantonese American dish moo goo gai pan ‘chicken with button mushrooms and sliced vegetables’, with a pun on each word: onomatopoetic moo, onomatopoetic goo, the informal noun guy, the Greek god Pan.

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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

Doctors Without Borders + Border Collie(s).

(Note that there are a lot of things you need to know to appreciate these comics.)

moo goo guy Pan. Wikipedia on the dish:

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Moo goo gai pan is the Americanized version of a Cantonese dish, usually a simple stir-fried dish consisting of sliced or cubed chicken with white button mushrooms and other vegetables. Popular vegetable additions include snow peas, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts and Chinese cabbage.

The name comes from the Cantonese names of the ingredients: moo goo (mòhgū): button mushrooms; gai (gāi): chicken; pan (pín): slices

The cartoon has a table with, in order, a cow, a baby, a young man, and what you need to recognize as a satyr.

The cow says moo. From NOAD2:

verb moo: make the characteristic deep vocal sound of a cow. noun moo: the characteristic deep vocal sound of a cow. ORIGIN mid 16th century: imitative.

The baby says goo(-goo). Again, from NOAD2:

1 amorously adoring: making goo-goo eyes at him. [possibly related to goggle; possibly (AMZ) related to sense 2] 2 (of speech or vocal sounds) childish or meaningless: making soothing goo-goo noises. [onomatopoetic]

A young man can be called a guy.

All that’s easy, diner #4. the satyr, is a bit trickier: you need to recognize him as the god Pan, and to accept English /pæn/, the name of the god in English, as close enough to /pan/, the usual pronunciation of the fourth syllable in the name of the dish. From Wikipedia:

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Absolicious modern rendering of Pan, from this site

In Greek religion and mythology, Pan is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature of mountain wilds and rustic music, and companion of the nymphs. His name originates within the ancient Greek language, from the word paein (πάειν), meaning “to pasture”; the modern word “panic” is derived from the name. He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr. With his homeland in rustic Arcadia, he is also recognized as the god of fields, groves, and wooded glens; because of this, Pan is connected to fertility and the season of spring. The ancient Greeks also considered Pan to be the god of theatrical criticism and impromptus.

Doctors Without Border Collies. In #2, we’re in a doct’s office, and there are a lot of sheep there. Two ingredients for the POP (one for the doctors, one for the sheep), and you need to recognize both to appreciate the cartoon.

On Doctors Without Borders, from Wikipedia:

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Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, is an international humanitarian non-governmental organization (NGO) best known for its projects in war-torn regions and developing countries affected by endemic diseases. In 2015, over 30,000 personnel — mostly local doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, logistical experts, water and sanitation engineers and administrators — provided medical aid in over 70 countries. The vast majority of staff are volunteers. Private donors provide about 90% of the organization’s funding, while corporate donations provide the rest, giving MSF an annual budget of approximately US$750 million.

Médecins Sans Frontières was founded in 1971, in the aftermath of the Biafra secession, by a small group of French doctors and journalists who sought to expand accessibility to medical care across national boundaries and irrespective of race, religion, creed or political affiliation. To that end, the organisation emphasises “independence and impartiality”, and explicitly precludes political, economic, or religious factors in its decision making.

And then border collies. From Wikipedia:

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Border collie posing

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Border collie herding

The Border Collie is a working and herding dog breed developed in the Anglo-Scottish border region for herding livestock, especially sheep. It was specifically bred for intelligence and obedience.

Considered highly intelligent, extremely energetic, acrobatic and athletic, they frequently compete with great success in sheepdog trials and dog sports. They are often cited as the most intelligent of all domestic dogs. Border Collies continue to be employed in their traditional work of herding livestock throughout the world.

… [BUT NOTE:] Border collies require considerably more daily physical exercise and mental stimulation than many other breeds. … Although the primary role of the Border collie is to herd livestock, this type of breed is becoming increasingly popular as a companion animal.

In this role, due to their working heritage, Border collies are very demanding, playful, and energetic. They thrive best in households that can provide them with plenty of play and exercise, either with humans or other dogs. Due to their demanding personalities and need for mental stimulation and exercise, many Border Collies develop problematic behaviours in households that are not able to provide for their needs. They are infamous for chewing holes in walls, furniture such as chairs and table legs, destructive scraping and hole digging, due to boredom. Border collies may exhibit a strong desire to herd, a trait they may show with small children, cats, and other dogs. The breed’s herding trait has been deliberately encouraged, as it was in the dogs from which the Border collie was developed, by selective breeding for many generations. However, being eminently trainable, they can live amicably with other pets if given proper socialisation training.

The Daily Jocks ad from the 25th, with an appeal to base, or low, instincts (of taking pleasure in viewing the male body); to the basic, or fundamental, instinct of sexual appetite; and ultimately to an appreciation of the fundamental, or basilar, that is, gluteal:

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On the lexical items involved — among them, the moral adjective base, the adjective basic, the noun fundament, and the adjective basilar — see my discussion in the earlier posting today “base(ly)”. Here, I’m slipping back and forth between locational understandings of these expressions, moral understandings, and anatomical understandings.

(The title also works in to appeal to the (political) base and the movie Basic Instinct, but in a scattershot way.)

The DJ ad is for the Australian brand Teamm8, which turns up here every so often. If you’re interested in the details: the hunky model — I think of him as Basil — is wearing a Tempo Tank (in Navy) and a Track Short (in Gray Marle).

Then there are matters fundamental (of the fundament) or basilar (of the bottom): Teamm8 gluteal delights. Three samples from the current catalogue:

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The gray marle short, bottom view

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A Sprint Brief in green, basilar shot

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An Animal Instinct Brief in tiger, rear view

Basil the Base, at bottom a good guy.

It’s May Day, an ancient spring festival — think maypoles and all that — so, the beginning of the cycle of the seasons. (Everybody knows the Vivaldi. Try listening instead to the Haydn, here.) And it’s the first of the month, an occasion for still other rituals, including one that calls for everyone to greet the new month, upon awakening, by saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” (or some variant thereof). There’s even a Rabbit Rabbit Day Facebook community, with this page art (not attributed to an artist):

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The three-rabbit variant is the one I’m familiar with. (I got it as an adult from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky. Since she was from the South, I thought it was a specifically Southern thing. But today I learned, from an astonishingly detailed Wikipedia page, that that is very much not so.)

Today also brought a Facebook posting from my friend Mary Ballard, to whom the whole inaugural-rabbit thing was news, and, by good fortune, three cartoons from various sources: a Bizarro I’ve already posted about; a Mother Goose and Grimm with an outrageous bit of language play; and a Calvin and Hobbes reflection on the meaning of the verb read.

rabbit rabbit rabbit. The Wikipedia piece, almost in its entirety:

“Rabbit rabbit rabbit” is one variant of a superstition found in Britain and North America that states that a person should say or repeat the word “rabbit” or “rabbits”, or “white rabbits”, or some combination of these elements, out loud upon waking on the first day of the month, because doing so will ensure good luck for the duration of that month.

The exact origin of the superstition is unknown, though it was recorded in Notes and Queries as being said by children in 1909:

“My two daughters are in the habit of saying ‘Rabbits!’ on the first day of each month. The word must be spoken aloud, and be the first word said in the month. It brings luck for that month. Other children, I find, use the same formula. [So in the earliest citations, it’s childlore.]

In response to this note another contributor said that his daughter believed that the outcome would be a present, and that the word must be spoken up the chimney to be most effective; another pointed out that the word rabbit was often used in expletives, and suggested that the superstition may be a survival of the ancient belief in swearing as a means of avoiding evil. [There are attestations of rabbit as a milder version of drat, itself a euphemism for damn.] People continue to express curiosity about the origins of this superstition and draw upon it for inspiration in making calendars suggestive of the Labors of the Months, thus linking the rabbit rabbit superstition to seasonal fertility.

It appeared in a work of fiction in 1922:

“Why,” the man in the brown hat laughed at him, “I thought everybody knew ‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.’ If you say ‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit’—three times, just like that—first thing in the morning on the first of the month, even before you say your prayers, you’ll get a present before the end of the month.

Chapter 1 of the Trixie Belden story The Mystery of the Emeralds (1962) is titled “Rabbit! Rabbit!” and discusses the tradition:

Trixie Belden awoke slowly, with the sound of a summer rain beating against her window. She half-opened her eyes, stretched her arms above her head, and then, catching sight of a large sign tied to the foot of her bed, yelled out, “Rabbit! Rabbit!” She bounced out of bed and ran out of her room and down the hall. “I’ve finally done it!” she cried […] “Well, ever since I was Bobby’s age I’ve been trying to remember to say ‘Rabbit! Rabbit!’ and make a wish just before going to sleep on the last night of the month. If you say it again in the morning, before you’ve said another word, your wish comes true.” Trixie laughed.

In the United States the tradition appears especially well-known in northern New England although, like all folklore, determining its exact area of distribution is difficult. The superstition may be related to the broader belief in the rabbit or hare being a “lucky” animal, as exhibited in the practice of carrying a rabbit’s foot for luck.

During the mid-1990s, U.S. children’s cable channel Nickelodeon helped popularize the superstition in the United States as part of its “Nick Days,” where during commercial breaks it would show an ad about the significance of the current date, whether it be an actual holiday, a largely uncelebrated unofficial holiday, or a made-up day if nothing else is going on that specific day. (The latter would be identified as a “Nickelodeon holiday.”) Nickelodeon would promote the last day of each month as “Rabbit Rabbit Day” and to remind kids to say it the next day, unless the last day of that specific month was an actual holiday, such as Halloween or New Year’s Eve. This practice stopped by the late 1990s.

… As with most folklore, which is traditionally spread by word of mouth, there are numerous variants of the superstition, in some cases specific to a certain time period or region.

– “When I was a very little boy I was advised to always murmur ‘White rabbits’ on the first of every month if I wanted to be lucky. From sheer force of unreasoning habit I do it still — when I think of it. I know it to be preposterously ludicrous, but that does not deter me.” – Sir Herbert Russell, 1925.

– “Even Mr. Roosevelt, the President of the United States, has confessed to a friend that he says ‘Rabbits’ on the first of every month — and, what is more, he would not think of omitting the utterance on any account.” – Newspaper article, 1935.

– “On the first day of the month say ‘Rabbit! rabbit! rabbit!’ and the first thing you know you will get a present from someone you like very much.” Collected by the researcher Frank C. Brown in North Carolina in the years between 1913 and 1943.

– “If you say ‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit’ the first thing when you wake up in the morning on the first of each month you will have good luck all month.” Collected by Wayland D. Hand in Pennsylvania before 1964.

– “Say ‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit’ at the first of the month for good luck and money.” Collected by Ernest W. Baughman in New Mexico before 1964.

– “…it must be ‘White Rabbit’ … but you must also say ‘Brown Rabbit’ at night and walk downstairs backwards.” Reported in a small survey that took place in Exeter, Devon in 1972.

– “Ever since I was 4 years old, I have said ‘White Rabbits’ at the very moment of waking on every single first day of every single month that has passed.” Simon Winchester, 2006.

– “…the more common version ‘rabbit, rabbit, white rabbit’ should be said upon waking on the first day of each new month to bring good luck.” Sunday Mirror, 2007.

(Sources for all the citations are given as footnotes in the Wikipedia article.)

The three cartoons. The Bizarro played on a recent Pepsi ad exploiting protestor-police interactions. The other two:

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(Note that this is a meta-cartoon, in which the characters recognize that they are in fact characters in a cartoon.)

The idiom leave no stone unturned ‘try every possible course of action in order to achieve something’, with the /ston/ and /trn/ pieces interchanged (spooneristically), taking advantage of the ambiguities in /trn/: (verb turned, noun tern) and /ston/ (noun stone, adjectival use of the PSP stoned ‘under the influence of marijuana’.

‘ (#3)

Calvin extends the use of the verb read not only to cover the territory of skim ‘read (something) quickly or cursorily so as to note only the important points’ (NOAD2), as people sometimes do, hopefully or deceptively, but goes all the way to ‘turn the pages from beginning to end’ (without any engagement of eyes on text, much less extraction of meaning).

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, which presents the reader with a challenge in understanding. You need to know something about music, and a lot about urban life:

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That’s a grand piano on a cinder block, with its lid propped open by a shovel, on the grassy lawn (BrE garden) in front of the house; and there’s a BEWARE OF DOG sign, indicating the presence of a guard dog. Signs of urban blight (see the title of the cartoon), decline, diminishment (a diminuendo). All very troubling (in musical Punnish, treble-ing) to the musical old couple walking by.

The musical references are relatively easy, but to get the urban blight part, you need to know about derelict cars (possibly with their hoods/bonnets propped open by whatever’s at hand) parked on the grass, especially in front of houses, and jacked up on cinder blocks rather than tires. In North America and the UK, a sign of urban decay, a run-down neighborhood, an area going downhill. In the US, especially associated with rednecks —

a working-class white person, especially a politically reactionary one from a rural area: rednecks in the high, cheap seats stomped their feet and hooted | [as modifier]: a place of redneck biases. ORIGIN from the back of the neck being sunburned from outdoor work. (NOAD2)

— but by no means confined to whites or to rural places, though rural white rednecks / hicks / hillbillies / yokels are the stereotypical cement-blockers.

From the VW Vortex site (for Volkswagen enthusiasts), under the heading “You know you’re a redneck when…” (with a bow to comic Jeff Foxworthy), two photos of cars on the grass, one car on cinder blocks:

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(Note the propped-up hood.)

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Cars on grass and cars on cinder blocks are such conventional signs of urban blight that many cities (in the Bay Area, Oakland and San Jose, at least) ban them. The obvious solution (to many minds) is to pave over the front lawn in concrete — but in fact that too is banned in many places.

Why put a car up on cinder blocks in the first place? One possibility: to raise it, so that you can work on it from underneath; this is very much not recommended, because it’s seriously unsafe. So many a derelict car is on cinder blocks for long periods of time, indicating the owner’s earnest hopes that they’ll get around to fixing it eventually. Another possibility: to take the weight off the tires. Still another: to sell the tires, or give them to a friend. Still another (regrettably common) possibility is that the tires have been stolen.

In any case, those cinder blocks are a class signifier. To working-class men, they’re part of the fabric of daily life, an attempt to make do with scarce resources and hard work, so these men deeply resent the meddlings of middle-class strivers in their lives. To middle-class people, they’re offensive signs of decay and disorder, not to mention the threat of take-over by dirty, dumb, and maybe dangerous barbarians (with their snarling dogs).

And, yes, diminuendo was verbed, as an inchoative intransitive ‘before softer, less loud’, some time ago. From NOAD2:

verb diminuendo: decrease in loudness or intensity: the singers left and the buzz diminuendoed.

OED2’s first cite:

1901 Westm. Gaz. 12 Nov. 2/1   Their booming note crescendoes up the scale with increasing speed and diminuendoes with the slackening of it.

Today, May the Fourth. Yes: May the Fourth be with you. Groan.

The original, by Yoda intoned:

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From Wikipedia:

The Force is a metaphysical and ubiquitous power in the Star Wars fictional universe. It is wielded by characters in the franchise’s films and in many of its spin-off books, games, and comics. In the story, the Jedi utilize the “light side” of the Force, while the Sith exploit what is known as the “dark side”. The Force has been compared to aspects of several world religions, and the iconic phrase “May the Force be with you” has become part of the popular culture vernacular.

Earlier on this blog, on 2/4/14, “Today’s linguistic pun”: Metaphors be with you.

And then, another version of the pun, involving only force / fourth (and not also may the modal / May the month):

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(The musical interval the fourth.)

And, from Brian Kane on Facebook, this Latin version of the joke:

Maias dies quartus vobiscum sit.

(to which Chris Ambidge replied, in his Anglican way: And with thy spirit.)

The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed:

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Ouch: Creighton Barrel / Crate & Barrel.

There’s quite a path in the history of Creighton as a first name. This will take us to probably the most famous person with first name Creighton, US Army General Creighton W. Abrams — and his son Creighton W. Abrams, a classmate of mine at Princeton.

The emporium. And how it got its name. From Wikipedia:

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Euromarket Designs, Inc. dba Crate & Barrel is a 170+ store American chain of retail stores, based in Northbrook, Illinois, specializing in housewares, furniture (indoor and out), and home accessories. Its corporate name is Euromarket Designs, Inc. The company is [now] wholly owned by Otto GmbH.

… Gordon and Carole Segal opened the first Crate & Barrel store on December 7, 1962, at age 23. The 1,700-square-foot (160 m2) space in part of an old elevator factory was located at 1516 North Wells Street in the then-bohemian Old Town neighborhood of Chicago

… The Segals derived the company name by the materials that they originally used to display items in their Chicago store. The Segals were originally going to call their company “Barrel and Crate”, but a friend suggested that they reverse the order of the words. They turned over the crates and barrels that the merchandise came in, let the wood excelsior spew out, and stacked up the china and glass. This helped emphasize their strongest selling point, that their products were direct imports.

The surname Barrel(l). From the Internet Surname Database:

Barrell: This unusual surname is of French origin, and is primarily a metonymic occupational name for a cooper, a maker of barrels or casks. The derivation is from the Old French “baril”, barrel, cask, but this word may also have been used as a nickname to describe one of rotund appearance, “the ydell and barrell bealies of monkes” (1561, New English Dictionary). A sizeable group of early European surnames were gradually created from the habitual use of nicknames; these nicknames were originally given with reference to a variety of personal characteristics, such as physical attributes or peculiarities, and to habits of dress and occupation.

So Lynette’s surname (possibly her married name) in the OBH cartoon is attested, but not very common. Still, it might have struck you in the first panel of the cartoon that the name might be a se-up for a joke.

The name Creighton. It starts as a placename, later used as a surname for people from that place. And then bearers of the surname lend their names to placenames (towns and cities). From Wikipedia:

Creighton is a [family] name, derived from Crichton, Midlothian [in Scotland]. It is also a placename, probably usually derived from bearers of the surname. [This spelling is one of a number of variants (compare the name of the writer Michael Crichton).]

The article cites the town names Creighton FL, MO, NE, PA, SD; SK, ON; and KwaZulu-Natal.

Another step is the use of a surname as a personal name, usually first for men (though such names often spread to women) — typically, to honor a surname somewhere in the bearer’s family, quite often in a female line.

In the case of Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, Jr., the personal name looks back to the family’s Scottish antecedents.

The name Abraham. This is straightforwardly a Biblical name, the name of the patroarch Abraham. It’s used as a personal name by Jews and also by Christians honoring their Old Testament religious traditions (note Abraham Lincoln). From that we get surnames Abraham (actor F. Murray Abraham), Abrahams (folklorist Roger D. Abrahams), Abrams (diplomat Elliott Abrams), Abrahamson (Irish film director Lenny Abrahamson), Abramson (linguist and phonetician Arthur S. Abramson), etc., some Jewish, some Christian.

Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, Jr. was apparently raised in a Methodist family and converted to Catholicism during the Vietnam War, but was often taken to be Jewish (an attribution he sometimes declined to dispute). From a New York Sun editorial of 8/28/04, with a naming bonus as the end of this excerpt:

One of our favorite stories about America and the Jews concerns Meyer Levin’s famous encounter with Creighton Abrams. It took place during World War II, when Levin was a young correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency assigned to scout around the European theater to write profiles of Jewish war heroes. He found a general who was Jewish and approached his aides, saying, “Hi, I’m Meyer Levin of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. I want to write a profile of the general, stressing the Jewish angle.” Back came word that the general wanted no such profile; he had enough problems.

So Levin kept searching until he heard about a dashing young tank commander called Creighton Abrams. He finally caught up with the future chief of staff in the field. The correspondent climbed aboard the officer’s tank and the colonel himself emerged. “Sir,” the writer said, “I’m Meyer Levin of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. I want to write a profile of you – stressing the Jewish angle.” Abrams looked at him a bit quizzically but without pausing a second said, “Well, hop in.”

We thought of the great Creighton Abrams, who was of Scottish background and not Jewish, as we read the latest from the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, bewailing the fact that many Iraqis have taken to calling American GIs “Jews.” Mr. Friedman attributes this to Scott Pelley of CBS, who had been asking around Iraq to see what Iraqis were calling the Americans the way Americans called the Germans “Krauts” and the Viet Cong “Charlie.”

We have now come all the way to the general, whose service spanned from World War II to Vietnam. From Wikipedia:

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Creighton Williams Abrams, Jr. (September 15, 1914 – September 4, 1974) was a United States Army general who commanded military operations in the Vietnam War from 1968–72 (which saw U.S. troop strength in South Vietnam fall from a peak of 543,000 to 49,000). He served as Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1972 until shortly before his death in 1974.

He had three sons, all of them Army officers: Gen. Robert B. Abrams, Gen. John N. Abrams, and Brig. Gen. Creighton W. Abrams III. (At some point, the general seems to have abandoned his Jr. suffix — as I have done with mine — and his son Creighton converted his III to Jr.)

The general was excoriated on one side for having pursued the war in Vietnam and on another for having lost the war. Within the military, he was revered. From a 5/30/13 piece on the Foreign Policy Research Insttute site by Lewis Sorley, “The Way of the Soldier: Remembering General Creighton Abrams”:

Creighton Abrams was something quite rare in the military profession, a man of tactical and strategic brilliance, personal bravery and integrity of the highest order, and inspiring leadership who was also compassionate, modest and wise.

… Abrams came from a modest background, his father a railroad mechanic and his mother the daughter of an estate caretaker

On to his son Creighton. His freshman photo at Princeton:

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From the Princeton Alumni Weekly on 5/16/12, a piece “Alumni Profile: Creighton W. Abrams Jr. ’62, head of the Army Historical Foundation” by Van Wallach:

Résumé: Executive director of the Army Historical Foundation since 2000. Retired Army brigadier general. Served 31 years, including deployments to Korea, Vietnam, Germany, Southwest Asia, and Italy. Site manager for General Dynamics in Saudi Arabia. English major at Princeton.

Preserving Military History. As head of the Army Historical Foundation, Brig. Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr. ’62 is charged with building support for the National Museum of the United States Army. Expected to open in 2016 at Fort Belvoir, Va., the museum would fill a major gap in the Army’s historical presence

(A Brigadier General is a one-star general.)

I didn’t really know Creighton at Princeton, but then we were in a class of about 700 men and not in the same eating club.