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.

Mueller just after the appointment:

  (#1)

From Wikipedia:

Macaroni is a variety of dry pasta traditionally shaped into narrow tubes, produced in various shapes and sizes. Originating in Italy and made with durum wheat [that is, with semolina flour], macaroni is commonly cut in short lengths; curved macaroni may be referred to as elbow macaroni [or elbows].

[Linguistic note: macaroni is a M(ass) noun in English. The noun elbow, the truncated version of elbow macaroni, is, however, a C(ount) noun, almost always used in the PL (the close relationship between (SG) M nouns and PL (C) nouns — together forming a grammatical category I’ve labeled E (for Extended, in contrast to S C = I, for Individuated) — is central to the grammar of nouns in English.]

On semolina (flour):

Semolina is the coarse, purified wheat middlings of durum wheat mainly used [as flour] in making pasta and couscous. The word semolina can also refer to sweet dessert made from semolina and milk.

And then from the “semolina pasta: elbows” page on the Mueller’s site:

Shape: Short tubes with a slight bend in the shape. Recommended sauce pairings: meat, cream, seafood, or vegetable based. Adults and kids alike enjoy this shape in the American favorite, Macaroni & Cheese. Additionally, because this shape is hollow, it pairs nicely with a variety of sauces.

And on to macaroni and cheese (aka mac ‘n’ cheese). From Wikipedia:

  (#2)

Macaroni and cheese — also called mac and cheese in American, Canadian, and macaroni pie in Caribbean English; and macaroni cheese in the United Kingdom — is a dish of English origin, consisting of cooked macaroni pasta and a cheese sauce, most commonly cheddar. It can also incorporate other ingredients, such as bread crumbs, meat and vegetables.

Traditional macaroni and cheese is a casserole baked in the oven; however, it may be prepared in a sauce pan on top of the stove or using a packaged mix. The cheese is often first incorporated into a Béchamel sauce (milk gravy) to give a Mornay sauce which is then added to the pasta. In the United States it is considered a comfort food.

… Pasta and cheese casseroles have been recorded as early as the 14th century in the Italian cookbook, Liber de Coquina, one of the oldest medieval cookbooks, which featured a dish of parmesan and pasta.

… The first modern recipe for the dish was included in Elizabeth Raffald’s 1770 book, The Experienced English Housekeeper. Raffald’s recipe is for a Béchamel sauce with cheddar cheese — a Mornay sauce in French cooking—which is mixed with macaroni, sprinkled with Parmesan, and baked until bubbly and golden. The famous British Victorian cookbook Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management included two recipes for the dish.

… In the United Kingdom, during the 2010s, it has seen a surge in popularity, becoming widespread as a meal and as a side order in both fast food and upmarket restaurants.

And in the United States as well. From a 12/23/16 posting here, a section on

a small San Francisco restaurant (1453 18th St., on Potrero Hill) named Mac Daddy, because its specialties are “playful mac ‘n’ cheese combos, salads & American sides”. Part of a trend in restaurants turning comfort food into exquisite upscale specialities. I mean, like truffle mac ‘n’ cheese.

The possibilities for variation are enormous: in the types of pasta used, the types of cheese used, the details of preparation, and the addition of further ingredients.

[Further linguistic note, on the pronunciation of the name Mueller. In German, the first, accented, vowel of the name variously spelled Müller or Mueller is a short high front unrounded vowel [ü] (IPA [y]) — a high vowel that is both palatal (front) and labial (rounded) in articulation. This vowel can be nativized in English in several ways: by eliminating the palatality, giving [U], which is likely to be respelled as Muller and then spelling-pronounced with a [∧]; by eliminating the labiality, giving [I], which is likely to be respelled as Miller; or by breaking the palatality and labiality into sequential components, as [jU] (or [ju]). But the respelling isn’t inevitable, so that there are Americans with the name Mueller with first vowel /U/ (rhyming with fuller), /∧/ (rhyming with cruller), /I/ (rhyming with pillar), and /jU/ or /ju/ (rhyming with fueler). All are attested, but options 2 (/∧/) and 4 (/jU/ or /ju/) are by far the most common. The pasta company and  special counsel Robert Mueller’s family both took option 2. You can hear it in a retro Mueller’s ad here and a recent CNN political news report here,]

(Men’s underwear, but nothing hard-core.)

The Daily Jocks ad from the 9th, featuring the Marco Marco brand, with my caption:

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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.

Marco Marco. A 3/3/17 posting has a section on the Marco brand and L.A. designer Marco Morante (who designs over-the-top stuff for women, drag queens, hot gay men, whatever), where I noted, cautiously, that “Many of his underwear models read as gay”.

One all, all one. Or the reverse. And, yes, a Swiss connection! (Swissies are everywhere.) From Wikipedia:

Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno is a [chiastic] Latin phrase that means “One for all, all for one” in English.

… Switzerland [which is a federation] has no official motto defined in its constitution or legislative documents. The phrase, in its German (Einer für alle, alle für einen), French (un pour tous, tous pour un), Italian (Uno per tutti, tutti per uno) and Romansh (In per tuts, tuts per in) versions, came into widespread use in the 19th century.

… One for all, and all for one (Un pour tous, tous pour un; also inverted to All for one, and one for all) is a motto traditionally associated with the titular heroes of the novel The Three Musketeers written by Alexandre Dumas père, first published in 1844.

The three Marcos probably aren’t Swiss, but they are presented as a trio,

The Zapata connection.Instead of going to Marco Polo, I decided to go for someone a bit rougher (ok, and more obscure, at least to most Americans). From Wikipedia:

(#2)

Subcomandante Marcos was the nom de guerre used by Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente (born June 19, 1957) who was the leader and primary spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) during the Chiapas conflict. Marcos has used several other pseudonyms; he referred to himself as Delegate Zero during the 2006 Mexican Presidential Campaign, and in May 2014 announced that Subcommandante Marcos “no longer exists,” adopting the name Subcomandante Galeano instead.

Born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Marcos earned a degree in sociology and a master’s degree in philosophy from National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and taught at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) for several years during the early 1980s. During these years, he became increasingly involved with a guerrilla group known as the National Liberation Forces (FLN), before leaving the university and moving to Chiapas in 1984.

The EZLN was founded in the Lacandon Jungle in 1983, initially functioning as a self-defense unit that was dedicated to protecting Chiapas’ Mayan people from evictions and encroachment on their land. While not Mayan himself, Marcos emerged as the groups leader, and when the EZLN – often referred to as Zapatistas – began their rebellion in January 1, 1994, Marcos served as the Zapatistas’ spokesman.

Known for his trademark ski mask and pipe, and for his charismatic personality, Marcos led the EZLN during the 1994 revolt and the subsequent peace negotiations, during a counter-offensive by the Mexican Army in 1995, and throughout the decades that followed.

Body types and personas. Using several models in a single ad is a way to appeal to a wide variety of potential customers: each customer wants to be that guy in the ad, and he want to do that guy, and he’s also got his own tastes in men. So the company supplies its own brand of guy in almost all of its models — for Marco Marco, the guys have those pecs, amazing abs, sturdy thighs — but then each model is as distinct from the others as possible. Marco Maxi is compact and lean, “ethnic”, with black hair, a mustache, and a light beard; the others are clean-shaven and have blond to brown hair, with bigger bodies than Maxi.

But Midi and Mini have very different hair styles, and very different torsos, though they’re about the same height: Mini has an extraordinarily long torso (from the shoulders to the hipbones), much longer than Midi’s. And Mini has a bunch of tattoos and wears glasses.

A type for them all, each one a type of his own.

This Non Sequitur cartoon by Wiley Miller:

(#1)

squid / quid. And squid as a source of ink, squid as food. .

Hat tips to Chris Hansen and Josh Simon. On the cartoon, see this Page.

Two crucial pieces of background, from NOAD2:

noun quid pro quo: a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something: the pardon was a quid pro quo for their help in releasing hostages. ORIGIN mid 16th century (denoting a medicine substituted for another): Latin, ‘something for something.’

noun calamari (also calamares): squid served as food. ORIGIN Italian, plural of calamaro, from medieval Latin calamarium ‘pen case,’ from Greek kalamos ‘pen’ (with reference to the squid’s long tapering internal shell and its ink). The variant calamares is Spanish.

(Grammatical note: the English noun calamari can be either (SG) M (this calamari is) or PL (C) (these calamari are). The M treatment seems to be more common, but both are well attested.)

The pun squid pro quo has been exploited by one cartoonist after another. Three more, from Rhymes With Orange, a cartoon regularly featured here; from Courtoons: daily legal cartoons by David Mills; and from Marcus Connor’s Brainless Tales (which I’ll take up in another posting):

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)

xx

#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?

[Digression. A baniener is of course to be distinguished from a bananier, a (French) banana tree — a plant made musically famous by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the flamboyant virtuoso pianist and composer of extravagant piano and orchestral works. You can listen to Gottschalk’s Le Bananier here, where the YouTube poster supplies this pared-down version of the Wikipedia article on the piece (lightly edited here):

Le Bananier is third in the cycle of four Louisiana Créole pieces written in France between 1848 and 1851. Bananier is based on the Créole tune En avan’ Grenadie and this little piece literally took Paris by storm. The publisher, according to Gottschalk scholar Robert Offergeld, earned 250,000 francs from sales of the piece before selling the rights for another 25,000. And that is but a partial measure of its appeal, since pirated copies abounded. Georges Bizet had the piece in his performing repertoire for years and a hand-written copy of it was found in the personal effects of Alexander Borodin who, many insist, used Bananier as a blueprint for his Polovtsian Dances

Wikipedia on Gottschalk:

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (New Orleans, May 8, 1829 – Rio de Janeiro, December 18, 1869 [of yellow fever]) was an American composer and pianist, best known as a virtuoso performer of his own romantic piano works. He spent most of his working career outside of the United States [touring in Europe and in Central and South America].

Gottschalk was born in New Orleans to a Jewish businessman from London and a Creole mother. He had six brothers and sisters, five of whom were half-siblings by his father’s mixed-race mistress (she would have been called mulatto at the time)

… Gottschalk’s music was very popular during his lifetime and his earliest compositions created a sensation in Europe. Early pieces like Bamboula, La Savane, Le Bananier and Le Mancenillier were based on Gottschalk’s memories of the music he heard during his youth in Louisiana. In this context, some of Gottschalk’s work, such as the 13-minute opera Escenas campestres, retains a wonderfully innocent sweetness and charm. Gottschalk also utilized the Bamboula theme as a melody in his Symphony No. 1: A Night in the Tropics.

Gottschalk is a guilty musical pleasure for me. So over the top, so much fun.

Morphological note: French bananier ‘banana tree’ is a derivative of the fruit noun banane ‘banana’, with the suffix –ier. It’s parallel to prunier ‘plum tree’ (prune ‘plum’), pommier ‘apple tree’ (pomme ‘apple’), poirier ‘pear tree’ (poire ‘pear’), cerisier ‘cherry tree’ (cerise ‘cherry), etc.]

Now on Brainless Tales. From its own site:

Brainless Tales is a daily single panel comic by me, Marcus Connor. Puns aplenty are served up with a side of your ol’ pop’s humor, and a bit of “Huh?” thrown in for good measure. Sit back, relax, and enjoy life the way it’s meant to be: expressed by anthropomorphic food, plants, and tools. Just like the good doctor says, “a Tale a day keeps the boredom away.” Each panel is like a daily multi-vitamin only much better, and safer for you. Please view responsibly.

… May 7, 2016 was the final daily comic from Brainless Tales — which was published every day for 9 years. The site now shows a classic comic each day at the top of the homepage.

Much, much language play in these cartoons. Four more examples:

(#2)

Something that is both a potato and a (computer) chip, so playing on an ambiguity of chip.

(#3)

Playing on an ambiguity in the adjective: Cornish orig. ‘from or relating to Cornwall or its language’, in the fixed expression Cornish hen ‘Rock Cornish ((game) hen)’, referring to ‘a stocky chicken of a breed that is kept for its meat’ (NOAD2); or cornish ‘like or resembling corn’, in this case, incorporating an ear of corn, both cob and husk.

(#4)

Another ambiguity, in pork’n beans: pork ‘n’ beans ‘pork and beans’ (such as one might buy in cans, to eat) vs. pork’n’ beans ‘porking beans, beans that are fucking’,

Apparently, the sexual noun and verb pork have not been covered in this blog before. From GDoS:

noun pork 1 in senses of flesh [AZ: cf. meat]. (a) a generic term for a woman or women viewed as sex objects [Partridge lists it as 18th to early 20th century; GDoS’s first cite is 1942] (b) the penis [first site 1835] … (d) the vagina [one cite from 1983]

verb pork 2 of a man, to have sexual intercourse [first cite 1967-8 in a dictionary; 1978 Animal House [film script] Boon: Marlene! You’re gonna pork Marlene Desmond!]

(#5)

Ambiguities in /aj fon/ I phone (with verb phone) or iPhone (with noun phone), and /ju t(j)ub/ you tube (with verb tube*) or YouTube (with noun tube).

*noun tube: informal fit (a person or animal) with a tube to assist breathing, especially after a laryngotomy. (NOAD2)

Three cartoons in today’s feed: a Bizarro with a talking dog; a One Big Happy with a slice that OMG might grow into a pizza; and a Zippy riff on Farley Granger and They Live by Night:

(#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)

(#3)

Annals of animal communication. #1 is a goofy variant on Wittgenstein’s “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him” (Philosophical Investigations, p.223). Well, you could teach a dog to talk, but then you’d have to live with the dog’s preoccupations, like smelling things; signing chimpanzees were, after all, largely fixated on bananas,

The dangers of a slice. Two things about #2: Ruthie thinks of pizzas as living things, the fruits of the pizza tree (an idea that she combines with a childish fear of swallowing seeds — a bit of childlore that, in my own experience, centered mostly on watermelon seeds, which you were never ever to swallow); and the lexical item slice (in pepperoni slice).

(#4)

(postcard from Zazzle)

From NOAD2 on the noun slice:

a thin, broad piece of food, such as bread, meat, or cake, cut from a larger portion: four slices of bread | potato slices; a single serving of pizza, typically one eighth of a pie: every payday we’d meet at Vinnie’s for a beer and a couple of slices.

The NP a slice, standing on its own, is then understood either as ‘a slice of (something)’, where the whole that the slice is part of is supplied by context; or specifically as ‘a slice of pizza’, even when there’s no pizza in the context — as in the NOAD2 example above, or in I really could go for a slice right now.

On the lam with Farley Granger. The title of #3, “Grangers on the Brain”, is an elaborate pun on the title of one of Farley Granger’s most famous films, “Strangers on a Train” (1951); on the movie, see my 12/31/15 posting “Zippy’s Eve”. From the Wikipedia article:

The film has … been the inspiration for … film and television projects with similar themes of criss-cross murder, often treated comically. [with a long list]

On Granger, from Wikipedia:

(#5)

FG posing in a swimsuit

Farley Earle Granger Jr. (July 1, 1925 [in San Jose CA] – March 27, 2011) was an American actor, best known for his two collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock; Rope in 1948 and Strangers on a Train in 1951.

Granger was first noticed in a small stage production in Hollywood by a Goldwyn casting director, and given a significant role in The North Star, a controversial film praising the Soviet Union at the height of World War II, but later condemned for its political bias. Another war film, The Purple Heart, followed, before Granger’s naval service in Honolulu, in a unit that arranged troop entertainment in the Pacific. Here he made useful contacts, including Bob Hope, Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. It was also where he began exploring his bisexuality, which he said he never felt any need to conceal.

His bisexuality (manifested in a number of affairs with famous people of both sexes), was covered in juicy detail in his autobiography, written with “his longtime romantic partner Robert Calhoun” (from the NYT obituary, discussed in my 3/31/11 posting “partners”):

(#6)

The 1948 film They Live by Night came between The Purple Heart and Rope. From Wikipedia:

(#7)

They Live by Night is a 1948 American film noir, based on Edward Anderson’s Depression era novel Thieves Like Us. The film was directed by Nicholas Ray (his first feature film) and starred Farley Granger as “Bowie” Bowers and Cathy O’Donnell as “Keechie” Mobley.

The movie is the prototype for the “couple on the run” genre, and is generally seen as the forerunner to the movie Bonnie and Clyde. Robert Altman directed a version using the original title of the novel, Thieves Like Us (1974).

The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed, a charming 11-panel Sunday special:

The panel I’m interested is the one right in the middle, panel 6, in which the kids’ father says, of the mystery leaf: “from one of those exotic trees, like a Quesadilla benjamina, or something.”

A quesadilla is a kind of food, and a Ficus benjamina is a plant, an ornamental fig, but quesadilla could be the name of a plant: “Marguerite climbed the trunk of the mighty quesadilla in no time at all”. Or the name of an animal: “The fierce quesadilla pawed the ground before charging.” Or a the name of a disease: “That’s the worst case of Feldspar’s quesadilla I’ve seen in years.” Or the anatomical name of a bodypart: “The patient broke his left quesadilla in two places.”

From James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, with Mitty fantasizing himself as a surgeon: “Coreopsis has set in.” (Coreopsis is a bright yellow daisy.)

Technical-sounding names in one domain can be playfully imported as names in another domain. Laughter ensues.

Caught on a local tv station, an ad for Spam:

(#1)

An easy pun — fried for tried — on a formulaic expression, Don’t knock it until / ’til / till you’ve tried it. In service of an exhortation to enjoy Spam by frying it just like ham.

First, on the ad campaign. Then, on the expression.

The ads. From Adweek’s “How Spam Used the Super Bowl to Kick Off Its Sizzling New Message: From out of the cupboard and into the frying pan” by Robert Klara on February 9th:

Did you know that right now, as you read this, the pantries of one-third of American homes contain Spam? (We mean the precooked pork product, not the junk mail.) Using 2016’s tally of 125.82 million households in America, that comes to nearly 43 million homes with a can of Spam on the shelf.

That’s a lot of Spam, but parent company Hormel would, naturally enough, like to see more. Which is why the famed convenience meat has quietly lifted the lid on a new marketing campaign this week.

(#2)

Actually, it wasn’t so quiet. Not only did Spam air its new ads in select markets during the Super Bowl, its new campaign is all about noise — specifically, the sizzling sound a slice of Spam makes when it hits a hot frying pan.

You can watch the commercial here.

The formulaic expression. The idea — that you can’t really appreciate something until you’ve experienced it, and then you’ll probably like it (Try it, you’ll like it, in the catchphrase from an old Alka-Seltzer ad campaign) — is an old one, and has been formulated in many ways as an encouragement to engage in some novel experience (from foods to sexual acts). One formulation partly crystallized into a family of admonishing expressions involving the verb knock (NOAD2: informal talk disparagingly about; criticize) under negation in the main clause and the verb try in a subordinate clause. Some variants:

Don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it (at least once). Don’t knock it if you haven’t (ever) tried it. Don’t knock it if you’ve never tried it. Never knock it if you haven’t tried it. 

plus variants with specific NPs instead of it — Don’t knock Spam unless you’ve tried it — and variants with the subordinate clause first — If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it — and variants with main-clause declaratives instead of imperatves — You shouldn’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.

But my impression is that one formulation is by far the most frequent:

Don’t knock it until / ’til / till you’ve tried it.

(until rather than unless or if tilts things towards the expectation that you will indeed try it). That is, this version is in some sense the canonical version of the catchphrase (one that in fact appears in some idiom dictionaries), which can then be varied in a number of ways.

This is in fact a common configuration for idioms. As Susanne Riehemann noted in ch. 3 of her 2001 Stanford PhD dissertation,  though an idiom generally has a canonical form (which dominates the data statistically, is reflected in the way dictionaries and speakers refer to the idiom, and serves as the seed for learning), some have more than one. For example, a search for the idiom in which someone is placed at the mercy of the meat-eaters yields the canonical throw to the wolves (39 exx.), plus lions (11 exx.), and 1 ex. each of tigers, sharks, dogs.

Four language-related strips in my comics feed on Sunday the 4th, which this year was Pentecost,

the Christian festival celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Jesus after his Ascension, held on the seventh Sunday after Easter. (NOAD2)

KJV Acts 2:3: And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them

The word came down. In One Big Happy, Rhymes Wth Orange, Zits, and xkcd.

I’ll get to the comics in a little while. But first, a digression on flaming tongues: in music, in the plant world, and in mansex.

Musical tongues. The biblical story worked into a hymn, “Come Thy Fount of Every Blessing”:

Come thou fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of God’s unchanging love.

From Wikipedia:

“Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is a Christian hymn written by the 18th century pastor and hymnist Robert Robinson. Robert Robinson penned the words at age 22 in the year 1757.

It’s been set to a number of different tunes; some discussion in my 12/23/11 posting “Come Thou Fount”.

And then there’s the rock music by Daniel Menche, released in 2005 and 2006:

(#1)

Botanical tongues. The daylily cultivar ‘Flaming Tongues’:

(#2)

Men wielding flaming tongues in sex. Two shots, the first of intensely rainbow man-kissing (suitable for Pride Month):

(#3)

And then of a flaming togue working its way south:

(#4)

On to the comics. In a bunch:

(#5)

(#6)

(#7)

(#8)

OBH: rhododendron. In #5, a spelling problem. Nick, the kids’ grandfather, identifies a plant as a rhododendron, not a rose, but when his neighbor challenges him to spell the name, he decides that it’s a rose after all.

A grand display of rhododendrons (rhodies to their fans):

(#9)

From Wikipedia:

Rhododendron (from Ancient Greek ῥόδον rhódon “rose” and δένδρον déndron “tree”) is a genus of 1,024 species of woody plants in the heath family (Ericaceae), either evergreen or deciduous, and found mainly in Asia, although it is also widespread throughout the Southern Highlands of the Appalachian Mountains of North America. It is the national flower of Nepal. Most species have brightly coloured flowers which bloom from late winter through to early summer.

Azaleas make up two subgenera of Rhododendron. They are distinguished from “true” rhododendrons by having only five anthers per flower.

Here in Palo Alto the rhododendrons are almost finished blooming.

Etymological note: it’s a nice twist that the first element in the name rhododendron is in fact the Greek for ‘rose’.

Bonus: in another nice twist, my friend Ned Deily affects not to distinguish any flowers, identifying them all as roses, so for him rhododendrons are indeed kinds of roses.

Rhymes: hold the anchovies. On #6. From NOAD2:

verb hold: North American informal refrain from adding or using (something, typically an item of food or drink): a strawberry margarita, but hold the tequila.

This use of hold is pretty much restricted to the BSE form of the verb: in the imperative (as in the dictionary example); in to-infinitivals (I wanted them to hold the tequila); in unmarked infinitivals, as in complements to modals (I’ll hold the tequila, sir); or in forms identical to the BSE, in particular the PRS, as in Whenever the customer asks, I hold the tequila. Other forms are at best odd: ?The waitress held the tequila (cf. What the waitress did was hold the tequila).

The most frequent use of this hold is probably in the imperative, as in the Burger King jingle with the couplet:

Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce;
Special orders don’t upset us.

(which is a perfect rhyme for some, but only a half-rhyme for those who have a high unaccented vowel in the final syllable of lettuce, but a lower one in upset us).

On the Burger King ad campaign, from Subba Rao Chaganti’s blog BuildingPharmaBrands:

(#10)

Burger King came out with a slogan of Have It Your Way in 1974. This slogan summed up its difference with its rival McDonald’s. The slogan fits well with the emphasis in pop culture and on individuality. The line makes total sense at a time when self-expression and mass customization are critical elements of culture.

Burger King abandoned the slogan four years later in favor of forgettable themes such as Best Darn Burger (1978), Burger King Town (1986), and The Whopper Says (2001). The company, thirty years later, however realized that the retro culture is in and had gone into a back-to-future mode in its advertising. It returned to Have It Your Way in 2004 in TV ads from Crispin Porter + Borgusky, its former agency.

Research indicated Have It Your Way was still the theme that most resonated despite other campaigns. When you have an ad campaign that is sticky, it is foolish to go against said Russ Klein, the global marketing officer of Burger King. That’s the reason they returned to their earlier slogan.

Here’s a jingle that Burger King produced and used in the 70s in response to McDonald’s Big Mac song. The jingle has been modified several times and reused it. The lyrics proclaimed that Burger King would serve you a customized product (you can have whatever toppings you wanted on a burger, or even plain) living up to its slogan Have It Your Way.

Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce;
Special orders don’t upset us.
All we ask is that you let us serve it your way…
We can serve your broiled beef Whopper
Fresh with everything on topper.
Anyway you think is proper; have it your way…
(Chorus) Have it your way, have it your way! At Burger King, eat at Burger King!

Zits: blurting out the truth. About #7. Jeremy is given to saying out loud (to his parents) what he’s actually thinking, rather than what he realizes his parents want to hear. So his words are sometimes unfortunate.

Back on May 22nd, I posted (in “Prepositions matter”) about one such incident, in which Jeremy announces that he’s going off to study Sara, then corrects that to to study with Sara. In #7, he blurts out about beer pong, then hastily alters that to the innocent ping pong.

xkcd: state words. Finally, #8 has an xkcd (#1845) State Word Map, in which Randall Munroe mocks US maps based on some purported survey about the favored custom (often, word usage) in each state. Nobody checks this stuff out, so map-makers are pretty much free to make things up.

In the map in #8, my natal state (Pennsylvania) gets the word amplifying (as in amplifying random noise), my immediate-past state (Ohio) gets just, and my current state (California) gets little but.

The word but came down to California in a flaming cloud?

From Wilson Gray on ADS-L on the 6th, in a discussion of a joke that turns on a structural ambiguity, a totally different joke of this sort:

A drunk is staggering along the sidewalk muttering to himself, “It can’t be done! I couldn’t do it!” A passer-by comments, “Damn, man, you all fucked up!, It must have been something terrible! What couldn’t you do?!” The drunk answers, “Drink Canada dry!”

The joke doesn’t quite work in print like this, unless you use all-caps, the way artist Richard Prince did in this “joke painting”:

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Untitled (Drink Canada Dry), acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 1998

The joke of course also works fine in speech. (Early occurrences in print have only either Canada Dry or Canada dry, with text that points the reader towards the other.)

Two things: the joke and its history

The joke plays on an ambiguity in DRINK CANADA DRY:

simple transitive (simptr): a BSE-form VP drink Canada Dry — drink has one non-subject argument, a direct object NP, the compound N Canada Dry:

[ drink ] [ [ Canada ] [ Dry ] ]

resultative transitive (restr): a BSE-form VP drink Canada dry — drink has two non-subject arguments, a direct object NP, the N Canada, plus a (predicative) complement AdjP, the Adj dry:

 [ drink ] [ Canada ] [ dry ]

In the restr reading, Canada is treated as a container (cf. drink the bottle dry) and the interpretation involves a partitive rather than holistic reading of Canada: ‘drink from/of the bottle  so that it was / until it became  dry’.

Wikipedia  (amended beyond recognition) on resultatives:

In linguistics, [resultative constructions (there seem to be several)] … express that something or someone has undergone a change in state as the result of the completion of an event. [A resultative construction involves] a verb (denoting the event), a postverbal noun phrase (denoting the entity that has undergone a change), and a [predicative phrase](denoting the state achieved as the result of the action named by the verb) which may be represented by an adjective, a prepositional phrase, or a particle, among others. For example, in the [clause] the man wiped the table clean, the adjective clean denotes the state achieved by the table as a result of the event [of wiping].

The semantics of the man cleaned the table is then a composite of ‘the man worked at table-cleaning’ and ‘as a result, the table became clean’.

The full range of facts about resultatives is very complex. Many verbs in these constructions are quite choosy about the predicatives they occur with, to the point where the combination looks idiomatic. You can laugh or drink yourself sick or silly, maybe helpless or goofy, but anything decidedly positive — happy, wise, well — is notably odd, at least without a lot of contextual set-up.

The history of the joke. Barry Popik, on his blog, has done this one up pretty well. From the entry of 8/24/13, “Drink Canada Dry” (joke):

Canada Dry is a brand of soft drinks owned since 2008 by the Texas-based Dr Pepper Snapple Group. For over a century Canada Dry has been known for its ginger ale, though the company also manufactures a number of other soft drinks and mixers. Although Canada Dry originated in its namesake country, it is now produced in many countries around the globe, including the United States, Mexico, Colombia, the Middle East, Europe and Japan.

The “Dry” in the brand’s name refers to not being sweet, as in a dry wine. When John J. McLaughlin, who first formulated “Canada Dry Pale Ginger Ale”, originally made his new soft drink, it was far less sweet than other ginger ales then available; as a result, he labelled it “dry”.

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A vintage metal advertising sign

Early cites of the joke:

11 October 1927, Middlesboro (KY) Daily News, “Allen’s Sawdust,” pg. 4, col. 6:

Waiter—“Would you like to drink Canada Dry, sir?”
Tourist—“I’d love to, but I’m only here for a week.”

29 January 1928, Boston (MA) Herald, Editorial-Social Section, pg. 7, col. 4:

Waiter: “Would you like to drink Canada Dry, Sir?”
Customer: “I’d love to, but I’m here for only a week.”

— Cleveland News.

10 March 1929, Springfield (MA) Sunday Union and Republican, pg. 3F, col. 4:

Canadian (to American)—“How would you like to drink Canada dry?”
American (parched)—“Can’t. Won’t live long enough.”

Plus later occurrences.

Two Batman cartoons have just come to me. Passed on by Chris Hansen, this uncaptioned (and unsourced) cartoon:

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Batman at a bustop with four old women: what to make of the scene?

And in today’s comics feed, this Bizarro:

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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 13 in this strip! — see this Page.)

Bus stop Batman. #1 is very much a puzzle in interpretation. Of course, you have to recognize the figure of Batman and the setting, a bus stop, but that doesn’t get you very far. If you don’t know a crucial thing about the 1960s tv series Batman, you’re lost. You also need to know this English word, from NOAD2:

noun nana: informal one’s grandmother. ORIGIN mid 19th century: child’s pronunciation of nanny or gran.

But unless you know the first, even the caption won’t help:

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(Yes, the bus stop is irrevelant; it’s just a place to get four grandmothers and the Caped Crusader together.)

What you need to supply is the title theme song from the tv series, which you can listen to in my 8/4/12 posting “Batmaaaan!”. The words are those in the caption of #3 (where nana is meaningless filler).

Getting turned. #2 has its own interpretive demands (beyond your recognizing the two characters as a vampire and the superhero Batman). You need to know that in modern vampire lore someone becomes a vampire by being bitten by a vampire. Similarly for werewolves. And zombies. So it’s natural for the vampire to suppose that someone gets to become a superhero by being bitten by a superhero. (Well, Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man by being bitten by a radioactive spider, which is close to this notion. However, Spider-Man doesn’t go around creating a legion of fresh Spideys by biting people.)

The experience of changing one’s nature, of taking on a new identity, of becoming something new, can be referred to with the intransitive inchoative verb turn (suggesting turn into X, where X is the new identity), and the act of causing someone to change their nature in this fashion can be referred to by the transitive causative verb turn (suggesting turn s.o. into X). These verbs can be applied to many changes: becoming a monster (vampire, werewolf, zombie), becoming a prostitute, becoming a corrupt police officer, becoming a spy or a traitor, becoming a gang member, etc. In these usages, the new identities are viewed negatively by the society as a whole, so that transitive turn is roughly like recruit, but with a strongly negative societal judgment on the new state (you can recruit someone for good purposes or bad, but if you turn them, you’re probably inducing them to become something society disapproves of).

Batgeon. These two cartoons led me to more playing with the Batman image. Notably, the following three-panel webcomic Fredo and Pid’jin:

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Play on two possible interpretations of the compound catwoman: ‘(superhero) woman who is (that is, takes on the appearace of) a cat’ vs. (very roughly) ‘woman who is a cat fancier’ (and so accumulates cats she cares for).

Fredo and Pid’jin are pigeons; the webcomic has been written by Eugen Erhan and drawn by Tudor Muscalu (two Romanian friends) since 2006.

Now two comics parodies of Batman.

Parody comic: Darkwing Duck. From Wikipedia:

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Darkwing Duck is an American animated action-adventure comedy television series produced by Walt Disney Television Animation that first ran from 1991 to 1992 on both the syndicated programming block The Disney Afternoon and Saturday mornings on ABC. It featured the eponymous anthropomorphic duck superhero whose alter ego is suburban father Drake Mallard.

… Darkwing Duck tells the adventures of the titular superhero, aided by his sidekick and pilot Launchpad McQuack (from Ducktales). In his secret identity of Drake Mallard (a parody of Kent Allard, the alter ego of the Shadow), he lives in an unassuming suburban house with his adopted daughter Gosalyn, next door to the bafflingly dim-witted Muddlefoot family. Darkwing struggles to balance his egotistical craving for fame and attention against his desire to be a good father to Gosalyn and help do good in St. Canard. Most episodes put these two aspects of Darkwing’s character in direct conflict, though Darkwing’s better nature usually prevails.

Parody comic: Mad magazine. The magazine returned to the figure of Batman for parodic effect a number of times, as here:

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(putting the magazine’s mascot Alfred E. Neuman into Superbat costume).

Artistic parody: Superhero Gothic. Parodies of Grant Wood’s American Gothic abound, and of course superheroes find their place. Here are Batman and Superman, with                      Batman in the feminine slot:

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Artistic parody: Bathero Gothic. Now sticking to the Batverse, here are Robin and Batman, with Robin in the feminine slot:

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Breaking news. From Variety yesterday, “Adam West, TV’s ‘Batman,’ Dies at 88” by Brian Lowry:

Adam West — an actor defined and also constrained by his role in the 1960s series “Batman” — died Friday night in Los Angeles. He was 88. A rep said that he died after a short battle with leukemia.

… on the occasion of his birthday (6/15/14; he died in 1999), three cartoons that came my way this morning: a Zits, a Gary Larson, and a Bill Whitehead (new to this blog).

Steinberg. Illustrator, cartoonist, caricaturist, artist, social critic (with a Page on this blog). One specialty: language, thought, and reality. Six cartoons and New Yorker covers in this domain:

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The Stroop effect on the hoof. From Wikipedia:

In psychology, the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. When the name of a color (e.g., “blue”, “green”, or “red”) is printed in a color that is not denoted by the name (e.g., the word “red” printed in blue ink instead of red ink), naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color. The effect is named after John Ridley Stroop, who first published the effect in English in 1935.

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Zits. With the compound zoo-teen ‘teen (i.e. teenager) who serves as an intern at a zoo’:

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This is probably an unpaid internship, not a paid job: work in the world of millennials.

[Added 6/16: the follow-up:

(#7a)

(in which Jeremy gets the bad news about pay)]

Gary Larson. You know about book readings and poetry readings. Larson brings us cartoon readings:

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Bill Whitehead. And his Free Range Comics. Heavy on puns, as here:

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A pun on business ‘trade, commercial activity’ or ‘feces or urine’ (attested in this sense from 1632 in GDoS), with the second usage especially common with reference to dogs, in do s.o.’s business.

Two more punning cartoons from Whitehead:

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Pun on the noun change.

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Pun on the verb swing.

Today’s Zippy:

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One in a long series of Zippy strips about Tod Browning’s film Freaks, the characters in it, and the actors who played them (only some of them posted about here). Also one in a long series of strips referring to the Magrittean disavowal, a contradiction between text and image: in this case, the title of this comic strip, This is not a comic strip.

One more Magrittean disavowel (MD), sort of. This story begins with this Facebook query two days ago from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky:

I need a three word oath. The instructions are: “[K]eep in mind, that it should be action oriented, use short syllables and leave out punctuation and ampersands”

A cascade of suggestions followed: good advice, wonderful playfulness, catchphrases and quotations, unusable obscenities, the whole gamut. My own contribution was in the form of a MD — Not an oath, understood as an abbreviated version of This sentence is not an oath.

Unlike the title of the comic strip in #1, or the inscription Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’ in Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images — both involving a contradiction between text and image, the text —  the sentence This sentence is not an oath is self-referential (the sentence is about itself).

Now, self-referential sentences can simply be true or false. This sentence is six words long is true, This sentence is five words long is false. This sentence is not an oath is true; it has a surprising tinge to it, but it’s not literally paradoxical. This sentence is false, on the other hand, is genuinely paradoxical: if it’s true, it’s false, and if it’s false, it’s true.

MDs nevertheless have the flavor of paradox, arising (a) from the fact that the text is attached to the image, and consequently feels like part of it, and (b) from the slipperiness of the demonstrative this, which can point to various parts of the context of utterance.

Take the strip in #1 and its title, which contains the demonstrative this. If the this is understood as referring only to the title text, then the (self-referential) title sentence is true: it’s not a comic strip. If the this is understood as referring to the strip the title is attached to, then the (other-referential) title sentence is false: that referent is indeed a comic strip.

If the title is understood to be part of a complex entity (as Ceci ne pas une pipe is part of Magritte’s painting) and the this is understood as referring to this complex entity, then the (other-referential) title sentence would appear to be true again: the complex entity is not a comic strip, though it has a comic strip as one of its two parts. But the classification of the complex entity could be argued; in other circumstances, we’re comfortable posting entities of category X with entities of category X as proper parts. If we take that position in this case, then the title sentence is false again.

So: no self-contradiction, but plenty of uneasy bafflement.

At the end of this posting, I’ll append a list of MD postings on this blog. Now on to other topics that have come up above: nominations of three-word oaths; the notion of an oath; Oath Inc.; the song and movie Three Little Words; some other, much racier, candidates for three-word oath status.

Some nominations of three-word oaths. A great many of the expressions suggested as oaths are conventionized, formulaic language of various types: quotations, catchphrases, proverbs, and the like. And most of these are imperatives (a very small sampling of the suggestions):

Take the cannoli, Duck and cover, Abandon all hope, Omit needless words

or are understood as imperative in force (though not in form):

To the Batcave!, This side up, When in Rome [with do as the Romans do truncated]

or implicate an instruction, advice, or command:

Resistance is futile [a declarative, implicating Do not resist]

A few suggestions are imperatives, but not formulaic:

Leave me alone, Just restart it

And a very few aren’t imperative in form or intent:

[declarative] Veni vidi vici

Some other non-imperative possibilities, not (yet) in Elizabeth’s corpus:

God will provide, You never know, Who can tell, I love you, Haste makes waste, Bros before hos, E pluribus unum, Ladies and gentlemen, Bacon and eggs, Words and music, Now or never, Primus inter pares, Everything in moderation

A few of the suggested oaths are “foul oaths”, exclamatory expressions that are obscene or profane, for instance:

Fuck this shit!

What is an oath? From NOAD2 for the noun oath:

1 a solemn promise, often invoking a divine witness, regarding one’s future action or behavior: they took an oath of allegiance to the king; a sworn declaration that one will tell the truth, especially in a court of law. 2 a profane or offensive expression used to express anger or other strong emotions.

The main part of sense 1 is the relevant one here. The point about oaths is that they’re a kind of promise: they are commitments on the part of the speaker to engage in future action or behavior, and thus contrast sharply with advice, instructions, and commands, all suggesting or imposing commitments on the part of the addressee(s) to engage in future action or behavior. Three-word oaths in this sense are not very numerous:

I will serve, It’s my job [implicating and I will do it]

Three-word oaths in the ‘sworn declaration’ sense are equally rare:

I do swear, On/Upon my word

At this point, we should ask where the request for oaths ultimately comes from, and what purpose it’s intended to serve. The first question is easy: Oath Inc. The second is more puzzling, but I’d guess that the company is casting about for a slogan, a really pithy one, like

Do you Yahoo!?, Fair and balanced, Don’t be evil, Where’s the beef?, Snap crackle pop, Just do it, Stronger than dirt, Wintergreen for President, Be what’s next, Kills bugs dead, I like Ike, No more tears, Finger lickin’ good, Taste the rainbow, Imagination at work, Mmm Mmm good

Oath Inc. From Wikipedia:

Oath Inc. (also officially dubbed Verizon Digital Network) is a subsidiary of Verizon Communications’ Media and Telematics division, that will serve as the parent company of its content sub-divisions AOL and Yahoo!.

… AOL and Yahoo will maintain their respective brands following the completion of the transaction.

The Oath name is meant to convey the parent company’s commitment to the media business.

All this is relevant because Elizabeth, who sent out the original request for three-word oaths, works for Yahoo!

So I’m guessing that the new company wants three-word slogans that express commitment to the media business. Asking for punchy three-word oaths seems to net you a lot of imperatives about all manner of things not especially connected to the media business — but it’s kind of fun.

(Apparently, there’s nothing we can do about the new company’s name; it is what it is. But it doesn’t conjure up much in the way of imagery, and I know from experience that unless you say the name very slowly and clearly, people are inclined to think you’ve said the company’s named Oaf.

Well, I don’t know what I’d do onomastically with a conglomerate of Verizon, Yahoo!, and AOL, so maybe I should hold my tongue.)

Three Little Words, the song and the movie. The three-word requirement led me immediately, of course, to the song and the movie that it gave its name to:

On the song, from Wikipedia:

“Three Little Words” is a popular song with music by Harry Ruby and lyrics by Bert Kalmar, published in 1930.

The Rhythm Boys (including Bing Crosby), accompanied by the Duke Ellington orchestra, recorded it on August 26, 1930 and it enjoyed great success. Their version was used in the 1930 Amos ‘n’ Andy film Check and Double Check, with orchestra members miming to it. The film was co-written by Kalmar and Ruby along with J. Walter Ruben. The song also figured prominently in the film Three Little Words, a 1950 biopic about Kalmar and Ruby.

You can listen to the Ellington/Crosby recording here. The crucial lines:

Three little words
Eight little letters
Which simply mean I love you

On the movie, from Wikipedia:

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Three Little Words is a 1950 American musical film biography of the Tin Pan Alley songwriting partnership of Kalmar and Ruby and stars Fred Astaire as lyricist Bert Kalmar, Red Skelton as composer Harry Ruby, along with Vera-Ellen and Arlene Dahl as their wives, with Debbie Reynolds in a small but notable role as singer Helen Kane.

… In this closing scene, Astaire and Skelton perform a medley of most of the songs featured in the film, ending with “Three Little Words” – Kalmar having finally found a suitable lyric for Ruby’s melody, a running gag throughout most of the film.

(A tremendously enjoyable musical.)

Three-word sex talk. Long ago, my recollections of the movie (which I saw as a child, when it came out) combined with my (later) interests in gay porn and in language to inspire me to collect a small inventory of three-word formulaic expressions in mansex talk: Suck my cock, Fuck me harder, Fill me up, Eat my ass, etc. (plus some that are two-word imperatives plus an address term: Eat dick, faggot! and the like). The idea was that these are the three little words that would move a queer.

I seem to have lost the file, but you surely get the idea. Mostly punchy imperatives, so they’d fit in with the expressions people have been offering to Elizabeth, though Oath Inc. would be appalled at them as slogans. Well, how about Eat our words!?

Inventory of MD postings. On this blog, about the Magrittean disavowal:

on 7/19/12, “Magritte”

on 10/8/13, “Speech balloons in Dingburg”

on 12/13/13, “Friday cartoons”

on 3/11/15, “Magritte goes on”

on 3/29/15, “This is not a Ding Dong”

on 7/1/16, “Big and cool and tangentially surreal”

on 2/15/17, “The news for penguins, and, oh yes, penises”

on 2/19/17, “Art of the penis”

on 2/27/17, “Two Ztoons on language use”

on 6/3/17, “This is not a president”

Or: Happy Trails to You.

It starts with a Richard Oliva photo in Steathy Cam Men on the 28th, with the caption “Hello, sexy daddy man!”:

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In  leather singlet, displaying his furry pecs and treasure trail.

(As with my previous Stealthy Cam Men photo — #1 in this posting from the 26th — the subject is flagrantly displaying his body in a public place, so I have no compunction about passing on a picture taken surreptitiously.)

Two notable elements of this display: the treasure trail, and the wrestling singlet, cut low and crafted from leather, to make a piece of athletic apparel into a piece of fetishwear.

On treasure trails, from a 11/15/11 posting “Annals of anatomical vocabulary”, quoting from Wikipedia:

… hair grows in a vertical line from the pubic area up to the navel and from the thorax down to the navel. Slang terms for this line of hair include “snail trail”, “happy line”, “happy trail”, or “treasure trail”. (link)

Note happy trail. I’ll get to that in a litte while.

Then on gay singlets, from a 12/3/15 posting with a section on wrestling singlets and their adaptations as fetishwear:

Homowear singlets are scooped way low, below the navel, to display the whole torso; they are pouch-enhancing; they’re likely to be made of sexy materials (faux leather, shiny fabrics, camo fabric, fabrics in intense colors); and sometimes they have open rears, offering the wearer’s butt as well as his crotch … They are for fun and display, not athletic competition.

The Treasure of the Singlet Padre. An elaborate play on the title The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, playing on the treasure of treasure trail, substituting singlet for sierra, and replacing madre ‘mother’ in the mountain range name Sierra Madre by padre ‘father’, to make it all masculine, in grammatical gender and in sociocultural gender too (like the guy in #1).

On the movie, from Wikipedia:

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The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1948 American dramatic adventurous neo-western written and directed by John Huston. It is a feature film adaptation of B. Traven’s 1927 novel of the same name, about two financially desperate Americans, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), who in the 1920s join old-timer Howard (Walter Huston, the director’s father) in Mexico to prospect for gold.

Happy Trails. The alternative title. A play on the anatomical happy trail, plus an allusion to the song title “Happy Trails”. From Wikipedia:

“Happy Trails” by Dale Evans was the theme song for the 1940s and 1950s radio program and the 1950s television show starring [Western movie stars] Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Rogers, always sung over the end credits of the program.

You can listen to Rogers and Evans singing their song here — and, if you wish, view a slide show of the couple through the years. The chorus of the song:

Happy trails to you,
Until we meet again.
Happy trails to you,
Keep smiling until then.

If you take happy trails to be anatomical, then this is slyly racy. Meet you at the end of the trail!

The alternative reading has not been disregarded. For example: a sexy romp on BuzzFeed on 9/8/14, “23 Breathtaking Instagram Happy Trails Everyone Should Follow: Because they all lead to happiness”. A lot of them have been removed from Instagram, but several steamy images remain, like this one:

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Homo eroticus on the hoof, head to crotch.

But wait! There’s more! There’s a titular spin-off of the song title “Happy Trails”. From Wikipedia:

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Happy Trails is the second album of the American band Quicksilver Messenger Service. Most of the album was recorded from two performances at the Fillmore East and Fillmore West, although it is not clear which parts were recorded at which Fillmore. The record was released [in 1969] by Capitol Records in stereo.

Ride a cowboy!

Two recent cartoons in my feed that play with language: a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) in Rhymes With Orange, an outrageous pun in Bizarro (a replay from 2009, first posted here on 2/15/14).

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On #1, there’s not a whole lot to say, beyond the fact that Hilary Price is inordinately fond of POPs. And that joining marionette + networking in print (rather than in speech) requires a bit of fudging.

On #2, see discussion in my earlier posting, to which I now add remarks on pheromones.

From my 5/25/11 posting “Scent and masculinity”:

The idea is that some scents are masculine (and some feminine), so that when you’re manipulating scent (by colognes/perfumes, deodorants, soaps and shampoos, and the like) or merely broadcasting scent that can be gendered — the scent of flowers or home cooking (feminine), the scent of wood fires, leather, grilling meat, or piney woods (masculine), etc. — you’re sending gender messages.

… the classic Scent of a Man is, of course, male sweat, as generated by work, exercise, or sexual arousal, and accumulated in men’s clothes and in places like locker rooms…

Preparations that claim to be based on pheromones offer the possibility of capturing this scent — hints of musk and testosterone — as an allure to women or gay men, depending on your inclination, but I don’t know if these work for that purpose, though they might facilitate male bonding.

On this last question, from Wikipedia:

A pheromone (from Ancient Greek φέρω phero “to bear” and hormone, from Ancient Greek ὁρμή “impetus”) is a secreted or excreted chemical factor that triggers a social response in members of the same species. Pheromones are chemicals capable of acting outside the body of the secreting individual to impact the behavior of the receiving individuals. There are alarm pheromones, food trail pheromones, sex pheromones, and many others that affect behavior or physiology. Pheromones are used from basic unicellular prokaryotes to complex multicellular eukaryotes. Their use among insects has been particularly well documented. In addition, some vertebrates, plants and ciliates communicate by using pheromones.

… While humans are highly dependent upon visual cues, when in close proximity smells also play a role in sociosexual behaviors. An inherent difficulty in studying human pheromones is the need for cleanliness and odorlessness in human participants. Experiments have focused on three classes of putative human pheromones: axillary steroids, vaginal aliphatic acids, and stimulators of the vomeronasal organ.

… Axillary [armpit] steroids are produced by the testes, ovaries, apocrine glands, and adrenal glands. These chemicals are not biologically active until puberty when sex steroids influence their activity. The change in activity during puberty suggest that humans may communicate through odors.

… Further evidence of a role for pheromones in sociosexual behavior comes from two double blind, placebo-controlled experiments [investigating pheromones of one sex affecting behavior of people of that sex].

… Although there are disputes about the mechanisms by which pheromones function, there is evidence that pheromones do affect humans. Despite this evidence, it has not been conclusively shown that humans have functional pheromones. Those experiments suggesting that certain pheromones have a positive effect on humans are countered by others indicating they have no effect whatsoever… Some body spray advertisers claim that their products contain human sexual pheromones that act as an aphrodisiac. Despite these claims, no pheromonal substance has ever been demonstrated to directly influence human behavior in a peer reviewed study.

Looks like bad news for the pharoah.

Three cartoons from the latest issue (July 10th and 17th) of the New Yorker, by Roz Chast (heirloom hot dogs), William Haefeli (gay couple with dog and baby), and Bruce Eric Kaplan (a visit from Dr. Seuss).

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(As always with Chast, the names are a hoot. Beefs d’Hiver is especially nice, allowing for a possible play on English beef the meat vs. beef ‘grudge, dislike’ and also a possible play on French d’Hiver ‘of winter’ vs. divers ‘various, miscellaneous’.)

(#2) “Back when we got him, Rufus was a child substitute. Now he’s just a dog.”

(#3) “The craziest part is that I dated Thing One years ago.”

Chast and the hot dogs. #1 jokes with the heirloom of heirloom tomatoes and heirloom apples. Heirloom hot dogs — the great hot dogs of yesteryear — for summer grill and picnic time, especially the Fourth of July. So American!

Here are three actual proposals for hot dogs representing American traditions, from a recent Pinterest posting with a bewildering variety of ideas: (representing Southern picnic traditions) a bacon hot dog loaded with Southern slaw, baked beans, and pickled okra; (exploiting the more recent Southern and Midwestern tradition of slathering on ranch dressing wherever possible) a BLAT dog, a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with lettuce, avocado, tomatoes, and ranch dressing; (and dipping into an ethnic food heritage) a hot dog topped with Thai-inspired slaw, peanut sauce, chopped peanuts,and cilantro.

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(#5) The BLAT dog, with ranch

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Eating a wiener for Independence. A traditional lunch on the Fourth for me. I ordered a ¼ lb. all-beef hot dog with relish and red onions, with cole slaw and pickle chips on the side.

And then three different staff members at the Palo Alto Creamery (diner-style atmosphere and food) remarked to me that this was exactly what I’d ordered last Fourth of July. Well, yes, I replied, it’s a tradition for me, and I once again marveled at what experienced restaurant staff remember.

Haefeli’s gay couple. Haefeli’s cartoons are single-panel pieces of affectionate social criticism, targeting the urban upper middle class. A recurrent subtheme is the lives of gay men, especially gay couples, as in #2, where he skewers both the tendency of childless couples (other-sex as well as same-sex) to project nurturing behavior onto pets, especially dogs; and also the spreading fashion for same-sex couples becoming parents (by any of several routes).

A lot of it is about facial expressions: the men’s satisfied smirks, Rufus’s aggressive disgruntlement.

Kaplan’s cross-comic allusion. BEK’s #3 is typically absurd, with the extra feature of incorporating characters from another comic, in this case Thing 1 and Thing 2 from Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat — depicted here, where they’re introduced (by the Cat) in these rhymes:

“I will pick up the hook.
you will see something new.
Two things. And I call them
Thing One and Thing Two.
These Things will not bite you.
They want to have fun.”
Then, out of the box
came Thing Two and Thing One!

The hapless, probably self-deluded, woman in a relationship is a regular in BEK’s cartoons, as here:

(#7)

Both here and in #3, you need to recognize a character in the cartoon if you are to make any sense of the cartoon at all. Thing 2 as a Seuss character in #3, Count Dracula in #7.

As with Haefeli, there’s social criticism in many of BEK’s strips. As here, with a couple sliding into old-folks’ music without recognizing the effects of time:

(#8)

From Wikipedia on Kaplan:

Bruce Eric Kaplan (born September 9, 1964), known as BEK, is an American cartoonist whose single-panel cartoons frequently appear in The New Yorker. His cartoons are known for their signature simple style and often dark humor. Kaplan is also a screenwriter and has worked on Seinfeld and on Six Feet Under.

A photo of him, looking characteristically wary or sardonic, you can’t be sure which:

(#9)

R. (for Ronnie) Land and Roz Chast, two American artists, out of the Art mainstream. Both entertain, both pointedly observe the culture around them. But otherwise they’re quite different: male vs. female, centered in Atlanta vs. centered in NYC, mostly producing “underground art” in public places vs. mostly known through cartoons in tony publications, presumably Christian vs. definitely Jewish, deeply private and unforthcoming about his life vs. exposng much of her life and opinions in her art and in interviews.

The two of them recently brought to my attention, Land through a posting from 2012 of one of his works (Little Bunny Foo Foo art at Grant Central Pizza Restaurant in Atlanta), Chast through an exhibition of her work at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco.

Two samples: Land’s Pray for ATL image, displayed in public, in several forms, in many places all around the city; and Chast’s “More Hamptons” cartoon, both very much of their place:

(#1)

(#2)

The Land plays on the ostentatious public religiosity of the American South, the Chast on wealthy New Yorkers’ inclination to summer in the Hamptons (at the eastern end of Long Island), leaving less favored New Yorkers to seek relief at home (in a cool bathtub, next to a fan, on their building’s rooftop).

On the Hamptons, from Wikipedia:

The Hamptons, also called the “East End” (of Long Island), are a group of villages and hamlets in the towns of Southampton and East Hampton, which form the South Fork of Long Island, New York. The Hamptons form a popular seaside resort, one of the historical summer colonies of the American Northeast. The area features some of the most expensive and luxurious residential properties in the U.S.; in 2016, according to Business Insider, the 11962 ZIP Code encompassing Sagaponack, within Southampton, was listed as the most expensive in the U.S., with a median home sale price of $8.5 million.

Praying for ATL. Land has a website packed with other examples of his work, including a Catlanta parody of his image in #1:

(#3)

Little Bunny Foo Foo. On this blog, a 4/5/17 piece on the children’s song, which goes (in part, in one version): Little bunny Foo Foo / I don’t want to see you / Scooping up the field mice /And bopping them on the head. The R. Land illustration:

(#4)

The CJM Chast show takes off from Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Chast’s graphic memoir of her parents’ final years:

(#5)

(Hat tip to Rod Williams.)

While Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? forms the basis of the exhibition (every one of the approximately 150 drawings in the original book will be on view), there is a great deal more: dozens of Chast’s original cartoons and covers for The New Yorker, as well as cartoon illustrations for her own and other writers’ books for both children and adults; rugs made by the artist; and personal material related to her parents. There will also be a video interview with the artist; a video of her at work on a life-sized mural; and a walk-in, life-sized recreation of one of her cartoons.

The exhibition was organized and debuted at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts in June 2015, traveled to the Museum of the City of New York in 2016 and makes its Western debut at The CJM. (link)

The museum, at 736 Mission St. in SF:

(#6)

Two items from the exhibit: a New Yorker cover “Venus at the Beach” from 8/4/14; and a Sluggo and Nancy mock critique of Chast’s cartoon “The Three Certainties”:

(#7)

(#8)

And, as lagniappe, a photo of Chast herself in mid-interview:

(#9)

In the latest series (“It’s Not Surprising”) of GEICO tv ads, “Running of the Bulldogs”, with its silly play on the running of the bulls. A screen shot:

(#1)

Description from iSpot.tv:

Men in white run for their lives through the streets of Spain. As one of them falls and begs for his life, the menace chasing them comes running around the corner — a herd of slobbering bulldogs. The fallen man braces for impact and gets a good licking.

That’s what bulldogs do: faced with people down on the street, they rush to lavish affection on them by licking their faces.

The commercial moral:

GEICO knows that the running of the bulldogs might be surprising, but how much money Aleia [a satisfied GEICO customer] saved on car insurance shouldn’t be.

You can watch the ad here.

Background: Pamplona and all that. From Wikipedia:

The Running of the Bulls (in Spanish: encierro, from the verb encerrar, “to corral, to enclose”) is a practice that involves running in front of a small group of cattle, typically six, of the toro bravo breed that have been let loose on a course of a sectioned-off subset of a town’s streets.

(#2) The running in Pamplona

The most famous running of the bulls is held during the nine-day festival of Sanfermines in honor of Saint Fermin in Pamplona, although they are also traditionally held in other places such as towns and villages across Spain, Portugal, in some cities in Mexico, and southern France during the summer.

The origin of this event comes from the need to transport the bulls from the fields outside the city, where they were bred, to the bullring, where they would be killed in the evening. During this ‘run’, youngsters would jump among them to show off their bravado. In Pamplona and other places, the six bulls in the event are still those that will feature in the afternoon bullfight of the same day.

Better yet: do it with bulldogs.

GEICO’s ads start with some arresting premise and then make a non-sequitur leap to the pitch. I posted a while ago on their series of “It’s What You Do” ads, and now it’s “It’s Not Surprising”. From the company’s site on the 3rd:

There are a lot of surprising things in this world. In our latest commercial series, we suggest a few scenarios you might be surprised by…

Like the running of the bull…dogs
Or runway models on a runway
Or Caesar on a caesar salad
Or ordering a getaway car from an app
Or Tiki Barber running a barbershop
Or a figure-skating sumo wrestler
Or Ice T at a lemonade stand

What’s not surprising? [Here’s the leap.] How much our customers really saved when they switched their car insurance to GEICO. In fact, new GEICO customers report saving an average of over $500 a year. How much could you save when you make the switch to GEICO?

Most of these involve word play, as with bulls / bulldogs. There’s runway, playing on senses 1 and 2 in this NOAD2 entry:

noun runway:  1 a leveled strip of smooth ground along which aircraft take off and land. 2 North American a raised aisle extending into the audience from a stage, especially as used for fashion shows. 3 an animal run, especially one made by small mammals in grass, under snow, etc. 4 an incline or chute down which something slides or runs.

And the proper name Caesar (as in Julius Caesar), originally a title, vs. the commonified caesar of caesar salad (see discussion of the salad in this posting, “It ended in a Mexican caesar salad” of 6/10/17).

And two other proper / common plays: Tiki Barber vs. barber and Ice-T vs. ice(d) tea.

On Tiki Barber, from Wikipedia:

Atiib Kiambu Hakeem-Ah “Tiki” Barber (born April 7, 1975) is a former American football running back who played for the New York Giants of the National Football League (NFL) for ten seasons. He played college football for the University of Virginia. Barber was drafted by the Giants in the second round of the 1997 NFL Draft, and played his entire professional career for them.

And on the rapper and actor with the stage name Ice-T, notable for playing Det. Fin Tutuola on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, see my 2/24/15 posting “Cops and DAs”.

A Jason Chatfield cartoon in the July 10&17 New Yorker:

(#1)

The cartoon is amusing as the working out of the absurd pun in Employer vs. Impaler. But it also manages to allude simultaneously to the current Presidents of both Russia and the United States.

Background: Vlad the Impaler. From Wikipedia:

(#2) Ambras Castle portrait of Vlad III (c. 1560), source of the depiction of Vlad in #1

Vlad III, known as Vlad the Impaler … or Vlad Dracula (1428/31 – 1476/77), was voivode (or prince) of Wallachia [a region of what is now Romania] three times between 1448 and his death. He was the second son of Vlad Dracul, who became the ruler of Wallachia in 1436.

… Vlad’s reputation for cruelty and his patronymic gave rise to the name of the vampire Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.

Background: the President of Russia. Currently Vladimir Putin, often depicted in the West as devious and cruel, and sometimes referred to as Vlad so as to connect him to Vlad the Impaler.

Background: the President of the United States. From Wikipedia:

The Apprentice is an American game show that judges the business skills of a group of contestants. It has run in various formats across fourteen seasons since January 2004 on NBC.

…  Episodes ended with the host eliminating the poorest contributor from the competition, with the words “You’re fired!”

… Real estate tycoon and now U.S. President [REDACTED] was the show’s host for the first fourteen seasons.

Instead of “You’re fired!”, Vlad in #1 exclaims, in effect, “You’re hired!”

Jason Chatfield. The artist is new to this blog. From Wikipedia:

(#3) Chatfield in a self-portrait

Jason Chatfield (born Perth, 1984) is an Australian cartoonist and stand-up comedian, based in New York City. At 23 he became Australia’s most widely-syndicated cartoonist, appearing daily in over 120 newspapers in 34 countries. His art spans the disciplines of comic strip, gag cartoon, editorial cartoon, book illustration, caricature and commercial art.

… Chatfield took over writing and drawing the iconic internationally syndicated comic strip Ginger Meggs in 2007, becoming the strip’s fifth artist, succeeding James Kemsley. Kemsley wrote to the Bancks family to secure approval for Chatfield to succeed him. Ginger Meggs is currently syndicated by Andrews McMeel Universal to 34 countries. Chatfield is the youngest cartoonist to take on the iconic comic strip in its 96-year history.

A Ginger Meggs meta-comic:

(#4)

(which depends on a character’s explicit recognition that he is in fact a character in a cartoon).

Note from Michael Maslin on his Inkspill blog (“New Yorker Cartoonists News and Events”), appearing as a comment on a recent posting of mine here:

As you see, Mr. Zwicky’s blog is “mostly about language”; when it’s about the language of New Yorker cartoons it will be mentioned here

This could get burdensome. I’ve posted here over a hundred times about New Yorker cartoons and covers; these are indexed in a Page on this blog, with subpages for (so far) 25 specific artists — including one for Maslin himself!

[revised version]

From David Preston, yesterday’s Brewster Rockit comic strip, in a male character attempts to mansplain mansplaining to Pamela Mae Snap (aka Irritable Belle):

(#1) (Note strategic use of speech bubbles in the third panel.)

Today’s follow-up:

(#2)

[Notes from David Preston on Facebook:

[Rockit’s alias is] Short Attention Span Avenger. He’s blond. I’m not sure if Mansplainer is a previously introduced character, or if he’s just a random member of the crew. Usually it’s Ensign Kenny who gets injured. He’s the equivalent of Ricky Redshirt in Star Trek.

Brewster Rockit appears in #4 below.]

On the comic, from Wikipedia:

Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! is a satirical retro-futuristic comic strip created by Tim Rickard. It chronicles the misadventures of the dim-witted Brewster Rockit, captain of the space station R.U. Sirius, and his crew. Many of the comic’s characters and elements are derived from the Star Trek franchise, American science fiction films of the 1950s, and science fiction comics of the 1940s and 1950s. It debuted on July 5, 2004, and is nationally syndicated by Gracenote.

The weekday strips usually feature extended serial storylines, often running several weeks at a time. The Sunday strips are stand-alone, self-contained gags which are often more elaborately illustrated and action-oriented than the dailies, and are sometimes presented in medias res style. The comic’s humor includes satire, metahumor, slapstick, dark humor, running gags, word play, and puns.

Two central characters:

Captain Brewster Rockit: The lantern-jawed and squinty-eyed captain of the R.U. Sirius. He is brave, optimistic… and dumb as a rock. His strong leadership skills are complemented by a boyish sense of humor (and childlike mindset). He graduated from the Air Force Academy and then served in NASA as a space shuttle pilot. However, he failed his intelligence exam because he kept eating the pencils. He originally had the intelligence of an average person, but excessive memory wipes from alien abductions caused him to lose it. According to Pam, he has an obsession with ham.

Lieutenant Pamela Mae Snap [aka Irritable Belle]: The tough and pragmatic second-in-command aboard the R.U. Sirius, Pam is usually the one responsible for keeping things running, despite the collective idiocy of her shipmates. She sometimes has a hot temper and an attitude that gets her into trouble. She is also the mother of two young kids from a bad marriage that she doesn’t talk about. She has shown to have a “thing” for bad boys, having dated Dirk Raider, Brewster’s nemesis, as well as Karnor [a visiting alien given to eating people; he’s tall, green, and has a crush on Pam].  She enjoys killing things.

On mansplaining (and straightsplaining) on this blog, see this 9/20/14 posting. On the condescension in such explanations, see this Minnesota Public Radio site, with this illustration:

(#3)

Men mansplaining mainsplaining has become something of a trope on its own.

Back in the Brewster Rockit world, Capt. Rockit and his guys are also given to manfixing — “I’ll fix that for you, ma’am” — as in this 8/4/14 strip:

   (#4)

The two other characters in this strip:

Cliff Clewless: The station’s engineer – a position for which he is completely unqualified. He got his position through his computer-hacking abilities by hacking into NASA’s computer and upgrading himself from “programmer” to “engineer”. He believes himself to be popular with the ladies. He is fat and is invariably shown sporting a cap and sunglasses.

Dr. Mel Practice: The station’s conniving science officer (and mad scientist, though he prefers the term, “sanity-challenged scientist”). He often creates monsters and machines (killbots), but inevitably fails in his plans to conquer the universe. One of his craziest inventions was a “Procrastination Ray”, which sent troublesome objects into the future, so one would have no choice but to deal with them later. He is bald and wears a white lab coat, black gloves, and spectacles.

Irritable Belle. Out of the great pile of jokey names in the strip, I’ll comment on just this one, a play on irritable bowel, as in irritable bowel syndrome. On IBS (and the pun irritable vowel syndrome) on this blog, see this 4/11/17 posting.

The play in Irritable Belle can be taken one step further, to give the portmanteau name Irritabelle. And it has been. From an Adweek article of 4/14/16, “Ad of the Day: Meet Irritabelle, Your Irritable Bowel Sidekick, in Campy Ads for Viberzi: Actress Ilana Becker tells us why she loves the character” by David Gianatasio:

   (#5)

Take a bowel, Ilana Becker! [The puns just keep coming.]

The actress and comedian tells Adweek that portraying “Irritabelle,” the personification of a stomach ache with diarrhea, in campy ads for IBS-D (Irritable Bowel Syndrome With Diarrhea) medication Viberzi, has been a dream come true.

“I wanted this job from the moment I laid eyes on the copy,” she says. Originally hired to provide voiceovers when the work was in its animatic/storyboard phase, “I remember thinking how much fun it would be to be able to bring Irritabelle to life.”

Fashioned by Arnold Worldwide for pharma giant Allergan, the campaign broke nationwide last week, starring Becker as a kooky colon who makes life difficult for her owner. Clad in a jumpsuit decorated with a goofy digestive-tract illustration, her hair and lips painted atomic red, Becker makes a distinct impression in “Home,” the 60-second launch spot.

The site has several ads featuring Irritabelle.

A classic Gary Larson cartoon, which came up on Pinterest this morning:

(#1)

Pun time at the protist corral, playing on Anglicized Spanish adios, amigos ‘goodbye, friends’ (perhaps better in AmE: ‘so long, buddies’).

And then there’s this knock-knock joke (call it Amoeba Dumb) reproduced on a number of joke sites:

Knock, knock!
Who’s there?
Amoeba.
Amoeba who?
Amoeba dumb, but I’m not crazy.

with a punch line that puns on the song line:

I may be dumb, but I’m not crazy

There are plenty of cartoons and jokes involving amoebas (including a number of other cartoons from Larson), but not all that many punning on the word amoeba, as here.

On amoebas. Some terminological background, starting with the noun protist ‘a member of the Protista’. Based on the proper noun Protista:

Biology a kingdom or large grouping that comprises mostly single-celled organisms such as the protozoa, simple algae and fungi, slime molds, and (formerly) the bacteria. They are now divided among up to thirty phyla, and some have both plant and animal characteristics. (from NOAD2)

And then from Wikipedia:

An amoeba (rarely spelled amœba, US English rarely spelled ameba; plural am(o)ebas or am(o)ebae), often called amoeboid, is a type of cell or organism which has the ability to alter its shape, primarily by extending and retracting pseudopods. Specifically, the amoeba moves by extending a pseudopod (a process known as “ballooning”), attaching it to the substrate and filling it with cytosol and releasing its rear portion from attachment to the substrate which results in the organism being propelled forward. Amoebas do not form a single taxonomic group; instead, they are found in every major lineage of eukaryotic organisms. Amoeboid cells occur not only among the protozoa, but also in fungi, algae, and animals.

Microbiologists often use the terms “amoeboid” and “amoeba” interchangeably for any organism that exhibits amoeboid movement.

… The best known amoeboid protists are the “Giant Amoebae” Chaos carolinense and Amoeba proteus, both of which are widely cultivated and studied in classrooms and laboratories.

(#2) Chaos carolinense

Other well known species include the so-called “brain-eating amoeba” Naegleria fowleri, the intestinal parasite Entamoeba histolytica, which causes amoebic dysentery, and the multicellular “social amoeba” or slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum.

The formula: I may be X, but I’m not Y. The knock-knock joke above puns on a specific quotation, from the chorus of the Rihanna song “Stupid in Love”:

This is stupid, I’m not stupid
Don’t talk to me, like I’m stupid
I still love you, but I just can’t do this
I may be dumb but I’m not stupid

From Wikipedia:

“Stupid in Love” is a song recorded by Barbadian singer Rihanna for her fourth studio album, Rated R (2009). The song was written by Shaffer Smith, Mikkel S. Eriksen and Tor Erik Hermansen, with production helmed by StarGate.

The “Stupid in Love” line is an instance of a formula

I may be X, but I’m not Y / but I’m no Y

where the speaker accepts the predication of X but not that of Y (usually because Y is further along on some scale of negative evaluation than X), as in these other instances of the formula:

The Offspring song “Self Esteem”: “I may be dumb, but I’m not a dweeb”

from the Monty Python “Village Idiots” sketch: “I may be an idiot, but I’m no fool” [where idiot is an occupational title in this context]

the character Wade Wilson/Deadpool in the movie Deadpool: “I may be super, but I’m no hero”

the Hank Moody character in Californication: “I may be easy, but I’m not sleazy”

the character Bishop in the movie Aliens: “I may be synthetic, but I’m not stupid”

Any of these quotations could in principle serve as the basis for the punch line in a knock-knock joke, but the joke only works if the quotation is memorable and the joke-teller and their audience both know it. If you don’t know the lyrics to the songs in the show South Pacific, then this knock-knock joke won’t really work for you:

Knock, knock!
Who’s there?
Sam and Janet.
Sam and Janet who?
Sam and Janet Evening.

You gotta know “Some Enchanted Evening”.

As it happens, I didn’t know the “Stupid in Love” line, so the Amoeba Dumb knock-knock joke was intriguing to me, but not really successful (a Monty Python “Village Idiots” allusion Amoeban idiot, but… would have worked for me).

Still, Amoeba Dumb is intriguing, because of the contrast the “Stupid in Love” line draws between being dumb and being stupid.

Note: the discussion here applies only to speakers (primarily in North America) who have dumb as a near-synonym of stupid; the adjective dumb ‘unable or unwilling to speak’ is irrelevant here.

Though the adjectives dumb and stupid overlap considerably in their use, most speakers seem to agree that when they’re differentiated, stupid is further out on a scale of negative evaluation: stupid is ‘seriously dumb’ or is more reprehensible (some say that being dumb is just not knowing, while being stupid is not knowing plus not caring).

As a result, A is dumb but not stupid (said of a person A) is entirely comprehensible, but A is stupid but not dumb is at least puzzling, if not contradictory.

Compare the explicitly contradictory A is very dumb but not dumb and the explicitly contradictory A is both dumb and doesn’t care about that, but not dumb; similarly, A’s doing B is very dumb but not dumb (said of a person A and an act B) and A’s doing B is dumb and A doesn’t care about that, but it’s not dumb. And then consider the possibility that instead of dealing with scalar predication or conjoined predication, with their logical implications, we are dealing with something weaker than strict implication — with conventional implicature or lexical connotation.