Scott Hilburn’s Argyle Sweater cartoon from the 20th:

A parody set off by a pun.

From Wikipedia on the original:

“Folsom Prison Blues” is a song written in 1953 and first recorded in 1955 by American singer-songwriter Johnny Cash. The song combines elements from two popular folk styles, the train song and the prison song, both of which Cash continued to use for the rest of his career. It was one of Cash’s signature songs. It was the eleventh track on his debut album With His Hot and Blue Guitar and it was also included (same version) on All Aboard the Blue Train. A live version, recorded among inmates at Folsom State Prison itself, became a #1 hit on the country music charts in 1968.

You can listen to the song here.

The pun is as close to perfect as an imperfect pun can be: prison – prism, with syllabic n vs. syllabic m, just one feature apart.

Then in the text itself, more substantial alterations. Compare with original with the verson above:

I hear the train a comin’ rollin’ round the bend
I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when

while preserving the prosody and the rhyming words bend – when.

The rest of the original :

Well I’m stuck in Folsom Prison and time keeps dragging on
While a train keeps a rollin’ on down to San Antone

Yesterday, from Steven Levine on Facebook:

(#1)

Not too long ago the Steven Levine necktie museum received a significant donation from the Arnold Zwicky tie archives, which included a goodly percentage of paisley ties spanning a few decades. From what I’ve seen, there have been takes on paisley prints on neckties going back to the 20s and I’m pretty sure you can find them currently. This polyester tie seems seventies to me.

Steven added:

From Wikipedia’s entry on paisley: “The pattern is still commonly seen in Britain and other English-speaking countries with men’s ties but remains popular in other items of clothing in Iran and South and Central Asian countries.”

On this blog, there’s a 10/22/16: posting “Paisley days”, with five of my paisley ties, plus links to two previous postings on Steven’s ties, on paisley patterns, and on the name paisley.

And then today, the eve of Steven Levine Day (his birthday), a non-Zwicky paisley:

(#2)

Today’s big fat 70s paisley tie (or maybe it’s a lobster bib) comes from the Larry Hanks collection, donated to the Steven Tie Museum by Deborah Robins a while back. This is from Goldwater’s Mens World in Phoenix and was probably expensive originally — it seems to be silk, and it’s actual patchwork rather than a single print. I think I would like each individual print as a tie more than I like the combination. [I agree.]

On the title of this posting. A la.me play on the song title “Tangled up in Blue”, with a pun on tied for tangled, and the pattern name paisley for the color name blue. There’s even a tenuous Minnesota connection, Dylan raised in Hibbing, Steven now in Minneapolis.

Dylan’s very complex song “Tangled Up in Blue” appeared on his 1975 album Blood on the Tracks. From it: “Lord knows I’ve paid some dues getting through / Tangled up in blue”. Lord knows what happens when you’re tied up in paisley.

The Zippy from September 30th, featuring Mary’s Coffee Shop, which also offers grinders:

(#1)

Plays on several senses of grind, plus the idiom one-hit wonder (with its phonological play on /wʌn/).

The coffee shop. Faced with a Zippy set in a diner, a coffee shop, or a fast-food restaurant, my first move is to identify the place. Surely, Mary’s Coffee Shop and grinders would get a quick hit, right?

Well, Mary’s Coffee Shop, sure — but it’s a place in Brooklyn that doesn’t look remotely like the place in the cartoon, and seems not to offer grinders (the submarine sandwiches).

And then any search with coffee and grinders in it nets lots of coffee grinders, devices for grinding coffee beans, but no coffee shops that sell subs.

So I still don’t know what actual coffee shop is depicted in the cartoon.

Grinding it out. From NOAD2:

noun grinder: 1 a machine used for grinding something: a coffee grinder; a person employed to grind cutlery, tools, or cereals. 2 a molar tooth; (grinders) informal the teeth. 3 US informal another term for submarine sandwich.

noun grind: … hard dull work: relief from the daily grind.

the daily grind is semantically transparent, but it’s also a cliché, a conventional way of referring to the hard dull work of daily routine.

The title of the cartoon, the daily grinder, is a portmanteau of the daily grind and grinder, referring both to submarine sandwiches and to coffee grinders; Mary’s is, after all, both a coffee shop and a grinder shop.

More on the submarine sandwich, from Wikipedia:

Grinder: A common term [attested since the 1950s] in New England, its origin has several possibilities. One theory has the name coming from Italian-American slang for a dock worker, among whom the sandwich was popular. Others say it was called a grinder because it took a lot of chewing to eat the hard crust of the bread used. [Still another: that it was a favorite of studious college students; NOAD2 on the noun grind: US informal an excessively hard-working student.]

In Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, and parts of New England the term grinder usually refers to a hot submarine sandwich (meatball; sausage; etc.), whereas a cold sandwich (e.g., cold cuts) is usually just simply called a “sub”.

Meanwhile, the name grinders has spread far from the northeast U.S. I give you: Grinders Submarine Sandwiches, a shop in Oakland CA.

One-hit wonders. From Wikipedia:

A one-hit wonder is any entity that achieves mainstream popularity and success for a very short period of time, often for only one piece of work, and becomes known among the general public solely for that momentary success. The term is most commonly used in regard to music performers with only one top-40 hit single that overshadows their other work. Sometimes, artists dubbed “one-hit wonders” in a particular country have had great success in others. [And the classification as a hit or success is subjective.]

Some examples, U.S. oriented, from the Wikipedia article, from pop music and from classical music:

Pop: Billy Ray Cyrus, “Achy Breaky Heart”; Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”; The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star”; Nana, “99 Luftballons”; The Archies, “Sugar Sugar”; Baha Men, “Who Let the Dogs Out?”; Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”

Classical: Maurice Ravel, “Bolero”; Johann Pachelbel, Canon in D; Samuel Barber. Adagio for Strings; Jeremiah Clarke, “Trumpet Voluntary”; Léo Delibes, “The Flower Duet” from Lakme; Amilcare Ponchielli, “Dance of the Hours” from La Gioconda

(The bold-faced items are the featured pieces of music in a forthcoming posting on musical flash mobs. Stay tuned.)

But now the one-hit wonders from 1965 mentioned in the cartoon: Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, with “Wooly Bully”; and Barry McGuire, with “Eve of Destruction”.

On Sam the Sham, from Wikipedia:

(#2) Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, 1965

Domingo “Sam” Samudio (born 28 February 1937, Dallas, Texas), better known by his stage name Sam the Sham, is a retired American rock and roll singer. Sam the Sham was known for his camp robe and turban and hauling his equipment in a 1952 Packard hearse with maroon velvet curtains. As the front man for the Pharaohs, he sang on several Top 40 hits in the mid-1960s, notably the Billboard Hot 100 runners up “Wooly Bully” and “Li’l Red Riding Hood”.

Possibly Sam the Sham should be classified as a two-hit wonder, but “Wooly Bully” was certainly the one big hit for which he’s remembered. You can watch Sam and the Pharaohs performing it here.

Then Barry McGuire and “Eve of Destruction”. From Wikipedia:

(#3)

“Eve of Destruction” is a protest song [alluding to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and especially the civil rights movement] written by P. F. Sloan in mid-1964. [“But you tell me over and over and over again my friend / Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction”] Several artists have recorded it, but the best-known recording was by Barry McGuire. This recording was made between July 12 and July 15, 1965 and released by Dunhill Records. The accompanying musicians were top-tier LA session players: P. F. Sloan on guitar, Hal Blaine (of Phil Spector’s “Wrecking Crew”) on drums, and Larry Knechtel on bass. The vocal track was thrown on as a rough mix and was not intended to be the final version, but a copy of the recording “leaked” out to a DJ, who began playing it. The song was an instant hit and as a result the more polished vocal track that was at first envisioned was never recorded.

You can watch McGuire’s performance here. On the singer, from Wikipedia:

Barry McGuire (born October 15, 1935) is an American singer-songwriter. He is known for the hit song “Eve of Destruction”, and later as a pioneering singer and songwriter of contemporary Christian music.

Through a Facebook connection, this .NAF. cartoon:

Yet another play on an antic song title.

Earlier on this blog, on 9/29/11, “Comma chameleons”, on cartoons with five commas and a chameleon, playing on

the song title “Karma Chameleon” (by the British New Wave band Culture Club, featured on the group’s 1983 album Colour by Numbers (link)), with the chorus: “Karma karma karma karma, karma chameleon”

Now in the cartoon above, even further from karma: five comas and a chameleon.

The cartoonist signs his work .NAF. and goes by the name NAF. A website with his work here, and a bit of an interview from Prospect magazine on 2/1/10 by David Killen, “Cartoonist of the month: NAF”:

DK: First, give me your autobiography in 100 words or so

NAF: Raised by a loving family in Edinburgh, I studied biological sciences before embarking upon a career as a zookeeper. I looked after primates and snakes (a classic combination) but ended up slaughtering more animals than I kept alive so, tired of playing God, I ran away to South Africa to work on a game reserve. The game reserves were full, however, so I hit rock bottom and with nowhere else to turn and with nothing to lose, I became a cartoonist. I still survive in this sleazy profession, occasionally supplementing my income by playing the banjo.

Entertaining, but not really informative.

(Fun with names and language play, but mostly Zippyesque popular culture in many manifestations.)

In recent days, Zippy has gone to a psychic shop (offering “crystals, past lives, tarot cards”), to the Tropical Treat in Hanover PA, to Luna Park in Sydney (NSW), to the ghost of a  Mickey Rooney hotel in Downington PA, and to the ghost of the Justin Time diner in Meriden CT.

Past lives at the psychic shop. From October 5th:

(#1) Helmut Sanford-Sharpie, Lester Sylvester, Mimi Garneau

The first two are probably inventions of Bill Griffith’s, though the details of their lives in the strip might well be distant allusions to real things, and there have certainly been men named Lester Sylvester (though none, I think, with associations to cons, flea circuses, or Allentown PA). But Mimi Garneau is solid. From the American Sideshow Blow-Off site on 7/13/06:

(#2) Mimi on stage (but not with a neon sword)

Mimi Garneau was born as Hazel Jude Thomas in 1890 (also reported as 1894) near Phillipsburg, PA. The young woman learned to swallow swords and began performing under the name Jude by the late 1920s. She soon gained acclaim by becoming the first woman to swallow a neon sword. By the early 1930s Jude met her husband-to-be, Fred Garneau. It’s unknown why she eventually adopted the first name Mimi…  Garneau spent her final years in Tampa, FL, where she passed away on Feb. 22, 1986.

The title of the strip is an allusion to an American tv show. From Wikipedia:

I Led 3 Lives (also known as I Led Three Lives) is an American drama series which was syndicated by Ziv Television Programs from October 1, 1953 to January 1, 1956. The series stars Richard Carlson. The show was a companion piece of sorts to the radio drama I Was a Communist for the FBI, which dealt with a similar subject and was also syndicated by Ziv from 1952 to 1954.

It was loosely based on the life of Herbert Philbrick, a Boston advertising executive who infiltrated the U.S. Communist Party on behalf of the FBI in the 1940s and wrote a bestselling book on the topic, I Led Three Lives: Citizen, ‘Communist’, Counterspy (1952).

Tropical Treat. From the 6th:

(#3) Deep thoughts with fast food

The actual place, Crabbs Tropical Treat in Hanover PA, as described in a TripAdviser review of 6/12/14:

(#4)

Nice Neon sign inviting you in to retro Hamburger and Ice Cream Stand on Carlisle St. between Cross Keys and Hanover, PA. Inexpensive food, decent ice cream and cute retro grounds, complete with old time gas pump signs, a giant neon ice cream cone and car hop parking stalls if you don’t care to eat on their cute patio. The kind of place we all would have hung out at for dates in high school. Good place for an ice cream in the summertime!

Back to Luna Park. From the 11th, after a couple of earlier strips on the rather menacing amusement park in Sydney NSW:

(#5) Luna Park on this blog recently: on August 25th

From NOAD2:

adj. world-weary: feeling or indicating feelings of weariness, boredom, or cynicism as a result of long experience of life: their world-weary, cynical talk.

Then the groan-inducing pun whirled weary ‘weary of being whirled’, a V-prp + Adj compound with a very unusual relationship between its elements — one of the things that makes it groan-inducing (especially for people for whom world and whirled aren’t homophonous).

That’s Mickey Rooney painted on the wall. From the 12th:

(#6)

The actual place, the “Mickey Rooney inn” in Downingtown PA, in its derelict days:

(#7)

From a Daily Local News by Brian McCullough on 7/14/16:

It’s been quite a few years since Mickey Rooney’s smiling face greeted travelers along Lancaster Avenue to the Tabas Hotel.

Since its closing in 1989, the immediate Downingtown area has been without a hotel. On Friday, that will change with the opening of Home2 Suites by Hilton.

While the new hotel has no plans to have celebrities appear like the closed resort did, its owners believe it can succeed by providing “very hip and very modern” rooms in an area where there’s a demand, said Patti Shores, director of sales for Home2 Suites.

The four-story hotel has 115 suites designed for business people on extended assignments as well as family vacationers.

Rooney lent his image to the Tabas Hotel, but seems not to have been an investor.

In its new incarnation, apparently a spiffy place.

Then there’s Rooney, who’s gotten a couple of mentions on this blog because of his performance as Puck in the 1935 Hollywood film of Midsummer Night’s Dream. From Wikipedia:

(#8) Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in a promotional portrait for 1938’s Love Finds Andy Hardy

Mickey Rooney (born Joseph Yule Jr.; September 23, 1920 – April 6, 2014) was an American actor, vaudevillian, comedian, producer and radio personality. In a career spanning nine decades and continuing until shortly before his death, he appeared in more than 300 films and was one of the last surviving stars of the silent film era.

At the height of a career that was marked by precipitous declines and raging comebacks, Rooney performed the role of Andy Hardy in a series of 15 films in the 1930s and 1940s that epitomized American family values. A versatile performer, he became a celebrated character actor later in his career. Laurence Olivier once said he considered Rooney “the best there has ever been.” Clarence Brown, who directed him in two of his earliest dramatic roles, National Velvet and The Human Comedy, said he was “the closest thing to a genius I ever worked with.”

Rooney first performed in vaudeville as a child and made his film debut at the age of six. At 14 he played Puck in the play and later the 1935 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Critic David Thomson hailed his performance as “one of cinema’s most arresting pieces of magic”. In 1938, he co-starred in Boys Town. At nineteen he was the first teenager to be nominated for an Oscar for his leading role in Babes in Arms, and he was awarded a special Academy Juvenile Award in 1939. At the peak of his career between the ages of 15 and 25, he made forty-three films, which made him one of MGM’s most consistently successful actors and a favorite of studio head Louis B. Mayer.

Rooney was the top box office attraction from 1939 to 1941, and one of the best-paid actors of that era, but his career never rose to such heights again.

… At his death, Vanity Fair called him “the original Hollywood train wreck.” He struggled with alcohol and pill addiction. He is notable for having married eight times … His first marriage was to Ava Gardner. Despite earning millions during his career, he had to file for bankruptcy in 1962 due to mismanagement of his finances

At the diner, carping about McDonald’s. From today:

(#9) The former Justin Time diner in Meriden CT

From the Roadside Architecture site:

(#10)

Cassidies [or Cassidys] Diner is a Silk City [diner] from 1949. It was previously known as the Justin Time Diner. The diner was badly damaged in an automobile accident in 2008. It was still covered with tarps in 2009. In 2010, the diner was repaired and reopened. In 2014, the diner was being spruced up by new owners. For more, see this website.

If I remember correctly, the last time I ate at a McDonald’s was 1988, and that was at the insistence of a friend (who was fond of the place). Before that, sometime around 1970. I’m with Zippy here.

Tucked inside Reid Forgrave’s story in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the Boundary Waters area of northern Minnesota was an admirable brand name, an off-color portmantriple (boldfaced below):

[Becky] Rom and her husband climbed out of the canoe. Back in [the town of Ely], they pointed out thriving enterprises. One family company makes outerwear, which nicely complements the family’s other business, a lodge that runs winter dogsledding trips. An outfit called Crapola makes cranberry-apple granola. An art gallery displayed prints from a nature photographer…

If you live in or near Ely (a town of three or four thousand people), or if you’re a serious granola maven, you’re probably familiar with Crapola, but otherwise the product isn’t widely known.

The product, in its original form; in its (sigh) Number Two variety; and in an American patriot spinoff (all packages featuring the founders, Andrea and Brian Strom):

(#1) Note: “Makes even word people regular”

Brian Strom, on the company’s website:

By June of 2007, we were living the country life on our very own off-grid homestead in northern Minnesota. That’s when a silly conversation turned into inspiration for our granola business. One day I said something like “wouldn’t it be funny if we made cranberry apple granola and called it Crapola?”. I say lots of things like that, but for some reason this idea actually became a reality. Next thing I knew, a business was born.  Be careful what you say in front of your wife.  It could change your life forever.

On the model for the product name, from NOAD2:

noun crapola: North American vulgar slang nonsense; rubbish. ORIGIN from crap [‘feces’] and -ola, a suffix used humorously to extend standard words.

The title of Forgrave’s piece, a compact summary of the story:

In Northern Minnesota, Two Economies Square Off: Mining vs. Wilderness: Proposed mines near the Boundary Waters have become the latest front in the fight over who gets to profit from America’s natural resources

A photo from the NYT, suggesting the beauties of the lakes and islands:

(#2)

The article also shows the open-strip mines in the area, but I’ll spare you that.

(‘Whatever Seurat is, Seurat is’, that is, ‘Seurat is what he is’. That’s with English que /ke/, as in “Que Sera, Sera”.)

A photo by Elizabeth Zwicky on Facebook on the 14th:

(#1) Boston harbor; the orange bit is a reflection of a construction crane

In the photo (of ripples in water, with reflected points of sunlight), Ellen Evans, on Facebook, saw life imitating art, in this case, Seurat’s pointillism, and I agreed, hence the title of this posting. Robert Coren suggested Monet, and that’s not impossible, but a pointillist painter is a better fit.

The art. From my 11/30/16 posting “Poet in search of his moose”, #4 Barry Kites’s collage “Sunday Afternoon, Looking for the Car”:

On the background painting, from Wikipedia:

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (French: Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte) painted in 1884, is one of Georges Seurat’s [1859-1891] most famous works, and is an example of pointillism.

The original:

(#2)

Note the water. Water figures prominently is a great many pointillist paintings. Here’s Paul Signac‘s Steeple in Saint Tropez, 1896:

(#3)

On the technique, from Wikipedia:

Pointillism is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image.

Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed the technique in 1886, branching from Impressionism. The term “Pointillism” was coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists, and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation. The movement Seurat began with this technique is known as Neo-impressionism.

… The technique relies on the ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to blend the color spots into a fuller range of tones. [“Don’t stand, don’t stand so, / Don’t stand so close to me”]

In comparison to Seurat and Signac, a representative Monet:

(#4) Blue Water Lilies, 1919

From Wikipedia:

Water Lilies (or Nymphéas, French) is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926). The paintings depict Monet’s flower garden at his home in Giverny, and were the main focus of Monet’s artistic production during the last thirty years of his life.

Monet’s water ripples are achieved by short brushstrokes, not dots.

The song. And, especially, its title. From Wikipedia:

(#5) Listen to Doris Day singing the song here

“Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)”, first published in 1956, is a popular song written by the songwriting team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. The song was introduced in the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring Doris Day and James Stewart in the lead roles.

… The popularity of the song has led to curiosity about the origins of the saying and the identity of its language. Both the Spanish-like spelling used by Livingston and Evans and an Italian-like form (“che sarà sarà”) are first documented in the 16th century as an English heraldic motto. The “Spanish” form appears on a brass plaque in the Church of St. Nicholas, Thames Ditton, Surrey, dated 1559. The “Italian” form was first adopted as a family motto by either John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford, or his son, Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford. It is said by some sources to have been adopted by the elder Russell after his experience at the Battle of Pavia (1525), and to be engraved on his tomb (1555 N.S.). The 2nd Earl’s adoption of the motto is commemorated in a manuscript dated 1582. Their successors — Earls and, later, Dukes of Bedford (“Sixth Creation”), as well as other aristocratic families—continued to use the motto. Soon after its adoption as a heraldic motto, it appeared in Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (written ca. 1590; published 1604), whose text (Act 1, Scene 1) contains a line with the archaic Italian spelling “Che sera, sera / What will be, shall be”. Early in the 17th century the saying begins to appear in the speech and thoughts of fictional characters as a spontaneous expression of a fatalistic attitude.

The saying is always in an English-speaking context, and has no history in Spain, Italy, or France, and in fact is ungrammatical in all three Romance languages. It is composed of Spanish or Italian words superimposed on English syntax. It was evidently formed by a word-for-word mistranslation of English “What will be will be”

Side note. It seems there are programs for altering photographs to make them appear pointillist, giving output like this:

(#6) Relatively simple pointillization

A comment on the vulgar noun crapola in yesterday’s posting “A portmantriple”, from David Preston:

[cited by AZ] “-ola, a suffix used humorously to extend standard words.”

Wasn’t the original ‘ola’ the shoe-polish brand Shinola? Then it became humorous with the phrase “know shit from Shinola.”

Actually, playful -ola didn’t start with Shinola, though Shinola appeared fairly early in the history.

From Michael Quinion’s Affixes site on 9/23/08, about -ola:, which lists [a] diminutives; [b] trade names; [c] humorous or dismissive formations:

[a] A few words in this ending come directly from Latin, usually with a diminutive sense: areola (Latin, diminutive of area, area), a small circular area, in particular the ring of pigmented skin surrounding a nipple; cupola (Latin cupula, small cask or burying vault, diminutive of cupa, cask), a rounded dome forming or adorning a roof or ceiling; pergola (Latin pergula, projecting roof, from pergere, come or go forward), an archway in a garden or park.

[b] This diminutive sense may have been the inspiration for various US trade names (Pianola, a mechanical piano [late 19th c.]; Victrola, a type of phonograph [ca. 1900]; Moviola [ca. 1925], a type of film editing machine; Granola [late 19th c.], a kind of breakfast cereal), mostly now generic or obsolete. [Crayola crayons from 1903. Shinola shoe polish: name trademarked 1903, company founded 1907; went out of business in 1960.]

[c] From the 1920s in the US the ending began to be added to a variety of nouns and adjectives to make humorous slang terms. Many of these were only temporary, but two of several that have survived are boffola (from slang boff, a hearty laugh), a joke or a line in a script meant to get a laugh, and crapola (from crap, excrement), total rubbish. One that has become standard English is payola, the practice of bribing someone to use their influence or position to promote a particular product, from which have evolved drugola, payola in the form of drugs, and plugola, payment to get favourable mention or display (a plug) for a product in a film or on radio or television. The ending is mainly limited to the US.

And then the idiom (not) know shit from Shinola ‘be completely ignorant’, of WWII vintage — which has been subject to scientific investigation. From the Neatorama site on 2/11/14, “Spectroscopic Discrimination of Shit from Shinola”, quoting an article from The Annals of Improbable Research by Thomas H. Painter, Michael E. Schaepman, Wolf Schweizer, and Jason Brazile. With the conclusion:

… it is evident that to the human eye, shit and Shinola are inseparable given similar morphology [‘form’]`, whereas with near-infrared spectroscopy shit is easily known from Shinola.

On the 23rd, “The pumpkin spice cartoon meme”, with a variety of developments of pumpkin spice ‘spice for pumpkin (pie)’ to concrete uses for the flavor of such spice and the scent of such spice and then to figurative uses ‘special, extraordinary’ and from there ‘top-grade’. Now, some further developments:

The possibility that Pumpkin Spice might be a Spice Girl (Michael Palmer asks on Facebook, “Which of the Spice Girls is Pumpkin Spice?”).

More generally, the rule of thumb: if spice, then pumpkin spice, as in this playful e-card:

(#1) The verb spice up > pumpkin spice up

And, as also illustrated in #1, the metonymical extension of pumpkin spice to ‘autumnal’ (thanks to the association of the spice with the fall).

From NOAD2, re #1:

verb spice: [with object] (often as adjective spiced) flavor with spice: turbot with a spiced sauce; add an interesting or piquant quality to; make more exciting: she was probably adding details to spice up the story.

These days, most uses of pumpkin spice are playful. Some are entirely jokes; I give you the pumpkin spice condom, tampon, and laxative suppository; and the pumpkin spice buckshot and handgun.

(#2)

(#3)

(#4) Seasonal Dulcolax (#5)

(#6) The seasonal Glock

Two are explicitly seasonal — special issues for the autumn. All presumably are supposed to convey high quality, and the first three maybe a spicy scent.

Other advertising uses of pumpkin spice are playful, but represent actual offers — in particular, Mighty Auto’s fall specials, which I’ll get in a moment. First, some music.

Spice Girls. From Wikipedia:

(#7) The Spice Girls in a 2008 reunion concert

The Spice Girls were an English pop girl group formed in 1994. The group originally consisted of Melanie Brown (“Scary Spice”), Melanie Chisholm (“Sporty Spice”), Emma Bunton (“Baby Spice”), Geri Halliwell (“Ginger Spice”), and Victoria Beckham, née Adams (“Posh Spice”).

The naming pattern led to all manner of nominal goofing, strikingly in this xkcd cartoon (#1554):

(#8)

… which was then played with further in a 7/22/15 Language Log posting “Spice lists” by Mark Liberman.

Fall comes to Mighty Auto. This posting was set off by Chris Ambidge’s posting this image on Facebook:

(#9)

At first I thought this was just image tampering, but no, it’s a thing. The image above is, I think, from a Mighty Auto outlet in the Dallas/FortWorth Metroplex — as reported on in a web story of 9/22 by Rebekah Black, on the sites of CBS Radio’s FM stations KVIL 103.7 and KLUV 98.7 in that area. From Black’s story:

It looks like everyone is cashing in on the pumpkin spice craze. Even brake pads!

Wait, what???

A company called Mighty Auto has gone viral after offering “pumpkin spice” brake pads. And apparently, this isn’t the first year the auto company has offered up these deliciously flavored car parts. What’s next? Pumpkin spice tires???

What exactly can you expect from pumpkin spice brake pads? How do you know they’re really pumpkin spice? Do you get to smell them before they’re installed on your vehicle? When you slam on the brakes, do the cars behind you get a whiff of pumpkin spice?

The company’s intention is to convey ‘autumn special offer’ and maybe also ‘top of the line’, but not, I suspect, the spicy scent of nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger.

The Mighty Auto Parts company, headquartered in Norcross GA, has over a hundred local distributors nationwide. Most of them seem to participate in fall pumpkin spice advertising campaigns; Steve Anderson reported on Facebook that the Asheville NC store offers pumpkin spice oil changes every fall.

In an old New Yorker (from 7/6/15), two cartoons that especially struck me: a Mick Stevens meta-cartoon, and a Liana Finck with a playful word transposition. The second led me to a Finck from this spring that presents a real challenge in understanding.

The raw material:

(#1) Mick Stevens, going meta

(#2) Liana Finck: two Use compounds playfully transposed/Spoonerized

(#3) Liana Finck in the 5/8/17 magazine: two worlds intersect on the street

The meta-cartoon. Stevens’s couple in #1 are suddenly confronted with a gigantic pen intruding from above into their living room — and then they understand that they’re characters in a cartoon being drawn by an artist wielding that pen, which provides an explanation for the signature (of the artist) on the floorboard of the room.

From my 7/11/13 posting “More meta-cartoons”, which is about:

meta-cartooning, in which characters in a cartoon recognize in some way that they are, in fact, in a cartoon

illustrated with an Arlo and Janis and an Adam@Home. I wrote that:

Zippy has been going meta for many years, and Doonesbury dips into the genre every so often. Not long ago, I posted about a sequence of Pearls Before Swine strips in which the characters (including the cartoonist) commented on their cartoonness, and also posted a meta-Bizarro and then a meta-Mother Goose and Grimm.

Compound switches. The two Use N + N compounds — dish soap ‘soap for (washing) dishes’ and soap dish ‘dish for (holding) soap’ — are a transposition, or Spoonerism, pair, and so should enjoy one another’s company. As they do, with delight, in Finck’s cartoon.

Christian evangelism meets recycling. To understand Finck’s cartoon in #3, you need to recognize the formula “Have you heard the good news?” as part of a routine of public evangelism, especially by Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, going door to door or appealing to people in public places, including on the street. In an expanded form:

Have you heard the good news (about (our Lord) Jesus Christ)? (He is/has risen (from the grave).)

You also need to recognize the two characters in the cartoon as plastic water bottles — not at all difficult — and — more difficult — also recognize the symbol

(#4)

as a symbol of recycling, and in addition understand that “recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects” (Wikipedia). That is, in recycling, material metaphorically dies (when it is discarded) and then, if recycled, is reborn — metaphorically rises from the dead.

If you’ve got all that, you can appreciate the cleverness in having evangelical water bottles spreading the good news about how water bottles have been resurrected (via the miracle of recycling).

Note on the universal recycling symbol in #4, from Wikipedia:

Worldwide attention to environmental issues led to the first Earth Day in 1970. Container Corporation of America, a large producer of recycled paperboard, sponsored a contest for art and design students at high schools and colleges across the country to raise awareness of environmental issues. It was won by Gary Anderson, then a 23-year-old college student at the University of Southern California, whose entry was the image now known as the universal recycling symbol. The symbol is not trademarked and is in the public domain.

Or: zoology, geometry, geography, and medicine. In three visual + verbal jokes that have been floating around the internet. Starting, A, with a punning coordinate bears composition — playing geometrically with polar bear — that came to me from Mike Reaser (who got it from an aggregation source), and a buildup to a portmantriple, C, that came to me from Kim Darnell (who got it from the Exploding Fish Shitposting and Senseless Drivel, Inc. Facebook page) — a combo of geometry, medicine, and animals (hippos rather than polar bears). The first led to more geometric play, B, on polar bear, taking us into medical (specifically psychiatric) territory. And then, bonus, there’s some simple geographic play, D, with polar bear.

The bear corpus, items A and C:

(A1) polar bear and (A2) Cartesian bear

(C1) polar bear and (C2) bipolar bear

Tons of lexical background here. From NOAD2:

noun pole 2: [a] either of the two locations (North Pole or South Pole) on the surface of the earth … that are the northern and southern ends of the axis of rotation…; [b] Geometry a fixed point to which other points or lines are referred, e.g., the origin of polar coordinates…; [c] one of two opposed or contradictory principles or ideas: Miriam and Rebecca represent two poles in the argument about transracial adoption. ORIGIN … < Greek polos ‘pivot, axis, sky’

adjective polar: 1 relating to the North or South Pole: the polar regions; (of an animal or plant) living in the north or south polar region… 3 directly opposite in character or tendency: depression and its polar opposite, mania.

[polar in pl. noun polar coordinates: Geometry a pair of coordinates locating the position of a point in a plane, the first being the length of the straight line (r) connecting the point to the origin, and the second the angle (θ) made by this line with a fixed line; the coordinates in a three-dimensional extension of this system.

(A’) Cartesian vs. polar coordinates of a point

pl. noun Cartesian [aka rectangular] coordinates: Mathematics numbers that indicate the location of a point relative to a fixed reference point (the origin), being its shortest (perpendicular) distances [x and y] from two fixed axes [the X and Y axes] … that intersect at right angles at the origin.]

adj. bipolar: 1 [a] having or relating to two poles or extremities: a sharply bipolar division of affluent and underclass; [b] relating to or occurring in both North and South polar regions: bipolar species. 2 [a] (of psychiatric illness) characterized by both manic and depressive episodes, or manic ones only; [b] (of a person) suffering from bipolar disorder.

(A1) shows a polar bear, Thalactos maritimus, so-called because of its Arctic location, in the vicinity of the North Pole — a plump, spheroidal creature. (A2) shows a boxy bear.  Setting things up as A1 bear vs. A2 bear as circular vs. rectangular, corresponding to polar vs. Cartesian coordinates, and opening the way for polar in (A1) to work as a pun on its geographical and geometric senses.

(C1) shows Thalactos maritimus again, but this time explicitly paired with polar coordinates. Then (C2), goofily, gives us a two-headed bear, labeled bipolar bear (with the prefix bi– ‘two’), for which it creates a corresponding system of geometric coordinates — bipolar coordinates, punning on the medical sense of bipolar (sense 2 above). Bipolar bear can then be seen as a portmanteau of bipolar and polar bear, with polar being used in two different senses.

The polar bear / bipolar pun without the geometry:

(C’) Mike Riley, I Taste Soundcartoon of 2/5/11

From Wikipedia on bipolar disorder:

Bipolar disorder, previously known as manic depression, is a mental disorder that causes periods of depression and periods of elevated mood. The elevated mood is significant and is known as mania or hypomania, depending on its severity, or whether symptoms of psychosis are present. During mania, an individual behaves or feels abnormally energetic, happy, or irritable.

And then the bonus, a simple pun on polar bear and bipolar in sense 1b above (making reference to both North and South poles): a John Bell cartoon posted here on 3/28/15:

(D) The polar bear (Arctic) and the penguin (Antarctic)

Now, from polar bears to hippos, in a burst of portmanteaus:

(E)

The ingredients: the hypotenuse, from geometry (the longest side of a right triangle, opposite the right angle); Hippocrates (Greek physician, regarded as the father of medicine), from medicine; and the hippopotamus, from zoology. These have an initial /hɪ/ (or /haj/) and a medial /pa/ (or /po/) + a voiceless stop /p t k/, pieces that can be used in portmanteauing.

Which gives us:

hippopotenuse: hippopotamus on a hypotenuse

Hypocrates: hypotenuse with Hippocrates inside it

Hippopocrates: hippopotamus-headed Hippocrates

And then, eek, the portmantriple hippopocranuse.

The 6/1 Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, a medical cartoon:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

The crucial thing here is a pop-cultural reference, involving that huge hand (in the drawing) and the reference to being a fan at sporting events (in the text); if you don’t know that connection, the cartoon is just baffling.

That connection is a folk practice originating about 50 years ago in the U.S., and still, I think, predominantly an American thing. From Wikipedia:

(#2) A fan raises a foam hand at a Cleveland Indians game (Wikipedia image)

A foam hand, commonly known as a foam finger, is a sports paraphernalia item worn on the hand to show support for a particular team. The most common version resembles an oversized hand with an extended index finger, and slits in their bases allow them to be worn over the hands. Usually the surface displays a silk-screened team name, logo, or other graphic or slogan, such as “We Are #1.” Foam hands are made of open-celled foam.

… The first prototype foam finger was created in 1971 by Ottumwa High School student Steve Chmelar, who constructed a giant hand out of hardware cloth and papier-mâché for the 1971 Iowa High School Athletic Association Boy’s State Basketball Finals, between the Ottumwa Bulldogs and the Davenport West Falcons.

… In 1976, Texas high school teacher Geral Fauss created foam fingers to show support for the team at the high school where he taught, to raise funds for the industrial arts club, and as a project that his industrial arts class could produce themselves. His first prototype foam finger was actually made out of plywood and had a painting of a “number one” done in the school’s colors.

Fauss first sold his foam fingers at the 1978 Cotton Bowl in Dallas (University of Texas vs. Notre Dame), and he later went on to found Spirit Industries for the large scale manufacturing of foam fingers. In 1979, the first polyurethane foam version of the product was produced by Spirit Industries.

The title of this posting. A play on an already playful name, The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate (with all those /f/s, the echo of vulgar slang a flying fuck, and of course the obscene gesture of giving someone the finger, communicating ‘up yours, fuck you’ (though that involves the middle, rather than the index, finger).

From A Way with Words (the radio show and podcast), “Fickle Finger of Fate Origins” by Grant Barrett on 11/21/16, the sumary:

The television show “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” popular in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, was famous for awarding its goofy trophy, the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate. But the term fickle finger of fate is actually decades older than that.

Today’s morning name: South Cackalacky, mildly derogatory slang for South Carolina (suggesting crudeness, rusticity, and remoteness: the boondocks). And Cackalacky, for the Carolinas taken together, with the same associations. (Sorry,  Charleston, Charlotte, and Research Triangle.)

Then, of course, such associations can be inverted, to connote local pride, down-hominess, and the like. As has happened in this case.

Whence Cackalacky? Evan Morris’s Word Detective site on Cackalacky from 9/15/10:

Dear Word Detective: I live in North Carolina and “Cackalacky” seems to be a synonym for the old north state (as well as a barbecue sauce.) I was wondering if it originally had meaning or was just a great nonsense word. — Caroline Sunshine.

[Word Detective’s response] Ah, North Carolina, the Tar Heel State, otherwise known as the Old North State, both of which are seriously strange nicknames. I had, I must admit, never heard North Carolina referred to as “Cackalacky” before I read your question. I initially suspected that it was, as you suggest, simply “a great nonsense word,” a silly name the locals had invented. After a bit of research, however, I discovered that there is quite a bit more to the story.

The first thing to note is that “Cackalacky” seems to be used as a nickname for both North Carolina and South Carolina. The second, and more productive, thing I’ve learned about “Cackalacky” is that there are a lot of people out there, especially at the University of North Carolina (UNC), trying to figure out where this “Cackalacky” business came from.

In a 2005 posting to ADS-L, the mailing list of the American Dialect Association, Bonnie Taylor-Blake pointed to the work of two UNC faculty members, Paul Jones and Connie Elbe, who have been searching for information on “Cackalacky” (also, according to Taylor-Blake, sometimes seen in the forms Cackalackie, Cackalack, Kakalak, Kakalaka, Cakalacky, Kackalacky, Cakalaka, and others).

There are a number of theories about the origin of “Cackalacky,” but, despite the efforts of folks at UNC, so far no one has been able to pin down its source with any real certainty. Such vagueness is not uncommon in cases of “folk speech,” which may pass from generation to generation by word of mouth for many years without ever being written down. This seems to be especially true in the case of “Cackalacky,” which was apparently completely undocumented in printed form until it was used (in the form “cakalaka”) in the lyrics to a hip-hop song [“Scenario”] by A Tribe Called Quest in 1991. Since that time, use of the term in hip-hop lyrics and on the internet seems to increased its popularity quite a bit.

So it’s a very distance riff on Carolina, amplified by a bunch of playful sound-symbolic material. Such inventions rarely have identifiable etymons, or at least not unique identifiable etymons, but are often melanges of stuff.

You can listen to “Scenario” here (#1). The relevant bit is “New York, North Kakalaka, and Compton” — referring to black areas of Queens NY, North Carolina, and Compton CA (in southern Los Angeles County).

Local color. The label Cackalacky has more recently been applied, affectionately, to all sorts of things associated with the Carolinas. Just two items…

Cackalacky sauces. From Spencer NC. From their site, one of the company’s products:

(#1) Famously Original Cackalacky® Hotter Sauce: Made with our famously original blend of sweet potatoes and signature secret spices and CAROLINA REAPER peppers, this is the HOTTER version of our Southern sauce that helped us introduce the Cackalacky® Brand to The Free World! Perfect as a dressing, dip, topping, and marinade!

Cack-A-Lacky ginger pale ale. From the Fullstream Brewery in Durham NC:

(#2)

Evan Morris. I hadn’t used his Word Detective site for a while, so I searched for some information about recent entries — only to discover that he’d died three years ago. Brief notice on Word Detective:

Evan Morris, author and newspaper columnist, died on October 8, 2017, after a two-year struggle with cancer. He was 67. The author of four books about words and language, Evan was best-known for his popular website The Word Detective, based on his newspaper column of the same name.

An interesting and complex life, detailed in the Word Detective piece.

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, with a groaner pun on the name F. Scott Fitzgerald (the American writer) plus an instance of the Pavlov cartoon meme:

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

The pun is straightforward (it does depend on your recognizing Spot as a conventional name for dogs in English); but though Pavlov isn’t mentioned in the cartoon, it’s all about classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning, and the cartoon makes no sense unless you recognize the allusion to Pavlov, and also recall that Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate (and expect food) on hearing a bell ringing (here, the carriage return bell on a typewriter, which younger readers will be unfamiliar with, typewriters being an obsolete technology — but the cartoon helpfully fills in this bit of typewriter arcana).

Pavlov on this blog. Five previous cartoons.

— on 10/11/15 in “Pavlov’s cat”, a Maria Scrivan cartoon (one of many featuring some kind of role reversal):

(#2)

— on 10/20/15 in “Going to the dogs”, #2 a Phil Selby cartoon with a hot dog wagon selling Pavlov’s dogs:

(#3)

— on 10/26/15 in “R(e)ubenesque”, #6 a Mark Stivers cartoon:

(#4)

— on 11/15/15 in “Title generator, Pavlov”, #2 a Tom Gauld cartoon :

(#5)

— and on 11/15/17 in “The [Bob] Mankoff rat cartoon”:

(#6)

As a bonus, the posting has a section on classic, or Pavlovian, conditioning.

Playing with ambiguity:

— a One Big Happy cartoon with: I feel like a tuna fish sandwich

— a domestic exchange about: I will make a dessert of my youth

— a Pearls Before Swine cartoon with: Tell me roughly

— a photograph, labeled Schrödinger’s Dumpster, of a dumpster with the signage: EMPTY WHEN FULL

The example data; then some comments on ambiguity as a characteristic of language.

I feel like a tunafish sandwich. The One Big Happy strip from 12/5/19 (appearing more recently in my comics feed):

(#1)

We’ve been here before, sort of, on this blog. From my 2/19/12 posting “I feel like sushi”, about a Rhymes With Orange strip:

(#2)

Among the many uses of the verb feel is is the one OED2 glosses as:

to feel like (doing something): to have an inclination for

with the usage note “(? orig. U.S.; now common)” and the usage label “colloq. or vulgar” (I wouldn’t say that vulgar is appropriate now, even if it was in 1989, but colloquial is about right). In the cartoon, this sense competes with a sense in which the subject of the verb is the source of a touch perception (with the experiencer of this perception optionally expressed by a PP in to).

OED2’s gloss for the second sense:

Used (like taste, smell) in quasi-passive sense with complement: To be felt as having a specified quality; to produce a certain impression on the senses (esp. that of touch) or the sensibilities; to seem.

So: something feels rough, like sandpaper, as if it was sanded (to me).

Call the activity idiom involving feel, activity feel like.

The second sense of feel above is used here with the P like, so call this feel like combination prepositional feel like: the P functions semantically like a conjunction: feel like sushi ‘feel the way sushi feels’.

But I feel the way sushi feels is itself ambiguous, between the referent of sushi (also of the higher subject I) serving in the participant role Source (of a sensation — sushi feels slippery and fishy, somewhat meaty and chewy; if I feel like sushi, so do I) ; and the referent of sushi (also of I) in the participant role Experiencer (of a sensation — sushi feels that it has been prepared to be eaten by diners; if I feel like sushi, I feel similarly threatened). Source P feel like versus Experiencer P feel like.

The ambiguity in #2 is between activity feel like and Source P feel like; in  #1 (with tuna on toast rather than sushi), between activity feel like and Experiencer P feel like.

Then in my 2/24/15 posting “Ode to Almond Joy”, on the candy jingle “Sometimes you feel like a nut / Sometimes you don’t”, turning on the ambiguity of feel + like (in combination with the ambiguity of nut (the foodstuff vs. ‘wild and crazy guy’): activity feel like plus foodstuff nut giving the interpretation ‘have an inclination to have (that is, eat) a nut’; versus yet another sense of feel, roughly ‘believe’, specifically ‘believe to be’,  plus crazy/eccentric person nut, giving an interpretation along the lines of ‘believe to be like a nutty person’.

(For completeness, I note still other prepositional feel like idioms: positive-affect feel like a million bucks ‘feel wonderful’, negative-affect feel like shit / crap / hell ‘feel terrible’.)

I will make a dessert of my youth. From a 12/21/19 Facebook posting reporting on an household exchange between Chris Waigl and her wife Melinda Shore:

Chris: I will make a dessert of my youth.
Melinda: You will take your youth and turn it into a dessert?

First, on the food, Dr. Oetker Milchkaffee. From Wikipedia:

Dr. Oetker is a German multinational company that produces baking powder, cake mixes, frozen pizza, pudding, cake decoration, cornflakes, and various other products.

The company is a wholly owned branch of the Oetker Group, headquartered in Bielefeld.

(#3) ParadiesCreme ‘Paradise Cream, Cream of Paradise’

A dried dessert powder for a heavenly dessert cream flavor (add chilled milk, whisk for 3 minutes, and serve) — schmeckt locker-leicht und cremig ‘tastes airy-light and creamy’

(Comes in various flavors: vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate, nougat, caramel, and more)

Then, the ambiguity centered on the verb make: make a dessert of my youth. Part of the story is an ambiguity in argument structures, famously exploited in jokes:

Make me a sandwich / Poof, you’re a sandwich

My mother made me a homosexual / If I paid her a hundred dollars, would she make one for me too?

Skimming over most of the details, we’re looking at VPs of the form:

make NP1 NP2

understood as either of:

make NP2 for NP1 (roughly, benefactive)

make NP1 into NP2 (roughly, transformative)

But wait, there’s more. In addition to this argument structure ambiguity, there’s a structural ambiguity, with the PP of my youth parsed either as a postnominal modifier in the NP a dessert of my youth, or as an argument (an oblique object) of the verb make.

Tell me roughly. Then, from Facebook on 12/21/19, from Mike Pope, this Pearls Before Swine cartoon of 12/20:

(#4)

Tell me roughly, elliptical for ‘Tell me roughly how much we pay’.

Again, a structural ambiguity and a lexical ambiguity work together. The adverb roughly functions either as a VP adverbial or as a degree adverbial (an approximative) modifying how much (we pay).

The VP adverbial is the –ly counterpart to the adjective rough in NOAD‘s sense 2a:

adj. rough: … 2 [a] (of a person or their behavior) not gentle; violent or boisterous: strollers should be capable of withstanding rough treatment.

The degree adverbial is the –ly counterpart to the adjective rough in NOAD‘s sense 3d:

adj. rough: … 3[a] not finished tidily or decoratively; plain and basic: the customers sat at rough wooden tables. [b] put together without the proper materials or skill; makeshift: he had one arm in a rough sling. [c]lacking sophistication or refinement: she took care of him in her rough, kindly way. [d] not worked out or correct in every detail: he had a rough draft of his new novel.

Similarly, in AHD5 sense 6:

Not perfected, completed, or fully detailed: a rough drawing; rough carpentry.

(Neither quite gets at the further development to ‘inexact, approximate’, as in a rough estimate, but that’s not directly relevant to the Pearls ambiguity.)

EMPTY WHEN FULL. Another ambiguity passed around on Facebook back in December, an ambiguity in labeling / signage (in part a result of the abbreviated form of signs) that has come to be known as:

(#5)

(apparently suggesting that the dumpster is somehow simultaneously empty and full, like Schrödinger’s cat, which is somehow simultaneousy alive and dead)

Again, a constructional and lexical ambiguity working hand in hand: empty as a verb (the intended reading), in an imperative sentence (parallel to the label or sign USE AS NEEDED); vs. empty as an adjective (the Schrödinger reading), in a declarative sentence (parallel to the label or sign SLIPPERY WHEN WET).

Schrödinger might be on its way to serving as a cartoon meme. Three examples:

— on 3/26/15 in “The cat at the vet’s”, with Benjamin Schwartz’s “Schrödinger’s cat at the vet’s”

— in Mark Liberman’s 5/21/17 Language Log posting “Schrödinger’s pundit”: an SMBC, with a pundit both opposing and favoring a bill

— on 6/27/19 in “The Desert Island Reaper”: #10 the Schwartz cartoon

Why is ambiguity seen as a defect? Speakers of English are inclined to view examples like the ones above as entertaining demonstrations of unfortunate defects in the language: a properly designed language wouldn’t allow for any such thing. (Well, they can’t know this, but every language in the world appears to be jam-packed with just such ambiguities, so there obviously must be something deeper going on.)

Typical despondent views of ambiguity in fact turn on a piece of language ideology that is most vibrantly expressed in European Rationalist thought, in particular in the dream of a perfect language, in which you say exacty what you mean, no more and no less.

In my 9/27/18 posting “Mike Lynch”. I wrote that

[Peter Mark] Roget’s obsessive [Thesaurus] project … stood squarely in two related intellectual traditions: the devising of (universal) “philosophical languages” in the 17th century (George Dalgarno, John Wilkins, Gottfried Leibniz); and then the projects of the Enlightenment in the 18th, especially the French Encyclopédie, the great catalogue of all the things in the world.

(So: not only a perfect language, but a complete one, capable of expressing all ideas.)

The desire for a perfect language seems inarguable to many people these days, accustomed as we have become to the metaphorical usage of the word language for systems of symbols and rules for writing computer programs or algorithms. But the dream of a perfect language was of a sign system people could use in speaking and writing.

The nature of a perfect language. In brief, these components:

— perfect morphosyntax: one form / one meaning: neither ambiguity (one form, several alternative meanings) nor variability (one meaning, several alternative forms)

— perfect exponence: no redundancy (more than one co-occurring exponent of some meaning; so, among other things, no agreement) or omission (missing exponents for some meaning: no ellipsis, truncation, etc.) or inexplicitness (no abbreviation, indirection, allusion, etc.); Omit Needless Words (ONW), Include All Necessary Words (IANW)

— perfect lexicon: no lexical gaps, in particular neither lexical underdifferentiation (English cousin, no separate simple words for ‘female cousin’ and ‘male cousin’) nor lexical overdifferentiation (English niece and nephew, no simple word for the two of them taken together)

But but but. Language is not only a system of signs but also a system of sociocultural practice. These two aspects of language are indissoluble.

Most of the “defects” of ordinary language above — ambiguity, variability, redundancy, omission, inexplicitness — can be seen as devices serving the purposes of language in its sociocultural context: signaling shared information or belief, aspects of surrounding text, participants’ goals or intentions in engaging in the exchange, participants’ presentations of themselves in the interaction, and more.

Ambiguity, in particular, allows for compactness of expressions –“perfect” languages require astounding amounts of text to convey messages adequately — while using participants’ abilities to exploit background knowledge and the richness of context to winkle out each other’s intentions. They don’t do this perfectly, of course, but then they don’t have to. They only have to be good enough most of the time.

They are human systems for human uses.

(And then since there’s a considerable amount of randomness in linguistic history, some stuff just is, without a deeper meaning. For instance, the lexical overdifferentiation and underdifferentiation examples above.)

(Rudely suggestive song taking off on the names of toys for infants, so sure to be offensive to some.)

Sighted by Ann Burlingham at a toy store in the Pittsburgh suburb of Oakmont (and posted on Facebook on 10/30/19), these “natural rubber teethers”, in a “fruits and vegetables series”:

(#1) Kendall the Kale, Ana Banana, and Arnold the Avocado: teethers from Oli&Carol natural rubber toys

And then the song (a rudely suggestive riff from my hand):

Name That Symbol.
Or, Prisoners in Rubbertown (It’s a Dirty Little Store)

He called his banana Ana and his avocados Arnold
He called his broccoli stalk Brucy and his radishes Ramona
He called his carrot Cathy and his coconuts Coco
He even called his mushroom Manolo and his pink cherry Mery
He was queer as Brucy and Nellie as a whole circus, though
With a capacious packed trunk
And he sucked the seed of his watermelon Wally… but:
Lips and tongue, Kendall, lips and tongue! No teeth!

The full inventory of playfully named teethers:

Ana the banana, Arnold the avocado, Kendall the kale, Brucy the broccoli, Manolo the mushroom, Ramona the radish, Mery the Cherry, Pepita the apple, Coco the coconut, Clementino the orange, Cathy the carrot

The model for the riff. From Wikipedia:

“Three-Five-Zero-Zero” is an anti-war song, from the 1968 musical Hair, consisting of a montage of words and phrases similar to those of the 1966 Allen Ginsberg poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra”.

… The song begins with a slow, somber catalogue of violent images of death and dying, but its tone changes, as it becomes a manic dance number satirizing the American military’s media attempts to gain support for the war by celebrating Vietnamese casualty statistics. At this point, the lyric begins a repeated refrain, “prisoners in Ni**ertown / it’s a dirty little war”, echoing Ginsberg’s lines:

The war is over now —
Except for the souls
held prisoner in Ni**ertown

You can listen to the original Broadway cast recording of the song here.

Some name references that might be non-obvious. Nellie the Elephant is a half-rhyming name, but it’s also a literary reference. From Wikipedia:

“Nellie the Elephant” is a children’s song written in 1956 by Ralph Butler and Peter Hart about a fictional anthropomorphic elephant of that name.

… The chorus of the song is as follows:

Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk
And said goodbye to the circus
Off she went with a trumpety-trump
Trump, trump, trump

Then there’s Brucy the Broccoli. In my 1/27/16 posting “Bruce Bruce Bruce”, notes on Bruce as a particularly Australian name (and, in the U.S., as a particularly gay name). So Brucy the Broccoli reads as queer:

(#2)

(not to mention being phallic — as of course are several of the other teethers (“he called his mushroom Manolo” — not to mention bananas and carrots); though some might have hoped for Egbert the Eggplant, for its prime phallicity).

On the company, from its site:

Oli&Carol is a recent born company from Barcelona specialized in designing natural baby rubber toys for modern parents and their kids.

The creative souls behind the brand are Olimpia and Carolina, 20 and 25 year old sisters who decided to start a business four years ago.

They love design and nature and wanted to create environmentally friendly products in a business where they could enjoy and have fun together.

You probably weren’t expecting Barcelona. Nobody expects Barcelona.

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip (Wayno’s title: “Farm to Slab”):

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

A combination of two cartoon memes: the familiar Caveman meme, plus  a Remarkable Restaurant meme that’s a specialty of the Bizarro strips.

Plus the portmanteau word play in filet magnon (filet mignon + cro-magnon). And a subtle play on a systematic ambiguity between raw and cooked understandings in certain food names, in particular for cuts of meat. You ask for a filet at the Paleo Cafe, you get a hunk of raw meat.

Remakable Restaurants. Previous postings on this theme include two with restaurants catering to anteaters and serving ants, and one on a restaurant catering to dragons and serving knights in armor.

From my 5/29/18 posting “Chez Le Fourmilier”:

(#2)

A strenuous exercise in cartoon understanding: you need to be familiar with a certain kind of (seafood) restaurant, and to recognize both anteaters and a children’s educational toy known as an ant farm. And then to understand that the cartoon embodies a metaphorical translation from a seafood restaurant world to an anteater world.

(On such translations, see my 5/22/18 posting “I just can’t stop it”.)

Another version in my 3/27/20 posting “Chez Le Fourmilier II”:

(#3)

And then in my 5/21/20 posting “Knight bibs”. a restaurant serving knights for a clientele of dragons:

(#4)

Then in #1, a restaurant servng raw meat to cavemen. The ultimate paleo diet. From my 7/23/20 posting “Let’s go paleo”, outside another Remarkable Restaurant, the Totally Natural Foods Cafe, where “They appear to be chasing a mastodon around with rocks and clubs.”

(#5)

Implementing the Paleolitic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, Stone Age diet, or hunter-gatherer diet, right along with the appropriate hunting practices, for the appropriate prey.

From my 10/23/14 posting “Miss Florence and the Paleo diet” on the diet: “a modern nutritional diet designed to emulate, insofar as possible using modern foods, the diet of wild plants and animals eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era” (Wikipedia).

filet magnon. First the food, then the European early modern humans.

From Wikipedia:

Filet mignon (French, lit. '”tender, delicate, or fine fillet”‘) is a steak cut of beef taken from the smaller end of the tenderloin, or psoas major of the cow carcass, usually a steer or heifer. In French, this cut is always called filet de bœuf (“beef fillet”), as filet mignon refers to pork tenderloin.

The tenderloin runs along both sides of the spine, and is usually harvested as two long snake-shaped cuts of beef. The tenderloin is sometimes sold whole. When sliced along the short dimension, creating roughly round cuts, and tube cuts, the cuts (fillets) from the small forward end are considered to be filet mignon. Those from the center are tournedos; however, some butchers in the United States label all types of tenderloin steaks “filet mignon”. In fact, the shape of the true filet mignon may be a hindrance when cooking, so most restaurants sell steaks from the wider end of the tenderloin – it is both cheaper and much more presentable.

(#6) Filet mignon with mashed potato, string beans and mushrooms (Wikipedia photo)

The tenderloin is the most tender cut of beef, making it one of the more desirable cuts. This, combined with the small amount given by any one steer or heifer (no more than 500 grams), makes filet mignon generally the most expensive cut. Because the muscle is not weight-bearing, it contains less connective tissue than other cuts, and so is more tender. However, it is generally not as flavorful as some other cuts of beef (e.g. prime rib cuts). For this reason it is often wrapped in bacon to enhance flavor, and/or served with a sauce.

Then the early humans. From Wikipedia:

“European early modern humans” (EEMH) is a term for the earliest populations of anatomically modern humans in Europe, during the Upper Paleolithic. It is taken to include fossils from throughout the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), covering the period of about 48,000 to 15,000 years ago (48–15 ka), spanning the Bohunician, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian periods.

… The term EEMH is equivalent to Cro-Magnon Man, or “Cro-Magnons”, a term derived from the Cro-Magnon rock shelter in southwestern France, where the first EEMH were found in 1868. Louis Lartet (1869) proposed Homo sapiens fossilis as the systematic name for “Cro-Magnon Man”. W. K. Gregory (1921) proposed the subspecies name Homo sapiens cro-magnonensis. In literature published since the late 1990s, the term EEMH is generally preferred over the common name Cro-Magnon, which has no formal taxonomic status, as “it refers neither to a species or subspecies nor to an archaeological phase or culture”.

Still, even specialists often use the term Cro-Magnon (or Cro Magnon) in their writings, because of its familiarity. So in Marcel Otte’s book Cro Magnon (Perrin, 2008):

(#7) The cover shows an artist’s reconstruction of a Cro-Magnon man — looking very much like current humans; the caveman of cartoons is some composite of Neanderthal features and brutish fantasy

The raw and the cooked. Suppose I go into a modern restaurant and order filet mignon with new potatoes and asparagus on the side — and I am then presented with something like the filet mignon below, plus some raw potatoes and raw asparagus:

(#8) From the Kansas City Steak Company, “4 signature, butter-tender USDA Prime Filet Mignon, 6 oz each cut from the best of the best beef available” ($150) (signature, butter-tender, and best of the best, all in one short description!)

(Compare the filet magnon in #1.)

Now of course, this isn’t going to happen — well, it would be an outrage if it did — because the default for these three menu items (filet mignon, potatoes, asparagus) is that they are they are all cooked dishes, not raw material. Meanwhile, at the butcher’s shop, if you order filet mignon, you don’t expect to get something like #6.

In general, out of context, there’s a systematic (metonymy-based) ambiguity, for a large class of lexical items, which can refer to edible foodstuffs or to cooked preparations of them. As with other such ambiguities — for example, between reference to some concrete object or to a simulacrum of it — we largely negotiate these semantic spaces without appreciating the complexities in them.

We are good at using our background knowledge, information about the context we are in, and estimations of what other people are trying to achieve in our interactions, to pick out the appropriate interpretations of the words they use, and we rarely notice that all this stuff is happening off-stage.

Today’s Zippy takes us to a perished donut shop (in Niceville FL), which gives him play for his well-known fascination with the sheer sounds of words:

(#1)

In panel 1, it’s alliteration with /d/: defunct donut dispensary with dismay. In the other two panels, with /ɛks/ (or with a more reduced vowel): examined the extent of extinguished excretions … not exasperated but exuberant. (In the latter case, the choice of vocabuary items is seriously strained, to get alliterative words.)

First, there is indeed a defunct donut shop in Niceville FL:

(#2) Donut Shop No Longer, Niceville, Florida, a photograph by Kay Brewer, uploaded on March 17th, 2018 (photo link)

Note from Wikipedia:

Niceville is a city in Okaloosa County, Florida [well northwest, in the Panhandle], United States, located near Eglin Air Force Base on Boggy Bayou that opens into Choctawhatchee Bay.

Then, Zippy’s parting words: “When one donut dies, a thousand holes blossom”. This looks like a Zippyesque mélange of several sources, one of which came to me immediately.

— first idea: Chairman Mao. From Wikipedia:

The Hundred Flowers Campaign, also termed the Hundred Flowers Movement, was a period from 1956 to 1957 in the People’s Republic of China during which the Communist Party of China (CPC) encouraged citizens to express openly their opinions of the communist regime. Following the failure of the campaign, CPC Chairman Mao Zedong conducted an ideological crack down on those who criticized the regime, which continued through 1959. Observers differ as to whether Mao was genuinely surprised by the extent and seriousness of the criticism, or whether The Hundred Flowers Campaign was in fact a premeditated effort to identify, persecute, and silence critics of the regime.

During the campaign, differing views and solutions to national policy were encouraged based on the famous expression by Mao: “The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom [or blossom] and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science.” The movement was in part a response to the demoralization of intellectuals.

This is commonly misquoted as a thousand flowers.

— second idea: doors closing and opening. When one door closes, a thousand other doors will open, a saying attributed to Imam Ali, a central figure in Shia Islam. I haven’t tried to track down the original. (There are a lot of rabbit holes here.)

— third idea: one falls, and many more arise. The powerful image is related to the legend of Cadmus and the sowing of dragon’s teeth; see my 3/26/16 posting “Monsters of vegetative spread: dragon’s teeth”. The image turns up in a collection of (vaguely snowclonic) stock expressions of the form:

When one falls, a thousand more … take its place / rise /  step forward

These are even harder to track down, and I’m in no position to even try to do the job; though someone with better resources and more time than I have might find the task rewarding.

In any case, it looks like Bill Griffith has managed to evoke at least these three sources (and maybe more I haven’t thought of).

(Racy talk and joking about men’s bodies, so probably not to everyone’s taste.)

The background story is an error committed by the Imperator Grabpussy in reading from his text recently, with /θaj/ for /taj/ ‘Thai’, thereby introducing us all to the wonders of Thighland. (Details below.) Wags seized on the error for jokes, and on Facebook Tim Evanson offered photos of the King of Thighland, showing his massive muscular thighs and focusing our attention on the crotch they surround:

(#1) Thigh Guy: Kevin Cesar Portillo, who is all-around massive (he’s 6′5″), a former college basketball player at Miami-Dade CC, Mississippi Valley State, and Ave Maria Univ., now working as a male model (projecting smouldering sexiness) and fitness consultamt

Even more impressive:

(#2) Closer up

My first jab at a response:

This is in Thighland Park IL, right?

(Highland Park, a suburban city in Lake County IL, about 25 miles north of downtown Chicago.)

And then the much more elaborate racy parody (with Babes in Toyland apologies to Victor Herbert and the Disney Studios):

Thighland, Thighland
Delicious crotch and my land
While you dwell within it
You are ever happy there
Thighland, Thighland,
We’re on our way to Thighland
Don’t know when we’ll get there
But we know there’s fun in store

[Digression: from Wikipedia on Babes in Toyland, which may refer to:

— Babes in Toyland (operetta), a 1903 operetta by Victor Herbert

— Babes in Toyland (1934 film), a musical comedy starring Laurel and Hardy, based on the Victor Herbert operetta

— Babes in Toyland (1961 film), a Disney musical starring Ray Bolger, Annette Funicello and Tommy Sands, again based on the Victor Herbert operetta

— Babes in Toyland (1986 film), a television movie starring Drew Barrymore and Keanu Reeves, using only two songs from the Victor Herbert operetta

— Babes in Toyland (1997 film), an animated film featuring the voices of Christopher Plummer, Joey Ashton and Lacey Chabert, using only one musical number from the Victor Herbert operetta]

Tim Evanson countered with a racy parody of his own:

One night in Thighland and the world’s your oyster
The bod’s a temple – pull the sausage free
You’ll find a god in every bulging crotch there
A little flesh, a little history
I can feel his devil sliding up in me

The original keeps us in Thailand. From Wikipedia:

“One Night in Bangkok” is a song [released in 1984] from the concept album and subsequent musical Chess by Tim Rice, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. British actor and singer Murray Head raps the verses, while the chorus is sung by Anders Glenmark, a Swedish singer, songwriter and producer.

The original words:

One night in Bangkok and the world’s your oyster
The bars are temples but the pearls ain’t free
You’ll find a god in every golden cloister
And if you’re lucky then the God’s a she
I can feel an angel sliding up to me

The song exists in many versions. Here you can watch the video from Chess: a re-recorded version from a TV performance in 1985 for the special “Lyrics By Tim Rice”.

The name of the actual country. From a NYT story (from Reuters) on-line on 8/7/20: “Not ‘Thigh-Land’: Thais Amused at [REDACTED]’s Slip”:

Citizens of Thailand were surprised and bemused on Friday to discover their country’s name had become a social media meme after U.S. President [REDACTED] mispronounced it.

Though [REDACTED] quickly switched to the correct pronunciation, people quickly seized on the slip to mock the U.S. leader online as #Thighland became one of the top-trending Twitter hashtags in Thailand with 32,000 tweets and in the top 25 in the United States with over 156,000, according to the tracking site Twitscoop.

… The American president made the gaffe during a speech in Ohio while explaining how his trade war with China had forced factories to move production to Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam and, as he pronounced it, “Thi-land”.

In the next breath, [REDACTED] got it right, saying: “Thailand and Vietnam – two places that I like their leaders very much.”

The meme escalated when conservative American pundit and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who was pardoned by [REDACTED] after a conviction of violating campaign finance law, argued in a series of tweets that “Thighland” is in fact the correct pronunciation.

Rikker Dockum, a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, told Reuters that Trump’s second pronunciation – with an aspirated hard “t” instead of a soft “th” sound – is the widely used one in both Thai and English.

“Among English speakers around the world, this is not a disputed pronunciation,” he added.

A Zippy sequence that began back on 8/3 in this strip (reported on in a section of my 8/3 posting “The art of everyday objects”):

(#1) The premise is that this little house just appeared one day in Bill Griffith’s Connecticut neighborhood, provoking some bafflement as to its origin and function (note: in Bill Griffith’s neighborhood, not in the Dingburg area where the cartoon character Griffy is to be found)

That posting argued that the sliding door with a Z on it is just a standard Z-series barn door.

There followed three strips in which the door slowly opens, revealing someone inside — in fact, Zippy, presenting himself as a real person (like BG (Bill Griffith) rather than Griffy). Then a sequence of 8 increasingly surrealistic strips turning on issues of fiction and reality. Finally, two strips in which it turns out that Zippy is running a farm stand of the mind from that little shed.

(The strips are of course littered with Zippyesque pop-culture references of several kinds, including to characters from other comic strips.)

The door opens. In #2, the puzzle of the little house is restated and elaborated (BG is toying with us):

(#2)

In #3, the door begins to open:

(#3)

And in #4, wait, is that Zippy inside?:

(#4)

Are you real? In #5, it is indeed Zippy, and BG and Zippy each express surprise that the other is real:

(#5) BG: “So you’re a real person?” Zippy: “So you’re a real person?”

In #6, they dip fully into surrealism:

(#6) Pun on code: building code vs. zip code; 06423 is the postal code for East Haddam CT

In #7, it turns out that Zippy has been living in BG’s CT neighborhood for years:

(#7) Zippy: “I’ve been reading about us every day in the Boston Globe”

In #8, it becomes clear that both BG/Griffy and Zippy exist in counterpart pairs, fictional and real; the strips use the fictional Griffy and Zippy:

(#8) Zippy: “I’m both real and fictional. Th’ real me is similar to the one in the strips, only not quite as zany”

In #9, they examine the specific case of the plaid Poindexter barbat:

(#9) Zippy: “The real me thought it up, but th’ fictional me brought it into th’ strip years ago”

In #10, more on acts of creation and their agents; it seems that the fictional characters can be created afresh on different occasions, so that there are multiple Griffys:

(#10) Zippy: “Th’ real you and me create th’ fictional you & me .. which spin off into Dingburgers” – “I communicate my Zippy strip ideas to th’ real Zippy by encrypted email — he writes them down for the fictional Zippy to say!” BG: “Then who is writing this story arc?” Zippy: “you’re th’ Griffy that was created last week for this story arc, which may or may not be real!”

In #11, Zippy stresses the fragility of this particular Griffy’s existence:

(#11) Zippy: “You only exist in this story arc — It’s been kind of interesting having you here. I could set up a cot if you’d like to stay”

And in #12, BG despairs at this state of affairs:

(#12) BG: “Why did I ever stick my nose into that weird little house down th’ road? It’s probably just a shed .. or a soon-to-be farm stand”

The farm stand. And so it turns out to be. In #13 and #14, we discover that it is in fact Zippy’s Farm Stand, offering characteristic Zippy items (Valvoline, lugnuts, clam juice, etc.), orderable only by mental telepathy:

(#13)

(#14)

At this point, it’s positively refreshing to get back into the Zippy world of Pop-Tarts, Gummy Bears, and Astroturf.