An Andy Singer No Exit cartoon, accompanying Anthony Gottlieb’s review of Ruth R. Wisse, No More: Making Jewish Humor, NYT Book Review 6/2/13, pp. 38-9:

Two parallel puns, on practicing and on observant.

(On Andy Singer, see this posting.)

practicing. From NOAD2:

practice   verb [with obj.] (Brit. practise)

1 perform (an activity) or exercise (a skill) repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one’s proficiency: I need to practice my French | [no obj.]: they were practicing for the Olympics.

2 carry out or perform (a particular activity, method, or custom) habitually or regularly: we still practice some of these rituals today.

• actively pursue or be engaged in (a particular profession or occupation): he began to practice law | [no obj.]: he practiced as an attorney | (as adj. practicing): a practicing architect.

• observe the teaching and rules of (a particular religion): they are free to practice their religion without fear of persecution | (as adj. practicing): a practicing Roman Catholic.

The senses relevant to the Singer cartoon are 1 and the last sense in 2. In the first, we have a V, the PRP of which is used in progressive constructions, both as a main V (The pianist was practicing) and as a nominal modifier (I saw a practicing pianist ‘I saw a pianist who was practicing’). In the second, we have an Adj, the PRP practicing converted to an Adj — in fact, an Adj that can occur only adnominally and not predicatively (He’s a practicing Catholic ‘he practices Catholicism’, but *He’s a Catholic, but he’s not practicing meaning ’he’s a Catholic, but not a practicing Catholic’). A subtle but real difference.

The interpretation of practicing Catholic that will come first to mind (out of context) is the second, specialized, sense, and the Catholic priest (identifiable by his garb) is presumably a practicing Catholic. But the cartoon also conveys the first sense visually: the priest is playing the piano. So we have a practicing Catholic who is practicing (the piano) — two senses in one drawing.

observant. Again, from NOAD2:

observant   adjective

1 quick to notice things: her observant eye took in every detail.

2 adhering strictly to the rules of a particular religion, esp. Judaism.

The first sense is irrelevant to the cartoon, while the second is conveyed visually: the other figure in the drawing is an Orthodox Jew (identifiable by his garb and grooming) and so presumably is religiously observant. (Note that observant is an all-purpose adjective, occurring both adnominally and predicatively.)

The drawing also conveys another sense of observant, one that is in principle possible for a Adj derivative in -ant / -ent from a V but hasn’t been attested, even in the OED, for this particular derivative: ‘observing’ (compare convergent (on) ‘converging (on)’ and different (from / to / than) ‘differing (from / to / than’). So we have a (religiously) observant Jew who is observing the piano-playing (and thus might be said to be observant of it) — again, two senses in one drawing.

On AZBlogX yesterday, a set of ten more cattions (male photography — in this case, from Michael Taubenheim, Benno Thoma, and Bel Ami — plus captions from me plus B. Kliban cat stickers); from my third cattion posting:

As in the two earlier collections [here and here], the cattions are variously poetic, funny, slyly queer, and vulgar, often several at once. [The fourth collection is here.]

In the current set, the fifth, this item:

  (#1)

The guitar-playing cat is a version of the central figure from my very favorite Kliban cartoon:

  (#2)

(I posted another version of the cartoon as #5 in this posting.)

Notes on the verse. It’s a 4×4: four lines of trochaic tetrameter. Reading the lines as poetry, lines 1 and 4 are short, with no fourth foot; but in setting the verse to music, the third foot (S W in reading) would be replaced by two S feet, restoring tetrameter to the music (at the cost of accenting the second syllable of mousies in line 1 and the particle off in line 3).

The rhyme pattern is A B C  B.

Three of the four lines are initially truncated, by omission of a 1sg subject (very common in casual speech and informal writing). Line 2 is truncated in a different way, by omission of the copula.

Line 1 has the nonstandard (but incredibly frequent) demonstrative determiner them (instead of those). Lines 2 and 4 have the possessive determiner in the form they (rather than their), presumably representing an r-less (non-rhotic) variety of English.

The effect is of the refrain from a folksy  song — about a distinctly bloodthirsty topic. There’s a video here with the song performed as a children’s song, in the vein of “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley”:

But the Official B. Kliban Cats Web Site has a much better blues version.

On B. Kliban. Notes on the cartoonist, from Wikipedia:

Bernard “Hap” Kliban (January 1, 1935–August 12, 1990) was a well-known and popular cartoonist born in Norwalk, Connecticut.

He studied at Pratt Institute but left without graduating and spent time painting and traveling in Europe before moving to California, where he lived in the North Beach section of San Francisco with his first wife Mary Kathleen and his daughter Kalia. (Mary Kathleen was a talented artist who later also became a noted cartoonist in her own right as M.K. Brown and chose many of the cartoons that appeared in his publications.) It was while living in North Beach that “Hap” Kliban began to draw cartoons for Playboy magazine. The income from Playboy provided financial security that allowed him to move his family to an old house in the town of Fairfax in Marin County.

… The books that followed Cat consisted mostly of extremely bizarre cartoons that find their humor in their utter strangeness and unlikeliness. Many of these are cartoons that Kliban drew for Playboy. They often contained dysmorphic drawings of nude figures in extremely unlikely environments, as if to spoof Playboy’s own subject matter. Another frequent subject of satire were the type of wordless, step-by-step visual instruction manuals typically found with such things as office furniture. Kliban also had a recurring series of drawings called “Sheer Poetry,” in which the page would be split into six panels, containing images of objects whose names, when spoken in the order presented, would form a rhyming, nonsensical verse.

Here are four language-oriented cartoons from Kliban:

 (#3)

Outrageous puns on feet and meters.

  (#4)

Very distant pun here.

  (#5)

Pun on unnatural acts, with an unnatural ax in the drawing.

  (#6)

Jocular back-formation, treating fence as fents and then recovering a singular referring to one slat. English for Italian speakers.

Today’s cartoon crop includes a Tundra strip (passed on by Chris Waigl) with a penguin as the central character (and a pun and an implicature) and a penguinless one (today’s Pearls Before Swine) that’s about characters from one strip appearing in another — but then leads to another cartoon penguin (and portmanteau animals and a hand signal):

  (#1)

  (#2)

Strip #1. By asserting a generalization about common knowledge — everyone knows (that) penguins can’t fly — the penguin implicates that it can’t fly (and therefore must drive).

Folded in there is a play on two senses of intransitive fly. From NOAD2:

(of a bird or other winged creature) move through the air under control: close the door or the moths will fly in | the bird can fly enormous distances.

• (of an aircraft or its occupants) travel through the air: I fly back to New York this evening.

Now, on Tundra:

Tundra is a comic strip written and drawn by Wasilla, Alaska, cartoonist Chad Carpenter. The comic usually deals with wildlife, nature and outdoor life. Tundra began in December 1991 in the Anchorage Daily News and is currently self-syndicated to over 500 newspapers.

… Tundra is primarily drawn in two styles, single-panel gag comics using puns in combination with wildlife and the outdoors, and a three-panel strip that employs regular characters: Sherman the Squirrel, Dudley the Bear, Chad the Cartoonist, Andy Lemming, Whiff Skunk, and Hobart the Wise [a monk]. (link)

(It’s significant that Chris Waigl lives in Alaska and so sees this strip regularly.)

Strip #2. Pearls Before Swine has been indulging in metastrips recently (as I noted here). In this one, not only does the cartoonist (Stefan Pastis) appear as a character in his own strip — as Bill Griffith regularly does in Zippy the Pinhead  (and Chad Carpenter does in Tundra) — but a character (Steve Dallas) from a different strip appears as well (something Griffith also does every so often in Zippy):

Steve Dallas is a fictional character in the American comic strips of Berke Breathed, most famously Bloom County in the 1980s.

He was first introduced as an obnoxious frat boy in the college strip The Academia Waltz, which ran in the University of Texas’s Daily Texan during 1978 and 1979. Steve then reappears in Bloom County after graduation as a self-employed, unscrupulous lawyer.

He was the first character to have been featured in all four of Breathed’s comic strips. He appeared regularly, albeit much older, in the Sunday-only Opus. (Wikipedia link)

Two views of Steve:

  (#3)

  (#4)

I’ll get to some details of #4 in a little while. Right now, what’s most important is that Steve Dallas leads us to that most famous of cartoon penguins, Opus:

Opus the Penguin (Opus T. Penguin) is a character in the comic strips and children’s books of Berkeley Breathed, most notably the popular 1980s strip Bloom County. Breathed has described him as an “existentialist penguin” and the favorite of his many characters. Until November 2, 2008 he ran in the comic strip Opus.

… Opus’ appearance changed since his inception – he originally looked like a common penguin, but between 1982 and 1986 his nose grew dramatically (developing its signature bump in the middle, of which Opus is very self-conscious). Mike Binkley, during one Sunday strip, points out the fact that Opus more closely resembles a puffin, a revelation which shocks Opus. (In the final panel of the same strip, Opus responds by telling Binkley that he looks like a carrot.) Opus says he is attracted to “svelte buoyant waterfowl”.

… Over the years Opus has served as Steve Dallas’ legal secretary, journeyed to Antarctica in search of his mother, played the tuba in heavy metal group Deathtöngue (later renamed Billy and the Boingers), wooed (and was briefly married to) an abstract sculptor named Lola Granola, worked as a newspaper personals editor, lifestyle columnist and comic strip writer, had brief, experimental stints employed as a farmer, garbageman and even a cartoonist (or, as he called it, a stripper, which he would also be at one point), and run for vice president on the National Radical Meadow Party ticket, along with his running mate Bill the Cat. (Wikipedia link)

In this early strip (about misperceptions of speech), Opus’s nose/beak is still fairly realistic:

  (#5)

(Note the Wikipedia reference to the heavy metal group Deathtöngue, whose name appears, without the umlaut, on Steve Dallas’s shirt in #4.)

Digression on portmanteau animals. While we’re in Bloom County, here’s a Breathed character of linguistic interest, the basselope:

  (#6)

The basselope is a hybrid of the basset hound and the antelope — a hybrid with a portmanteau name. The model for it is the celebrated jackalope:

The jackalope is a mythical animal of North American folklore (a so-called “fearsome critter”) described as a jackrabbit with antelope horns or deer antlers and sometimes a pheasant’s tail (and often hind legs). The word “jackalope” is a portmanteau of “jackrabbit” and “antalope”, an archaic spelling of “antelope”. (Wikipedia link)

  (#7)

(Note the wonky subject-verb agreement in the last sentence of the postcard’s text.)

The hand signal. Back to #4 and the gesture Steve Dallas is making in it:

Hook ‘em Horns is the slogan and hand signal of The University of Texas at Austin. Students and alumni of the university employ a greeting consisting of the phrase “Hook ‘em” or “Hook ‘em Horns” and also use the phrase as a parting good-bye or as the closing line in a letter or story.

The gesture is meant to approximate the shape of the head and horns of the UT mascot, the Texas Longhorn Bevo [seen on Steve Dallas's shirt in #4 with its tongue sticking out]. The sign is made by extending the index and pinky fingers while grasping the second and third fingers with the thumb. The arm is usually extended, but the sign can also be given with the arm bent at the elbow. The sign is often seen at sporting events, during the playing of the school song “The Eyes of Texas”, and during the playing of the school fight song “Texas Fight”. It is one of the most recognized hand signals of all American universities.

Bonus: penguin cartoon postings. An inventory of some penguin cartoons, on Language Log and this blog.

First, from Language Log Classic, a posting “Spheniscid-American? Polar American?”, with this Glen Le Lievre cartoon (which is no longer available in the LLC archives):

  (#8)

Then on New Language Log, in the posting “Ar(c)tic”, an Alex Hallatt Arctic Circle penguin cartoon.

On to this blog:

6/22/11  It doesn’t always stay in Vegas (link): a Michael Shaw penguin cartoon

12/14/11  Recognition (link): a Shannon Wheeler penguin cartoon

1/23/12   Happy Penguin Awareness Day (link): a captioning

3/4/12   The news for penguins (link): the claymation tv series Pingu; a 1937 animated cartoon “Peeping Penguins” by Dave and Max Fleisher

5/13/12   The penguin chronicles (link): an American Scientist cartoon by Leighton; two captionings

4/17/13   Penguins and tuxedos (link): 7 cartoons — a Bizarro with penguins in t-shirts and open-necked shirts instead of tuxedos; a Carol Stokes cartoon on the Emperor’s new clothes; a Rob Cottingham cartoon on Linux; a Phil Selby cartoon with a foul-mouthed penguin; a Savage Chickens on the Last Supper; a Rob Middleton cartoon showing a penguin with Sigmund Freud; a Randy Glasbergen cartoon showing a penguin in the executive office

6/2/13   Penguin cartoon (link): a Rhymes With Orange showing a penguin that is not a flight risk

Today’s Pearls Before Swine:

Pig sets up a preposterous rhyme chain, origami salami tsunami. And then, as in the word avalanche strip posted here (ending with “Does the word shame mean anything to you?”), Rat upbraids the cartoonist in the final meta-panel.

Today’s Pearls Before Swine, with a very silly pun:

Ottoman the piece of furniture takes us back to the Ottoman Empire:

An ottoman is a piece of furniture consisting of a padded, upholstered seat or bench, usually having neither a back nor arms, often used as a stool or footstool, or in some cases as a coffee table. Ottomans are often sold as coordinating furniture with armchairs or gliders.

An ottoman can also be known as a footstool, tuffet, hassock, or pouffe. Some ottomans are hollow and used for storage.

… The ottoman was brought to Europe from Turkey in the late 18th century. The word ottomane to refer to furniture appeared by at least 1729 in French. The first known recorded use in English occurs in one of Thomas Jefferson’s memorandum books from 1789: “P[ai]d. for an Ottomane of velours d’Utrecht.” In Turkey, an ottoman was the central piece of family seating, and was piled with cushions. In Europe, the ottoman was first designed as a piece of fitted furniture that wrapped around three walls of a room. The ottoman evolved into a smaller version that fit into the corner of a room. (link)

In today’s crop of cartoons, an outrageous Pearls Before Swine and a silly Mother Goose and Grimm, both of them meta-strips and both playing with idioms:

(#1)

(#2)

In #1, the characters are treating pieces of wood to psychological pressure, which moves Rat to bash the cartoonist with one of the pieces of wood.

From OED3 (March 2007):

pressure-treated: Of timber: impregnated with a preservative applied under pressure.

[first cite] 1928   Iowa Recorder 12 Sept. 5/2,   $5 buys a twelve foot pressure treated hog trough that will last you a ‘lifetime’.

In #2, we have the cartoon character Charlie Brown (visiting from another comic strip) on the couch of a psychiatrist who’s reassuring the boy about good grief. Charlie Brown is famous for using the (American) exclamatory idiom Good grief!

(#3)

From the Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms (2003) on good grief:

I am very surprised “I have four computers at home” “Good grief. What do you do with them all?”

Usage notes: often used humorously, when someone pretends that a situation is more serious than it really is: Good grief, look at all this food! Are you feeding an army?

In yesterday’s mail, this cartoon card by Glenn McCoy:

  (#1)

Inside:

Arnold –
From the motssisi in
Ann Arbor
XOXO!
We miss you

(with signatures and messages from lots of people attending the motss.con in Ann Arbor last weekend). Very sweet.

And from the 10PerCent company recently, the same sentiment, but with a commercial purpose (and a smiling muscle hunk):

  (#2)

On Glenn McCoy, from Wikipedia:

Glenn McCoy is an American conservative cartoonist, whose work includes the comic strip The Duplex and the daily panel he does with his brother Gary entitled The Flying McCoys. McCoy also produces editorial cartoons.

Another language-related cartoon from McCoy, this time from The Flying McCoys:

  (#3)

This one turns on the ambiguity of do one’s business.

A Scott Hilburn pun strip, passed on by City Lights on Facebook:

(thighs – hide is a nice half-rhyme, with /z/ matched with /d/)

Two earlier appearances of Hilburn on this blog: “A conjugational visit” of 5/6/11 and “The perils of fronting” of 7/4/12 (with three strips and some information about Hilburn).

Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine, yet another meta-strip that builds up to an elaborate outrageous pun of the “immortal porpoises” type — for which the cartoonist merits death:

There are many variants of the “immortal porpoises” joke; the one I heard first built to “transporting young gulls across staid lions for immortal porpoises”. The joke type depends on a piece of formulaic language that is then punningly varied at multiple points.

Today’s Zippy, another installment in the Barbara Stanwyck retrospective (Stella Dallas (1937) here, Double Indemnity (1944) here):

Zippy and Zerbina are coping with the plot of the alliterative The Mad Miss Manton of 1938.

From Wikipedia:

The Mad Miss Manton is a 1938 screwball comedy and mystery film starring Barbara Stanwyck as fun-loving socialite Melsa Manton [more Ms!] and Henry Fonda as newspaper editor Peter Ames. Melsa and her debutante friends hunt for a murderer while eating bonbons, flirting with Ames, and otherwise behaving like silly young women. Ames is also after the murderer, as well as Melsa’s hand in marriage.

This was the first of three screen pairings for Stanwyck and Fonda, the others being The Lady Eve and You Belong to Me.

At 3:00 am, Melsa (Barbara Stanwyck) takes her little dogs for a walk. Near a subway construction site, she sees Ronnie Belden run out of a house and drive away. The house is for sale by Sheila Lane (Leona Maricle), the wife of George Lane, a wealthy banker. Inside, Melsa finds a diamond brooch and Mr. Lane’s dead body. As she runs for help, her cloak falls off with the brooch inside it. When the police arrive, the body, cloak, and brooch are gone. Melsa and her friends are notorious pranksters, so the detective, Lieutenant Mike Brent (Levene), does nothing to investigate the murder. Ames writes an editorial decrying Melsa’s “prank”, and she sues him for libel.

Melsa and her friends decide they must find the murderer in order to defend their reputation. The resulting manhunt includes searches of the Lane house, Belden’s apartment, Lane’s business office, and all of the local beauty shops; two attempts to intimidate Melsa; two shooting attempts on her life; a charity ball; and a trap set for the murderer using Melsa as bait. During this time, the women twice attack Ames and tie him up, Melsa’s friend Myra enthusiastically flirts with Ames, and their friend Pat eats incessantly

… During the film, the relationship between Melsa and Ames evolves from sharp animosity to love and marital engagement. Melsa appears to be hostile toward Ames during most of the film, while he almost immediately decides that he’s going to marry her and begins to woo her aggressively. She stabs him in the leg with a fork in retaliation for a treacherous trick he played on her, but they have a friendly chat early in the story, and a longer, more heart-to-heart conversation later. After the police rescue them from Norris, the film ends with Melsa and Ames planning their honeymoon.

Stabbing him in the leg with a fork is an especially nice detail.

On screwball comedy, from Wikipedia:

The screwball comedy is a principally American genre of comedy film that became popular during the Great Depression, originating in the early 1930s and thriving until the early 1940s. Many secondary characteristics of this genre are similar to the film noir, but it distinguishes itself for being characterized by a female that dominates the relationship with the male central character, whose masculinity is challenged. Other elements are fast-pace repartee, farcical situations, escapist themes, and plot lines involving courtship and marriage. Screwball comedies often depict social classes in conflict, as in It Happened One Night (1934) and My Man Godfrey (1936).

While we’re on the topic of Barbara Stanwyck, here’s a comment from Ann Burlingham on Facebook, with a Stanwyckian verbing:

Granted it’s a movie script, but watching Barbara Stanwyck in WITNESS TO MURDER, someone asks about her missing a meal, and she verbs away: “I’ll drugstore it on my way home.” First time I’ve ever heard the verb “to drugstore,” but of course it was immediately understandable and perfectly reasonable for 1954.

In 1954, when drugstores had lunch counters.

(Not a lot about language, but mostly about music, sexuality, and the display of men’s bodies.)

This is about the country musician Steve Grand, the cover musician Steve Starchild, and the underwear models Steve Chatham and Finn Diesel — who are all the same young man, now getting wild media attention through a music video. From Wikipedia:

Steve Grand [born 1990] is a country music performer from Lemont, Illinois. He was acclaimed as the first openly gay male country singer after the music video of his song “All-American Boy” went viral on YouTube in less than a week.

“All-American Boy” is a sweet song of unrequited love, between the gay singer and his straight best buddy. It’s notable for including a kiss between the men that passes without eliciting “gay panic”, either in the buddy or in most of the video’s many viewers. Grand is also a strong singer with an attractive voice (hence Starchild’s career as a cover singer) and a very attractive body as well (hence Grand’s career as an underwear model, under various names).

The video:

 (#1)

The lyrics:

Ripped jeans, only drinks whiskey
I find him by the fire while his girl was getting frisky, ohh
I say we go this road tonight

He smiles, his arms around her
But his eyes are holdin me, just a captive to his wonder, ohh
I say we go this road tonight

Now I know that that’s your girl, I mean no disrespect
The way that shirt hugs your chest boy, I just won’t forget
I’ll be sittin here, drinking my whiskey
I won’t say goodnight unless I think ya might miss me, ohh

Be my all-american boy tonight
Where everyday’s the 4th of july
And it’s alright, alright
And we can keep this up till the morning light
And you can hold me deep in your eyes
And it’s alright, alright
Be my, be my
My all-american boy

Ripped jeans, tight shirt
He lights a cigarette you know I’m glad that she can’t stand it, ohh
I drink the moonlight from his eyes

Now hold there, just a moment
I want to take this in now we don’t need no photo of it, no
We should go this road tonight

Now I know that that’s your girl, and I don’t give a damn
She’s been cussin and cryin, she don’t know what she has
So I’ll be sittin here, tryin hold down my whiskey,
You tell your girl good night cause somebody’d like to kiss me, ohh

Be my all-american boy tonight
Where everyday’s the 4th of july
And it’s alright, alright
And we can keep this up till the morning light
And you can hold me deep in your eyes
And it’s alright, alright
Be my, be my
My all-american boy

Of all the girls and boys to look my way
Ain’t no body ever hit me this way
So won’t you come back with me
And lay with me a while

I’m gonna wrestle you out of them clothes
Leave that beautiful body exposed
And you can have my heart and my soul and my body
Just be mine

Be my all-american boy tonight
Baby you light my fire
I’ll make you feel alright, alright!

And we can keep this up till the morning light
And you can hold me deep in your eyes
And it’s alright, alright
Be my, be my
Just, be my, be my
My all-american boy

[Linguistic notes: The song has features from informal English -- so-called "g-dropping", gonna for going to -- but otherwise has four fleeting features from non-standard vernacular: "double negation" in we don't need no photo; 3sg don't rather than doesn't in she don't know; the inversion with ain't in the negative existential ain't nobody ever hit me; and the demonstrative them in them clothes.  These features build up as the singer moves towards the climactic moments of the song, when his desire becomes most poignant and is expressed most openly.]

[Notes on poetic form: The first couplet rhymes perfectly (whiskey / frisky), but then the rhymes deviate from perfection (around her / wonder, disrespect / forget, whiskey / miss me), until eventually we can't be entirely sure that some lines were meant to rhyme at all (moment / photo of it ?).]

On to Steve Starchild. Here’s his strong cover of Lady Gaga’s “You and I”:

 (#2)

About the song:

“You and I” (stylized as “Yoü and I”) is a song by American recording artist Lady Gaga, taken from her second studio album, Born This Way (2011). Written by Gaga, “You and I” is a rock and roll-influenced song that samples Queen’s “We Will Rock You” (1977) and features electric guitar by Queen’s Brian May. (link)

And now to Grand’s modeling work. Four samples from Abs City, starting with a relatively routine shot (except for the facial expression) in Timoteo briefs (from DNA magazine):

(#3)

Then a cock tease shot, again in Timoteos (but just barely), again from DNA:

(#4)

Finally, two cock tease shots not involving briefs:

(#5)

(#6)

About DNA magazine:

DNA [subtitle: Made That Way] is an Australian monthly magazine targeted at the gay male audience. The magazine features stories, celebrity profiles, pop culture reviews, fashion tips/reviews, grooming tips and photography. The magazine is available at most newsagencies in Australia, as well as larger book stores. Launched in Australia in 2000, the magazine is now available in many countries, including Canada, the United States, New Zealand, United Kingdom and several other countries in Europe. (link)

The magazine explains its name:

Many people ask why a gay magazine is called DNA and if it has anything to do with Deoyxribose Nucleic Acid. Yes and no. Back in 2000, there was a lot of talk about the ‘gay gene’ in human DNA. We decided DNA was a great title for a gay magazine. It also gave us a chance to say that being gay has something to do with what’s in your jeans! (link)

Finally, the Timoteo line:

Timoteo Ocampo is an American designer based in Los Angeles, California. He studied at California State University, Los Angeles and received a Bachelor’s degree in Art with an option in Fashion Design.

… In addition to the fashion lines he carried, he produced his own contemporary men’s collection that carries his name, TIMOTEO. The collection consists of denim, dress shirts, fashion tees, and a variety of accessories. In 2006, swimwear was added to the TIMOTEO collection. The TIMOTEO line recognizes great fashion but also understands that style, fit, and comfort are the key to its success. (link)

The Timoteo line is deeply devoted to men’s bodies, especially their crotches. Here are three samples not involving Steve Grand: a male nude showing off a fashion accessory; a guy in (well, partly out of) a singlet from the Timoteo Sport collection (sporting a major moose knuckle); and a guy in a Timoteo rugby brief:

(#7)

(#8)

(#9)

(Hat tip to Thib Guichert-Callin for the lead from the Steve Grand of “All-American Boy” to all the other stuff.)

Today’s Bizarro, for Bastille Day (today):

Bring the revolution to school! As it happens, Doug Wyman wrote me a little while ago about a piece of revolutionary childlore, the rhyme:

(1)
No more pencils,
No more books,
No more teachers’/teacher’s/teachers dirty looks.

(This is a rhyming couplet, in trochaic tetrameter, written here with the first line split in two.) Doug wondered about variations in the rhyme. It looks like the couplet above is invariant (in pronunciation; there are orthographic variants given above), but there are numerous extensions to it around, and some of them are aggressive taunts against teachers and schools.)

The “no more pencils” couplet in (1) was incorporated into Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out (For Summer)”, a 1972 title track single released on Alice Cooper’s fifth album. In Cooper’s song, not only is school over for the summer, it’s over forever: the school has been blown up. (Explosives certainly trump occupying the school.)

Some aggressive continuations of (1):

(2)

…Throw the pencils in the well,
Tell the teachers go to hell.

…When the teacher rings the bell,
Drop your books and run like hell.

… When you hear the final bell,
Burn your books and run like hell.

…When the principal rings the bell,
Kick him down and run like hell.

…Kick the table(s), kick the chairs,
Kick the teachers down the stairs!

A suffering, but not aggressive, variant:

(3)
…Reading science and arithmetic
Nine months of that can make you sick.

Then there’s a set of continuations of the “no more” form:

(4)
… No more Latin, no more French,
No more sitting on a hard school bench!

… No more English, no more French,
No more sitting on the old school bench.

… No more school, no more stick
No more rotten arithmetic.

… No more math tests, no more school
No more class cause I’m no fool.
No more homework, no more lunch
No more class, I’d rather be a dunce
School is over, let the party begin
School is over, it’s the kids who now win

Finally, a variant in which the extra material precedes (1) rather than following it:

(5)
N more days and we’ll be free
From this place of misery
No more pencils, no more books
No more teacher’s dirty looks!

(where N is the number of days remaining in the school year).

As Iona and Peter Opie have observed, kidlore is capable of spreading fast, even in the absence of media attention, but it typically is varied in transmission. I’m not a folklorist and have no idea about the history of (1) before Alice Cooper recorded that version; there were probably variations from before 1970. (Unfortunately, people’s memories of what they said and did in childhood can be unreliable, since later experience often interferes with those memories.)

Talk Like a Pirate Day isn’t until September 19th, but George Takei posted this entertaining piratical moment (passed on to me by Victor Steinbok) recently, and I don’t want to wait two months to post it here:

That would be Alexander Pope (“To err is human; to forgive, divine”, from An Essay on Criticism) crossed with stereotypical pirate talk (“Arr, me hearties!”).

On piratical “Arr”, see my posting “Said the Pirate King, “Aaarrrf …” “, with links to earlier TLAPD postings by Mark Liberman; and this later posting “R!” (about a piratical t-shirt). One of Mark’s postings traces the spread of the stereotype to actor

Robert Newton [playing Long John Silver] in the 1950 movie version [of Treasure Island]. A short bio of Newton is here.

Mark then asked where Newton got it, and Geoff Nathan wrote:

many pirates (such as those of Penzance, for example–those who plough the sea) … originated in the Southwest of England, which is, of course, r-ful, and in fact has always seemed to me to be somewhat more hyperarticulatedly r-ry than American r-fulness.

The theory I originally heard was that Maritime Pidgin English (early nineteenth century version) was based on that area. Stereotypical pirate talk (including invariant ‘be’ for all copulas, for example) was a fossilized survivor of the Pidgin (‘That be the white whale, me hearty’).

Mark:

for what it’s worth, Robert Newton apparently hailed from Shaftesbury in Dorset [in SW England]. I think that “maritime pidgin English” was more of a 17th and 18th century development, but maybe its r-fulness was well established among buccaneers by the time that Stevenson wrote about.

[Addendum: I just realized that there are plenty of pirates in Asterix, but I don't know what they exclaim as the equivalent of "Arr!", in French or in the English translations. Anyone have some evidence?]

(Warning: Some plain talk about man-man sex.)

In a comment on my “Name notes” posting (on royal names, unisex names, and fashionable names), javava2012 wrote:

Then there’s that whole (surprisingly large) class of inappropriate names — so, most often, because of what their diminutives are. I’ve personally known two Candice (ne Candy) Kanes and one Mary Christmas. I’ve also known one Michael (NEVER Mike) Hunt. (The latter’s brother was nicknamed York.) (Their sister, fortunately for her, was named Lynette.)

Another category of notable names: names that are remarkable because they’re ambiguous, with an interpretation other than as a simple name — in particular, as a fixed expression of some kind (Mary Christmas, Candy Kane), or as risqué or even obscene phrase (Mike Hunt, York Hunt).

I’m suspicious of the brothers Mike and York Hunt; the ghits suggest an urban legend. But Mike Hunt I can vouch for; this is the name that Scottish pornstar Michael Hunt usually works under.

Some physical description of the man, plus two X-rated photos of him with Robin Fanteria, can be found on AZBlogX. Here’s a steamy, but non-X, shot of him:

Despite his vaginal nom de porn, Hunt seems to be a solid top (with a notably long and fat dick).

The AZBlog posting has shots of Hunt and Fanteria in the UK Naked Men video Strictly Cum (2010); from UKNM’s description:

It’s the UK version of Dancing with Stars, and UKNM [UK Naked Men] star Robin Fanteria ends up being trained by the studly Michael Hunt. Neither has danced with another man and it’s all a bit awkward at first, but they soon figure out how to relax the stiffness and release the tension so they can concentrate on the dancing. Their method’s unorthodox, quite messy, and wouldn’t be shown on tv, but here we have exclusive behind-the scenes footage. 30 minutes of sharing their fat, uncut cocks, muscled bodies & hairy arses and huge loads of cum from their heavy balls leaves them feeling much more relaxed and bonded.

(UKNM is given to parodic titles. Strictly Cum is a play on Strictly Ballroom. Then there’s Twelve Fucks and a Funeral.)

But back to remarkable names. Some of these are birth names (see John Train’s Remarkable Names of Real People (1977)), given by parents playfully or cluelessly or in an attempt to honor both sides of the baby’s heritage (which results in things like Ming-Toy Rabinowitz, or not so extremely, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky and Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky).

Other remarkable names are the result of joining family names in marriage, as when the marriage of Corky Sherwood to Will Forrest in the tv sitcom Murphy Brown resulted in Corky Sherwood Forrest.

There’s also a big world of names that are chosen. Authors of fiction choose their characters’ names, often intentionally choosing remarkable ones. Charles Dickens, famously so: Harold Skimpole, Mr. Sloppy, Mr. Wopsle, Polly Toodle, the Squeers family (including Wackford Squeers), and all the rest. And Joseph Heller in Catch-22: Milo Minderbinder, Lieutenant Scheisskopf, Captain Aardvark, General Dreedle, Captain Flume, Corporal Popinjay, and of course Major Major Major Major.

But names are also chosen for real people. As pseudonyms or pen names, for example. Or stage names (Benjamin “Benny” Kubelsky becomes Jack Benny, etc.). Or, more playfully, as drag names, DJ names, roller derby names, or stripper names (all treated briefly here). That brings me to porn names, which I’ve talked about on other occasions (notably, in a conference handout, “Name That Pornstar”).

Many pornstars choose (or have chosen for them) what I call “whitebread names”: Lee West, Dean Flynn, Jon King, Jeff Quinn, Mark Jennings, David Anthony, Eric Carter, Rick Conrad, Tom Steele, Chris Tyler, Ryan Fox, Brian Kidd — names that are so ordinary they are hard to distinguish and hard to remember, even if you like enjoy a particular man’s performances.

At the other end of the scale are names chosen to be memorable. For instance, playful rip-offs of familiar non-porn names: Mike Nichols, Jimmy Dean, Clark Kent, Thom Cruz, Tom Sawyer, even Dred Scott (folding the aggressive dread into the name), Girth Brooks (folding a sexual reference, to penis girth, into an allusion to Garth Brooks), and Rock Hardon (folding a sexual reference — rock hard — into an allusion to Rock Hudson). Finally, there are flat-out images of aggressiveness, masculinity, and sex, as in Rik Jammer, Brandon Bangs, Cody Cummings, Whack Simmons, and the amazingly named Australian pornstar Oz Dick.

In between these extremes, there are porn names that achieve (relative) memorability by using a unique (in the porn business) first name (FN) or last name (LN) or both or offering a mixed-nationality combination, as in the names Wagner Vittoria (German plus Italian) and Tiziano Fuentes (Italian plus Spanish/Latino) discussed here. As far as I can tell, Vittoria is a unique LN in gay porn (and is also a feminine FN in Italian, which is in itself remarkable), and Tiziano a unique FN there; there’s at least one other FN Wagner in gay porn (Wagner Touro), plus of course a whole lot of guys with LN Wagner (Paul as the most famous, but also Anthony, Kurt, Ryan, and more).

Getting back to Mike Hunt. There’s a choice, in porn as well as in real life, between full names (like Michael) and nicknames (like Mike). Roughly speaking, the choice is between a name of power (with gravitas, often connoting distance) and a name of solidarity (connoting closeness) — to adapt the terminology of Roger Brown and Albert Gilman in their famous (and influential) “Pronouns of Power and Solidarity” (1960).

Pornstar names lean heavily towards nicknames — Rick, Rich, Dick, Ricky, or Richie, rather than Richard; T(h)om or Tommy rather than Thomas, etc. — for obvious reasons. That takes Michael Hunt to Mike Hunt.

In “Sexual lexical semantics”, I took up (among other things) similes like Maggie fucks like a mink, attributing enthusiasm in intercourse to Maggie. And now a comment from Robert G with a simile that was new to me:

“I have to piss like a mink”. One of the old-man’s odd turns of phrase. Surely he was an odd phrase-maker, but I cannot see as this fits into the general drift re: intransitives.

I don’t see intransitivity as the point of interest here (most uses of piss are intransitive). Instead, it’s the choice of comparison animal that intrigues me; where does the mink come from?

Piss like a mink was new to me, and I get no ghit for it and its variants. The standard comparison animal for pissing is the horse: piss like a horse, piss like a racehorse / race horse (elaborating on the simile a bit), piss like a Russian racehorse (introducing alliteration, for fun), piss like a Russian racehorse at the Kentucky Derby (spinning the thing out still more). (All of these have variants with the euphemistic verb pee.) I don’t think there’s any rational basis for any of the elaborations past the simple horse — though people are of course happy to concoct stories that would make sense of them.

But horse makes sense. Horses are large animals, so they piss quite substantial volumes, and the display is particularly impressive for male horses. (There are, of course, quite a few YouTube videos of male horses pissing.)

But then mink. One way minks could get into things would be, in fact, from the conventional simile fuck like a mink, using minks as a stereotypical symbol of excessiveness. And then the indirect allusion to fucking that comes along with mink makes piss like a mink just a bit dirtier than piss like a horse (and it’s assonant as well).

(Warning: high sexual content.)

Continuing my series of postings on sexual practices and slang terms for them, I turn today to cum play of various kinds, in particular snowballing and gokkun (illustrated in #1 and #2, respectively, in this posting on AZBlogX). The first practice was familiar to me, though I didn’t know it had a slang name, other than the transparent name cum sharing; and the second I vaguely recalled having heard about, but under the transparent name cum drinking.

There are many forms of cum play, and they have special emotional power in the gay world, because of the symbolic value of cum to gay men. Cum feeding (with the fingers) and cum eating (by licking it off a dick or the surface of someone else’s body) are common practices, as of course is swallowing the cum of a partner at the climax of cocksucking. Coming on your partner’s face or in their open mouth (in a cum facial) was discussed, and illustrated, in an AZBlogX posting ”Scruff cum” on cum facials (and related forms of bukkake). And rubbing cum into the skin (your own or someone else’s), like a lotion, is also common. That brings us to more complex events. (Just about every kind of cum play you could imagine is depicted in a 4-disc (!) porn compilation by Treasure Island Media, Drunk on Come. Note: I use come for the ejaculatory verb and cum for the noun, but you can see that usage varies.)

On snowballing, from Wikipedia:

Snowballing or snowdropping is the human sexual practice in which one takes someone else’s semen into their mouth and then passes it to the mouth of the other (another), usually through kissing.

The term was originally used only by homosexuals. Researchers who surveyed over 1200 gay or bisexual men at New York LGBT community events in 2004 found that around 20% said they had engaged in snowballing at least once. In heterosexual couples, a woman who has performed fellatio may afterwards return the semen to her or to one of their partner’s mouth, mixed with saliva; the couple or other partners may then exchange the fluid several times, causing its volume to increase (hence “snowballing”). Many heterosexual men are uncomfortable with the practice. The practice is very visual, making it a popular activity in pornography and when more than two people are involved. Snowballing is commonly seen in bukkake films.

In popular culture: In Kevin Smith’s film Clerks, the character Willam Black is nicknamed “Snowball” because he enjoys the practice.

And on gokkun, again from Wikipedia

Gokkun … is a Japanese term for a sexual activity in which a person, not necessarily but usually a woman, consumes the semen of one or more men, usually from some kind of container. Commonly-used containers in this genre include cups, beakers, bowls, and wine or cocktail glasses. The vast majority of these scenarios involve the semen of multiple men. As the genre’s producers attempt to outdo one another, the number of men participating has exceeded 200 in recent Japanese films and 140 in recent American films. Less frequently, the scenes involve a large container of semen from a single male who has, over time, stored up a large volume for this purpose, generally by freezing it.

“Gokkun” can also refer to the sexual act of swallowing semen after performing fellatio or participating in a bukkake.

The word “gokkun” is an onomatopoeia, which translates into English as “gulp”, the sound made by swallowing.

Some other cum-related practices: the creampie (internal ejaculation, also known in a gay context as breeding or as seeding), felching, and (getting) sloppy seconds. On the creampie, see this posting, which also mentions felching briefly:

Breeding is sometimes followed by felching, which involves sucking the semen from the partner’s anus.

Finally, sloppy seconds. From Wiktionary:

(vulgar, plural only) The act of having sex with someone soon after a previous partner has had sex with them. [almost always used, so far as I know, only for fucking and only with respect to the fucker]

The expression has been around for quite some time; sloppy is in there from the days of unprotected sex.The connection with cum here is that the cum of the first man serves as a lubricant for the second man’s fucking.

(Sloppy seconds has been used in all sorts of language play, in particular to refer to second occurrences of something, usually sexual in character. There’s an extended use for a girl dating a guy who’s just been dumped by another girl. And the 2006 movie Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. And the Ramones-influenced Indianapolis punk band Sloppy Seconds. And the Tucker Max book Sloppy Seconds. And so on.)

An accumulation of miscellanea: portmanteaus, porn flick and pornstar names, (in the continuing Remarkable Underwear series) black lace skivvies, and (in the continuing News for Penises series), the smallest penis in Brooklyn.

Portmanteaus. From Victor Steinbok, malternative from the Beer Advocate site, grillebrate from Dietz & Watson ads.

Victor writes that the first refers to

non-beer products that either qualify as “malt beverages” or are similarly spiked to serve as beer substitutes (e.g., Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice)

Beer Advocate posting “Reinvasion of the Malternatives” (2/13/02) here.

That’s malt + alternative; grillebrate is grill + celebrate — celebrate (summer) by grilling franks and sausages from Dietz & Watson, purveyors of “Premium Meats and Artisan Cheeses”. One promotion here, with grillebration as well as grillebrate.

Naming in porn. Name that porn flick, name that pornstar.

Enthusiastic ad copy:

Lucas Entertainment’s latest import from Great Britain, “Bangers and Ass,” features one of the sexiest international casts yet!

Yes, Bangers and Ass (a play on the name of the British dish bangers and mash ‘mashed potatoes and sausages’), in which guys use their sausages to bang ass.

From scene 3, a cropped photo of Tony Rivera banging Paul Walker:

  (#1)

On the pornstar front, recent finds include a guy with the porn name Jack or Jake Manhole (yes, he’s a bottom). Then I’ve posted on AZBlogX — warning: nudity and man-man sex — about the nicely named Jason Adonis and Race Cooper (Cooper is black). I don’t know if Adonis has been paired with Dionisio Heiderscheid, who makes gay videos under the name Dionisio or (most often) D.O.

Black lace skivvies. From Undergear, an offering of the Extreme line of lace underwear for men. Viewable in “Hot in black lace” on AZBlogX here, along with a couple photos of underwear model James Guardino. Only one of these images skirts the X line, but I put them on my X blog because there’s not much of linguistic interest (though the ad copy is entertaining).

The smallest penis in Brooklyn. Well, the smallest one on a guy who was willing to enter a contest for the title. From Betsy Herrington, a story (by Victor Jeffries II, from today) about the event:

  (#2)

NSFW: The Delivery Man Has the Smallest Penis In Brooklyn

Saturday afternoon, King County Bar in Brooklyn hosted the first annual Smallest Penis in Brooklyn Pageant. Six contestants, only five of which made it to the final round (contestant number 6, a tourist from France, got debilitatingly inebriated with his wife and had to bow out), participated in 3 rounds of intense competition for the prized designation and $200.

… The contestants — Perry Winkle, Sugar Daddy, Rip van Dinkle, Quinette (our French friend), The Delivery Man, and Flo Rider — opened the competition with the evening wear round. Our humble competitors donned satin baby socks sewn to thongs, adorned with bow ties and buttons, and sauntered up and down the bar in front of a crowd of over 100 incredibly supportive audience members.

Round two, the talent round, brought out dance numbers, hand made farting sounds, and jokes. The third and final round featured swimwear—tulle sewn to a an elastic band.

There was confirmation by tape measure.

The story has lots of (not veery good) pictures. But it looks like the contestants, and especially the winner, were in the micropenis range. From Wikipedia:

Micropenis is an unusually small penis. A common criterion is a dorsal (measured on top) erect penile length of at least 2.5 standard deviations smaller than the mean human penis size, or smaller than about 7cm (3 inches) for an adult when compared to an average erection of 12.5cm (5 inches)… The term is most often used medically when the rest of the penis, scrotum, and perineum are without ambiguity… Micropenis occurs in about 0.6% of males.

Note that micropenis is used in the entry as the name of a condition (like cleft palate) and so lacks an article. The variant He has micropenis appears to be the most common usage on the net, but He has a micropenis occurs as well.

Claude and Griffy muse over identity and soft serve in today’s Zippy:

(#1)

According to my records, Zippy and soft serve came together last in December, when I wrote, here:

In ZippyPopLand, redemption can be found in soft serve. (In particular, New England Soft Serve … in Colchester CT)

The Wikipedia entry on soft serve begins by treating the stuff as a kind of ice cream, which is the way ordinary people think of it:

Soft serve is a type of ice cream that is softer than regular ice cream. Soft serve ice cream has been sold commercially since the late 1930s.

… in ordinary English, ice cream covers a variety of frozen confections — but in the United States, the label is regulated, so that, technically, soft serve is not ice cream.

The inventor of the stuff is disputed; Carvel (Tom Carvel, in Hartsdale NY) and Dairy Queen (J.F. McCullough and his son Alex, near Moline IL) have competing claims to the invention of soft serve. It happened in the 1930s, in any case.

Nice contrast between soft serve and hard-nose (as applied to Dick Cheney).

The cast of characters:

Dick Cheney: Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney (born January 30, 1941) is an American politician and businessman who was the 46th Vice President of the United States from 2001 to 2009, under President George W. Bush. (link)

Captain Queeg: Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, USN, is a fictional character in Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny. He is also a character in the identically titled 1954 film adaptation of the novel and in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, the Broadway theatre adaptation of the novel that opened in the same year as the film. (link)

Dondi: Dondi was a daily comic strip about a large-eyed war orphan of the same name. Created by Gus Edson and Irwin Hasen, it ran in more than 100 newspapers for three decades (September 25, 1955 to June 8, 1986).

… Dondi’s original backstory describes him as a five-year-old World War II orphan of Italian descent. The boy had no memory of his parents or his name, so when a pretty Red Cross worker said he was “a dandy boy,” he thought she was naming him “Dondi.” Two soldiers who spoke no Italian, Ted Wills and Whitey McGowan, found the child wandering through a war-torn village. The soldiers brought the child back to the United States and Ted eventually became his adoptive father. (link)

(#2)

Little Lulu, from Wikipedia: ”Little Lulu” is the nickname for Lulu Moppett, a comic strip character created in the mid-1930s by Marjorie Henderson Buell. The character debuted in The Saturday Evening Post on February 23, 1935 in a single panel, appearing as a flower girl at a wedding and strewing the aisle with banana peels. Little Lulu replaced Carl Anderson’s Henry, which had been picked up for distribution by King Features Syndicate. The Little Lulu panel continued to run weekly in The Saturday Evening Post until December 30, 1944.

… [main characters] “Little” Lulu Moppet: Lulu is the title character and is often the ringleader of the girls… Lulu is a kind and sincere little girl who, though prone to mischief, usually ends up saving the day.

(#3)

Thomas “Tubby” Tompkins: Tubby, whose real name is Thomas, is Lulu’s friend and the leader of the fellers. He has helped Lulu many times and has tormented her just as much.

(#4)

Irwin Tripp: Irving Rose Tripp (June 5, 1921 – November 27, 2009), was an American comic book artist, best known as the illustrator of Little Lulu comics. (link)

A bonus from the Zippy site: ”Zippy’s Comic Book Collection”:

30 little imaginary Zippy Comic covers, incuding horror, western, romance, funny animal and other titles. Parodies of Little Lulu, Plastic Man, Archie, Captain Marvel and more.

(#5)

Little Lulu is in the bottom row, the second full panel.

In the NYT on the 17th, an obituary “Marc Simont, Classic Children’s Book Illustrator, Dies at 97″ by Margalit Fox, beginning:

Marc Simont, an acclaimed illustrator whose work, embodying both airy lightness and crackling energy, graced some of the foremost titles in children’s literature, died on Saturday [July 13th] at his home in Cornwall, Conn.

On his art work:

Mr. Simont (pronounced sih-MONT) received the Caldecott Medal, considered the Pulitzer Prize of children’s book illustration, in 1957 for “A Tree Is Nice,” written by Janice May Udry and published in 1956.

His art for that book, a prose poem about the beauty of trees, is a distillation of his characteristic style: painterly, with rich, jewel-like colors; spare, without a wasted line, yet detailed enough to capture an entire world in microcosm; and imbued with a lacy delicacy that recalls the paintings of Raoul Dufy.

Over more than half a century, Mr. Simont illustrated nearly 100 books, his work paired with texts by some of the world’s best-known writers for young people, including Margaret Wise Brown, Karla Kuskin, Faith McNulty and Charlotte Zolotow.

With Ms. Kuskin, he collaborated on two picture books now considered classics: “The Philharmonic Gets Dressed” (1982), which depicts the minute preconcert preparations of the members of a symphony orchestra, and “The Dallas Titans Get Ready for Bed” (1986), which does likewise, postgame, for the members of a football team.

(#1)

From Wikipedia:

Marc Simont (November 23, 1915 – July 13, 2013) was a Paris-born American artist, political cartoonist, and illustrator of more than a hundred children’s books. Inspired by his father, Spanish painter Joseph Simont, he began drawing at an early age. Simont settled in New York City in 1935 after encouragement from his father, attended the New York National School of Design, and served three years in the military.

Simont’s first illustrated children’s book was published in 1939.

Along the way he illustrated several books by his friend James Thurber, notably Thurber’s The 13 Clocks:

The 13 Clocks is a fantasy tale written by James Thurber in 1950, while he was completing one of his other novels. It is written in a unique cadenced style, in which a mysterious prince must complete a seemingly impossible task to free a maiden from the clutches of an evil duke. It invokes many fairy tale motifs.

The story is noted for Thurber’s constant, complex wordplay, and his use of an almost continuous internal meter, with occasional hidden rhymes — akin to blank verse, but with no line breaks to advertise the structure.

… By the time he wrote this book, Thurber was blind, so he could not draw cartoons for the book, as he had done with The White Deer five years earlier. He enlisted his friend Marc Simont to illustrate the original edition. (Wikipedia link)

The cover of the original edition:

(#2)

This is one of my favorite books of all time. The beginning of the story:

The evil Duke of Coffin Castle lives with his good and beautiful niece, the princess Saralinda. A few days before Saralinda’s twenty-first birthday, Prince Zorn of Zorna arrives in the town disguised as a minstrel named Xingu. After meeting an enigmatic character known as the Golux, who declares his intention to help Zorn rescue the Princess, Zorn gets himself arrested and imprisoned.

The Duke gives suitors for Saralinda impossible tasks to perform, and when they fail, kills them and feeds them to a disgusting creature called the Todal (which looks like a blob of glup, makes a sound of rabbits screaming, and smells of old, unopened rooms — and gleeps while devouring a victim). Quotations from the Duke:

We all have flaws, and mine is being wicked.
I’ll slit him from his guggle to his zatch.

And from the Golux:

I make things up, you know.
I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good.
Never trust a spy you cannot see.

Zorn confronting the Duke:

(#3)

After The 13 Clocks came The Wonderful O, also illustrated by Simont:

The Wonderful O is the last of James Thurber’s five short-book fairy tales for children. Published in 1957 by Hamish Hamilton / Simon Schuster, it followed Many Moons (1943), The Great Quillow (1944), The White Deer (1945) and The 13 Clocks (1950).

As well as constant, complex wordplay, Thurber uses other literary devices such as frequent internal meter or rhythmic prose, near-poetry, puns, literary allusions (e.g to wandering minstrels) and thus creates a humorous satire involving loss, love and freedom. The Wonderful O uses a form of constrained writing or lipogram where the letter O is omitted at the demands of the villains.

From Mike Speriosu on Facebook, this entertaining image:

(#1)

Yes, pure bread poodle. A simple spelling error, based on the homophony of bred and bread and the much greater frequency of bread over bred; errors like bredstick for breadstick are very uncommon, but pure bread / pure-bread / purebread in an animal breeding context is surprisingly frequent.

A few examples, with all three punctuations illustrated:

He’s a pure bread Poodle ( Tea Cup ) He is my “Medical Service Dog “
I have M.S. and get seashers [seizures]. (link)

Anyway Muffy is a pure bread poodle, she’s Penelope’s little dog. (link)

We have an old pure-bread collie that’s really dear to us, but for the past month (maybe 2) she has been biting at her legs and tail raw (and bleeding). (link)

How can I tell if my Boxer is pure bread (link)

if my purebread dog gets stuck with a non purebread dog will this ruin the future to breed purebreads from the stuck one (link) [an astonishing number of people ask this questiom in one form or another]

Meanwhile, the pun in pure bread dog is out there to be used, and at least one cartoonist has snapped it up:

(#2)

I.B. Nelson is Bill Nelson, whose website says he does “Web Development, Graphics, Personal Journal, Cartoons”. The New Breed strip has various contributors; Nelson has drawn a number of other strips (The Darkside, The Nutthouse, Trev ’n’ Trav, etc.) on his own.