Today’s Calvin and Hobbes is a replay of a strip from 2/24/86:

I remember this strip (with its play on two senses of pro) with great fondness, and I was sure it had been posted (possibly by me) on Language Log or this blog, but an hour’s searching found nothing, so I’m posting it here.

On the prefix pro– of pronoun, from Michael Quinion’s affixes site:

Latin pro, forward, in front of, on behalf of, instead of, on account of.

In a few words it has the sense of something acting as a substitute or deputy: proconsul (Latin pro consule, (one acting) for the consul), a governor of a province in ancient Rome, having much of the authority of a consul; pro-vice-chancellor, an assistant or deputy vice-chancellor of a university; procaine, a synthetic compound used as a local anaesthetic, especially in dentistry, named because it was a substitute for cocaine.

In pronoun, the idea (which goes back to grammars of the Classical languages) is of a pronoun as “standing for” a noun and so allowing a speaker or writer to avoid repeating that noun — a notion that isn’t crazy, but is very far from an accurate or useful definition of pronoun in a great many ways.

A somewhat improved definition, from Dictionary.com:

any member of a small class of words found in many languages that are used as replacements or substitutes for [in other dictionaries: “are used instead of”, “stand for”] nouns and noun phrases [the addition of “and noun phrases” is relatively modern – in fact, the first cite for noun phrase in OED3 (Dec. 2003) is from 1884], and that have very general reference, as I, you, he, this, who, what.

NOAD2 now offers a definition that is very far from traditional grammar, notably because it’s cast in terms of reference:

a word that can function by itself as a noun phrase and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g., I, you) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g., she, it, this).

So much for the prefix pro- in pronoun. On to the informal clipping pro. From NOAD2:

noun   a professional, especially in sports: a tennis pro.

adjective [well, modifier]   (of a person or an event) professional: a pro golfer.

The noun has an extended use referring to someone who is highly competent or very talented in some activity: He’s a pro at rap / Instagram / fellatio / backhanded compliments / striking conversations up / etc. (all attested).

Then there’s another informal clipping, from prostitute. Usually used of women, but there are of course male prostitutes, occasionally called male pros, but not (so far as I can tell) just pros. (Conversely, female pro for a female prostitute is also very rare; it sounds redundant to many people.)

Today’s Zippy:

(#1)

From the annals of snowclones, commercial icons in contestation, commercial names, and advertising run amok.

Snowclones. In the title: “He put the eff in the tee”. Eff (for Freez) and Tee (for Tastee) were Tastee-Freez’s ad mascots back in the 1950s (more on this below).

Meanwhile, the title is an (erratic) instance of a well-known snowclone, Put the X in Y (put the fun in fundraising, put the ass in fantastic, etc.). Discussion in Language Log by Geoff Pullum on 1/25/04, by Mark Liberman on 3/19/04.

Commercial icons in contestation. The grotesque Tee (never a widespread icon) above sees himself in opposition to (the much more widespread) Bob’s Big Boy (discussion of him on this blog on 10/12/12). Soft serve vs. burgers, with the burgers winning. Tee thinks Big Boy is out to destroy him.

Some backstory. From Wikipedia (warning: the article uses the verb immortalize in a non-standard extended sense):

Tastee-Freez is a soft serve ice cream frozen dessert product served at 350 locations at Wienerschnitzel and Original Hamburger fast food chains and also franchised chain of 50 fast-food restaurants. Its corporate headquarters is based in Newport Beach, California and has stores in 22 of the United States, with most of its freestanding stores located in Virginia, Illinois and Maryland. The first Tastee-Freez was established in … Illinois [in 1950].

… Tastee-Freez was immortalized by John Mellencamp (then performing as “John Cougar”) in his song, Jack & Diane, from the 1982 album American Fool. “Suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freez; Diane’s sittin’ on Jacky’s lap, he’s got his hands between her knees.”

Tastee Freez was also immortalized by Cheech And Chong in their skit Waiting for Dave, from their 1971 first self-titled album. Head on straight north to you come to the Tastee Freez; make a right and go 97 miles straight…

S. E. Hinton immortalized Tastee Freez in her classic novel The Outsiders, chapter 7. Ponyboy and Two-Bit stop at one on their way to the hospital to visit Johnny and Dally. “We stopped at the Tastee Freez to buy Cokes and rest up, and the blue Mustang that had been trailing us for eight blocks pulled in.” It is portrayed in scene 20 of the movie The Outsiders directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Tastee-Freezes come in many forms, from basic burger-shack buildings up to what are clearly repurposed Howard Johnson’s restaurants. Somewhere in the middle, this place in Perris CA:

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Commercial names: avoiding ice cream. Ordinary people think of soft-serve / soft serve as just a kind of ice cream: soft-serve ice cream, if you need to be specific. The companies that make the stuff are mostly much more cautious about naming their product, because of legal restrictions (in various jurisdictions) as to what can be labeled ice cream (it’s a dairy industry thing): not enough milk-fat (less fat, more air).

So the names of the firms and their products generally avoid ice cream, though dairy is ok, and of course freez(e) and the truncated soft serve. The first two firms: Carvel and Dairy Queen. Then, in no particular order: Dole Soft Serve, Chloe’s Soft Serve Fruit, Tastee-Freez, Foster’s Freeze.

It seems that soft-serve ice cream is incredibly popular in Singapore, to the extent that there is actually a posting (of 2/19/15) on The Smart Local, Singapore site with “12 Best Soft Serve Ice Creams in Singapore”. The names:

Sunday Folks, Tsujiri Tea House (green tea soft serve!), Milkcow, IKEA (yes, the Swedish emporium), Mr Bean, McDonald’s (yes, the American fast-food place), Come-in Hokkaido, Oyogei Taiyaki, Godiva (scandalously rich), Saint Marc Cafe, Danmi Soft, Honeycomb

Advertising run amok. On the Roadside America site, on the “Tastee-Freez Twins”:

This mystery started with a photograph that had bumped around in roadsideamerica.com’s “miscellaneous scans” folder since 1996. Mike snapped it on a cross-country trip, but we had trouble placing exactly where.

We called him the Goon in a Top Hat. He was obviously naked, sans genitals, though quite pleased with himself. The gagging tongue and bulbous eyes only added to the disturbing Goon- style hospitality. His hat might be made from an old oil drum, but it was hard to tell.

In 2002, Smiler Dean Jeffrey sent us his own record of the Goon, washed out after six more years of weather and wear… “Looks like it’s about four feet tall and was probably some kind of advertising at some point. It’s at Donnie’s Corvette Specialists on Route 301 in Kenly, NC.”

(#3)

Dean stumbled onto another goon in Raleigh December 2004: “I was out taking a walk, right in my own neighborhood, when I saw another one of those statues, in a neighbor’s backyard. The nice folks who live there told me they had gotten him at a Tastee-Freez in the ’60s — he rode home in the back seat of their brand new 1965 Mustang convertible.”

(#4)

“I did a little poking around online and found out that in the ’50s, Tastee-Freez had a couple of mascots called Tee and Eff. They were naked and had globs of ice cream topping on their heads (strawberry for Tee, the female, and chocolate for Eff, the male.) In 1957, they were featured in six issues of a Tastee-Freez comic book, similar to the Big Boy comics put out by Shoney’s. They also appeared in ads and on napkins, cups, and other packaging.

“I think the one down in Kenly is Tee, and the one here in Raleigh is Eff (although he’s obviously been repainted a few times, even having clothes painted on him at some point.).”

Tee and Eff were also marketed as a pair of salt and pepper shakers (both looking chocolatey and female:

(#5)

Ah, then, the comic books. Here’s one:

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Among the other comic books were Caspar the Ghost, Rags Rabbit, Sad Sack, Little Dot, and Mazie, some essentially unknown these days.

[Added the next day, the next Zippy, with more Tastee-Freez elf:

(#7)

The Goon in the Top Hat, with a political connection.]

On the Comics Kingdom blog on Tuesday, for National Escargot Day (May 24th), ten cartoons on snails, all of them new to this blog. Some turn on the snail cartoon meme (having to do with slowness), many have to do with the slowness of postal services (snail mail, in the rhyming retronym), the rest deal with other gastropodal matters.

One by one, with the Comics Kingdom notes:

1. Mooch is worried about his pet – Mutts (by Patrick McDonnell) 5/19/16

(#1)

#1 and #10 are clear examples of the slow-snail meme.

2. The restaurant biz has its own set of priorities – Tino’s Grove (by Rina Piccolo) 9/21/09

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3. When it comes to a wager, it’s all in the name for Sherman – Sherman’s Lagoon (by Jim Toomey) 1/14/13

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4. Oscar’s horticultural efforts have unintended consequences – Arctic Circle 12/30/11

(#4)

5. Ah, to settle in for a nice, quiet weekend – Rhymes With Orange 2/5/15

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6. Peer pressure can be overwhelming to a youngster – Six Chix (by Isabella Bannerman) 4/6/15

(#6)

Note: slide, rather than jump. Snails don’t jump.

7. This guy is really retro when it comes to communicating – Bizarro 5/20/16

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8. Could “letters from Grandma” be a thing of the past? – Baby Blues (by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott) 7/5/14

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9. Curtis thinks technology has made him slick, but his dad has got his number – Curtis (by Ray Billingsley) 1/30/12

(#9)

The clipping ‘za for pizza is in fact well attested back to the 1980s. Iit seems to be roughly contemporaneous with ‘rents for parents, the two clippings sharing the unusual property of preserving an unaccented syllable from the original.

10. Mooch decides his pet needs its freedom – Mutts 5/21/16

(#10)

xx

It’s Pride month, time for rainbow everything (as symbols of solidarity and resistance to oppression) and also time for defiant celebrations of same-sex desire, same-sex sexual acts, and social and personal motss-identification. All especially important in the face of explicit attempts to exterminate our community, like the monstrous wickedness in Orlando the night before last. As usual, I’ve sequestered the images of sexual body parts on AZBlogX (“The dick days of summer”, here, with three stirring photos for gay men), but I won’t be shy about talking about men’s bodies and the excellent sexual practice of masturbation, so this isn’t for kids or the sexually modest.

The dual flag. Start with the easy stuff: this dual-purpose flag (it’s two, two, two flags in one!) and a slogan to go with it (a slogan open to quite a range of interpretations):

On the left, it’s an American flag; on the right, it’s a rainbow flag. So who is the we in our story? Americans? lgbt people? the union of these two sets? their intersection?

And then — I hate to have to say this — what does is mean in the slogan? Is it a descriptive is, asserting that hate is not, has not been, our story? Or is it a normative is, making a claim about what our story should be?

Assuming for the moment that the we is the lgbt community, is our story the one we tell, as actors in the world? Or is it the story we experience, have thrust upon us (in which case, hate is certainly our story)?

Bator days. On to another rainbow item: Rainbow Dick (#3 in the “dick days” posting), an erect penis illuminated for the viewers’ delight, by what I take to be prismatic light.

The other two photos in the “dick days” posting are a tiny sampling of a avalanche of photos and video clips on the Tumblr site “hairyb8r’s bate fuel”, devoted to hairy men masturbating.

[A linguistic note: the site regularly uses the clippings bate (or b8)  for masturbate and bator (or b8r) for masturbator. I don’t think I’ve noted these on this site before (and they’re very hard to search for). On-line slang sites, including Urban Dictionary, generally have both, but the big slang dictionaries (Lighter’s HDAS and Green’s Dictionary) seem to have neither — suggesting that the clippings are either relatively recent or not very widespread (or both). (There are also some on-line uses of bation for masturbation.)

The full versions are formal or clinical in style / register, while the clipped versions are slang, so of course speakers see a connotative distinction between them — usually expressed by saying that the clipped versions refer to acts performed for pleasure, or very frequently or compulsively (even “obsessively” or “addictively”). The first way of talking shows  a generally positive evaluation of masturbation, the second betrays the widespread devaluing of the act.]

hairyb8r says of himself, “Being a compulsive bator with a fetish for hairy guys, I post the types of things that get me off.” So he collects phallophili(a)c photos and videos showing hairy men jacking off, or getting ready to do so: what part of this indicates a compulsion and a fetish? (compulsion in NOAD2: ‘an irresistible urge to behave in a certain way, especially against one’s conscious wishes’; fetish in NOAD2: ‘a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body, etc.’). Why are all of these things — delight in cocks, especially hard ones; a preference for hairy men; pleasure in watching men jacking off; jacking off oneself — not simply enthusiasms (requiring no apology, and in the case of jacking off, deserving of encouragement and celebration)? Why should b8rs be treated differently from foodies, avid sports fans, or opera queens?

In any case, some of b8r’s material is artful (#1 in “dick days”), but a lot of it is routine means to an end (#2 there is a borderline case, though I like it, both aesthetically and viscerally). But then some religious music is great art, though a lot of it is routine, and some of it is downright embarrassing (soppy-sentimental and awkward), but it gets the job — praising God, inspiring devotion — done, at least for people who are inclined that way. So with porn (hairyb8r’s stuff is certainly a species of gay porn).

This would be a good time to celebrate jacking off and whatever helps you to shoot your load. In your face, haters and destroyers!

Not quite what you think. Two cartoons: a Mother Goose and Grimm from yesterday, today’s Bizarro:

(#1)

(#2)

To appreciate #1, you need to know about the custom of putting out a cat for the night (V + Prt put out ‘put sth. outside (a house)’), and you need to recognize the piece of heavy earth-moving equipment in the room, with brand names Caterpilllar and (clipped) Cat.

To appreciate #2, you need to know that Zeus / Jupiter is the mythological hurler of thunderbolts, and you need to recognize Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat (with one of his accompanying Things) and to see that the figure in the cartoon is a hybrid of Zeus and Dr. Seuss’s Cat, a combination conveyed by the portmanteau name Dr. Zeuss.

Heavy machinery. An ad for Cats:

(#3)

From Wikipedia, including the company’s own naming story:

Caterpillar Inc., is an American corporation which designs, manufactures, markets and sells machinery, engines, financial products and insurance to customers via a worldwide dealer network.Caterpillar is the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives.

… Caterpillar machinery is recognizable by its trademark “Caterpillar Yellow” livery and the “CAT” logo.

… On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1904, [Benjamin Holt] successfully tested [an] updated machine plowing the soggy delta land of Roberts Island [near Stockton CA].

Company photographer Charles Clements was reported to have observed that the tractor crawled like a caterpillar, and Holt seized on the metaphor. “Caterpillar it is. That’s the name for it!” Some sources, though, attribute this name to British soldiers in July 1907.

(In either case, the name seems to have been metaphorical.)

The hurler of thunderbolts. Hurling thunderbolts is one of the prime attributes of the Father of the Gods, as in these two statues, of Zeus Keraunos (keraunos ‘thunderbolt, lightning’) and of Jupiter of Smyrna:

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(#5)

The Cat in the Hat. Then there’s Dr. Seuss’s creation, discussed (and illustrated) in a posting of 10/17/13. From the book:

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

(#6)

In #2, we see Thing 2 riding Zeuss’s thunderbolt.

(Underwear and raunchy innuendo, with a jock harness bonus, and some language stuff, but, yes, men’s bodies, so not to everyone’s tastes.)

The latest Daily Jocks offering, with my caption:

(#1)

Lukas and the Back Alley Boys
Return this week for a
Short engagement,
Featuring old favorites
— “Butt Up, Baby”, and
Fresh stuff
— “Pullin’ My Pants Down For You”,
Soon to be released on their
Ballsy new album
Silly Love Songs

(Lukas sport shorts from Helsinki Athletica.)

Apologies to Paul McCartney, whose 1976 song “Silly Love Songs” actually was about silly love songs. And of course to the Backstreet Boys for the play on back alley  (from Green’s Dictionary of Slang: alley ‘vagina’, 1st cite in 1842, then, inevitably, alley ‘anus’, 1st cite in 1934, a usage often played on in a gay context, as in the San Francisco leather street fair Up Your Alley).

Bonus material, with fortuitous finds, discoveries from checking the Daily Jocks site. Which led me to this:

Cellblock13’s new X Wing Jockstrap is one of the sexiest jock we’ve had. This specific jock/pouch can only be worn with a harness. For a complete gear look, wear it with the “X Wing” Neoprene Harness [sold separately].

Two parts: the jock, which won’t work on its own, because it has only the butt band, with no waistband to hold it up; and the harness, a cross harness (or X harness). Front view of the jock-harness combo, in red:

(#2)

Focused on the jock. Moving up the body:

(#3)

And then the side view, which shows you how it all fits together:

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(Not really the point here, but this strikes me as a satisfyingly homoerotic shot.)

The jock harness doesn’t come cheap: $34 for the jock, $62 for the harness. A big outlay to show off your bulge, your big pecs, and your hot butt.

At this point, realizing that Jock is a reasonably common personal name (a Scottish name, diminutive of John, like English Jack) and that Harness is an attested surname, there might well be guys named Jock Harness.

And so there might, but my search for them was overwhelmed by pieces of apparel called jock harnesses, all of them combining something like a jock with some kind of harness. None, as far as I can tell, as fine as Cellblock13’s model.

Also thrown up in my searching: links to things labeled as vegan jock harnesses. You might well want to mouthe a jockstrap, but eat one?

Well, it turns out that vegan here is short for vegan leather (truncation is everywhere): leather not involving animal products, that is, artificial leather. From Wikipedia:

Alternative leather (bicast leather) is a fabric or finish intended to substitute for leather in fields such as upholstery, clothing, footwear and fabrics, and other uses where a leather-like finish is required but the actual material is cost-prohibitive, unsuitable, or unusable for ethical reasons.

… Artificial leather is marketed under many names, including “leatherette”, “faux leather”, “vegan leather”, “PU [polyurethane] leather” and “pleather”.

And of course, the branded Naugahyde (“Tell me, Eric, just how many innocent naugas had to be sacrificed to make you those sexy chaps, jockstrap, and big bulldog harness?”).

In my blogging backlog, two underwear images from Daily Jocks, from the Echt Apparel company (of Australia):

(#1)

The Lowe [‘Lion’] Stringer

(#2)

The Equip Stringer

The linguistic path here starts with tank top, for a type of sleeveless t-shirt. From that, by truncation, tank ‘tank top’.

Then a particular type of tank, one with thin (sometimes string-like) shoulder straps (and, usually, a deeply scooped front): the stringer tank. From that, by truncation, stringer ‘stringer tank, stringer tank top’.

So: the stringers in #1 and #2.

Stringers are especially associated with bodybuilders. The two guys above are well bulked up, but the next two are out in the further regions of muscular development:

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At the other end of the scale, we have a nicely muscled but slender young man in slim stringers (from the New Arrival company):

(#4)

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

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

On the title of this posting. From Wikipedia:

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

You can watch the video here.

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

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

(#1)

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

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

That would be Berkeley City College. From Wikipedia:

(#2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Cold Steel company:

(#3)

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

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

And then the doll. From the company site:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two more, with /s h/.

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

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

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

(Thanks to a cascade of medical conditions that began at the beginning of this month and has consumed much of my time, I’m still working my way through Christmas-oriented postings. Better late, as they say. [And yes, the back-truncation better late is in my files.])

The classic vehicle for carrying Christmas ornaments is the Christmas tree, an up-standing object. But suspended vehicles are also possible: hanging baskets, for instance, or this festive arrangement in Virginia Transue’s dining room that takes advantage of a chandelier:

(#1) Virginia’s 2018 smilax chandelier, with ornaments

(Virginia and her family appear on this blog every so often. She’s my sister-in-law — well, technically, my step-sister-in-law, since she’s my man Jacques’s brother’s widow, but that degree of technicality strikes me as just silly.)

Most of this posting will be taken up with the plant Virginia refers to as smilax here (“also called ironroot, a staple of the woods and copses of my agrarian childhood”, she says), which provides the handsome and durable greenery for her suspended Christmas.

Digression on other suspended Christmases. The hanging basket, as in this evergreen composition from Flowerland:

(#2)

This kissing ball, on offer at Macy’s from the National Tree Company:

(#3) “The Crestwood Spruce Kissing Ball features branch tips mixed with bristle and is trimmed with red berries, pine cones and glitter. It is pre-strung with 35 battery-operated warm white LED lights that are energy-efficient and long lasting. 6 hours ON/18 hours OFF timed operation. Hang this holiday decoration in indoor or covered outdoor locations.

And then there’s the suspended Christmas we had for some years in the Columbus OH house: ornamental fishnets (in bright colors) stretched out just under the ceiling (and anchored at various points), with Christmas ornaments hanging down from them. The effect was that you were inside a Christmas tree.  Wonderful.

(I was hoping that somewhere in the boxes full of photographs there would be at least a few showing the nets, but apparently not. I’ve never been any good at taking photographs, so I long ago gave up trying; Jacques took a great many, but pretty much confined himself to shots of people and plants.)

A red herring. Well, there’s smilax and then there’s smilax. From NOAD:

noun smilax: 1 a widely distributed climbing shrub with hooks and tendrils. Several South American species yield sarsaparilla from their roots, and some are cultivated as ornamentals. Genus Smilax, family Liliaceae [the genus is now treated as belonging to a separate family, the Smilacaceae; see below]. [This is the smilax I’m talking about.] 2 a climbing asparagus, the decorative foliage of which is used by florists [sometimes called florist’s smilax]. Asparagus (or Myrsiphyllum) asparagoides, family Liliaceae [the genus is now treated as a belonging to a separate family, the Asparagaceae]. ORIGIN late 16th century: via Latin from Greek, literally ‘bindweed’.

(#4) Asparagus asparagoides

Called smilax because its leaves resemble those of Smilax species. More detail from Wikipedia:

Asparagus asparagoides, commonly known as bridal creeper, bridal-veil creeper, gnarboola, smilax or smilax asparagus, is a herbaceous climbing plant of the family Asparagaceae native to eastern and southern Africa. Sometimes grown as an ornamental plant, it has become a serious environmental weed in Australia and New Zealand.

… Asparagus asparagoides, often under the name smilax, is commonly used in floral arrangements or home decorating.

Virginia’s smilax. Mail from her on 12/23/18:

It grows from a tuber [Here Virginia supplied a photo of a wheebarrowful she dug up (very hard work indeed):]

(#5)

and will live FOREVER, slowly strangling trees and shrubbery it embraces. It comes out of the ground a woody stalk,  that from an old tuber can be up to 1/2 an inch in diameter. It WANTS to go straight up, ‘laddering’ up on a privet or other bush, and keeps climbing. Its goal is to get way up high in a tree. It goes for hardwoods. The top ends of it are like heavy threads, so winds blow it. Aggressive and effective tendrils enable it to catch onto a limb on its selected hardwood, and then up it goes. Once secure up there, it adds more and more ‘limbs’ of those glossy leaves, and you get a pretty cluster. The gatherer has as  much work to get it down as IT put out out to get UP THERE. The tendrils have thickened and have locked it on. One just climbs the tree if at all possible. But its brilliance is in the malleability of the vine itself. It just … drapes,  achieving those lovely lines all by itself. It will look like you hired the fanciest florist in town and paid him a fortune to do up your house. When all you did was lay a vine over a mirror or doorway. I grew up with Christmases decorated with this, and loved it from day 1. All of this is from my yard. So, for me the vine is sort of magical as well as beautiful.
However, turn your back on it and you will eventually have a woven mat, an impenetrable snarl.

I immediately identified the plant as catbrier, a (minor-league) pest vine familiar to me in Pennsylvania and Ohio, but Virginia assured me that her ironroot was somethng different, and that there were lots of different kinds of smilax vines, with different folk names, often hard to distinguish. True, all true.

On the genus Smilax, from Wikipedia:

Smilax is a genus of about 300–350 species, found in the tropics and subtropics worldwide. In China for example about 80 are found (39 of which are endemic), while there are 20 in North America north of Mexico. They are climbing flowering plants, many of which are woody and/or thorny, in the monocotyledon family Smilacaceae, native throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Common names include catbriers, greenbriers, prickly-ivys and smilaxes.

… Greenbriers get their scientific name from the Greek myth of Crocus and the nymph Smilax. Though this myth has numerous forms, it always centers around the unfulfilled and tragic love of a mortal man who is turned into a flower, and a woodland nymph who is transformed into a brambly vine.

… On their own, Smilax plants will grow as shrubs, forming dense impenetrable thickets. They will also grow over trees and other plants up to 10 m high, their hooked thorns allowing them to hang onto and scramble over branches.

… The common floral decoration smilax is Asparagus asparagoides.

Note on the family, from Wikipedia:

Smilacaceae, the greenbrier family, is a family of flowering plants. Up to some decades ago the genera now included in family Smilacaceae were often assigned to a more broadly defined family Liliaceae, but for the past twenty to thirty years most botanists have accepted Smilacaceae as a distinct family [now #91 in my running index of plant families]. It is considered that the two families diverged around 55 millions years ago during the Early Paleogene possibly near the boundary between Paleocene and Eocene.

Back to the genus, and notable species within it. From the Southern Living site on Smilax spp.:

Native to the Americas, this is a large group of tough, moderately fast-growing, evergreen to deciduous vines that grow from rhizomes or large tubers. Some species are valuable ornamentals, others flat-out weeds; some are viciously thorny, others nearly thornless. All climb by tendrils. Greenish or yellowish flowers in spring or early summer are small and insignificant, but the berries that follow are often showy and are relished by birds. Because many species look similar, this is a difficult group to sort out; the common names can be as tangled as the vines.

Saw Greenbrier, Catbrier, Bullbrier:  Smilax bona-nox

Cat Greenbrier, Sawbrier: Smilax glauca

Dwarf Smilax, Wild Sarsaparilla: Smilax pumila

Common Greenbrier, Horse Brier: Smilax rotundifolia (grows from a huge tuber)

Jackson Vine, Lanceleaf Greenbrier [or Southern Smilax]: Smilax smallii (enormous tubers). The most important ornamental species, this old favorite, named for Stonewall Jackson, is prized for its glossy, deep green foliage; leaves and stems are popular for holiday decorations, as they retain their color long after cutting.

Coral Greenbrier: Smilax walteri

The catbrier of my PA/OH days was pretty clearly S. rotundifolia. From Wikipedia:

(#6)

Smilax rotundifolia, known as roundleaf greenbrier and common greenbrier, is a woody vine [deciduous or semi-evergreen] native to the eastern and south-central United States and to eastern Canada. It is a common and conspicuous part of the natural forest ecosystems in much of its native range. The leaves are glossy green, petioled, alternate, and circular to heart-shaped. They are generally 5–13 cm long. Common greenbrier climbs other plants using green tendrils growing out of the petioles.

The stems are round and green and have sharp spines. The flowers are greenish, and are produced from April to August. The fruit is a bluish black berry that ripens in September.

… The woody vine can grow up to 20 feet long and climb various objects and vegetation around it using tendrils. If there is nothing for it to cling onto it will grow across the ground. It has woody stems that are pale green in color and glabrous with four sides …. Along the stem there are prickles that are about 1/3-inch-long.

The roots are big knobby rhizomes that are very hard to pull put of the ground. They easily regenerate new vines when the vines are cut, destroyed by fire, or treated with weed killers.

Note: S. rotundifolia has a fairly wide geographical range. It’s generally deciduous, and it’s prickly as hell.

Now, S. smallii, the smilax of the South:

(#6) A mass of S. Smalli foliage hanging from a tree, a host for this native vine

Its distribution: the coastal plain from southern VA to FL, west to eastern TX. It’s evergreen. And everyone describes it as thornless.

My tentative conclusion from this is that what Virginia has is a hybrid of rotundifolia and smallii, mostly smallii: the glossy leaves, rampant growth habit, and big roots of both species — but evergreen, darker-leaved, and over-the-top invasive like smallii, with the vicious thorns of rotundifolia. Yikes. But very pretty in holiday decorations.

… Before Swine(s), with language play. From 10/6/18, exploiting the ambiguity of /flu/ as flew or flu ‘influenza’; and two testicular cartoons, from 11/1/18 (nut sack) and (yesterday) 2/5/19 (go nads).

The cartoons:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

Pastis goes in for elaborate puns, sometimes involving long and complex set-ups (#3 is only of middling complexity here). He’s also fond of meta-cartoons, in which the characters are aware that they are in fact in a cartoon;  the cartoonist and others from outside the cartoon world (like the censor in #2 and #3) put in appearances; and characters from other cartoons occasionally intrude.

Greta Goose. Says “Flu shot”, but Pig hears telegraphic “Flew. Shot”. Confusion ensues.

Testicular vocbulary. On the relevant vocabulary, from my 9/8/15 posting “Go for the nuts!”

Apparently, Google counts nuts and balls as equivalents.

Well, as slang synonyms for testicles, they pretty much are, though in secondary uses they diverge…

Slang for testicles. People are tremendously inventive in coining expressions for the testicles (as for the penis, the breasts, etc.), but the collection of testicular slang expressions that are widely known and used isn’t very large. For modern English, nuts and balls — both metaphorical — lead the pack; they are, in effect, “standard slang”, the everyday words for this purpose. But other words referring to spherical or ovoid objects of roughly the right size will serve as the basis for a metaphor, and stones and rocks are reasonably common in this use (and also in extended uses, as in have stones, have the stones (to) VP, parallel to have balls, have the balls (to) VP ‘have courage, guts’; and in get one’s rocks off ‘ejaculate’).

… One more metaphor, the euphemistic family jewels. And a specialization of an anatomical term for ordinary-language purposes:

gonads  an organ that produces gametes; a testis or ovary. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from modern Latin gonades, plural of gonas, from Greek gonē ‘generation, seed.’ (NOAD2)

What’s remarkable here is that gonads is now taken to be vulgar slang, perhaps less so in its American clipped version nads.

And some later nutsac playfulness, in my 3/10/16 posting “The news for testicles”, about the NutSac company, which makes man-bags.

The testicular cartoons. #2 plays on a subtle ambiguity of /sæk/, distinguished only in spelling: as a bag in general, or as a more specialized kind of bag, both from the same historical source. From NOAD:

noun sack: 1 a large bag made of a strong material such as burlap, thick paper, or plastic, used for storing and carrying goods… ORIGIN Old English sacc, from Latin saccus ‘sack, sackcloth’, from Greek sakkos, of Semitic origin.

noun sac: [a] a hollow, flexible structure resembling a bag or pouch: a fountain pen with an ink sac. [b] a cavity enclosed by a membrane within a living organism, containing air, liquid, or solid structures. ORIGIN mid 18th century (as a term in biology): from French sac or Latin saccus ‘sack, bag’.

#3 manages to get from clipped nads back to full gonads, by combining the clipping with imperative go in the sports cheer Go TEAM-NAME! (though gonads has primary accent on its first syllable, while Go Nads! has primary accent on the second).

A few days ago, this full-page magazine display made the rounds of Facebook:

(#1) Deriding the “Libtard Agenda” while imitating the Johnson Smith Co.’s ads for novelty items in the back pages of comic books and other publications aimed at children

The first copies I saw didn’t identify the creator or the publication the page came from, and there was some question whether it was (as George V. Reilly, invoking Poe’s Law, put it) “a right-wing parody of progressive views, or a left-wing parody of right-wing opinions of progressive views”. Parody, certainly, but from what viewpoint?

So in its form it’s a parody of a genre of advertising hucksterism. And then in its specific content it’s a parody of a style of political talk (either mocking what’s framed as a preoccuption with kale, gun control, facts, and the like, or mocking those who engage in such mockery).

Much has now become clear. To start with, the copy of the page in #1 identifies the creator as Mary Trainor, and that provides enough context to eventually sort things out.

Background 1. Johnson Smith and its kin.From Wikipedia:

(#2) A Johnson Smith ad from 1980

The Johnson Smith Company (Johnson Smith & Co.) is a mail-order company established in 1914 by Alfred Johnson Smith in Chicago, Illinois, USA that sells novelty and gag gift items such as x-ray goggles, whoopee cushions, fake vomit, and joy buzzers. The company moved from Chicago to Racine, Wisconsin in 1926, to Detroit in the 1930s, and from the Detroit area to Bradenton, Florida in 1986.

The company would put ads in magazines devoted to children and young adults such as Boys’ Life, Popular Mechanics and Science Digest. Their ads appeared on the back cover of many historically significant comic books, including Action Comics #1, June 1938 (first appearance of the character Superman) and Detective Comics #27, May 1939 (first appearance of character Batman).

In 1970, humorist Jean Shepherd wrote the introduction for the reprint of The 1929 Johnson Smith & Co. Catalogue.

Johnson Smith is just the biggest of these back-of-the-magazine companies. Other, smaller companies offer(ed) more specialized fare. For example, there are the sea-monkeys, the wonderful sea-monkeys. See my 4/22/16 posting “Joe Orlando: a cartoonist and his sea-monkeys” — with this 1960s ad for them:

(#3)

Background 2. On libtard and contempt for libtards.

noun libtard: US informal, offensive a person with left-wing political views. ORIGIN early 21st century: blend of liberal and retard. [In fact, some time ago, the –tard of retard took on a life of its own as a formative in word formation, and it’s now a textbook example of a libfix. See my 1/23/10 posting “Libfixes”.]

Both parts come with a sting. From NOAD on one part:

noun retard: informal, offensive a mentally handicapped person (often used as a general term of abuse).[a clipping of retarded; GDoS1st cite 1967-8 in a survey of US undergraduate slang]

The Adj/N liberal has an extremely complex history as a political label. In the current usage of US conservatives, it’s a term of contempt and abuse, mocked from the liberal or progressive side by Geoff Nunberg in the wonderful title of his 2006 book:

Talking right: How conservatives turned liberalism into a tax-raising, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show

The right-wing critique mocked here proceeds by enumerating the life styles, the opinions, and the political goals of liberals in a way that treats them as frivolous, impractical, or dowright dangerous. The critique (as mocked by Nunberg and by Trainor in #1) tends to mix the trivial and the weighty in a way that’s familiar from other outpourings of grievance or annoyance combined with calls for action — as in the 1960s/70s campus radical manifestos that I once saw derided as demanding withdrawal from Vietnam, an end to racist policies on campus, and more bicycle racks in front of the library.

Poe’s law and its resolution. From Wikipedia:

Poe’s law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views. The original statement, by Nathan Poe, read:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.

In the case of #1, context supplies a resolution. Trainor’s career has been centered in two places: the Bongo Comics Group (associated with Matt Groening and The Simpsons) and the new incarnation of MAD Magazine. That’s solid-lefty territory: so #1 is making fun of rightwingers’ sourness about the left.

On Bongo Comics, from Wikipedia:

Bongo Comics Group was a comic book publishing company founded in 1993 by Matt Groening along with Steve & Cindy Vance and Bill Morrison. It published comics related to the animated television series The Simpsons and Futurama, as well as the SpongeBob SquarePants comic; along with original material. It was named after Bongo, a rabbit character in Groening’s comic strip Life in Hell.

Bongo has, at some time in its history, printed Simpsons Comics, Simpsons Comics and Stories, Futurama Comics, Krusty Comics, Lisa Comics, Bart Simpson, Bartman, Itchy & Scratchy Comics and Radioactive Man.

Lisa Comics #1 by Trainor:

(#4) From Alice’s Wonderland: A Visual Journey through Lewis Carroll’s Mad, Mad World by Catherine Nichols (2014), about how Wonderland has been imagined by artists, filmmakers, writers, and others

Then to MAD Magazine, which is where #1 comes from. The thing is, it’s from the April 2019 issue, which isn’t on the stands yet. The cover:

(#5) From Richmond Illustration Inc. (“Caricature and cartoon art studios”) on 2/18/19, “On the Stands: MAD #6” (April 2019)

And the table of contents:

(#6) (Cartoons in there by P.C. Vey and Lars Kenseth, cartoonists I’ve written about on this blog)

A note about MAD, from Wikipedia:

Mad (stylized as MAD) is an American humor magazine founded in 1952 by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines, launched as a comic book before it became a magazine

… From 1952 until 2018, Mad published 550 regular issues … The magazine’s numbering reverted to 1 with its June 2018 issue, coinciding with the magazine’s headquarters move to the West Coast.

From Trainor’s bottom row: gay penguins, kneeling, science, Canada!. Science, dismissed as mumbo-jumbo here, is the weightiest matter; Canada, mocked here as merely the home of Bullwinkle J. Moose, is politically consequential; kneeling in protest, derided as self-advertisement here, is a matter of both political and moral significance; and attention to gay penguins, presumably too ridiculous to merit further attention here, is a stand-in for respect for lgbt people and their rights.

Just can’t let Canada and gay penguins go by without comment.

— Oh Canada! Trainor offers us a maple leaf on a t-shirt on Bullwinkle: a leaf shirt moose ‘moose in a shirt with a leaf on it’. Multi-part compounds are fun.

The resources of the net provide us also with:

(#7) A moose leaf shirt ‘shirt with a leaf with a moose on it on it’

(#8) A leaf moose shirt ‘shirt with a moose with a leaf on it on it’

(I saved the images, then had to do other things, then when I returned, couldn’t find the sources any more. My apologies.)

— Gay penguins. Since I’m a gay man with a penguin totem, obviously of great interest to me. Trainor’s drawing looks like a version of this image:

(#9) A mirror image photo, offered as a representation of the penguin couple Stan and Olli at the Berlin Zoo

Then there’s this more elaborate creation:

(#10) From Danielle Ackerman’s micmackerman site

Bonus play. On FB, I identified the artist and writer of #1 as Mary Trainor. Then this exchange:

BH: And doesn’t she also do those greeting cards depicting 50s women with snarky speech balloons?

AZ: Betsy Herrington That’s Anne Taintor. Are we starting one of those name [association] chains? [If so, then:] Next up: Nell (Irvin) Painter.

The allusion is to my 3/15/18 posting “Name association chains”:

On this blog on the 13th, some examples of a type of phrasal overlap portmanteau sometimes known as name chains: Billy Zane Grey, Billy Joel Grey, Fletcher Christian Grey. On reading this, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky pointed me to a different way in which names can be chained, in a series of associations that’s sometimes used as a comedy routine. Elizabeth then sent me a wonderful example from Neil Gaiman’s Tumblr account.

With a chain of comic misidentifications, from various hands, following on Caroline Palmer’s suggestion that Neil Gaiman is the Sandman guy: Nah, I’m pretty sure he’s the dude that sings “Sweet Caroline” — leading to descriptions of:

Neil Diamond, Neil Armstrong, Neil Patrick Harris, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neil Stevenson, Neil Young, Neil Hannon, Niels Bohr, Niles Crane, Nile Delta, Na’il Diggs, …

From various friends on Facebook who know that I’m interested in meta-comics, this 4/21/17 Imbattable strip by Pascal Jousselin, in an English translation:

(#1) Imbattable (‘Unbeatable’) is a bandit superhero in a yellow and black costume

Among Imbattable’s superpowers is his ability to break the walls of the cartoon’s panels and freely move between them. With the result that temporarily, in the fourth panel, the cat is in two places at once — a phenomenon that unsettles both the cat and the old lady.

Here’s the French original, with a bit of information about the strip:

(#2)

The cover of the first Imbattable comic book:

(#3) He might be a superhero and a bandit, but he shops just like everyone else

Linguistic notes. About the old lady’s initial exclamation in the last panel:

(French) Ah oui, tiens.

(English) Well, I’ll be!

French exclamatory tiens has an extraordinarily wide range of effects in context; here it conveys something like ‘well well; how about that’. Bemused surprise. (The etymology is convoluted and surprising, ultimately involving the verb tenir ‘to hold’.)

The English translation uses the exclamatory idiom I’ll be!, often paired with initial well — so often that OED3 (Dec. 2014) takes the well to be part of the idiom:

well, adv. and n.4.[phrases] P6. colloq.
a. well, I’ll be damned (also blowed, jiggered, etc.) and variants: used to express surprise, amazement, disbelief, etc. [cites from 1830 on]
b. In shortened form well, I’ll be. Often representing the speech of children, and probably reflecting avoidance of damned or other words regarded as impolite or obscene; cf. quot. 1887. (1887 C. Miesse Points on Coal iv. ii. 420 Another man..exclaiming in loud laughter, ‘Well, I’ll be ——, I’ll be ——, well, I’ll be ——, etc.’) [then 1903 in Pedagogical Seminary, a list of slang expressions; 1937 in Boys’ Life; 1994 in P. Baker Blood Posse … ‘It was me and Dave Green who saved your cousin in the hospital when the gangs tried to shoot him.’ ‘Well I’ll be. Whatever happened to the footballer?’; 2001 Charles Schultz in a Peanuts cartoon: I was right? Well, I’ll be!]

Entirely fitting in the mouth of an old lady.

A different site of citations in GDoS, with no attempt to capture the social contexts of its use (and with two cites without the well):

excl. I’ll be!: abbr. of I’ll be damned! 1929 J.B. Priestley Good Companions: Well, I’ll be –; Joe did not say what he would be, but simply blew out his breath. 1970 A. Young Snakes: I’ll be! You mean that band you all got? Well, I’ll just be! 1972 G. Swarthout Tin Lizzie Troop: ‘Well, I’ll be,’ said Carberry. 2000 C. Cook Robbers: That brake fluid done stained my pants. The Ranger took a look. I’ll be, it sure nuff did.

It seems clear that for many speakers the source of the idiom as a euphemistic truncation is now muted or lost completely; for them, it just is. (That was certainy the case for me; I had no idea of its historical source until I looked it up for this posting.)

Presumably, it began life as a nonce truncation (as in the Miesse quote in OED3). From my 3/7/10 posting “Nonce truncations”, about:

truncations that are deployed by individual speakers/writers “for the nonce”, for the sake of brevity, in contexts where the omitted material can be supplied by hearers/readers — notably in fixed expressions.

A favorite example of mine comes from the British detective series Midsomer Murders (S14 E4 “The Oblong Murder”)”, DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) John Barnaby to his DS (Detective Sergeant) Benjamin Jones, urging Jones to take on a task:

England expects, Jones. [supply: that every man will do his duty]

Exquisitely dependent on context and shared background knowledge (in this case, of Admiral Nelson’s signal to his troops at Trafalgar in 1805).

Later in my 2010 posting:

these individual innovations can then spread to a larger community of speakers, perhaps becoming an in-group usage, so that people in that group can use the expressions without necessarily appreciating their historical origins. And then they can spread to more general use, as widely used — even, in some cases, standard — conventionalized expressions on their own.

So we get I’ll be!, which I associate with somewhat old-fashioned and fussy speakers — like the old lady in Jousellin’s cartoon.

… if you don’t know the phrase. An exercise in cartoon understanding that came to me from Facebook connections, but without any credit to the artist:

(#1)

If you don’t recognize It don’t mean a thing as part of a particular formulaic expression, you’re screwed; the cartoon is incomprehensible.

On the other hand, if you recognize it as the beginning of the song title It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing), then you can see that it’s a joke reference to the missing swing in the cartoon.

The task presented by #1 is a lot like the one I taked about in my 3/13/19 posting “Car wash cartoon understanding”, which crucially depends on your knowing the catchphrase The devil is in the detail(s), although that one requires that you put together the Devil and the detailing of cars as topics, while this one is a more straightforward formula-completion exercise.

I was at first outraged that, apparently, once again someone had posted a cartoon without crediting the cartoonist. But then I recognized the style as New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan’s — he has a Page on this blog — and found the original, which is a lot easier to understand:

(#2) Aha! BEK in the 4/20/92 New Yorker

If you don’t know the song title, this one is comprehensible, but only mildly entertaining; the title enriches the experience.

Another bash at the BEK. This time some transposition/Spooneristic word play from Mark Stivers (who also has a Page on this blog):

(#3)

The song. From Wikipedia:

“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” is a 1931 composition by Duke Ellington, whose lyrics were written by Irving Mills. It is now accepted as a jazz standard, and jazz historian Gunther Schuller characterized it as “now legendary” and “a prophetic piece and a prophetic title.”

The music was composed and arranged by Ellington in August 1931 during intermissions at Chicago’s Lincoln Tavern and was first recorded by Ellington and his orchestra for Brunswick Records (Br 6265) on February 2, 1932. After Mills wrote the lyrics, Ivie Anderson sang the vocal and trombonist Joe Nanton and alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges played the instrumental solos. The song became famous, Ellington wrote, “as the expression of a sentiment which prevailed among jazz musicians at the time.” Ellington credited the saying as a “credo” of his former trumpeter, Bubber Miley, who was dying of tuberculosis at the time [a credo crying out for authenticity]

A spirited 1943 performance of the standard by Duke Ellington and his orchestra:

(#4)

And two performances by Ella Fitzgerald (two, because Ella):

(#5) Fitzgerald in 1957, when she was in her late 30s

(#6) Fitzgerald in 1974, when she was about 60 (with a playful introduction by her)

(I saw her perform live in the early 1960s.)

A note on 3sg don’t and on ain’t. Both are features of what you might call  Working Class Vernacular English, occurring across regions and racial/ethnic groups throughout North America and many other parts of the English-speaking world, though the details of course vary from situation to situation. The point in the current context is that though the features are general in AAVE — an AAVE speaker who doesn’t use them ain’t got that swing — they aren’t diagnostic of it.

Truncation as a communicative strategy. Quoting the beginning of the song title can convey the whole thing, along with its meaning (as appropriate to the context of quotation). Earlier on this blog…

First, from my 3/29/18 posting “Bits of culture”, on a Sam Anderson NYT column about Morgan Parker’s poem ‘There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé’:

Filling in the reference. Anderson gives four examples of formulaic expressions (a proverb, a classic limerick, two lines from familiar songs) that can easily be “filled in” given their beginnings, plus the Gershwin song from Parker’s poem [“Summertime, and the living is [easy]”]

For any one of these, you could say, or write, the initial part as set-up and convey either the following part or the content of the entire formula, as tacit pay-off. When the moon hits your eye can convey ‘That’s love’. You can lead a horse (to) can convey ‘You can’t force someone to do something they don’t want to’. There once was a man from can convey ‘Fuck it!’.

There’s a conversational strategy here: producing just the beginning of a formula can convey the whole thing; conversational truncation — just truncation, for short — is an effort-saving scheme (and also serves to bond speaker and hearer socially, through their sharing the materials of culture).

Such nonce truncations (as I called them in a 3/7/10 posting here) are very common. A few examples from the many in my files (mostly based on idioms):

[in a Cold Case episode] You think he had a snowball’s chance [in hell]?

Law & Order S12 E9 “3 Dawg Night” (2001), cop: “Why not kill two birds [with one stone]?

Law & Order S4 E4: ‘Everyone swears on a stack [of bibles]: perfect marriage”

take a load off [your feet] – heard on a CSI re-run 5/24/16

I get the motivation from my boys winning, never did it with a co-sign / We built the whole machine, we go the whole nine [yards] – lyrics to “The Whole Nine” by Packy

They really went above and beyond [the call of duty] – TripAdvisor review of The Fairmount Express in Victoria BC

Then, in my 3/3/19 posting “The MetaCat”, harking back to that 3/7/10 posting “Nonce truncations”, about truncations that are deployed by individual speakers/writers “for the nonce”, for the sake of brevity, in contexts where the omitted material can be supplied by hearers/readers — notably in fixed expressions:

A favorite example of mine comes from the British detective series Midsomer Murders (S14 E4 “The Oblong Murder”)”, DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) John Barnaby to his DS (Detective Sergeant) Benjamin Jones, urging Jones to take on a task:
England expects, Jones. [supply: that every man will do his duty]

Exquisitely dependent on context and shared background knowledge (in this case, of Admiral Nelson’s signal to his troops at Trafalgar in 1805).

Just one day after a particularly fine Rhymes With Orange cartoon combining the Desert Island cartoon meme and the Grim Reaper meme — in my 6/27 posting “The Desert Island Reaper” — came a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with a groaner Grim Reaper pun:

(#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 figure of the Grim Reaper — the bringer of death — as a window-washer, removing — destroying — the grime on the windows of a high-rise building, with the blade of his scythe replaced by a window-washer’s squeegee.

Tool note. From NOAD:

(#2) A particularly handsome squeegee for window washing

noun squeegee: a scraping implement with a rubber-edged blade set on a handle, typically used for cleaning windows. … ORIGIN mid 19th century: from archaic squeege ‘to press’, strengthened form of squeeze.

Yes, the appropriate technical term for this tool is squeegee.

Puns on the grim of Grim Reaper. Going past Grime Reaper. My first idea was to look for perfect puns: Grimm Reaper, combining allusions to the figure of the Grim Reaper and to the folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm: Thumbling (Tom Thumb), The Robber Bridegroom, The Bremen Town Musicians, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, The Goose Girl, etc. Or combining allusions to the GR and to either the actual Grimm brothers, the title characters of the film The Brothers Grimm, or the tv show Grimm. It would be easy to fold the GR into any of these contexts.

What I found instead was a large eggcornish confounding of grim and Grimm: a fair number of people think that the GR is in fact called the Grimm Reaper, after the Grimm brothers’ often grisly tales. One cite from many:

Anyway, Robert and I collect card decks and really like the gothic and grungy decks.  We received our Bicycle Alchemy 1977 deck and the kings are all grimm reapers.  I thought that it would be so cool to replace the pokemon cards with the reaper kings. (link)

To be fair, the tv show does have main characters called Grimms, guardians devoted to keeping the balance between humanity and mythological creatures; and others called Reapers, bounty hunters devoted to killing Grimms — so that the Reapers are in fact Grímm rèapers, reapers of Grimms. And many references to Grimm Reapers are to these beings. But then many are just to the GR.

(On the tv show, see my 11/12/15 posting “Movies and tv: Grimm”.)

Meanwhile, the actual Grimms and the movie Grimms are still open for reaperish play. A quirky note on the former, from Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips site, by Mignon Fogarty on 11/19/14:

(#3) Honored with a 1985 stamp

The next time you watch Snow White, remember that Grimm’s Fairy Tales may be what made the Grimm name famous in popular culture, but Jacob Grimm was also one of the giants of early linguistics.

(There are plenty of other Grimm-oriented German stamps. They are national culture heroes.)

And the movie, which has Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, and the slightest of connections to history. From Wikipedia:

(#4)

The Brothers Grimm is a 2005 adventure fantasy film directed by Terry Gilliam. The film stars Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, and Lena Headey in an exaggerated and fictitious portrait of the Brothers Grimm as traveling con-artists in French-occupied Germany, during the early 19th century. However, the brothers eventually encounter a genuine fairy tale curse which requires real courage instead of their usual bogus exorcisms.

So much for perfect puns. #1 has an imperfect pun on the first word of grim reaper: grim /grɪm/ vs. grime /grajm/. All sorts of imperfect puns on the second word, reaper, are available: grim reamer, grim leaper, grim creeper, grim rapper, etc. But here I’ll look at just a few more puns on the first word.

First, a couple of puns varying the onset: Brim Reaper (it’s a beer and a fishing lure) and Trim Reaper (it’s a trimming machine).

From the Untappd site, about the Finnegans Brew Co. IPA – Rye called Brim Reaper:

(#5) “Excellent balance of fruit, citrus, and pine with subtle spice from the rye”; note the GR on the label

Then, Amazon offers Brim Reaper fishing lures by Blue Ribbon Lures. On the item brim here, from the trails.com site, “What Bait Should Be Used for Brim Fishing”:

The brim is a member of the sunfish family Centrarchidae of the order Perciformes. Brim are also referred to as bluegill, bream, perch, and copper nose. It is a freshwater fish native to North America, habitating rivers, lakes, streams, and ponds.

Along with Brim Reaper, another commercial product, the Trim Reaper. From the California Trim Store, which offers a hydoponic wet trimmer: the Trim Reaper trimming machine, specifically for marijuana plants :

(#6) Note the scythe

Then a pun varying the offset of grim: Grin Reaper, a famous piece of street art by Banksy, seen here in a screenprint (2005):

(#7)

And finally, another pun (besides grime reaper) varying the nucleus of grim: the ridiculously intricate book title Gram Reaper (with /græm/ for /grɪm/). In full:

Gram Reaper: Kill The Gram! How To Gain Followers On Instagram, Work With Brands & Become A Social Media Influencer (Kindle edition) by Lauryn Ellis (2019)

(#8)

The gram of Gram Reaper is a clipping of Instagram. The reaper is a synonym of killer, as in kill the gram! And that kill is a bit of slang, here conveying something like ‘perform impressively with/on’. From my 6/25/18 posting “Midsummer cartoons”, about a Zits strip with “if [my rock band] slays, we could…”:

intransitive slay is (apparently) a relatively recently innovation, a more colorful version of kill, as when we say that a performer really killed, performed very impressively, by really (metaphorically and hyperbolically) killing his audience. From GDoS on this kill:

verb kill: 1 (orig. US) to affect another person in a non-lethal way. (a) often constr. with dead, to amaze or delight, esp. an audience [1st cite 1770; from 1899 on, all the cites are transitive]

And from OED2 draft addition of June 2015 under the verb kill:

trans. colloq.(orig. U.S.). To do or perform (something) impressively or conclusively. Also: spec. to do extremely well at (an examination subject). Frequently in to kill it. Cf. nail v.6d. [with an assortment of cites from 1899 through 2012]

… Intransitive kill ‘perform very impressively, succeed absolutely’ is just a step past kill it.

Meanwhile, slay has developed senses analogically to kill.

And now we see that at least as a one-off, reap can take on these ‘succeed’ senses as well: a gram reaper is someone who can reap the gram ‘perform impressively with/on Instagram!’ (Look, I said it was intricate.)

… an arresting line from the Sacred Harp (1991 Denson revision), #404, Youth Will Soon Be Gone, suggesting perhaps:

OUR CARNAL WEAPONS

 

(#1)

adj. carnal: relating to physical, especially sexual, needs and activities: carnal desire. (NOAD)

But in SH404 it comes from St. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 10:3-4 (KJV):

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh … For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal

And it all depends on what the compilers of the King James Version meant by carnal, which is evidently not what comes first to modern minds.

(Image in #1 from today’s Daily Jocks ad, for “$10 Mystery Underwear”. Ah, sweet mystery of underwear!)

The line from SH404 is especially striking because it has the only occurrence of the word carnal and the only occurrence of the word weapon(s) in the Sacred Harp — this in a song that can fairly be described as deadly serious:

(#2) Ominous warnings to frivolous, Godless youth

As sung at the Sixth Ireland Sacred Harp Convention (2016):

(#3)

When the Palo Alto Sacred Harp group was led in this song last Sunday, I was immediately struck by the word choices; well, I’m a linguist and also something of a scholar of sexuality.

Carn-y vocabulary. Earlier on this blog:

— on 2/18/18 in “Putting the carnal in Carnival”

— on 3/5/19 in “carnitas”, with a brief survey of carn– related expressions, including Sp. carne ‘meat’

To which I now add, from NOAD:

noun carny (also carnie or carney): (a) [usually as modifier] North American informal a carnival or amusement show: a carny atmosphere. (b) a person who works in a carnival or amusement show. [clipping of carnival + suffix -y]

The 2 Corinthians 10 text. Apparently this is St. Paul’s defence of his ministry. First, I give you the whole thing in the KJV version. (I am sadly reminded of why I came to recoil from Bible readings many years ago; this passage is an interpretive minefield.)

10 Now I Paul myself beseech you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ, who in presence am base among you, but being absent am bold toward you:

² But I beseech you, that I may not be bold when I am present with that confidence, wherewith I think to be bold against some, which think of us as if we walked according to the flesh.

³ For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:

⁴ (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)

⁵ Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

⁶ And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.

Then in a modern translation, in the NIV (New International Version):

10 By the humility and gentleness of Christ, I appeal to you — I, Paul, who am “timid” when face to face with you, but “bold” toward you when away!

² I beg you that when I come I may not have to be as bold as I expect to be toward some people who think that we live by the standards of this world.

³ For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does.

⁴ The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.

⁵ We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

⁶ And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete.

Though this is scarcely transparent — to my mind, verse 5 is still a head-scratcher — it at least somewhat clarifies the intended opposition in verses 3 and 4, between the worldly (the physical, the carnal) and the spiritual (the divine).

So: no actual flesh, no meat, and certainly no man-meat.

Today’s Bizarro, with yet another unpacking of the initialism BYOB:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 12 in this strip! — see this Page.)

In the conventional initialism, BYOB stands for ‘bring your own bottle / booze / beer / beverage’, but here it’s ‘bring your OB’, where OB /o bi/ is short for — a clipping of — OB-GYN /o bi ǰi waj ɛn/. From NOAD:

noun ob-gyn: abbreviation [pronounced as an initialism] obstetrics and gynecology.

(A different play on BYOB from my 9/12/19 posting “BOY Party!”: Bring Your Own Boy.)

I was hoping, just hoping, for a Bring Your Obi-Wan Kenobi —

(#2) Bring me as your own!

Other possibilities: BYOJ (orange juice), much more darkly BYOD (overdose), technological BYOS (operating system), linguistic BYOT (Optimality Theory).

Or two-letter states and provinces: BYOH (Bring Your Ohio), BYOK (Oklahoma), ON (Ontario), OR (Oregon).

Or actual, unabbreviated words at the end of the alphabet: BYOW (Bring your ow!). BYOX (ox), BYOY (oy!), BYOZ (Oz).

Or, of course, you could just vary the final letter: BYOI, Bring Your Own Initialism.

The Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon from 9/11/18:

What Grimm says to Ralph is just a bare NP, but what it conveys is the content an entire sentence, but with almost all of its parts “omitted” — that is, implicit, rather than explicitly expressed: That’s / It’s the last time I let you talk me into flipping my house. 

— a subject that or it or something similar (referring to some antecedent that’s loosely in the context — here, Ralph’s convincing Grimm to flip his house) can be omitted (SubjOmit, Ref type)

— in combination with SubjOmit (of several types), a copular verb (specifically, a form of BE, here is or ‘s) can be omitted (VerbOmit in combination with SubjOmit)

— in sentence-initial position, certain occurrences of articles (primarily  the definite article the) can be omitted (ArtOmit)

All of these phenomena are constrained in complex ways by conditions having to do with which items are affected, in which circumstances. Below I’ll run through the phenomena with a few examples selected from my files, plus some notes about the conditions.

SubjOmit. First, of the Ref type (with vaguely referential it or that as the omitted subject).  From e-mail reported by Peter Edidin, “A New Pecking Order on Fifth Avenue”, NYT Week in Review, 12/19/04, p. 9:

Thank you for supporting the hawks!  Ms. Winters, the owner of the apartment where the birds nest, should be evicted from NYC.  How dark is her heart? Goes to show, money can buy you everything, but not class!

In a different type of SubjOmit, the omitted subject is a non-referential “dummy subject” (it or there).

For dummy it, from Bill Hayes, review of Avery Gilbert’s What the Nose Knows, NYT Book Review 10/12/08, p. 34:

Turns out, we are wrong.

For dummy there, from Jason Love, “Reflections on Marriage”, Funny Times, March 2008, p. 19:

No matter how much you love your mate, comes a time when, if you don’t get out a little, your tolerance level drops to dangerous lows, as in “Could you PLEASE stop digesting so loudly!”

(There are further types of SubjOmit — one exemplified in a sentence at the very end of this posting:

Hope you know what you’re wading into!)

SubjOmit + VerbOmit. Possible for both Ref subjects and dummy subjects.

For a Ref subject, from Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip of 9/10/04 (with omitted that’s):

[Iraqi:] She’s a U.S. citizen.  If we get married, I can get out of this hell-hole.

[Duke:]  My kind of love story.  Worked out the pre-nup?

For the dummy subject there, from the Doonesbury of 7/3/04 (with omitted there’s):

A:  Hey, dude!  Don’t let ‘em promote you!

B:  Not a chance, man!

ArtOmit. Mostly the definite article the. Omitted from a subject in a NYT Science Times column of 10/22/02, p. D3:

But for now, experts say, there is no solution for the botulism outbreaks.

“It’s naturally occurring,” Mr. Obert said.  “Chances are we won’t be able to do anything about it.”

And omitted from a sentence-initial adverbial, from Lea Wait, Shadows on the Coast of Maine (NY: Penguin, 2003),  p. 66:

Last she’d heard, he was in Arizona.

And for an indefinite article a in an adverbial, from Darrin Bell and Theron Heir, Rudy Park cartoon, 9/27/04:

[boss:]  Rudy, when was the last time I fired you?

[Rudy:]  Couple of months.

The whole carnival. Parallel to the MGG example above (but with omitted a rather than the), from the Doonesbury of 9/11/04:

[Honey:]  So what do you think of my guy, sir?

[Duke:]  Interesting choice, Honey.  Hope you know what you’re wading into!

Duke’s comment to Honey, in full, would be

That’s / It’s an interesting choice, Honey.

Two recent Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strips, from the 15th and (for St. Patrick’s Day) the 17th, both of linguistic interest: among other things, the portmanteau arthropodcast in the first; and the front-clipping ‘shmallows (for marshmallows, of the psychedelic sort) in the second:

A jointed-limb portmanteau. arthropod + podcast, with shared material pod:

(#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 elements of the portmanteau:

— arthropod. From Wikipedia:

An arthropod (from Ancient Greek ἄρθρον (arthron) ‘joint’, and πούς (pous) ‘foot’ (gen. ποδός)) is an invertebrate animal having an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and paired jointed appendages.

The name comes from the jointed appendages.

Arthropods include spiders, crustaceans (among them, crabs, lobsters, crayfish, and shrimps), insects, millipedes, and centipedes. Arthropods differ in their number of legs: insects 6, spiders 8, crustaceans 10 (plus some number of jointed feeding appendages — 6 for shrimp, 8 for lobsters, for example); note the (apparent) differences in leg count between the three otherwise very similar arthropods in the cartoon.

— podcast. from NOAD:

noun podcast: a digital audio file made available on the internet for downloading to a computer or mobile device, typically available as a series, new installments of which can be received by subscribers automatically. ORIGIN early 21st century: from iPod + broadcast.

A note on Greek arthr-on and Latin art-us ‘joint (of the body)’. These show up in English in a variety of places, including, for the first:

— noun arthritis: from NOAD:

painful inflammation and stiffness of the joints. ORIGIN mid 16th century: via Latin from Greek, from arthron ‘joint’.

— adjective arthrous: from OED 3 Dec. 2008 (latest version published online March 2018):

(Etymology: < ancient Greek ἄρθρον joint, (in grammar) the [definite] article [a metaphorical extension of the body-part usage]) Grammar. Of a [Classical or Biblical] Greek noun: used with the article. Opposed to anarthrous. [1st cite 1832]

The adjective as grammatical term has been extended to noun usage in languages other than Greek, in particular to such usage in English: in arthrous ‘having a (definite) grammatical article (the river Rhine, the Danube River)’ and anarthrous ‘lacking one (Lake Michigan, Great Bear Lake)’. See the Page on this blog on postings about arthrousness.

Then on English items traceable back to Latin artus ‘joint (of the body)’.

— noun article: from NOAD:

1 a particular item or object: small household articles | articles of clothing. 2 a piece of writing included with others in a newspaper, magazine, or other publication: an article about middle-aged executives. 3 a separate clause or paragraph of a legal document or agreement, typically one outlining a single rule or regulation: [as modifier]:  it is an offense under Article 7 of the treaty. 4 Grammar the definite or indefinite article.

You might reasonably ask why these four senses are being treated as instances of “the same” lexical item, rather than being treated as two or more separate items; in particular, what’s sense 4 doing in there? Why isn’t it article⁴?

The answer is, of course, that dictionaries group senses into entries on the basis of shared etymology, not mental relatedness, So NOAD‘s etymological note for the entry with these four senses is crucial:

ORIGIN Middle English (denoting a separate clause of the Apostles’ Creed): from Old French, from Latin articulus ‘small connecting part’, diminutive of artus ‘joint’.

So a metaphorical extension of a presumed articulus ‘small joint (of the body)’ — a finger joint, say, versus the hip or shoulder joint — to  any small connecting part then serves as the basis for specialized senses in different contexts (including the domain of grammatical terminology).

A sugary front-clipping. In a richly textured cartoon that incorporates a wide range of allusions:

(#2) (3 Bizarro symbols in this one) The leprechaun drug dealer offers the St. Patrick’s kid some magic marshmallows — ‘shmallows — from Lucky Charms cereal (Wayno’s title: “Trippy Charms”); in the real world the high you might get from Lucky Charms is from its high sugar content, not from psychedelic marshmallows

(You might stop and reflect on how much background knowledge you have to access to understand just this much of the content of the cartoon. But wait! There’s more!)

Lucky Charms, marshmallows, and leprechauns. It’s no accident that #2 appeared on St. Patrick’s Day, the holiday celebrating the patron saint of Ireland — hence the appearance of the leprechaun, the mischievous sprite of Irish folklore, and the reference to the rainbow (leprechauns commonly represented as guarding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow).

Lucky Charms cereal ties leprechauns to marshmallows. From Wikipedia:

Lucky Charms is an American brand of breakfast cereal produced by the General Mills food company since 1964. The cereal consists of toasted oat pieces and multi-colored marshmallow shapes (or marshmallow bits). The label features a leprechaun mascot, Lucky, animated in commercials.

(#3) Lucky, ready to charm you with his marshmallows

Front-clipping and psychedelia. Clipping is an abbreviatory process in which phonological material is omitted, as when both laboratory and Labrador (the name of a dog breed) are clipped to lab. Back-clipping / final clipping (as with lab) is by far the most common type, but front-clipping / initial clipping is not unknown, as in rents / ‘rents for parents.

Which brings us to shrooms / ‘shrooms. From NOAD, which doesn’t recognize the variant spelled with an apostrophe to stand for the omitted material:

noun shroom: informal, mainly US a mushroom, especially one with hallucinogenic properties.

Psychedelic shrooms are also known as magic mushrooms or psilocybin mushrooms, with psychedelic shroom often spelled with the apostrophe of omission. In my experience, the spelling with the apostrophe virtually always refers to psychedelic fungi. Which means that a front-clipping of marshmallows, spelled with an apostrophe and the initial remnant SH plus consonant, will strongly evoke ‘shrooms; ‘shmallows are then almost surely hallucinogenic, and you would be wise to be cautious about accepting such marshmallows from a leprechaun, however much they might look like everyday Lucky Charms.

Being the rainbow. “Try one of these and you’ll BE the rainbow”, the leprechaun tempts, hoping to hook the kid on Trippy Charms (the leprechaun’s eyes suggest that he’s pretty far into a trip himself) — and so evokes a second ad theme, in the “taste the rainbow” campaign for Skittes-brand fruit-flavored candies.

(#4)

See my 8/23/13 posting “Share the rainbow”.

(Some indirect and asterisked reference to man-on-man sex, but, hey, it’s from the Associated Press.)

Or: Love among the mobsters.  In some hot news:

Chicago (AP wire story) — An odd chapter in American mobsterdom came to an end in a hail of bullets yesterday as thugs of the Buonanotte crime family gunned down Pasquale “Patsy” Baloney, the famously vicious soldato for — and long-time secret lover of — capo Carlo “Charlie” Ravioli of the Bastardo family, who died of a massive heart attack only two months ago.

How it came about that Mafia mastermind Ravioli (smooth, urbane, a patron of Italian opera and respectable public face for the Bastardos, but also a genius at organized vice and a ruthlessly effective boss) connected sexually with his favored soldier Baloney (crude, vulgar, foul-mouthed, and vicious — often compared to Doug Piranha) is something of a mystery, but it was an open secret in the family, tolerated out of respect for Ravioli, rather than meeting the customary bullets to the back of the head for men labeled “faggots”. Even more remarkable because it was known that Ravioli was entirely subordinate and submissive in every way, accepting with grace Baloney’s referring to him as “my woman” and Baloney’s recounting in detail to his (openly revolted) fellow soldiers the sexual services Ravioli supplied for him (none of which, apparently, were reciprocated in any way). Despite the tolerance, a standing Bastardo dirty joke crowed that Charlie’s ravioli was getting stuffed with Italian sausage.

One fellow soldier, interviewed off-record for this story, just shrugged his shoulders, admitting that the mysteries of man-to-man attraction were inscrutable to him. (Verbatim: “You never f**king know what the f**k those c**ks**ker c**tboys will get off on”.)

Buonanotte-family soldiers now maintain that they had proposed to impale “that *ss-burglar Baloney” on a red-hot poker (their capo Luigi “Louisville” Esposito had apparently seen Derek Jarman’s film Edward II and been impressed by it), but that in the end the plan seemed overly complicated and required too much unfamiliar equipment, so they fell back on their familiar routine for offing the competition.

Today the streets of Chicago are tense with the possibility of a Mafia gang war.

And that’s the news from the mean streets.

Background: Patsy Baloney and Charlie Ravioli. From my 6/29/22 posting “Patsy Baloney”, about this as a mis-transcription of the name Pat Cipollone (the former White House counsel, now much in the news): Pasquale Anthony “Pat” Cipollone — thus accidentally creating the fictive low-level thug in the Mafia.

I’ll start with the names.

Patsy and Pat are nicknames for Pasquale (originally ‘paschal, relating to Passover / Easter’). Patsy tends to be associated with Mafia usage, as here:

Pasquale “Patsy” Conte (born March 12, 1925) is an American mobster who became a caporegime with the Gambino crime family. He also owned a bunch of Key Food supermarkets. (Wikipedia link)

Pasquale Lolordo (1887 – January 8, 1929), also known as Pasqualino or “Patsy”, was an Italian-born American Mafia boss from Ribera, Sicily, and head of the Chicago chapter of the Unione Siciliana, a “front” organization for the Mafia. Lolordo was considered one of the most powerful mafia bosses during the late 1920s. (Wikipedia link)

Cipollone (literally ‘big onion’ — an augmentative version of cipolla ‘onion’) originally referred to someone with a big head, now is just a surname.

Baloney is a lot more complicated. To start with, AmE has two nouns bologna and baloney, both pronounced /bǝlóni/. From NOAD:

noun bologna: North American a large smoked [AZ: everyday American bologna, from the Oscar Mayer company, say, is not smoked], seasoned sausage made of various meats, especially beef and pork. [elliptical for — a beheading of — the Source / Origin compound Bologna sausage ‘a large kind of sausage first made at Bologna (in Italy)’; OED2’s 1st cite for Bologna sausage is from 1833]

noun baloney: informal 1 foolish or deceptive talk; nonsense: typical salesman’s baloney. 2 North American [spelling] variant of bologna. [OED2 on sense 1: “Commonly regarded as < bologna n. (sausage) but the connection remains conjectural”; OED2’s 1st cite for this usage is from 1928]

More detail on the sausage from Wikipedia:

Bologna sausage, also spelled baloney, is a sausage derived from the Italian mortadella, a similar-looking, finely ground pork sausage containing cubes of pork fat, originally from the city of Bologna [in northern Italy]. Typical seasonings for bologna include black pepper, nutmeg, allspice, celery seed and coriander, and, like mortadella, myrtle berries give it its distinctive flavor.

(#1) Bologna slices (photo: MILANFOTO via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Bologna (pronounced in AmE /bǝlónjǝ/) is a fairly common Italian-American name, sometimes belonging to mobsters. Perhaps most famously, John Bologna. From the MassLive site, “FBI files on John Bologna offer new information on Mafia in Springfield [MA]” by Stephanie Barry on 5/23/17:

New York gangster John Bologna died in prison [in January 2017].

It was something of an irony, since he played the long game to stay out of jail for decades as an FBI informant. All the while, he still made a robust illegal living shoulder-to-shoulder with Mafia bosses from New York City to Springfield.

And then Ravioli. A rare, but attested, Italian and Italian-American surname. But mostly a play on the food name. From Wikipedia:

(#2) On the Jamie Oliver cooking site, a recipe for Bolognese ravioli with a simple tomato sauce: ravioli filled with Bolognese (that is, Bolognese sauce, the M(ass) noun Bolognese being a beheading of the full nominal), a combination of minced pork and minced veal or beef

Ravioli … are a type of pasta comprising a filling enveloped in thin pasta dough. Usually served in broth or with a sauce, they originated as a traditional food in Italian cuisine. Ravioli are commonly square, though other forms are also used, including circular and semi-circular (mezzelune).

The word ‘ravioli’ means “little turnips” in Italian dialect, from the Italian rava meaning turnips, from the Latin rapa.

… Traditionally, ravioli are made at home. The filling varies according to the area where they are prepared. In Rome and Latium the filling is made with ricotta cheese, spinach, nutmeg and black pepper. In Sardinia, ravioli are filled with ricotta and grated lemon rind.

… Canned ravioli were pioneered by the Italian Army in the First World War and were popularized by Heinz and Buitoni in the UK and Europe, and Chef Boyardee in the United States. Canned ravioli may be filled with beef, processed cheese, chicken, or Italian sausage and served in a tomato, tomato-meat, or tomato-cheese sauce.

The Jamie Oliver recipe is an elegant reproduction of the canned stuff.

The full name Charlie Ravioli (which I have shamelessly borrowed here) is an invention of the 3-year-old Olivia Gopnik, as described by her father Adam in a 2002 New Yorker piece that then appeared in his book Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York (2007). I turn now to Charlie.

The perpetually busy New Yorker Charlie Ravioli. My characterization of Patsy Baloney as a low-level thug in the Mafia struck a chord with my old (like, of 60+ years) friend Benita Bendon Campbell, who wrote me on 7/6 to connect Patsy to Charlie:

I  am so grateful to you for Patsy Baloney …  I think Patsy is a stalwart colleague of Charlie Ravioli, Olivia Gopnik’s imaginary acquaintance …. I have always suspected Charlie of some nefarious gangland shenanigans — otherwise why did he ignore Olivia’s messages so often?

The fantasy world is preferable to the Real One, just now.

(Bonnie is in no way responsible for what I’ve done with Patsy and Charlie, in my fantasy world.)

From the New Yorker‘s 9/30/02 issue, “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli: A theory of busyness, and its hero” by Adam Gopnik, on-line on 9/23:

My daughter Olivia, who just turned three, has an imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is growing up in Manhattan, and so Charlie Ravioli has a lot of local traits: he lives in an apartment “on Madison and Lexington,” he dines on grilled chicken, fruit, and water, and, having reached the age of seven and a half, he feels, or is thought, “old.” But the most peculiarly local thing about Olivia’s imaginary playmate is this: he is always too busy to play with her. She holds her toy cell phone up to her ear, and we hear her talk into it: “Ravioli? It’s Olivia . . . It’s Olivia. Come and play? O.K. Call me. Bye.” Then she snaps it shut, and shakes her head. “I always get his machine,” she says. Or she will say, “I spoke to Ravioli today.” “Did you have fun?” my wife and I ask. “No. He was busy working. On a television” (leaving it up in the air if he repairs electronic devices or has his own talk show).

On a good day, she “bumps into” her invisible friend and they go to a coffee shop. “I bumped into Charlie Ravioli,” she announces at dinner (after a day when, of course, she stayed home, played, had a nap, had lunch, paid a visit to the Central Park Zoo, and then had another nap). “We had coffee, but then he had to run.” She sighs, sometimes, at her inability to make their schedules mesh, but she accepts it as inevitable, just the way life is. “I bumped into Charlie Ravioli today,” she says. “He was working.” Then she adds brightly, “But we hopped into a taxi.” What happened then? we ask. “We grabbed lunch,” she says.

Innocent Olivia doesn’t realize that Charlie’s busyness is merely clever cover for his mob activities (and his clandestine couplings with Patsy), and has nothing to do with television. Well, she’s only 3, with very little knowledge of the wicked world, and she goes on what she sees. To her, Charlie seems to be just another upper-middle-class New Yorker.

More background: mob notes. From NOAD:

noun capo-2 : mainly North American the head of a crime syndicate, especially the Mafia, or a branch of one: the Sicilian capo claims he controls most of the world’s heroin trade. [ultimately < Latin caput ‘head’]

And then from Wikipedia:

A soldato or soldier is the first official level of both the American Mafia and the Sicilian Mafia in the formal Mafia hierarchy or cadre. The promotion to the rank of soldier is an elevation in the chain of command from the associate level. The associate, who is not an initiated member of the Mafia, must prove himself to the family and take the oath of Omertà in order to become an initiated made man and therefore rise to the rank of soldato.

…  A soldier’s main responsibility is to earn money and give a portion of his profits up to his capo.

… [Soldiers] also serve as muscle of their crime family. Like an associate, he can also be relied on to commit acts of intimidation, threats, violence and murder. The soldier is obliged to obey orders from his capo to commit murder for his crime family.

Capo Ravioli, soldato Baloney.

The Ravioli-Baloney dirty joke. You can of course fill, or stuff, ravioli, the pasta, with sausage meat of any number of varieties originating in Italy; Jamie Oliver’s recipe uses what is essentially bologna (aka baloney) meat, so it is in fact ravioli stuffed with baloney.

On the other hand, Ravioli stuffed with Baloney — with the British sexual verb stuff ‘pedicate, prong, screw’ (you get the idea) — is a dirty joke, a crude slur on Charlie and Patsy’s physical expression of their desire for one another.

The opportunities for dirty jokes here are rich; above I mentioned

a standing Bastardo dirty joke … that Charlie’s ravioli was getting stuffed with Italian sausage

which opens things up in several dimensions. For one thing, there’s proper Ravioli vs. common ravioli again, plus a sexual metaphor in which ravioli as receptacles for stuffing stand for a sexcavity as receptacle for a penis.

[Digression on C(ount) and M(ass). The Wikipedia article on ravioli and the Wikipedia entry for ravioli (‘small pasta envelopes containing ground meat, cheese, or vegetables’) both treat the English noun ravioli as PL C, as the Italian noun ravioli is (the PL of raviolo), but this is not at all the vernacular AmE treatment of the noun, which is as (SG) M. OED3 (Dec. 2008) gets it right:

As a mass noun: pasta in the form of square, circular, or semicircular envelopes with a filling of cheese, vegetables, or meat, usually served with a sauce. Also occasionally with plural agreement.

Similarly in AHD5.

(I realize that this is a digression in a digression, but in this particular posting of mine, it’s irresistible. OED3 has the following note:

Some sources state that ravioli should not be stuffed with meat …, but in English usage this does not seem to be widely observed.

Oh my.)]

Then to sausage, which has a wider range of usages than you might have thought. NOAD nails two:

noun sausage: [a] an item of food in the form of a cylindrical length of minced pork or other meat encased in a skin, typically sold raw to be grilled or fried before eating. [b] minced and seasoned meat that has been encased in a skin and cooked or preserved, sold mainly to be eaten cut up in slices: smoked German sausage.

The first complexity here is that for many speakers, sausage in both of these senses seems to be doubly classified for C/M, so that these speakers are comfortable both with Get some sausages for dinner (PL C) and Get some sausage for dinner (SG M), referring in both cases to the purchase of food items in encased links. Contrast this treatment with that of frankfurter and hot dog (among other nouns), which are resolutely C only. And — surprise! — with yet another sense of sausage ‘sausage meat’ (another beheading), which is resolutely M only (since it refers to ground meat, which is stuff rather than things).  Here, two ads for Johnsonville (hot) Italian sausage, the first with sausage in NOAD‘s sense a ‘(raw) link sausage’, the second with beheaded sausage ‘sausage meat”:

(#3) We’ve got the wienies

(#4) We’ve got the meat

The dirty joke in Charlie’s ravioli was getting stuffed with Italian sausage plays on the two senses: if you culinarily stuff ravioli with sausage, that’s the ground meat in #4; while if you sexually stuff a guy (like Ravioli) with sausage, that’s the bodypart counterpart to the links in #3 (Ravioli’s getting screwed with Italian dick).

One more twist. Alas, Italian sausage above doesn’t refer to just any sausage originating in Italy; not bologna / baloney, for example, or any of the varieties of salami, or uncured pisto. The expression here is an AmE idiom, referring to a particular type of mortadella(-ish) sausage. From Wikipedia:

(#5) From a “How to cook Italian sausages” page, a photo of links in the pan

In North America, Italian sausage (salsiccia in Italian) most often refers to a style of pork sausage. The sausage is often noted for being seasoned with fennel as the primary seasoning.

So we come around to another version of the dirty joke, the one in my title (Ravioli stuffed with Italian sausage), in which Ravioli, the person, gets sexually stuffed with a metaphorical Italian penis (in the shape of an Italian sausage link like those in #5).

That’s a dirty joke, also an elaborate pun, with an entirely innocent gastronomic interpretation, in  which a guy named Ravioli has eaten salsiccia to his limits or his satisfaction.

Meanwhile, I find that #5 makes my mouth water. Linguistic pragmatics is hard; let’s get eating.

The killing of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri by a targeted U.S. drone strike (taking him down as he stood on a balcony) over the weekend in Afghanistan was described by an MSNBC commentator yesterday morning as

a stiletto strike:  with the N1 + N2 compound N stiletto strike ‘sudden (military) attack resembling a stiletto (in being very narrowly focused lethal weaponry)’; the sense of the N2 strike here is NOAD‘s 2 [a] a sudden attack, typically a military one

Possibly it was stiletto airstrike; it went by very fast, I haven’t seen another broadcast of it, and it’s not yet available on-line, so I can’t check — but I am sure of the N stiletto and the N strike and the intent of the commentator to commend the pinpoint accuracy of the operation.

It seems that the metaphor has been used occasionally in military circles for some years, but very rarely outside these circles, so that it came with the vividness of a fresh, rather than conventional, metaphor — but while it worked well for me (evoking the slim, pointed, lethal daggers of assassins), it might not have been so effective with others, whose mental image of a stiletto is the heel of a fashionable women’s shoe (slim and pointed,  but alluring rather than lethal).

Yes, the two senses (plus a few others that I won’t discuss here) are historically related, with the dagger sense the older and, in a series of steps, the source of the shoe sense. But of course ordinary speakers don’t know that, nor should they be expected to (such information is the province of specialists, historical linguists and lexicographers); what they know is how stiletto is used in their social world, and that’s likely to involve trendy footwear rather than medieval weaponry.

Two families of senses. Well, actually, two distinct families of lexical items (each with a collection of senses), one having to do with weapons (dagger N stiletto), the other with footwear (shoe N stiletto). In the actual course of events, al-Zawahiri was stilettoed on the balcony, in a metaphorical use of V stiletto ‘stab with a stiletto’ (in a passive construction) — this V stiletto being a verbing of the dagger N. As in the cover of this 2015 ebook by Donahue B. Silvis:

(#1)

Entertainingly, al-Zawahiri could have been stilettoed on that balcony by appearing there in footwear with stiletto heels, a fabulous scene reportable with the descriptive Adj stilettoed ‘wearing stiletto heels’ — this Adj derived from the shoe N by suffixation with –ed. As in this photo of Celine Dion in the Elle Magazine of June 2019:

(#2) Celine Dion: jumpsuit by Armani Privé, necklace by Bulgari, stiletto sandals by René Caovilla (photo by Tom Munro); note that Dion is necklaced, jumpsuited, and stilettoed (cf. a stilettoed al-Zawahiri)

[Note on the N > Adj derivational suffix here. From Michael Quinion’s Affixes site on –ed1 ‘having; possessing; affected by; characteristic of’:

These adjectives are formed from nouns; a few examples of a large group are: cultured, diseased, flowered, grained, hooded, jagged, jaundiced, knotted, leisured, matted, ragged, ridged, scented, talented, toothed. In principle, most nouns can add ‑ed in this way to create new adjectives: architected, liposuctioned, polymered, touristed.

In contrast with –ed2 (the PSP of a V) serving as a modifier, as in a fallen tree, some cut flowers, the murdered man.]

The things, up close.

The dagger stiletto. From the Darksword Armory site (offering modern versions of medieval armory), under the header “Medieval daggers: stiletto”:

(#3) [ad copy:] The stylet or stiletto is the smallest of daggers, easily concealed, lightest in weight, with a strong triangular sectional blade. The dimensions of the stilettos made these daggers a favorite among assassins. The dagger was easy to conceal, enabling assassins to follow their would be victims at close range without being spotted. This stiletto is a reproduction from one on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The total length is 13 inches. ($80)

The crucial characteristics for stilettos in the stiletto strike metaphor are that they’re slim and relatively short (hence compact) and pointed (hence sharp and potentially lethal).

The lexical neighborhood of dagger stiletto, from Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, 3rd ed., under “synonyms for dagger”:

anlace, bayonet, blade, bodkin, cutlass, dirk, poniard, sidearm, skean, stiletto, stylet, switchblade, sword

Mostly historical, but also some modern weapons with blades. A net search for stilettos as weapons brings up tons of “automatic stilettos”, “push button stilettos”, or “spring assisted stilettos” — switchblade stilettos that fold up and have a button release.

The shoe stiletto. From an earlier posting on this blog:

(#4) Identità pointed toe ankle boot in genuine leather with internal zip and 100mm stiletto heel [AZ: it also comes with an, omigod, 120mm heel], $450.20

The words and their meanings. The history of the dagger N stiletto and the shoe N stiletto. Boiling down material from NOAD (which attempts to arrange its entries with the most common senses / uses first) and OED2 (currently in revision) (which attempts to order the sections of its entries on resolutely historical principles):

— we start with the dagger N, borrowed from Italian (first English cite in 1611), which quickly develops a variety of metaphorical uses, turning on the stiletto’s uses as a weapon, capable of inflicting harm

— then a metaphorical use for a very narrow, long heel of a woman’s shoe, exploiting the visual similarity of such a heel to the dagger; this yields the shoe N, but only in the compound stiletto heel (1st OED cite in 1931)

— by metonymy, stiletto heel used for a shoe with a stiletto heel (no reliable dating from the OED‘s sparse citations)

— separately, the beheading of stiletto heel referring to a kind of heel, giving the truncated stiletto, with the same meaning (again not easily datable)

— and of course the beheaded stiletto used for a shoe with stiletto heel; the metonymy (an extension in meaning) and the beheading (an extension in form) seem to have happened rapidly, since the OED has a cite from 1953 (below) showing the two together

— then, in the compound stiletto strike, the fresh metaphor based on dagger N that I started with above — a use of stiletto that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere

No doubt the beheaded stiletto ‘stiletto strike’ is soon to come, in describing military operations, in things like:

We’re going to do / perform / complete / … a stiletto on a top Taliban leader this weekend.

From the dictionaries. First, from NOAD:

noun stiletto: 1 [a] a woman’s shoe with a thin, high tapering heel. [b] (also stiletto heel) a heel on such a woman’s shoe: [as modifier]:  the rapid click of stiletto heels on pavement. 2 [a] a short dagger with a tapering blade. [b] a sharp-pointed tool for making eyelet holes. ORIGIN early 17th century: from Italian, diminutive of stilo ‘dagger’.

And then from OED2 (in revision):

— 1. a. A short dagger with a blade thick in proportion to its breadth. [1st cite 1611]

— b. In extended use. [metaphorical; 1st cite 1673 Andrew Marvell: Your whole Book of Ecclesiastical Politie having been Writ not with a Pen but a Stilletto.]

— 2. … b. Short for stiletto heel [1st cite 1953 OH newspaper ad: The Italian idea in fashion … Florentine stilettos … The slender fabric shoe, poised on a slim dagger of a heel.]

— Compounds C3. stiletto heel  n. a very narrow, high heel on women’s shoes, fashionable esp. in the 1950s; a shoe with such a heel. [1st cite 1931, in an IN newspaper]