From Sunday’s’s (7/21) New York Times Magazine, in the section “The Ethicist: Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman”:

Angel writes: My co-worker Nick suggested we have a baked-goods potluck at work. I got excited because I have a great baked-mac-and-cheese recipe. But Nick said it wouldn’t count. He says it must be something made with a batter or dough. I disagree!
—–
Many things are baked (potatoes, Brie, Alaska), and like macaroni and cheese, they are good. But they are not “baked goods” in common usage. … In your case, most of the cooking happens outside the oven, and the baking is just a finishing touch. That said, who cares? [and on from there]

Angel has run aground on the shoals of idiomaticity; they suppose that the meaning of baked goods is straightforwardly compositional, ‘goods that have been baked’ — the meaning of the plural noun goods as modified by the meaning of the adjective baked, using the primary senses of the two words. But that won’t fly here, because the nominal baked goods has developed a specialized use, in which it refers to not just any stuff, even not just any foodstuff, that’s been cooked in an oven, but only to breads (and similar foods) and cakes (and similar foods) from an oven. The category of baked goods is expansive, but not so broad as to embrace lasagna, roasted vegetables, baked chicken, baked beans, baked ham, etc. … or mac and cheese.

The details. Primary senses from NOAD:

adj. baked: (of food) cooked by dry heat in an oven: baked apples

noun goods: merchandise or possessions: imports of luxury goods| stolen goods

But then baked goods has its own entry:

pl. noun baked goods: bread, cakes, pastries, and similar items of food that are cooked in an oven: the moment you open the door at Billy’s Bakery the aroma of baked goods overwhelms you| bran can impart a hearty flavor to breads and other baked goods.

There’s clearly a restriction here on what foodstuffs cooked in a oven will count as baked goods, though “bread, cakes, pastries, and similar items of food” might not satisfy people who long for clear definitions. The category of things referred to here is highly culture-bound (not given in nature), and like other sociocultural categories has unclear boundaries and is subject to some variation from community to community. In some of my earlier postings on the sociocultural categories of foodstuffs, I’ve given it the suggestive label BREADCAKE, since it embraces the narrower categories of BREAD (encompassing clear (risen) breadstuffs, but also flatbreads and more) and CAKEPIE (encompassing cakes, cupcakes, cookies, and pies, but also some foodstuffs of mixed or unclear nature) and some foodstuffs in between things we’d call bread and things we’d call cake.

So the everyday use of baked goods is to refer to things in the BREADCAKE category, and (though delineating the membership of that category is, um, no piece of cake) that use is considerably more specific than  ‘(food) goods that have been baked in an oven’. BREADCAKE subsumes a lot of foodstuffs, but not lasagna, moussaka, tuna casserole, baked ham, etc. … or mac and cheese.

Bonus on the goods. A sampling of idiomatic uses of the goods, assembled and re-arranged from the material in NOAD:

[c] (the goods) informal the genuine article: the team proved on Friday that they are the goods. [d] (the goods) informal what is expected or required of one — in PHRASES come up with the goods and deliver the goods do what is required: we knew we were setting a tough task, but the team have come up with the goods. [e] (the goods on) informal information about (someone) that may be used to their detriment — in PHRASES get the goods on ‘obtain such information’ and have the goods on ‘possess such information’: he planned to hire a private eye to get the goods on his persecutors | you don’t lie to the FBI when they already have the goods on you.

In today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange, the clams are tenting tonight on the old campground, but find today’s experience to be unaccountably joyless; for some reason, the formulas just aren’t working:

To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize two similarity-based formulaic expressions of English: the metaphor happy camper and the simile happy as a clam; yet neither is overt in the cartoon, though both are alluded to indirectly (we’re campers and we’re clams)

Note: happy as a clam. My 11/29/18 posting “OBH information” has a section on the formulaic happy as a clam, with a folk etymology, plus the real source (from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words site), as a truncation of happy as a clam at high tide / water (the short form is venerable, first recorded in 1830 but is certainly older than that).

Note: happy camper. From NOAD:

nominal happy camper: informal a comfortable, contented person: I was making a living mopping floors then and I was not a happy camper | give me a good book, a Caribbean beach, and I’m a happy camper.

OED3  (revised 2013) notes that it is frequent in negative contexts, especially in not a happy camper; its first idiomatic cite (clearly not about actual campers) is from 1957:

‘I simply want to be a happy camper,’ says ‘Pocahontas’ whose real name is Miss Edna Riley (New York Amsterdam News)

The reference is clearly to summer camps for kids, but the details of the idiom’s origin are unclear.

In this morning’s comics feed, two linguistic jokes from the Roman Empire (in a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro); maybe it’s just something in the air, but on the other hand, September 4th, 476, marks the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity and consequently (in some people’s view) the beginning of the Middle Ages. So let’s say goodbye to the boy emperor Romulus, aka Augustulus, and antiquity; and hello to the barbarians and, oh yes, medieval times!

Bye-bye, Imperial times
Took Romulus to the border, to see the Empire die

I’ll get to Augustulus in a while.  But first the cartoons.

The Rhymes With Orange. Two Roman legionnaires greeting each other:

(#1) Greeting each other with high fives, in the Roman fashion

From NOAD, on the idiom:

noun high five: informal, mainly North American a gesture of celebration or greeting in which two people slap each other’s open palm with their arms raised: they gave each other an exuberant high five in the middle of the press center. verb high-five: [with object] greet with a high five: the two officers high-fived each other.

Q: Why high five? A: high because the arms are raised; five from the five fingers on one hand.

Then, instead of displaying the five fingers of one hand, the two Roman legionnaires are displaying a V sign, because the Roman numeral for ‘five’ is V. Think of it as a kind of manual pun.

The Bizarro. This one turns on a straightforward, though phonologically imperfect, pun:

(#2) antonym ‘opposite’ as a pun on the Antony of Antony and Cleopatra — as in the Shakespeare play, on the passionate (but doomed) relationship between Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, and Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony in English), as an agent of the Roman occupation of Egypt

The Shakespeare. From Wikipedia:

Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The play was first performed around 1607, by the King’s Men at either the Blackfriars Theatre or the Globe Theatre.

… The plot is based on Thomas North’s 1579 English translation of Plutarch’s Lives (in Ancient Greek) and follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony from the time of the Sicilian revolt to Cleopatra’s suicide during the War of Actium.

Other tellings. The story has been re-told many times, in a variety of forms, including several notable films. The most extravagant of which is surely the 1963 Cleopatra; from Wikipedia:

Cleopatra is a 1963 American epic historical drama film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with a screenplay adapted by Mankiewicz, Ranald MacDougall and Sidney Buchman from the 1957 book The Life and Times of Cleopatra by Carlo Maria Franzero, and from histories by Plutarch, Suetonius, and Appian. The film stars Elizabeth Taylor in the eponymous role, along with Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, Roddy McDowall and Martin Landau. It chronicles the struggles of the young queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt to resist the imperial ambitions of Rome.

From the film:

(#3) Taylor (then 31) and Burton (then 36), in golden times; they fell in love, and lust too, on the set

Even the film’s trashy indulgence of glitz and glamor and its absurd length can’t entirely overwhelm the poignant story; and Rex Harrison as Caesar, Roddy McDowell as Octavian, and Richard Burton as Mark Antony stand out for their characterizations (despite an erratic script). Elizabeth Taylor changes her costume every few minutes — I am not making this up — and is way out of her depth as Cleopatra (meanwhile, Burton figuratively reeks of testosterone, which works fine for the Mark Antony character). So in my opinion it’s a long vulgar mess with gems in it, which makes it, in my recollection, immensely enjoyable. I really should watch it again — but four hours would be a gigantic investment of my precious time.

Romulus Augustus Day, September 4th. From Wikipedia:

Romulus Augustus (c. 465 – after 511 [AZ: he was pretty much a cipher before 476, then vanished into obscurity afterwards]), nicknamed Augustulus, was Roman emperor of the West from 31 October 475 until 4 September 476. Romulus was placed on the imperial throne while still a minor by his father Orestes, the magister militum, for whom he served as little more than a figurehead. After a rule of ten months, the barbarian general Odoacer defeated and killed Orestes and deposed Romulus. As Odoacer did not proclaim any successor, Romulus is typically regarded as the last Western Roman emperor, his deposition marking the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity. The deposition of Romulus Augustulus is also sometimes used by historians to mark the transition from antiquity to the medieval period.

Remember, remember, the 4th of September

In e-mail on 9/24 from Masayoshi Yamada, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Shimane University (author of, inter alia: A Dictionary of Trade Names and A Dictionary of English Taboo and Euphemism), substantially edited:

Recently, I happened to read the newspaper comic strip Zits; on September 23 and 24, the main character Jeremy uses the expression “I had the radish”. One of the few dictionaries which defines it:

have had the radish ‘to be no longer functional or useful; to be dead or about to perish’. Local to the state of Vermont. Primarily heard in US. (Farlex Dictionary of Idioms, 2024) (Free Dictionary link)

However, I don’t have any clue to its etymology: why radish? And is it so local to Vermont? I have no idea which language source the Farlex Dictionary is based on. [AZ: It cites the Free Dictionary, which aggregates information from many sources, so that’s not especially helpful.]

I pointed out to MY that in the strip, Jeremy decides to just invent (make up) some expression, to see if he can get it accepted. And picks had the radish. Presumably in the belief that no one had ever used it as an idiom. The first three strips (in strips to come, Jeremy eventually concedes that his idiom has had the radish):

(#1) 9/23: the first attempt to spread the idiom

(#2) 9/24: a roadblock appears (with Jeremy’s buddies)

(#3) 9/25, today: resistance continues (with Jeremy’s family)

Here I note that these people are in (cartoon) central Ohio. Far from Vermont. Even if it turns out that the idiom is genuinely from Vermont (and that the creators of the cartoon, Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman, had somehow come across it and used it in the comic strip rather than inventing some entirely fresh expression for this meaning, like, say, earn the kaddish), in the cartoon, it’s a Jeremy coining, without any Green Mountain tinge.

However, I suspect I’ve found the Free Dictionary’s source. In my response to MY (somewhat edited), I noted a reputable source, which I now go on to quote from:

The idiom isn’t in the Dictionary of American Regional English, nor in (the three-volume) Green’s Dictionary of Slang. However, there is real evidence that it is in fact used in Vermont in this sense. From the Seven Days website (“an independent weekly newspaper covering Vermont news, politics, food, arts and culture”) WTF column, “What Does the Vermont Expression ‘Had the Radish’ Mean?” by Ken Picard on 12/20/17:

In keeping with this week’s Winter Reading Issue, WTF answers a native Vermonter’s burning lexicological question: “What does the expression ‘had the radish’ mean, and where did it come from?”

OK, perhaps the question isn’t burning so much as smoldering. Still, where there’s smoke, there’s fire — or so might say Wolfgang Mieder, a University of Vermont professor of German and folklore. Mieder is Vermont’s foremost paroe­miologist, or scholar of proverbs and proverbial expressions. If you’ve ever wondered about such colorful Vermontisms as “You can’t make a whistle out of a pig’s tail” or “A gallon of sap is worth one day’s labor,” Mieder is your go-to guy for tracing their meanings and origins.

Mieder, 73, is a jovial fellow from Lübeck, Germany, who’s taught at UVM for 46 years. During his tenure, he’s authored or edited more than a dozen books, including A Dictionary of American Proverbs, a compendium of more than 15,000 sayings, maxims and adages commonly used throughout the United States and Canada. As he remarked during a recent interview, “I always thought it was kind of neat that an immigrant did this book.”

Mieder’s enthusiasm for metaphorical language is palpable, and his office walls are lined with shelves of reference books and proverbs written in framed needlepoint. Some are commonplace, such as “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Others are less so: “One kind word will warm three winter months.”

Mieder instantly recognized the expression “had the radish” as meaning something that’s in deep trouble, spent or done for, as in: “That old tractor’s finally had the radish.” In fact, he first heard it from his wife, who heard it at Milton High School, where she taught German and Latin for 40 years after the couple moved to Vermont in 1971.

As to the expression’s Vermont roots, however, Mieder couldn’t immediately say. [AZ: and in the end he was still unable to say, though he cited a raft of imaginative speculations]

Meanwhile, back on Zits, you can look forward to had the radish having had the radish. (I have a certain limited ability to see into the comics future.)

A cartoon by Suerynn Lee in the New Yorker issue of 10/14/24:

(#1) We’re … we’re … like two peas in a pod!

Those peas really know their idioms.

The peapod pendant. From my 8/5/23 posting of this name, about this pendant:

(#2) Made by Georgia Morgan; a present to myself on my 83rd birthday

Symbolism of the peapod 1. For me, the peapod is a masculine symbol, a hyperbolic image of the (two) testes nestled within the protective scrotum (2 will get you 5).

But, as I point out regularly on this blog, symbols are just stuff, with no intrinsic, single meaning; a symbol can bear many different meanings, evoke many different associations, in different contexts, for different people.

Even I, with my ridiculous genital focus (I am entirely aware that my many kinks, considered dispassionately, lie on a scale from the silly to the preposterous, but they are my kinks, and I treasure them), immediately see another way of seeing the peapod symbolically.

Symbolism of the peapod 2. It turns on the idiom like two peas in a pod (from the Cambridge Dictionary on-line: very similar, especially in appearance: The twins are like two peas in a pod.) From which we get the peapod as a symbol of common humanity, of the unity of all human beings: though each of us is unique, we all share many characteristics.

Symbolism of the peapod 3. From the website Behind the Recipe — Jeri Quinzio: The stories behind recipes of the past and, sometimes, the present, “Peas symbols. Or, why peas are perfect for Valentine’s Day” …, on 1/26/22:

(#3) 10 peas in a pod

This Valentine’s Day, do something different. Forget flowers and candy. Present your lover with peas.

We may have forgotten the folklore, but for centuries, peas and pea pods (earlier called peascods) have been tiny symbols of love, romance, and fertility. Not merely a healthful food, simple side dish, or soup ingredient, peas are a rich source of stories and legends. They’re teeming with tradition.

… Both peas and pea pods had long been associated with love and marriage. Because pea pods shield little baby peas and ensure their safe delivery, businesses catering to pregnant women are often called some variation of “peas in a pod.”

According to David Moore, a nineteenth-century writer on gardening, “Peas and Peascods  are connected with wooing the lasses.” A lad would pick peapods and if the peas remained in the pod, he presented it to the lass of his choice.

… Folklore was also filled with stories about young women using peas to identify the right men.

(Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

Ok, one more little posting before I tackle writing about the last week in my life, parts of which were spectacularly awful, but through most of which I coped admirably and in good spirits, I don’t know why or how. This simultaneously disastrous and miraculous week ended with my delicious Thanksgiving dinner, of Korean soy and black vinegar chicken on japchae, a last-minute replacement for the long-planned Mexican homestyle pozole, which had to be shelved when the cook was incapacitated. Details to come.

But first a new gay porn release from NakedSword, with a title that’s a laughably lame, absurdly ugly pun.

What do you call a video set in a Spanish villa that’s about reciprocal anal intercourse? — Flip-Fuck Fiesta? Iberian Butt Buddies? Malaga Male on Male?  Mi Culo Es Su Culo? I could go on in this vein for some time.

But Spain in the Ass, just ouch. The ouch of the model expression pain in the ass is the ugly part; if you’re doing it right, there should be no pain, the two of you should collaborate so that it feels fantastic for the both of you (trust me; in a previous life, I used to do this a lot).

And then the image of Spain in a guy’s ass is just ludicrous, it’s just cramming the country into man-on-man sex. So, sadly, from the XBiz site, “Sir Peter, Paddy O’Brian Star in ‘Spain in the Ass’ From NakedSword” by Tom Grayson on 11/20/24:

San Francisco — Falcon / NakedSword exclusive Sir Peter and Paddy O’Brian star in the studio’s latest release, titled “Spain in the Ass.”

Directed by Alter Sin and Ben Rush, the first installment of the two-part release features O’Brian’s NakedSword Originals debut.

“A dip in the pool soon has Sir Peter and Paddy O’Brian’s soaking wet briefs clinging to their hard-ons as they embrace each other before a 100% raw flip-fuck,” the synopsis reveals. “After exchanging blowjobs outdoors, the two head inside their gorgeous Spanish villa, where an eager Sir Peter strokes Paddy’s cock from the back while spreading open his cheeks to rim his deliciously hairy hole.”

“Spain in the Ass: Sir Peter and Paddy O’Brian Flip-Fuck — Part 1” is streaming on NakedSword; the second scene will drop Nov. 27.

Everybody sing: I’ve got Spain inside my ass / I’ve got Spain deep in the heart of me …

Returning to a very old topic on this blog, making small advances on some outstanding puzzles. It starts with my 6/8/11 posting (yes, 14 years ago) “Parasites and the body politic”, about

my dismayed reaction to recent political assaults on teachers (and, more generally, public employees) as drains on the economy, selfishly demanding decent wages and benefits while being “unproductive”, producing nothing of significance. Lots of things are going on at once here — contempt for the working classes and for service workers like maids, cooks, gardeners, and janitors (and, yes, teachers); classic American anti-intellectualism (cue Richard Hofstadter); marketplace valuation of people’s worth; and more — but parallel attitudes surface in the way many people view academics, so it hits close to home for me.

Then the anecdote. Some years ago I was at some large public function involving people of money and substance and, wine glass in hand, struck up a conversation with another attendee. This guy plunged right in by asking me what I do [for a living]. (In many cultures, the leading question would be some version of “Where are you from?”, meaning “Who are your people?”, but in ours it has to do with occupation. All such questions are designed to position a stranger socially.)

I said I was a university professor, and, without waiting to identify himself occupationally, he said

Artists and scholars are parasites on the body politic. [call this State Suckers, SS for short]

I was by then old enough and experienced enough to just turn on my heels and walk away in search of someone else who might be interesting to talk to. (After all, I consider myself an artist as well as a scholar.)

(Either he was serious, in which case he was a hopelessly prejudiced asshole. Or he didn’t believe what he’d said and was just trying to joust with me for sport, in which case he was a different kind of asshole.)

Eventually, I came to wonder about what he’d said. Not very likely to be a spontaneous utterance; on the body politic, even without parasites, sure sounds like a quotation, not something that an ordinary speaker would come up with on their own.

Two parts here: the very poetic or archaic formulation the body politic, rather than, say, the state (what is its source?); and the parasites (a one-time bit of figurative language, or something also conventionalized to some extent?)

I passed these queries on to the hounds of ADS-L (the mailing list of the American Dialect Society), without much of a response. The questions lay fallow until recently, when I was pushed back towards looking at the SS claim by people wondering why anyone would read this blog, much less pay me for it (and then feeling partially vindicated in their dismissal of me upon discovering that I don’t get paid for this blog). My position is that I do some small — and as people are forever telling me, idiosyncratic — things reasonably well, in a way that a few people appreciate, doing it virtually every day, and that’s good enough. It’s a life. Yes, it will soon vanish with hardly any trace, but then most lives do. Meanwhile, stop dinging at me that I should have used my evident talents to do something other than what I did, something actually useful.

There are, however, the salaries that four universities have paid me (and that then provided me with a modest retirement income). Have I been sucking the lifeblood from society to pay for the frivolity of art and scholarship? What parsnips have been buttered by my life’s work? (The question implicates the answer: None.)

I say that there’s great value in story-telling, poetry, singing, playing instruments and playing games, dancing, painting, sculpting, weaving, and so on; in making life joyous and pleasurable, even exhilarating. And in learning, figuring out things that make the world — the natural world, our psychological and social worlds — wondrous and comprehensible. Fun, beauty, understanding, they’re the payoff.

Still, some days I fear I haven’t done much. From my 10/12/14 posting “October occasions”:

recently I’ve been struggling to create an interview document for a grammar / linguistics site about my work in linguistics and on my blog, a task that has demoralized me deeply: what have I done with my life? Ouch, ouch.

Remembering Jim [McCawley] has deepened my despair. As Noriko Akatsuka McCawley once said to me about Jim: he extruded papers and books. Wonderful papers and books, engagingly written and produced at white speed. A hard standard to meet.

But SS, professor, what about SS? When I went back to it this week, I started with two old-school (not on-line) dictionaries of quotations, looking under body, politic, parasites, and (since it popped up on-line in connection with the others) leeches.

body politic. That got me (only) one cite, for body politic, but a landmark one — in an English translation of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social (1762):

The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from its birth, and bears in itself the causes of its destruction.

No life-sucking creatures there.

But then OED3 (revised 2010) has a lot under the relevant sense of body politic, which chugs along from the 15th century to the 20th, when it picks up three cites in which the body politic is threatened, by blood-sucking liver flukes, baleful institutions, and poisons.

1. A nation regarded as a corporate entity; (with the) the state.

Frequently with body contrasted with the head of state, or used in medical metaphors [in which the body politic is contrasted with the body natural].

First cite a1475; the early uses are as a legal term; then there are more general uses from the 17th century on. Then in the 20th century, we get, among other cites, the threatened body politic:

1932 character in a Maxwell Anderson play: The whole damn government’s a gang of liver flukes, sucking the blood out of the body politic.

1993 Rush Limbaugh book: Though I denounce liberalism’s effect on our body politic, our culture, and our society, I deliberately eschew alarmism and fatalism.

2002 Will Self novel: Taking the long view, perhaps the West End junkies with their Dikes and Rits were the obsessive psychic abscess that, once burst, spread this poison throughout the body politic.

In the first two of these, we see an association with a right-wing political stance on the part of the source of the phrase. Hold that thought.

suckers. First parasites, as in SS. I found only a few examples, suggesting that the word in parasites on the body politic is an off-the-cuff, freshly coined, bit of figurative language, like the Maxwell Anderson character’s blood-sucking liver flukes. On the other hand, this search unearthed a number of leeches on the body politic (associative searching can on occasion be useful). Then I searched specifically on leeches, and got a slew of examples.

It looks like leeches on the body politic is formulaic, a conventional collocation (approaching idiom status) that can be pulled off the shelf, as it were. If the body politic is threatened, you can probably blame it on leeches.

The first of my finds happened to in the title of an academic journal article that uses it as a quotation, assumed to be familiar:

Charlotte Wells (historian at the University of Northern Iowa), “Leeches on the body politic: xenophobia and witchcraft in early modern French political thought”, French Historical Studies 22.3 (summer 1999)

The next three to come up:

column by Jonathan C. Jobe, Tahlequah Daily Press (Tahlequah, Cherokee Co. OK), 1/13/20: Those who scream “racism” are nothing more than the vultures who circle over the battlefield, waiting for someone to fall so they can devour his corpse as he slowly dies. They make nothing, contribute nothing, and are leeches on the body politic.

story by Don Pittis, Canadian Broadcasting Co. News, 4/8/13: Thatcher’s policies were the model for modern conservatism. The rich were no longer seen as leeches on the body politic, but creators of wealth. 

opinion column by Tim Worstall (Adam Smith Institute, London) in Dhaka Tribune (Dhaka, Bangladesh), 12/3/23: What if Milei’s plans actually work out? After all, it is possible — I would say certain, but then again I would — that they will. That killing off the leeches on the body politic will revive the economy.

This was remarkable; all three are associated with sources who take an aggressively right-wing political stance. So there seems to be a frequent political subtext to the collocation leeches on the body politic. That remains to be verified through large-scale data collections that I’m not able to do. But further along in my leeches search came an even more remarkable cite, with the verb leech in combination with body politic, from an aggressively right-wing political writer in an opinion column with a title that has parasites threatening the body politic — a kind of home run of body-politic leeches / parasites:

column by Ralph K. Ginorio ((self-identified) Conservative Idaho high school teacher of the history of Western civilization), “Parasites Threaten Our Body Politic”, Kootenai Journal (Kootenai Co. (Idaho Panhandle) ID), 4/30/24: Like any parasite, the Democratic Party has leeched value off of the American body politic to feed itself and its constituent factions.

And then to get back to my engagement with that stranger at a reception more than 45 years ago: he used SS to diss artists and scholars, which certainly sounded like a right-wing opinion to me.