Two Monday comics on linguistic topics: a Calvin and Hobbes with an unfortunate ambiguity (pitch the tent), and a Zits with a portmanteau for a combo sport (dodgebowl):

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Pitch the tent. The etymological source for the verb has a cluster of meanings in the domain ‘thrust, throw’: note the current senses in pitch a baseball and pitch an idea to the boss, and these two from NOAD2:

2 [with obj.] throw or fling roughly or casually: he crumpled the page up and pitched it into the fireplace. [with a further extension in slang: throw away, discard]

5 [with obj.] set up and fix in a definite position: we pitched camp for the night.

These are the senses in #1: the scoutmaster intended sense 5, Calvin understood it as sense 2, possibly because extended sense 2 is quite general, applying to a wide range of direct objects, while sense 5 has much tighter collocational restrictions: you can pitch a tent, or pitch camp, and that’s pretty much it (these are simply listed as idioms in many dictionaries).

Bonus on pitch tent. There’s a (metaphorical) sexual sense ‘have an erection that shows through covering, esp. while lying down so that the sheet above you stands up like a tentpole’. From a (wildly hyperbolic) site with fictional athletes to appeal to female readers:

Ladies meet Vincent QB#1 Panty Dropper Delgado: Every teen movie has the hot QB-ONE who balls hard day and night. That character was invented by Vince’s life. He has that smile that makes the bros nod and hoes wet. He is a 9 time All American. He’s been married four times and been through divorce twice. He owns 3 houses on every continent. He benches 275 lbs when he’s cutting and runs a 3.6 sec 40 yard dash with a weight vest underwater with a single breath. He has a childhood video of him dunking a basket ball the first time he ever tried (which was the second time he ever jumped when he was 8). The first girlfriend he ever had was a married Victoria Secret model. When the model’s husband found out, he divorced the model without giving a reason. The next week he tried proposing to Vince.

Here are some pictures of Vince that are just definitive proof that he is number one. He is a whole package for anyone who likes a BIG package. No homo. Just mad respect.

Look ladies he is outdoorsy. He can go camping and hike and pitch a tent for you and carry your back pack and make fires and shit.

Vincent pitching a tent:

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And a further bonus, Vince shirtless:

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Dodgebowl. That’s dodgeball + bowling, a portmanteau name for a combination sport/game (or double-sport, as some sites have it), apparently involving dodging bowling balls. Definitely a sport for the hardy.

Not surprisingly, there’s a (moderately snarky) BuzzFeed site (from 12/11/13) “10 Combination Sports You Need To Try Today”. It’s a mixed bag:

bicycle jousting, unicycle hockey, korfball [netball (Swedish ringboll) + basketball; Dutch korf ‘basket’], chess boxing, polocrosse, Segway polo, disc golf [frisbee golf], gravy wrestling, lawn mower racing, basketball derby [“there are no rules”]

Most of these are N + N compounds, and these mix cases where sports / games / pasttimes are combined (chess boxing, bicycle jousting, disc golf), with cases (unicycle hockey, Segway polo, lawn mower racing) where sports are played with non-standard equipment (plus gravy wrestling, involving wrestling in gravy, which I suppose you could consider a sport with non-standard equipment). There’s one entirely clear case of a portmanteau naming a combined sport: polocrosse (polo + lacrosse). Plus the Zits dodgebowl.

It turns out that there is a moderately popular phys-ed class team sport in the U.S. (grades 3 to 7, roughly) known as dodge-bowl or dodgebowl — but it involves foam bowling balls, not real, heavy, ones, as in Zits.

Today’s Zippy, with 19th-century novelty architecture:

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From Wikipedia:

The Elephantine Colossus, otherwise known as the Colossal Elephant or the Elephant Colossus, or by its function as the Elephant Hotel, was a tourist attraction located on Coney Island that was built in the shape of an elephant. An example of novelty architecture, the seven-story tall structure designed by James V. Lafferty stood above Surf Avenue and West 12th Street from 1885 until 1896, when it burnt down in a fire. During its lifespan, the thirty-one room building acted as a hotel, concert hall, and amusement bazaar.

It was the second of three elephants built by Lafferty, preceded by Atlantic City’s Lucy the Elephant and followed by The Light of Asia in Cape May.

The Elephant Hotel in a contemporary photograph:

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Earlier on this blog: from 4/18/15 “Artificial elephants and X Must Die! movies”, a  Zippy with Lucy the Margate Elephant (in Margate City NJ, near Atlantic City), constructed by Lafferty in 1881.

Notes. The title of the strip, “Not a real Republican”, alludes to the elephant as the symbol of the (U.S.) Republican Party, to claims that some who identify as Republicans are not real Republicans but are RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), and to the Elephantine Colossus as a building, not a real elephant.

And of course, elephant in your yard (in the strip) and 31-room elephant in the room (in my title) are allusions. From Wikipedia:

“Elephant in the room” or ” Elephant in the living room ‘ is an English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is going unaddressed. The idiomatic expression also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss. It is based on the idea/thought that an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook.

Two recent cartoons turning on fixed expressions, compounds in fact: a Rhymes With Orange and a One Big Happy:

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working girl. #1 turns on the ambiguity of the compound working girl, in both senses ‘girl (that is, woman) who works for a living’ — in one sense with literal work; in the other, with a specialized sense of work: (from Green’s Dictionary of Slang) ‘work as a street prostitute’, attested from 1939 on (usually with a direct object denoting a place: work the clubs, work the street, work that corner, etc.).

The daughter in #1 intends the first, but the mother is inclined to hear the second, euphemistic for ‘prostitute’, for which Green’s has  a pile of U.S. cites (with variants working broad, working chick, working woman), from 1928 on.

The expression is genuinely ambiguous, to the extent that a hit movie (not about a prostitute) could have the title Working Girl. From Wikipedia:

Working Girl is a 1988 romantic comedy-drama film directed by Mike Nichols and written by Kevin Wade. It tells the story of a Staten Island-raised secretary, Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith), working in the mergers and acquisitions department of a Wall Street investment bank. When her boss, Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), breaks her leg skiing, Tess uses Parker’s absence and connections, including her errant beau Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), to put forward her own idea for a merger deal.

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toothy comb. Ruthie’s version of fine-tooth(ed) comb is fairly far from the original, but we can see how to get there.

Start from the full expression. From NOAD2:

fine-tooth comb (also fine-toothed comb) a comb with narrow teeth that are close together. – [in sing.] used with reference to a very thorough search or analysis of something: you should check the small print with a fine-tooth comb.

The main sense here is largely compositional, ‘a comb with fine (that is, narrow) teeth’ (note the metaphorical teeth here), and the two variants are often alternatives: a three-floored building, a three-floor building (though some combinations are fixed: a three-masted schooner (not three-mast), a three-course dinner (not three-coursed)). So let’s disregard that variation. But the secondary, metaphorical, sense is specialized, and its connection to narrow teeth might be not at all clear to some speakers.

The way is then open to reinterpreting fine-tooth(ed) comb as fine tooth(ed)-comb, possibly with the adjective fine ‘excellent’ (or with fine ‘delicate’), but certainly with a different parsing of its parts. Some number of English speakers have done this. As I wrote in an eggcorn posting on Language Log some years ago:

fine-tooth comb > fine toothcomb. An interpretation reported to me by Gerald Gazdar in the summer of 1987, when I corrected his misapprehension as reflected in a paper he was writing.

Gerald (a noted theoretical linguist and computational linguist) had an image of a tooth comb — I think he understood it as ‘comb for teeth’ rather that ‘comb with teeth’ — and he’s far from the only person to have done so.

If you parse it this way, then tooth-comb (or tooth comb or toothcomb) is the head of the composite, and fine is a modifying adjective, hence in principle dispensable. In #2, Ruthie’s dispensed with fine, and understood toothed as an adjective, for which she offered the alternative toothy.

Two recent One Big Happy strips, one with Joe updating a nursery rhyme (with Ruthie’s help), one with Ruthie once again in the Land of Ambiguity:

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Three Blind Mice. Joe’s ingenious elaboration of the story of the three blind mice introduces one especially remarkable feature, the health insurance (to allay Ruthie’s concern about animals being harmed).

From Wikipedia:

“Three Blind Mice” is an English-language nursery rhyme and musical round [with its origin in the early 17th century; possible reference to historical figures is unclear].

[modern words]
Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they run. See how they run.
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,
Did you ever see such a sight in your life,
As three blind mice?

…[another elaboration] Published by Frederick Warne & Co., an illustrated children’s book by John W. Ivimey entitled The Complete Version of Ye Three Blind Mice, fleshes the mice out into mischievous characters who seek adventure, eventually being taken in by a farmer whose wife chases them from the house and into a bramble bush, which blinds them. Soon after, their tails are removed by “the butcher’s wife” when the complete version incorporates the original verse. The story ends with them using a tonic to grow new tails and recover their eyesight, learning a trade (making wood chips, according to the accompanying illustration), buying a house and living happily ever after. Published perhaps in 1900, the book is now in the public domain.

There are endless (often cloyingly) childish videos of the rhyme, but I recommend the 1962 (instrumental-only) recording by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, which you can listen to here.

Horse-drawn. #2 is considerably more straightforward. It turns on a simple ambiguity in the verb draw — from NOAD2:

[1] produce (a picture or diagram) by making lines and marks, especially with a pen or pencil, on paper

[2] pull or drag (something such as a vehicle) so as to make it follow behind

(These two verbs draw have the same historical source  in Germanic, but quite clearly separated long ago.)

So horse-drawn is either ‘pulled by a horse’ (the most plausible reading from a real-world perspective, but a reading using the infrequent verb draw [2]; horse-drawn ‘pulled by a horse’ is now an idiom, and is separately listed by NOAD2) or ‘depicted by a horse artist’ (semantically transparent, but bizarre by real-world standards, as Ruthie recognizes).

Today’s Zippy takes us to Minneapolis MN, where people are flinging bowling balls, flinging them down Memory Lanes:

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Linguistic notes: Ok, the pun on lane (in a bowling alley vs. in the metaphorical idiom down memory lane ‘in your memory of the pleasures of past events’ (Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms)). And the pun on fling (the verb fling ‘throw, toss’, as in impelling a bowling ball, vs. thing in the Proust title Remembrance of Things Past). It’s all about memory.

The bowling alley. The actual retro neon sign in #1:

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From their website:

Memory Lanes and Flashback Cafe & Cocktail Lounge, Minneapolis MN

Our state-of-the-art facility (with retro decor) is the perfect destination for any occasion!  We have 30 bowling lanes, a full-service bar & restaurant featuring pizzas, sandwiches, burgers and other favorites with 17 tap lines and a wide selection of bottled and canned beer and all the popular spirits, live music and other live events, 29 LCD screens for your viewing pleasure, 2 outdoor sand volleyball courts, darts and arcade games.

Not just pizza, sandwiches, and burgers, but an assortment of America’s favorite appetizers:

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From the bottom to the top. Polish sausage from the areas of Polish settlement in the U.S. (especially the northern industrial belt, from Buffalo through Minneapolis). BBQ chicken wings, originally from the South and as soul food, and, eventually, served with blue cheese dressing as “Buffalo wings”. Huevos rancheros originally from the American Southwest and now available almost everywhere as a standard “Mexican” dish. Walleye  (pike) from the Great Lakes area, especially Minnesota. And sliders, associated originally with the mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions of the country.

OED draft additions June 2015 on slider:

Chiefly U.S. Originally (slang): a hamburger. Now chiefly: a small hamburger; (more generally) any small sandwich made with a roll. [first cite 1974, Chicago Tribune; then 1981 in the Chicago Tribune, referring to White Castle’s little square burgers; later, 2006, grilled ahi tuna sliders, and, 2011, the sloppy-joe slider]

(so called, of course, because they slide easily dow the throat).

More food. In the third panel of #1, Zippy’s thoughts veer onto Little Debbie Pecan Spinwheels, possibly from an association to spinning (that is, rolling and turning) bowling balls:

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(Zippy is also a great fan of Little Debbie snack products (from McKee Foods), as well as Hostess snack foods, so Little Debbies are always in his mind.)

From the Little Debbie website:

Pecan Spinwheels^®  Sweet Rolls: A soft, fun pastry rolled with cinnamon spice and pecans .

Where to get Little Debbies in Minneapolis? Zippy’s looks to Kowalski’s Market, in a chain of markets in Minneapolis and surrounding areas.

Note. Ford’s vice president was Nelson Rockefeller. You’re on your own for zero sum and gnome vs. genome. And the 1958 Metro (a real car, but apparetly not one that Zippy owns).

A P.C. Vey cartoon in the latest (Sept. 5th) New Yorker:

Three things: the parallel between a steak on the grill and a book in progress; authorial anxiety over writing on something and completing it; and the pragmatics of the idioms in how’s it going? and how’s it coming?

Background. The artist has appeared only once on ths blog before, in a 1/29/16 posting entitled simply “P.C. Vey”.

Steaks and books. The main conceit of the cartoon is the parallel between cooking a steak on the grill and writing a book: just as people ask about the progress of the steak (in a politer versions of “Is it ready yet?”), so people ask about the progress of the book — or, indeed, any writing project you might have going, but especially books, because they’re very substantial projects.

The humor comes in turning the analogical relationship between steak and book into an identity: the author is cooking the book on the grill.

Authorial anxiety. If you’re like most writers, you really dread even well-intentioned queries about how your current project is going. If it’s a book, a short story, or an essay or scholarly article of any length, you’ll have had some clear idea of where you want it to go, but you’ll probably have found that the work seems to have a mind of its own and is taking you places you never thought you’d be going; this is enormously disconcerting, and it makes it hard to cope with people who ask how it’s going. (There are writers who maintain that this experience happens only to weak-minded pussies and that Real Writers map things out ahead of time and resolutely stick to the itinerary. Sigh.)

(If you’re a poet, either hide that fact or go into seclusion, if possible in an artists’ colony, where other poets will appreciate your plight. Otherwise, everyone thinks that your task is trivial, because, like, poems are so short, how much work could it take to turn them out? You could ask these people how long and how much work it takes to produce a finger of really good single malt whiskey, but in my experience that approach never really works; after all, these people say, poems are just words.)

Idiom time. The motion verbs go and come both figure in a family of idioms involving manner adverbials — as in Things are going well and Things are coming along nicely, but especially in idioms with the interrogative adverbial how, in How’s it going? or How goes it? ‘How are you doing? How are you?’ (as conventional polite queries).

Which brings us to (a) How’s your book going? and (b) How’s your book coming? Both are possible as queries to an author, but they differ subtly in ways that follow from facts about the semantics and pragmatics of the motion verbs go and come.

The verb go simply merely motion, progression, in space, or metaphorically in some other domain. The verb come, however, also evokes the end-point, the goal, of this progression, which makes (b) a much more pointed question than (a). If you’re an author, (a) will produce authorial anxiety, but (b) will give it to you in spades, because it asks, omigod, how close you are to finishing.

(Go and come are also famously different in what they convey about the location of the speaker with respect to the motion, but that difference doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant for (a) vs. (b).)

Two recent Dilberts:

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First Dilbert and the quality assurance guy Alan, then the pointy-haired boss and Alan.

Standard dictionaries don’t seem to have the technical use of assurance in quality assurance, though there is a techie Wikipedia entry on quality assurance that relates the expression to the verb ensure, rather than to the verb assure that the literalist Alan sees in it.

From NOAD2 on assurance, with my notes on the relationship between the noun assurance and the verb assure:

1 a positive declaration intended to give confidence; a promise: [with clause]: he gave an assurance that work would not recommence until Wednesday. [AZ: cf. He assured us that work would not recommece until Wednesday]

2 confidence or certainty in one’s own abilities: she drove with assurance. [AZ: cf. She was assured / certain in her driving]

[2a] certainty about something: the crowd’s assurance of Joe’s guilt. [AZ: cf. The crowd was assured / certain of Joe’s guilt]

3 chiefly Brit. insurance, specifically life insurance.

1 is a speech verb (involving a speaker, an addressee, and a proposition conveyed by the speaker to the addressee), 2 and 2a a mental-action verb (involving a belief arrived at by some route, including the case where the belief is instilled by someone else’s speech, but also allowing for a number of other possibilities).

Alan in the cartoons is using assurance-1, while assurance in the hymn Blessed Assurance (“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! / O what a foretaste of glory divine!”) is assurance-2a (‘I am assured / certain that Jesus is mine’). (Discussion of the hymn in a 12/14/10 posting.)

Then comes Wikipedia on quality assurance: a long piece aimed at a tech-savvy  business audience, not so easy for ordinary people to penetrate. A bit from the beginning, with the crucial verb boldfaced:

Quality assurance (QA) is a way of preventing mistakes or defects in manufactured products and avoiding problems when delivering solutions or services to customers; which ISO 9000 defines as “part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled”. This defect prevention in quality assurance differs subtly from defect detection and rejection in quality control, and has been referred to as a shift left as it focuses on quality earlier in the process.

The terms “quality assurance” and “quality control” are often used interchangeably to refer to ways of ensuring the quality of a service or product.

So, yes, it’s about ensuring quality. From NOAD2:

ensure make certain that (something) shall occur or be the case: [with clause]: the client must ensure that accurate records be kept.

[a] make certain of obtaining or providing (something): [with two objs.]: she would ensure him a place in society.

[b] [no obj.] (ensure against) make sure that (a problem) shall not occur.

The derived nominalization would of course be ensurance — but that would be too close to insurance. A usage note from NOAD2:

There is considerable overlap between the meaning and use of insure and ensure. In both US and British English, the primary meaning of insure is the commercial sense of providing financial compensation in the event of damage to property; ensure is not used at all in this sense. For the more general senses, ensure is more likely to be used, but insure and ensure are often interchangeable, particularly in US English: bail is posted to insure that the defendant appears for trial | the system is run to ensure that a good quality of service is maintained.

The nominalization ensurance in the sense ‘the action of ensuring or making certain’ is in fact not just rare, but way beyond rare: OED2 marks it as obsolete, and has only two cites (from 1654 and 1688). Instead, assurance steps in.

This means that quality assurance isn’t semantically compositional. It’s an idiom — tough news for literalists like Alan, but idioms are everywhere.

A recent One Big Happy has Ruthie, once again, coping with an expression unfamiliar to her — the negative polarity item (NPI) have the vaguest idea, under the scope of negative n’t in doesn’t have the vaguest idea — by interpreting vaguest as a phonologically close item familiar to her from watching daytime television: Vegas, short for Las Vegas.:

In fact, in casual speech, vaguest commonly lacks a final [t], so that it’s either homophonous with Vegas or differs from it only in the unaccented vowel in the final syllable (high in vagues‘, mid in Vegas — the same difference, for these speakers, as in Rose’s vs. Rosa’s).

Still, there’s some delight to be found in the concept of having the Vegas idea.

About male photography featuring naked men horsing around together, mostly at the beach. The (four) X-rated images are in a posting on AZBlogX; they’re there because they show penises, but in (I maintain) an essentially innocent way, but still there are penises. On this blog we’ll get we’ll get buttocks and concealed penises, but without sexual charge, so the images are technically safe for kids and the sexually modest, but you might want to use your judgment.

There are points about sexuality, about social practices involving the body (notably, horseplay), and about the use of on leave and on liberty.

The whole thing started with a penguin-themed collage based on an image of naked men frolicking in the surf (#2 on AZBlogX). That led (after some hours of searching) to another image of the same men horsing around, an image carefully chosen by the photographer to be technically safe, one that got me to the source, a 1993 book of male photography, Shoreleave, by Andrew Kennedy.

This photo:

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A cheeky description of the book from a bookseller’s site:

Four sailors and one naval officer take shore leave and provide the viewer with eighty pages of the young male in all his glory. As they leave the ship, one sailor urinates in the street. — They set out in a convertible, pick up a hunky hitchhiker, play beach volley ball, sunbathe and swim naked of course.  They pop a beer, play pool, just hang out.

On AZBlog: posing for the camera in #3 and #5, playing beach volleyball in #4. From AZBlogX:

Everybody’s cock hangin’ out for everything, but at approximately the sexual temperature of a naturist camp; if dick display can be said to be innocent, this is it. On the other hand, in their frequent posing, the guys show great pride in their bodies and pleasure at dislaying them (to each other and the wider world). But that’s a guy thing — if you’ve got it, flaunt it — not an especially gay guy thing.

As usual, men in general can appreciate these photos by identifying with the men in them, by wanting to be them, while gay men get an extra kick from seeing the men in the photos also as objects of desire, from wanting to do them. (Well, each gay man will have his own favorites.)

Amplifying on dick innocence:

[These images have to be on AZBlogX] because of the dicks, but the dicks are not at all the point of the photo, beyond the fact that they signify freedom and lack of constraint . [Putting this another way: their dicks are at liberty — NOAD2 on at liberty, ‘allowed or entitled to do something’, that is , ‘free (to)’]. (They hardly work as dicks for veneration or jack-off purposes: they’re normal-size, not even close to pornstar quality, and they’re retracted about as far as dicks can be, so they’re minimal appendages.)

Going naked is a male cultural thing (quite outside naturism movements), simultaneously an assertion of freedom (from conventions of propriety, order, neatness, and so on — note, all conventions typically assigned to women, mothers and then female partners, to regulate) and an assertion of masculinity through going rough and bonding with other men. There are long traditions of athletic contests in the nude, as well as naked swimming and running and the like, combining competition, demonstrations of endurance and toughness, displaying your own body and appreciating other men’s bodies, and joy.

In this context, a man’s dick isn’t so much something wielded for sex as merely a gender tag. It says: yes, I’ve got a man’s face and hair and muscles, and, oh yes, here’s the dick too. In this context, nobody cares how big it is or whether it’s hard, just that it is.

… [Another] significant feature of the two surf-frolicking photos: in the story they convey, the … characters are buddies, almost surely straight (and the models were almost surely straight too). They are bonding in pleasurable, but non-sexual, horseplay. Still, the images are homoerotic, because they show gorgeous men engaging in satisfying physical and emotional intimacy with other men. If you’re gay, that’s powerful, and really hot. (If you’re straight, it just looks like a lot of fun.)

Horseplay ‘rough, boisterous play’ is the relevant lexical item here. (The word has been around since the 16th century. My sources are not especially helpful in explaining it, saying only that it’s horse + play. Perhaps the original alluded to the gamboling of foals in the field; certainly, play — especially mock combat — among young animals  is widespread.)

The cultural practice, in modern America at any rate, is one engaged in by straight boys and men for fun; Kennedy’s boys are smiling or laughing in delight, as are the young men in this wonderful image (whose source I have not yet identified for sure, though it might well be Kennedy again) — who are also engaged in agonistic play, in mock combat:

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Horseplay on this blog:

Item 1. In “Male beauty” of 3/10/16, on Johan Paulik and Chance in Bel Ami Studio’s gay porn flick An American in Prague:

[Chance is] taken on a four-day tour of gay-sexual Prague. Their scenes together are full of adolescent horseplay as well as hot sex.

The actors are in fact young and straight, and it’s entertaining to see them move back and forth between their characters’ intense gaysex focus and their own (not entirely unstudied, I grant) adolescent goofiness.

Item 2. In “The strap snap” of 12/12/15, about jockstrap snapping:

Out in the real world, strap snapping is a not uncommon bit of locker room horseplay by teammates, with one guy snapping one strap of another guy’s jock; it stings, but only mildly. Then there is towel-snapping in the showers [also intended to be mildly hurtful, but not actually harmful], and more advanced body play, like fingering a teammate’s asshole.

The guys involved in this horseplay are usually straight; gay guys tend to do their best not to put themselves into potentially arousing situations like the ones I’ve just described. (I’ve seen strap snapping and towel-snapping at first hand, but not asshole-fingering, though there are plenty of accounts of locker room play in which fingering plays a part.) The emotional resonances of this apparently aggressive play are complex: part jockeying for dominance, part male bonding in which the targets are accorded membership in a tight group and show that they can good-heartedly “take it like a man”. The play is ritualized and almost never dissolves into actual aggression. [Everybody is supposed to laugh.]

Linguistic note. Kennedy’s story is about sailors on shore leave, and his photographs show men at liberty to display themselves, which brings us to the American Navy terms on leave and on liberty.

The expressions on leave and on liberty have very different meanings in the Navy. If you’re on leave, there are no restrictions on your travel, within the time limits of the leave. If you’re on liberty, your release is time-restricted, usually a weekend, you can’t leave the immediate area (as defined locally, so from 50 to 400 miles, depending on your base), and you have to be available for recall; but all federal holidays are liberty days, unless you have assigned duty on board.

(For sailors on leave in NYC, the standard guide is the Bernstein/Comden/Green On the Town, on Broadway in 1944, on film in 1949.)

Carnal note. Kennedy’s photos above are from the front, so even if the dicks aren’t the point, they’re in the picture (or just barely concealed). On the other hand, many of Kennedy’s  photos celebrate butts / asses unabashedly, and that’s more clearly homoerotic. Another from Shoreleave:

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There’s a gogantic world of beach butts out there, many already surveyed on AZBlogX. Here are two collections of surf guys, in shots where hand on ass is a thing:

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As far as I can tell, these are straight guys hanging with each other, guys so sure of their sexuality that they can use hand on ass as an affiliative gesture. I don’t have good identifications of either of these photos, but Google Images suggests that #4 shows guys from a Latin American fútbol team, either Atlético Tucumán in Mexico or Atlético River Plate in Argentina, while #5 is simply identified as “heteros mostrando a bunda” (‘straight guys showing ass’ in Portuguese), in what looks like an American football huddle.

Buddy butt pats if you’re straight, copping butt feels if you’re gay.

(Some vernacular sex talk along the way, so some judgment might be called for.)

It started with Dave Hause on ADS-L reporting this item from the seekingalpha site  (with the crucial bit boldfaced below):

The next wave of media consolidation will surely be on investors’ minds today following AT&T’s weekend agreement to buy Time Warner. Discovery Communications (NASDAQ:DISCA), Scripps Networks (NYSE:SNI), AMC Networks (NASDAQ:AMCX), Lions Gate (NYSE:LGF), Viacom (VIA, VIAB), and CBS already had their tails in the air on Friday afternoon as merger talk between AT&T and Time Warner heated up.

Hause reflected:

I may be off but I would interpret “tails in the air” as cat body language, “sexually receptive.” Maybe less suggestively as “seeking a dominant partner.”

There are actually two figurative interpretations here: one alluding to cat body language (in which an upraised tail communicates contentment and confidence) and one alluding to sexual receptivity signals in mammals (in which females raise their tails — and, often, back up to males — to communicate readiness for coitus).

Meanwhile, figurative (both metaphorical and metonymic) senses of tail — ‘penis’, ‘vagina’, ‘buttocks’, ‘anus’ — impinge on both of these figurative uses of raise (one’s) tail and similar idiomatic expressions, like put/have (one’s) tail (up) in the air.

Feline confidence and contentment. Any number of websites tell us that when a cat’s tail is held upright, it signals that the cat is happy and confident, an interpretation exploited by writer Jack Newcastle in his forthcoming (in December) book from Jack Sprat Press, With My Tail in the Air: The Illustrated Story of A Man, A Girl, and His Cat!:

Newcastle’s own (studiedly retro) description of the book:

Poor Josh Jenkins. Being at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, he knows the girl of his dreams is way out of reach. Yet, that’s about to change as the self-admitted schnook, schmuck, and shmeggege begins to take on the traits and personality of a certain little fellow who has finagled his way into the apartment.

Written in response to charge that it’s odd for a man to keep a cat, With My Tail in Air  is the perfect read for all cool cats, hepcats, daddy-os, greasers, swingers, playboys, jazzheads, and eggheads, or anyone who wants to be one.

And his account of himself:

A native of the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, NY, Jack Newcastle attributes his lifelong interest in mid-20th Century culture to his nearly ritualistic after-school viewings of television and film of that era. Through the courtesy of local broadcasters, it was on a daily basis that he was presented with fast-talking dames of the 40s, British buffoons of the 50s, and well-dressed but rather inept playboys of the 60s, all of them occupying a world he thought far more appealing than the one outside his 1970s window.

It is only after a long stretch of writing songs and performing with noisy pop bands that he took to writing fiction, with The Fine Art of Mixing Girls being his first novel. He lists British literary giants Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene, and Anthony Burgess as his primary influences, and yet to this day he maintains that the 1960s situation comedy Green Acres is brilliant theatre of the absurd. With his cat, he still resides in the city that used to be New York.

Meanwhile, back in academia, Quote Investigator Garson O’Toole wrote on ADS-L this morning supportimg the Happy Cat interpretation of tails in the air:

The website seekingalpha.com has used the expression “tails in the air” repeatedly. The examples suggest that organizations with “their tails in the air” have been impinged positively by a news event. Anthropomorphically speaking the organizations are happy.

Sexual receptivity. I’m inclined to follow O’Toole here, though the Fuck Me Please interpretation is more entertaining — and FMP manages to combine the root sense of tail with its metonymic extension to the rump of an animal (including the buttocks of a human being) and the further metonymic extension from ‘rump, buttocks’ to ‘vagina’ (and to suggest a further metaphorical extension, in gay usage, from ‘vagina’ to ‘anus’) — so it hits all the sexualized senses of tail except the metaphorical (shape-based) extension to ‘penis’. The larger point is that FMP connotes receptivity and submission.

The crucial element in FMP is raising the hips, putting the rump up in the air. From Wikipedia:

Lordosis behavior, also known as mammalian lordosis (Greek lordōsis, from lordos “bent backward”) or presenting, is a body posture adopted by some mammals including humans, elephants, rodents, felines and others, usually associated with female receptivity to copulation. The primary characteristics of the behavior are a lowering of the forelimbs but with the rear limbs extended and hips raised, ventral arching of the spine and a raising, or sideward displacement, of the tail.

Or, as in “Sex positions for gay men” (from 2/12/16):

(4) bottom kneeling (a genicular fuck), commonly called doggie/doggy-fucking

— or, in crude terms, taking it like a bitch.

Putting it (up) in the air.  Though this is probably totally irrelevant to media consolidation, sometimes putting your tail / ass  / butt (up) in the air is just a dance move. Consider Baracuda’s 2005 tune “Ass Up”, with its jaunty chorus:

put your ass in the air
put your ass up in the air [x3]
put your ass in the air
move around like you don’t care

Easy lyrics to memorize. You can watch Baracuda’s official video here. On the band, from Wikipedia:

Baracuda is a German dance project founded by Axel Konrad and Ole Wierk of Suprime Records in the Winter of 2002. Baracuda {also] consists of Tobias Lammer, otherwise known as DJ Toby Sky, and vocalist Suny.

… in July 2005 Baracuda released their third single, “Ass Up”.

Buttocks-out dancing goes back a bit. From Wikipedia

Grinding, also known as juking, freak dancing or freaking (in the Caribbean, wining) is a type of close partner dance where two or more dancers rub or bump their bodies against each other, this is generally with a female dancer rubbing her buttocks against a male dancer’s crotch area.

Grinding gained widespread popularity as a hip hop dance in night clubs, and eventually moved on to high school and middle school dances (especially proms) in the US and Canada [roughly 2001-2011], where there have been cases of administrators attempting to ban it due to its explicit nature.

A predecessor to grinding as a sexually charged high-contact social dance was “The Bump”, popular in the 1970s, in which the contact between partners generally involved the hips or buttocks of one dancer “bumping” those of the other dancer in temporary contact. Other predecessor elements of grinding may be attributed to the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, and the lambada, a brief dance craze of the 1980s that featured grinding actions [and of course the bump and grind of striptease performances]

(And then came twerking.)

Yesterday’s Doonesbury, with Lacey and Jeremy in the senior dating scene:

Wonderful idiom blends (also mixed metaphors): march to a different kettle of fish (march to a different drummer + a different kettle of fish), have both sails in the water (have both oars in the water + have the wind in one’s sails), play with a full house of cards (play with a full deck (of cards) + a full house (in poker) + house of cards).

A mildly poignant Zippy, in which things have come to the point where Griffy almost misses Richard Nixon. And another deeply poignant episode in the Doonesbury account of Lacey and Jeremy’s adventures in senior dating.

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Memories of Dick (and Jane, who came along by word association, but has nothing to do with either American politics or soft-serve ice cream).

To my (admittedly eccentric) mind, the strip is really about the roadside stand:

(#2) (#3)

From the Roadside Architecture site:

Singers Kreemy Deelite (now Chicken Coop), Oil City, PA. This photo of Singers Kreemy Deelite is from 2007. Since 2014, the building has housed the Chicken Coop. The top part of the cone sign was removed.

And about the Dairy Isle Ice Cream Stands, from that source:

The Dairy Isle chain was established in Wooster, OH in 1951. These ice cream stands featured giant ice cream cones piercing the roof at the front of the building. The building design was created by Clarence S. Shank and patented in 1957. The buildings were shipped as prefabricated kits and assembled on-site by the owner. There were more than 160 locations built. More than 40 locations represented at this page still exist. While most of them were apparently built in Ohio, there are plenty of examples elsewhere in the Northeast, Midwest, and a few in the South.

Senior dating and small talk. In yesterday’s (re-run) Doonesbury, we saw Jeremy (Cavendish) in a dither on a date (at an elegant restaurant) with Lacey (Davenport), who manages to maintain a wry poise. But the experience is humiliating for them both.

Today it gets worse. Jeremy abandons his attempt at making small talk, something he doesn’t really understand how to do. So he proposes to fall back on what he thinks men should be good at: talking about “serious stuff” (not small talk)  — things that he might have clippings on and notes for, like current politics, science news, business flashes, and so on (probably sports, too, though he must have enough sense to realize that sports talk — one of the things that performs the function of small talk among men, though men think of it as a deeply serious matter — is unlikely to engage Lacey).

Lacey is humiliated by all of this, but presses on, even in the face of the waiter Maurice’s solicitous concern about her return to dating.

Now, on the idiom small talk. Touched on briefly in this blog on August 1st in “Cartoon conversations”:

the social expectation in certain contexts is that people will “make conversation” — “make small talk”, as we say, with no point beyond behaving affiliatively.

(Direct verbing of the nominal small talk is attested, but the nominal is usually made available for verbal use by combination with the light verb make.)

From OED3 (Dec. 2012):

Light talk or conversation, esp. polite conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters, as engaged in on social occasions. Also fig. [first cite 1650; and note:]

1751   Ld. Chesterfield Let. 20 June (1932) (modernized text) IV. 1758   A sort of chit-chat, or small-talk, which is the general run of conversation..in most mixed companies.

Note that after the fact, small talk makes sense (with a figurative, displaced, use of small, as ‘talk about small things’, itself with a figurative use of small, as ‘unimportant’), but it still is a conventionalized expression, an idiom, whose meaning cannot be predicted by regular principles from the meanings of its parts.

The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed:

The assigned story was “The Princess and the Pea”, but Joe had heard only the title (and a bit of the plot), so /pi/ could have been the letter P, or (bizarrely) the vegetable pea, or (given the mention of mattresses) urine, pee. Joe goes with what he knows, and, having not actually read the story, confabulates a tale of enuresis.

Background 1. The story, from Wikipedia:

“The Princess and the Pea” (Danish: “Prinsessen paa Ærten”; literal translation: “The Princess on the Pea”) is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a young woman whose royal identity is established by a test of her physical sensitivity. The tale was first published with three others by Andersen in an inexpensive booklet on 8 May 1835 in Copenhagen by C. A. Reitzel.

Background 2. Books with letter names in their titles. A huge number, including James Thurber’s The Wonderful O and a bunch with Q, like Jonathan Rabb’s The Book of Q — and Andrew Conn’s P: A Novel.

On to the language play in the title of this posting. The basis is the metaphorical idiom

NOT judge a book by its cover ‘NOT trust outward appearances’

manifested in several variants:

Don’t / Never  judge a book  by / from  its / the  cover,

You  can’t / shouldn’t judge a book by / from  (looking at)  its / the cover.

(and the earlier: You can’t tell a book by its cover.)

Similarly: you can’t judge a story (or a book) by its title. Who would have thought that Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors was a murder mystery about, among other things, change-ringing?

Musical bonus: Bo Diddley, who you can listen to here. From Wikipedia:

“You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover” is a 1962 song by rock and roll pioneer Bo Diddley. Written by Willie Dixon, the song was one of Diddley’s last record chart hits. Unlike many of his well-known songs, “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover” does not rely on the Bo Diddley beat. A variety of rock and other performers have recorded renditions of the song.

The text:

You can’t judge an apple by looking at a tree
You can’t judge honey by looking at the bee
You can’t judge a daughter by looking at the mother
You can’t judge a book by looking at the cover

(Nice half-rhyme in mother … cover.)

And you can’t judge the story by looking for the pee.

From a Facebook discussion between a black woman T, a white guy C, and me, over the interpretation of a baffling — because drastically poor in detail — news story involving two young black men, a set of store employees, and a policeman: the guys asked for sliced cheese; an employee said the store didn’t carry it; the employee then herded the staff into a back room, locked it, and called the police; the cop who turned up told the guys they had to leave the store or they’d be arrested. T and I suspected that race might have been involved in the incident, and I was especially dubious about the sliced cheese part of the story; C maintained that race was not at issue, and in any case we didn’t have enough information to suspect that it did. At this point, T to C:

please don’t use your woke status to affirm your reading of the story and to presume that Arnold is alone in his side eye.

That is, my figurative side eye (or side-eye): I didn’t actually look sideways to express distrust or disbelief, but I certainly did express those attitudes (verbally rather than visually).

Slang check. The adjective woke ‘be socially aware’ (about the situation of black people), especially in the collocation stay woke, has spread relatively recently in AAVE. It’s natural for T to use it of C.

The compound side eye ‘a sidelong glance conveying disapproval, contempt, criticism, animosity, scorn; shock, surprise; distrust, disbelief’ (combining glosses from a number of different sources), on the other hand, turns out not to be particularly associated with black America, though, as it happens, I first heard it used by black speakers. Two illustrations of the gesture, from Justice Sonia Sotormayor and comedian Bernie Mac:

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And as an emoji:

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Now, on the expression and also the word, from Merriam-Webster’s “Words We’re Watching” site, the piece “The History of ‘Side-eye’: We have our eyes on this one. Chances are you’ve been on both ends of the side-eye. It’s that sidelong look, that glance or gaze that doesn’t want to involve the front of the face, but instead says way more by shifting to the corners of the looker’s eyes”:

People have of course been using side-eye forever, but the term side-eye (also styled side eye) is only newly popular. Since the end of the first decade of the 21st century it’s been increasingly used in major publications.

At its core, the term is about a physical act that communicates any number of things: suspicion, scorn, annoyance, jealousy, veiled curiosity. When we use the word, the context explains what the look being referred to expresses:

It’s this friendship, presented with utter sincerity, that serves as the movie’s emotional rudder. Though there’s humor in the unexpected pairing, the actors play it with the innocence of children who do not yet count the judging side-eye as part of their vocabularies. — Eliza Berman, Time, 18 Mar. 2016

The guy who stole your heart as the class clown can seem like just a clown out of his original context, like when people are giving him side-eye for cracking lame jokes in the hostess line. — Lauren Panariello, Cosmopolitan, July 2014

NZ comedian Steve Wrigley later commented that Kiwis have a unique habit of laughing enthusiastically, while at the same time sounding like they aren’t sure if they should be, and shooting a sneaky side-eye at their neighbours to make sure they are laughing too. — The Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand), 27 Apr. 2010

It’s often (and increasingly) used with the:

For the most part, the singular focus on results washes away concerns about getting the side-eye from a colleague judging you for not being in your cubicle, said Jack O’Laughlin, executive director of employment experiences at Edmunds. — Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, The Chicago Tribune, 18 Mar. 2016

Suddenly, Eddie … is attracting the attention of barons of the boardroom …, bullies on the street … and some mysterious third guy who keeps giving him the side eye and chasing him around Manhattan. — Cary Darling, The Detroit Free Press, 18 Mar. 2011

Newly ubiquitous though the word may be, it’s not a new term at all. James Joyce used it in Ulysses, published in 1922:

A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands.

But he was by no means the first. Our earliest evidence of side-eye in use is from 1797:

Here we come to what calls for the strongest eye-sight, the most steadfast gazing. Our being in Adam has been looked on with a side eye. The subject has provoked dislike; I may almost say, contempt. It is now painful to speak of it. — Remembrancer For Lord’s Day Evenings, 19 Mar. 1797

We’ve also seen some evidence of verb use, with the earliest example dating to 1916, but most evidence dating to the current decade:

In his mind’s-eye he saw himself associating with actor-folk, who invariably side-eye him and whispered among themselves: “That’s Alonzo Gubbins —frightfully wealthy — just about the real backing of the Frohman ventures –though, of course, Frohman is putting up the name and reputation!” — The Arizona Republican, 26 Aug. 1916

I naturally and perpetually side-eye every woman who can rock a pointed-toe shoe with ease. How divine your black, nude or brightly colored shoe looks on your tiny foot. — Lauren Porter, Essence, 23 Mar. 2016

With Zika Virus Headed North, American Scientists Side-Eye Asian Tiger Mosquitoes — headline, Inverse (inverse.com), 9 Mar. 2016

One other thing about side-eye: in these modern times, there’s some debate about what exactly side-eye is — in particular, about whether or not a turn of the head disqualifies a sidelong glance from being side-eye. Some say you have to keep your head steady and straight ahead and do it all with your eyes.

From a lexicographer’s perspective, the jury is very much still out on that. If people refer to both versions as side-eye, then both versions qualify. We’ll see if that changes. In the meanwhile, throw side-eye however you like. We won’t take it personally.

Even stronger: stink-eye. These explorations took me to another eye-rejection compound, stink-eye, that I had also heard first from black speakers. This, too, seems not to have any strong connection to black speech.

From GDoS:

stink-eye (US) an aggressive, hostile look. 1989 shot the dude a direct stink-eye … 2007 Not a hug, not a handshake, just the fuckin’ stink-eye all night

give someone the stink-eye (v.) to stare at someone in a hostile manner. 1999 Vic gave Jay some of that piping-hot stink-eye …

stink-eye v. to stare at in a hostile manner … 2005 The clerk just stink-eyed the greenback

There seems to be a general feeling that stink-eye is more extreme, more malevolent, than side-eye, but the evidence is uncertain. For one thing, the very same photos (of Michelle Obama, for instance) appear as examples of both; only the heading or caption differs. On the other hand, some stink-eye photos do seem more extreme that your typical side-eye photo — but not because of what the subject’s eyes are doing (which is side-eye), but because of what their mouth is doing in addition (a lip curl or sneer, for example). An especially nice example, from the character Sam Weir in the U.S. tv show Freaks and Geeks, as played by John Francis Daley (later Lance Sweets on Bones):

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(“Freaks and Geeks is an American teen comedy-drama television series, created by Paul Feig, with Judd Apatow as executive producer, that aired on NBC during the 1999–2000 television season.” (Wikipedia link))

One more: the eye-roll. The side-eye or stink-eye is directed at someone; it’s an aggressive act. Other eye-rejection gestures are aversive, and the most dramatic of these is the eye-roll, illustrated here dramatically by Saturday Night Live‘s Tina Fey:

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(Note the oral reinforcement.)

The OED has citations for roll the/one’s eyes back to the 15th century (Milton, Paradise Lost; Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece), but referring to a gesture conveying lust. The aversive gesture is iconic and might well be universal or nearly so. But the great fashion for it among teenage girls seems to be relatively recent; in this context, it can sometimes be passive-aggressive, but very often it seems to be a display of independence.

More terminology for eye gestures conveying aggression and/or rejection. Just three more idioms that occurred to me: to look daggers at (someone), to give (someone) a dirty look, to give (someone) the hairy eyeball. I haven’t researched their histories.

Over on ADS-L, there’s been riffing on batshit and other bat-crazy stuff. Which led things to the comic strip Shoe and its character Batson D. Belfry:

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Senator Batson D. Belfry, beltway blowhard, was originally a take-off of former Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neil. He has evolved over the years and, these days, typifies what outside-the-beltway Americans consider to be the quintessential politician: You can’t trust him as far as you can throw him, and he’s so big, you can’t throw him very far. (link to the strip site)

On the strip, from Wikipedia:

Shoe is an American comic strip about a motley crew of newspapermen, all of whom are birds. It was written and drawn by its creator, cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, from September 13, 1977 until his death in 2000. It has since been continued by Chris Cassatt, Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly.

While not politically oriented in the style of strips such as Doonesbury, Shoe often pokes fun at various social and political issues of the day (especially when Senator Batson D. Belfry makes an appearance).

Two representative trips with Belfry in it:

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characters, left to right: Shoe, The Perfessor, Belfry

(#3)

Belfrey and Shoe

Backtracking a bit: the association in English between bats and insanity (presumably from the erratic flying of bats), as in the slang adjactive batty ‘crazy’ and the idiom (have) bats in the belfry seems to be originally American and relatively recent (beginning of the 20th century), despite some ingenious story-telling that would make it earlier.

On to batshit, N, Adj, and Adv, from GDoS:

batshit n. also batcrap. 1. lies, nonsense, rubbish; also as excl. [play on bullshit] [first cite 1943]

batshit adj. … insane, crazy, also as adv.; thus go batshit v., to become insane, to act crazily; drive batshit v., to drive mad. [first cite:] 1966 R. Stone Hall of Mirrors (1987) 202: You’re batshit.

An entertaining development this morning on ADS-L, from Stephen Goranson:

Speaking of Batson D. Belfry…, in 1990 an American Egyptologist using the name Batson D. Sealing submitted an article to the British periodical Discussions in Egyptology. The article claimed to reproduce from an old New Orleans periodical a text in an unknown language. It was a fake periodical issue, but imitated an issue of a real one. The text was in Demotic, which the new article misleadingly translated. It was actually a (modern) translation into Demotic of parts of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. It was set in type for publication and was written up in The Financial Times as a great discovery before being recognized as a hoax the next week

Widely reported, in the middle of stories about the extension of the 2nd Avenue subway in NYC, a piece about Vik Muniz’s mural in the 96th St. station, with over three dozen mosaics of typical New Yorkers waiting for a train, including this gay male couple holding hands:

There’s a nice story about these men, “Meet the Gay Couple Holding Hands in That Groundbreaking NYC Subway Mural”, an interview with the men by Alexander Kacala on the (informatively named) Unicorn Booty site on the 3rd.

New York is the gayest place in the world. We all know this, right?  I don’t have stats on me right now, but you sign on to a dating app and instantly are bombarded with the profiles of a hundred men less than a few feet away. In short, New York is gay AF [flag on gay AF, below].

So why did it take so long for us to get some gay AF public art?

… Not only did New York get a brand-new subway line and three shiny new subway stations, it also got its first permanent, non-political LGBTQ piece of public art.

… The 96th Street Station is especially bougie [flag on bougie, below]. One of the things making it extra fabulous is a captivating mural by Vik Muniz. “Over three dozen mosaic portraits depicting everyday New Yorkers waiting for a train adorn the walls of the new line,” Buzzfeed writes.

One of those portraits is of married couple Thor Stockman and Patrick Kellogg.

The couple is particularly proud of their participation in the project because they don’t feel represented in popular culture. “Our friends were happy that this is gay representation on the walls of New York City, but our friends were even happier that this is gay representation that is not incredibly beautiful and skinny,” Kellogg tells The New York Post.

…. TS: I should have expected all the hate spewed out on the internet — ”Disgusting perverts!” — but I am still surprised by how upset some people get over something so minor as two men holding hands. Some are saying it will get defaced. But the big surprise was a lot of the criticism from gays and lesbians that we’re too white, too male, not queer enough, too old, too out-of-shape — you name it — to properly represent NYC’s vast and varied LGBTQ communities. And to that I kind of have to agree, but I also encourage everyone that if you don’t feel that the art out there represents you, to make art that does. Write the stories and songs, make the paintings and comics and films that show the world just how fierce and fabulous we are.

PK: I was shocked at the internet trolls. Upon seeing the mosaic, some commenters replied “yuck” (and worse, much much worse). It’s weird that two men holding hands would cause a strong reaction in 2017. We’re not even kissing. One webpage spun out a whole conspiracy theory about how this mosaic was trying to get more people to become gay, that Muniz was part of a “Hollywood cabal” of pro-gay artists churning out propaganda.

A piece of background, about Muniz, an artist I posted about on 9/29/11, in “Vik Muniz (and me)”, about his mosaics. He’s an originally Brazilian artist, working in NYC for some time; much of his work is explicitly “political”, on various fronts. His stuff is sensitive to queer issues, to a degree that some just assume he’s queer.

On complaints from LGBTQ people that Stockman and Kellogg are insufficiently representative of the diversity of the community: there’s no way, of course, that one couple could represent this diversity; only if about a third of the travelers in the mosaic were identifiable as LBGTQ would it come close to representing the diversity of the community, but then it would fail to represent the diversity of New York City.

On the shocking hateful responses to the image of two men holding hands: I’ve never understood the depth of these reactions, which both terrify and enrage me. Terrify me, because they seem always to be on the verge of setting off gay-bashing. Enrage me, because they have te effect of constraining my freedom of action in ways that straight people would never accept.

Linguistics note 1: gay AF. Short for gay as fuck ‘really really gay’. In an idiom pattern

Adj as Expletive (for Expletives hell, shit, fuck, at least)

gay as fuck is one of the two sources of the tv series title Queer as Folk, the other being the British informal aphorism there’s nowt so queer as folk ‘people are funny’ (i.e., people behave oddly).

Linguistics note 2: bougie. A complicated story here, part of which goes back to French bougie ‘(wax) candle’; but the relevant part of which goes back to French bourgeois (from bourg ‘town’) ‘of or characteristic of the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes’ (NOAD2). An abbreviated version bougie (with several alternative spellings) of bourgeois (in the sense ‘taking on the attitudes and lifestyle of the middle classes’ (GDoS)) came into slang use some time ago (first attestation in GDoS, 1976), often with negative connotations (of pretentiousness and the like). This use of bougie is especially widespread among U.S. black speakers, but it has wider usage as well.

Then, in an interesting development not recognized (yet) in GDoS, the word has been ameliorated to uses conveying ‘stylish, fashionable, fabulous’ (possibly ‘faabulous’) — as in “The 96th Street Station is especially bougie” in Unicorn Booty’s gay-hip intro above.

(Mostly about language, but male bodies and bodyparts play significant roles.)

Yesterday, a posting about a fantasy agency supplying male hustlers, featuring two meat + N compounds: meat market ‘sexual marketplace’ and meatmen ‘men considered as sexual objects’ (as bodies as wholes, but especially as assemblages of sexual parts — cock, balls, and ass).  The interplay of two senses of meat here (the body, especially the male body, as a whole vs. the central masculine bodypart, the penis) led me to two joking uses of meat, in a Pat Byrnes New Yorker cartoon from 2001 (in which the ‘animal flesh as food’ sense of meat is central) and a piece of advice on the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss from Joseph Francis some years ago (in which the ‘body as sexual object’ sense is central).

The Byrnes:

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And the quote from Joe Francis, directed at gay men:

Remember; you’re not just a man, you’re also a piece of meat.

The Byrnes turns farly simply on the primary sense of meat. From NOAD2:

the flesh of an animal (especially a mammal) as food

(In a while, we’ll get to double entendres involving this sense.)

[Digression on Byrnes, who’s appeared once before on this blog. From Wikipedia:

Pat Byrnes is an American cartoonist best known for his work for The New Yorker. He created the comic strip Monkeyhouse, which ran for three years.]

Then on figurative developments from the primary sense, from GDoS:

1 a body, usu. a woman’s, as an object of sexual pleasure [1st cite 1515-16; in the gay world, the body in question is usually a man’s, as in the Francis quote]

2 (also lump of meat, piece of meat) the penis [1st cite c. 1564]

3 the vagina [1st cite 1611]

The sense development in 2 is presumably metaphorical — penis as like a piece of meat — while the development in 3 is pretty much a classic whole-for-(central)-part metonymy.

meat ‘body’. From a 5/1/16 posting with a caption for a shot of a man in his underwear:

He scrutinized himself pitilessly in the
Mirror, as a piece of meat to feed the
Hot guys

The development is from meat as food, providing one kind of pleasure, to meat as providing other sorts of pleasures — visual, tactile, sexual.

That brings us to the compounds meat market and meat rack, referring to places where bodies are made available to others. From GDoS:

meat market as a place, usu. for sexual encounters:

(a) a rendezvous for prostitutes of either sex [first cite 1896]

(b) (US) any situation or place where people are regarded as commodities, such as a recruiting agency ior a modelling agency [first cite 1941]

(c) anywhere that people gather for the primary purpose of finding sexual partners [first cite 1957, in a college context]

(d) in fig. use, the world of commercial sexuality [first cite 1967]

meat rack (orig. gay) a place, such as a bar or a particular street, where homosexuals display their charms to potential customers [this should be revised to “potential sexual partners”, since the encounters are not necessarily commercial]. After the ‘singles bar’ explosion of the 1970s, the term was extended to heterosexuality. [1st cite 1963, from John Rechy’s City of Night, referring to a cruisy L.A. park; 2nd 1978 from Larry Kramer’s Faggots, referring to the hook-up area of Fire Island Pines on the Long Island NY coast]

meat ‘penis’. Very common uses here in the (rhyming) slang idiom beat one’s meat ‘masturbate, jack off’ and the slang idiom eat s.o.’s meat ‘fellate s.o., suck s.o.’s cock’. The latter has been the source of numerous double entendres on the ‘food’ sense of meat, as on the

EAT MY MEAT

cookout apron from Crazy Dog Tshirts in Rochester NY (on Amazon for $26.99)

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and t-shirts with the slogans

I ♥ TO RUB MY MEAT [a reference to rubbing a preparation of herbs and spices into meat before cooking]

Once you put my meat in your mouth you’re going to want to swallow. [with image of a grill]

I rub my meat before I stick it in. [with image of a grill]

In other contexts, the phallic reference is explicit. As in the gay comics series Meatmen, posted on here.

And in the name of the punk band The Meatmen, complete with cartoon dicks:

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The Meatmen are an American punk band headed by Tesco Vee, originally existing from 1981 to 1997. They were known for their outrageous stage antics and offensive lyrics. They reformed in 2008 and continue to tour and record. (Wikipedia link)

Tesco Vee (born Robert Vermeulen; 1955) is a Michigan-based punk rock musician and co-founder of Touch and Go Records zine. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he is a former elementary school teacher and the founding member, and front man, of punk bands The Meatmen, Tesco Vee’s Hate Police, Blight, and Dutch Hercules. (Wikipedia link)

And in the song “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion”, whose title has itself become a catchphrase and an idiom. Glosses from Wiktionary:

When it comes to sexual satisfaction, penis size doesn’t matter, but technique does.

(more generally) The tools you use to accomplish a goal are not as important as what you do with them.

(#4)

Originally a 1951 song by Lois Mann and Henry Glover, recorded by The Swallows; you can listen to it here. It’s probably now known best through the cover Maria Muldaur recorded in 1999, which you can listen to here.

Finally, there is of course phallic meat in the world of gay porn, as in this reference to prime meat in the liner notes for Choice Cuts (1983 HIS Video starring J.W. King):

All-beef weenies on the rampage! From hard hats to surfers, students to street hustlers, Choice Cuts shows you Southern California from a distinctly male U.S.D.A. prime meat in action perspective.

(#5)

Once again, I return to the question of what you have to know to understand a comic strip or a cartoon, with two recent cartoons in my comics feed, a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro; in both, understanding requires that you supply a word that isn’t in the text of the cartoon:

(#1)

(#2)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in #2 — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

The legally inclined dog. The Rhymes in #1 is completely incomprehensible if you don’t get the allusion to the idiomatic synthetic compound ambulance chaser. Otherwise, the dog is chasing an ambulance, and what does that have to do with law school?

The key, from NOAD2:

ambulance chaser: a lawyer who specializes in bringing cases seeking damages for personal injury. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the reputation gained by certain lawyers for attending accidents and encouraging victims to sue.

Texting 101. #2 is somewhat easier to cope with, since you can see where the key to understanding lies: the text has the unfamiliar noun tapmanship in it. You then have to work out that the word is a coinage based on the noun penmanship, and alludes to the act of tapping keys on a keyboard, in particular the keyboard of a smartphone used for texting.

On penmanship, from NOAD2: ‘the art or skill of writing by hand’. (Note that the word has drifted somewhat from its close association with pens, and now applies to any sort of implement for writing by hand, including pencils and crayons.) The conceit of the cartoon is that schoolchildren now need coaching in the skill of tapping the keys on their smartphones, the way they used to need coaching in the skill of writing by hand. It’s also possible that some younger people might not even know the noun penmanship.

Bonus. Asking Google to search for {tapmanship} first causes the program to offer the following alternatives:

upmanship, teamsmanship, topman shop, penmanship

(The third of these turns out to be a reference to Topman, a chain of British mens’ fashion stores.)

But Google does offer two legitimate occurrences of tapmanship, both playful coinages, one referring to wiretapping, one to typing. (You could imagine the word also being coined to refer to skill in tapping kegs of beer, etc.)

From the Battle Creek [MI] Enquirer on 5/23/73, a reference to an inept wiretap:

President Nixon had the FBI put taps on Mrs. Nixon. Regrettably, it was a sloppy piece of tapmanship, wires became crossed, Mrs. Nixon’s phone began performing oddly.

And from the publication Yojana (Planning Commission of India, New Delhi), Vol. XX, No. 2, on 2/15/76:

Not in the same category as M.F. Husain’s triology, “12 June 1975”, “24 June 1975” and “26 June 1975” now adorning the first sheet of the GOI [Government of India] calendar this year, perhaps, but worthy of a close look, nevertheless, the picture above [which I have omitted here] was done on a typewriter by Shri Y.M. Pitre of Belgaum [a city in the Indian state of Karnataka]. We liked especially the smart little truck, upper left, and the twelve marching soldiers at the bottom. The serious critic may find things to say about their pot bellies, but their stance and posture must not go unremarked. The number of eyepopping hours Shri Pitre lavished on this work of painstaking tapmanship is not mentioned in the forwarding letter sent by the proprietors of Pankaj Prakashan, Belgaum, the publishers of’ ‘Development Through Cooperation’ edited by the typartist.

Bonus bonus: the use of typartist for someone who does typart (aka typeart, type art, ASCII art, text art, text pictures, keyboard art, etc.), in the sense ‘creating pictures composed of typed characters’.

… or, playing over the top, and in fact doing this knowingly while winking at the audience, so that you might want to say: camping it up. I refer to the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which Neil Patrick Harris (NPH) plays the villain for laughs, while Patrick Warburton plays the author-narrator, Lemony Snicket, ditto, and a bunch of others — notably Joan Cusack, K. Todd Freeman, and Alfre Woodard — join them.

NPH in character:

(#1)

And Warburton in character, at the beach with the three Baudelaire children:

(#2)

(Those are bathing machines and a rickety trolley in the background.)

From Wikipedia on the series:

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, or simply A Series of Unfortunate Events, is an American black comedy dramedy television series from Netflix, and developed by Mark Hudis and Barry Sonnenfeld, based on the children’s novel series of the same name by Lemony Snicket. It stars Neil Patrick Harris, Patrick Warburton, Malina Weissman, Louis Hynes, K. Todd Freeman and Presley Smith, and premiered on January 13, 2017.

and on the author:

Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970). Snicket is the author of several children’s books, also serving as the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events (his best-known work) and a character within it and All the Wrong Questions. Because of this, the name “Lemony Snicket” may refer to either the fictional character or the real person.

Now, the genre of the series and the books on which it’s based: they are firmly in the genre I’ll call fantasy comedy, manifested in performances of many types: Punch and Judy shows, animated cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle (squirrel and moose beset by comically incompetent villains Boris and Natasha), Joan Aiken’s alternative-history comedy-adventure novels for children (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, etc.), James Thurber’s book The Thirteen Clocks, the movie The Princess Bride. The protagonists tend to be absurdly innocent, the villains thoroughly wicked, the settings fantastical rather than realistic, the plot lines full of bizarre twists and turns (like Zippy the Pinhead comic strips, but with villains). Many of these performances wink at the audience, and characters often address the audience.

Series has a fantastical setting; look back at #2. The characters are cardboard figures played for laughs: the Baudelaire children are preposterously earnest, good, and plucky; the other characters are absurdly good (Cusack’s judge character), sweet but deranged (Woodard’s character, the children’s Aunt Jusephine, who’s a nut about grammatical correctness, by which she mostly means spelling and word choice), bizarrely clueless (for example, failing to recognize the NPH character, Count Olaf, in his ridiculously transparent disguises), thoroughly evil, or deeply corrupt. And Warburton’s character does nothing but address the audience, owlishly warning us about the dire events about to unfold and telling us that we should avert our eyes, look away, thus pulling us into the guilty pleasures of the show. (I’d like to point out that there’s a lot you can do with adverbs.)

Digression on comedy genres. Fantasy comedy contrasts with two other comedy genres (though, as always, the lines between genres are not crisp): what I’ll call light comedy and black comedy. These are relevant because NPH is also celebrated for his work in a sitcom (a subtype of light comedy), How I Met Your Mother, and so is Warburton (in Rules of Engagement), while Cusack is celebrated for her work in a black comedy (Shameless). (Warburton and Cusack are both specialists in comic acting, of several types — they do almost nothing else — while Freeman and Woodard are acting generalists.)

Light comedy includes sitcoms (on tv) and romantic comedy (in the movies) as well as comic novels and short stories that are realistic in both setting and character; black comedy, the comedy counterpart to dramas like Breaking Bad, manages to be both funny and horrifying at once, again in realistic settings and with characters that have identifiably human characteristics the audience can sympathize with, but also with disastrous flaws.

The black comedy Shameless has a realistic setting, a white working-class neighborhood of South Chicago, complete with the El. Its preposterous characters are nevertheless played straight, and with no winking at the audience. All the characters are seriously flawed, but all have some redeeming qualities that allow you to sometimes identify with them: even the frighteningly narcissistic, irresponsible, alcoholic and drug-addled central character Frank (William H. Macy in an extraordinary performance) has a sweet love affair – with a woman close to dying from cancer, who then commits suicide. Fantasy comedy, either meant for children or affecting a child-like view of the world, steers clear of sexual connections, while Shameless is dramatically high in carnality: the characters fuck like bonobos, almost reflexively, out of ungovernable desire and, apparently, as a way to relieve tension; there’s also plenty of same-sex butt-fucking and muff-diving; and even the baby Liam compusively masturbates.

In Series, Warburton’s character and the theme song keep telling us to look away, look away, knowing that that will make us watch. But watching Shameless, you often do want to avert your eyes, because, out of sympathy with the characters, you wish you could pull them away from the disastrous things they are about to do.

The five featured actors. NPH, Warburton, Cusack, Freeman, and Woodard.

NPH (appearing as Count Olaf in #1) is an old acquaintance on this blog, seen most recently in the posting “Annals of adorable” (with his husband, David Burtka) on the 10th. Earlier, onstage in his underwear (and nothing else), in the 2/23/15 posting “From the Oscar watch”.

On the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, from Wikipedia:

How I Met Your Mother … is an American sitcom that originally aired on CBS from September 19, 2005 to March 31, 2014. The series follows the main character, Ted Mosby, and his group of friends in Manhattan. As a framing device, Ted, in the year 2030, recounts to his son and daughter the events that led him to meeting their mother.

… Neil Patrick Harris as Barney Stinson is a serial playboy, using his relative wealth and an array of outrageous strategies to seduce women for sex with no intention of engaging in a relationship. His catchphrases include ‘Suit Up’ and ‘Legend-wait-for-it-Dary’. He is Ted’s “bro,” often jealous of Marshall for having known Ted since college. Due to his father leaving him as a young child, Barney has abandonment issues and clings to his friends. He marries Robin in the series finale but they divorce after 3 years. In 2020, after a failed one night stand, he has a daughter named Ellie.

On Warburton, from Wikipedia:

Patrick John Warburton (born November 14, 1964) is an American actor and voice actor. In television, he is known for playing David Puddy on Seinfeld, the title role on The Tick [a superhero parody], Jeb Denton on Less Than Perfect, Jeff Bingham on Rules of Engagement and Lemony Snicket on A Series of Unfortunate Events.

And on the plot of the sitcom Rules of Engagement:

Two couples and their single friend deal with the complications of dating, commitment and marriage. It looks at different relationships in various stages, starring Patrick Warburton and Megyn Price as a long-married couple, Oliver Hudson and Bianca Kajlich as newly engaged sweethearts, and David Spade and Adhir Kalyan (the latter added in season 3) as their still-single friends. They often gather to enjoy a meal and discuss their issues at “The Island Diner”. (Wikipedia link)

The Warburton and Price characters are constantly negotiating having sex, which brings us many shots of a shirtless Warburton, as here:

(#3)

Warburton is a solid, beefy bear of a man, with a “natural”, rather than gym-boy, physique (note the hint of love handles). In Series, he always appears fully clothed, almost always in a dark business suit (as in #2). And in that show (and in some others) his tone is always wry, and even if you can’t see it, one eyebrow is raised.

Digression on camping it up. In a 12/3/16 posting “Camping it up”, I wrote about a Steam Room Stories episode, the expression camping it up (in the episode, camping it up is used as an in-group marker, for use by gay men with gay men, as a kind of bonding ritual), and the British actor Julian Clary (who camps it up a lot, rather sweetly, in public).

Series plays it for laughs, plays it over the top, to the point of camping it up, thus casting a gay lavender light over everything and disposing you to think that the male characters might be gay.

On the idiom play for laughs, from the TV Tropes website:

If something is played for laughs, it means it is being used with the intention to be comedic. It is often a parody of the instances where said device or trope is used seriously.

On the idiom over the top from NOAD2:

informal to an excessive or exaggerated degree, in particular so as to go beyond reasonable or acceptable limits: his reactions had been a bit over the top.

And then some relevant entries from GDoS:

noun camp: (also campery, campiness, camping) flamboyance, overt exhibitionism; usu. but not invariably applied to homosexuals [first cite 1932, from Scarlet Pansy]

verb camp to act ostentatiously and outrageously in a homosexual manner, although by no means restricted – verbally or physcally – to the gay world [first cite 1910]

verb camp about (also camp around, camp it up): of a man, to act in a deliberate and exaggeratedly effeminate manner; used of effeminate male homosexuals and those who, maliciously or otherwise, are attempting to mimic them [first cite 1962]

adjective campy: ostentatious, affected, effeminate [first cite 1932, Scarlet Pansy again]

All of this vocabulary can be used to refer to merely extravagant, exhibitionistic, or outrageous behavior, but a connotation of effeminacy, or merely gayness, persists. That connotation colors our view of all the male characters in the campy Series, even Warburton’s character, thanks to his slyness.

More to come on this theme in a little while. Meanwhile, back to the featured actors.

On Cusack, from Wikipedia:

Joan Cusack (… born October 11, 1962), is an American actress. She received Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress for her roles in the romantic comedy-drama Working Girl (1988) and the romantic comedy In & Out (1997)

… Cusack was a cast member on the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live from 1985 to 1986. She starred on the Showtime hit drama/comedy Shameless as Sheila Gallagher (née Jackson), a role for which she has received five consecutive Emmy Award nominations, winning for the first time in 2015. She is the sister of actors Ann and John Cusack.

(#4)

Cusack’s characters are almost always highly strung (as in Series). In Shameless, her character Sheila is beyond highly strung, into out-of-control, even deranged, territory: she’s cripplingly agoraphobic, compulsively orderly, hypersexual, and sexually kinky.

On Freeman, from Wikipedia:

Kenneth Todd Freeman (born July 9, 1965) is an American actor in theatre, television, and film.

… Freeman has been an ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois since 1993 [and has appeared on stage in Wicked and Airline Highway].

… He has also had supporting roles in various films such as Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), The Cider House Rules (1999), and The Dark Knight (2008). On television, he is perhaps best known for his recurring role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as “Mr. Trick”.

The character’s Buffyverse Wiki identifies him as a young vampire and the leading minion of Kakistos and, later, Sunnydale’s Mayor Richard Wilkins, adding that:

Unlike his ancient master [Kakistos], Mr. Trick was a modernist technophile at heart. He considered time-honored customs like hunting outdated, enjoying the amenities of modern occidental life, such as fast food employees, [and] pizza delivery boys

A definitely campy character.

The actor in a nice p.r. photo:

(#4)

In Series, Freeman plays Arthur Poe, the Baudelaire parents’ family banker, in charge of placing the children in the care of a suitable guardian; he’s generally venal, but sometimes merely deluded.

On the amazing (and astonishingly hard-working) Woodard, from Wikipedia:

Alfre Woodard (born November 8, 1952) is an American film, stage, and television actress, producer, and political activist. Woodard has been named one of the most versatile and accomplished actors of her generation.

Woodard began her acting career in theater. After her breakthrough role in the Off-Broadway play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1977), she made her film debut in Remember My Name (1978). In 1983, she won major critical praise … for her role in Cross Creek. In the same year, Woodard won her first Primetime Emmy Award for her performance in the NBC drama series Hill Street Blues. Later in the 1980s, Woodard had leading Emmy Award-nominated performances in a number of made for television movies, and another Emmy-winning role as a woman dying of leukemia in the pilot episode of L.A. Law. She also starred as Dr. Roxanne Turner in the NBC medical drama St. Elsewhere

And that just gets her up to 1990; there’s a lot more. A nice p.r. photo of her:

(#5)

In Series, her Aunt Josephine is deranged (but sweet) and generally over the top.

Back to campiness. As I said above, the decidedly campy tone of Series tends to cast a lavender light on all the male characters. And then, by extension, on the actors who play those characters. On every evidence, Warburton is uncomplicatedly straight, while NPH is openly, even celebratorily, gay — but his natural presentation of self is as normatively masculine, not at all campy. (He can of course do campy; he’s a versatile, accomplished actor. And in Series, he does one episode in drag.)

That leaves Freeman, who’s an intriguing cipher. Freeman has taken several gay parts (not especially common for black actors), he’s never been married, and none of the sources about him say a word about his private life — indicators which, taken together, would suggest that he’s a closeted gay man. Staying in the closet wouldn’t be at all surprising for a black male actor: being out would risk career suicide for a black man, so the the number of out black male actors is ridiculously small.

Another, simpler case: the hard-working black actor Ron Glass, who had two standout roles in his long life in acting, until he died at age 71 late last year. From Wikipedia:

Ronald Earle “Ron” Glass (July 10, 1945 – November 25, 2016) was an American actor. He was known for his roles as literary Det. Ron Harris in the television sitcom Barney Miller (1975–1982), and as the spiritual Shepherd Derrial Book in the 2002 science fiction series Firefly and its sequel film Serenity.

His character Harris was impeccably dressed, intellectual, precise, even prissy — one “type” of gay man —  and he pinged my gaydar 40 years ago in Barney Miller (and then again much more recently in Firefly). Glass as Harris:

(#6)

The actor was, by all accounts, charming and funny, and his homosexuality was an open secret in Hollywood for many decades (though he never came out). He frequented gay places in West Hollywood and apparently had an affair with actor Tony Geary from General Hospital, during which they often appeared together in public as a couple. He’s also said to have been rather effeminate and sometimes sweetly campy. Most of the people he worked with must have known he was gay, but still he seems to have thought that his career would have been threatened by his coming out. And maybe he was right.

On Pinterest this morning, along with a bunch of Gary Larson cartoons, this cartoon by Dan Thompson from some time ago:

(#1)

Ingredients: “Little Miss Muffet”; homophony (or near-homophony) of whey and way; the complex AmE idiom no way in hell. Bonus: Anne Taintor.

The nursery rhyme.

(#2)

From Wikipedia:

“Little Miss Muffet” is a nursery rhyme, one of the most commonly printed in the mid-twentieth century.

The rhyme first appeared in print in 1805, in a book titled Songs for the Nursery. Like many such rhymes, its origins are unclear. Some claim it was written by Dr Thomas Muffet (d.1604), an English physician and entomologist, regarding his stepdaughter Patience; others claim it refers to Mary, Queen of Scots (1543–87), who was said to have been frightened by religious reformer John Knox (1510–72). The former explanation is speculative, and the latter is doubted by most literary scholars, who note that stories linking folk tales or songs to political events are often urban legends] Several novels and films, including Along Came a Spider, take their titles from the poem’s crucial line.

What with curds, whey, and tuffet, the rhyme presents challenges to most modern readers. But then kids tend to roll with the punches in nursery rhymes; they’re used to them not making a lot of sense.

Whey and way. For a minority of modern speakers, these two words (and a number of other pairs) are distinct, with a voiceless (and breathy) initial in the first, a voiced initial in the second; other speakers have a voiced initial in both. (I have the distinction, but for those of us who do, the distinction is lost, in favor of the voiced approximant, in a variety of linguistic, discourse, and social contexts,)

The point is that whey and way are either homophonous or very close to it, which is what makes the no whey / way in hell joke work. The devil tells Miss Muffet that there’s no whey in hell — with no whey in hell understood literally, as ‘not any whey available in hell’ — but he’s also telling her that there’s no way in hell he’s going to get her some curds and whey from hell’s kitchen — with no way in hell understood as an informal emphatic AmE idiom, conveying ‘not in any circumstances’.

Note that what makes the devil’s assertion in the cartoon so satisfying is that he intends to convey both meanings.

The idiom. From NOAD2 on the idiom no way (as in no way I’m going to help you):

informal under no circumstances; not at all

It’s also emphatic (and, though NOAD2 doesn’t note this, mostly AmE).

The idiom can be made even more emphatic with the extension in hell. In an Anne Taintor collage:

(#3)

Anne Taintor. (Apparently I’ve never posted on Taintor the captionist, so here’s a bit, starting with the Wikipedia synopsis:

Anne Taintor (born August 16, 1953) is an artist whose themes deal with domestic stereotypes, as viewed through the lens of mid-century advertisements typically found in publications such as Ladies Home Journal and Life. Juxtaposing these images with tongue-in-cheek captions, her work serves as a commentary on the stereotypes of women popularized in the 1940s and 1950s. She has been credited by some as being a pioneer in the pairing of mid-century imagery with modern slogans.

Wonderfully wry. Two more examples, from a gigantic corpus:

(#4)

(#5)