A recent One Big Happy:

Higher vs.lower, in several senses. The two families of pain in the idioms are high vs.low on the body and high vs. low in tone. (They’ve been around for about a hundred years, but apparently didn’t catch fire until the 1930s.)

From GDoS, high end first:

pain in the neck (also head, side)  1 a feeling of irritation  2 an annoying person, a bore, a euph. for pain in the arse [first clear cite in 1926 (Carl Van Vechten)]  3 an annoying situation, anything considered unpleasant, typically a task one does not wish to perform [first cite in 1940 (Cab Calloway)]

give someone a pain in the neck etc. [earlier give someone a pain, an ache (with no location specified); then a first clear cite in 1911]

Then the low end:

pain in the arse (ass, backside, butt, can, fanny, etc.)  1 a feeling of irritation; usu as give someone a pain in the arse [first cite in 1935]  2 an annoying person [first cite in 1934 (Clifford Odets)]  3 an annoying object, situation or circumstance [first cite in 1951 (Mickey Spillane)

Google Ngram shows pain in the neck at modest levels going way back, but presumably in reference to literal pains. It then shoots up in the 1920s. On the other hand, pain in the ass doesn’t really shoot up until the 1960s and 70s; eventually it substantially overtakes pain in the neck — no doubt a reflection of greater directness (or, if you will, crudeness) in speech over these years. Now, it seems, even little kids like Ruthie know the gluteal variant, and also know that it’s not something you’re supposed to say in polite company.

(The title tells the story. Racy topic, unquestionably alluding to hard-core mansex, but indirectly and playfully. Use your judgment.)

The Steam Room Stories video that came by me yesterday morning: “Trophy Boys”, in which two good-looking, ripped gay men complain about being treated as pieces of meat, as just their bulging muscles and big dicks. There are several twists in this short scene (which you can watch here), but here I’m going to focus on the title and on one of the men’s complaints about the men who pick him up as their trophy boy:

It’s dinner, drinks, and back to their place to park the beef bus in tuches town.

(referring to insertive anal intercourse). Playful alliteration in beef bus and tuches town, — the characters in SRS are given to fanciful indirect references to all matters sexual — and then there are the specific items beef, tuches, and of course trophy in trophy boy.

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On the right, two gay trophy boys commiserating; on the left, two straight guys who (eventually) bond over admiration for intellect rather than bodies

Trophy. A trophy is an award in a contest, displayed (for admiration) as a symbol of victory. Specialized in the idiom trophy wife. From NOAD2:

noun trophy wife: informal, derogatory a young, attractive wife regarded as a status symbol for an older man.

And then extended to other compounds of the form trophy X. OED3 (March 2014) on the noun trophy in a class of compounds:

C1b. Designating people or things regarded as a status symbol; esp. in  trophy wife: a wife regarded as a status symbol for a (usu. older) man. [1973 trophy-wives, 1978 trophy-husband, 1989 trophy wife, 1997 ‘trophy’ books, 2008 ‘trophy tourism’ , 2009 trophy dining]

An example of trophy wife in popular culture:

Trophy Wife is an American television sitcom that aired during the 2013–14 television season on ABC. … Trophy Wife premiered on September 24, 2013. On May 8, 2014, ABC canceled Trophy Wife after one season.

The series revolved around Kate (Malin Åkerman), a young, attractive, blonde party girl, who marries a middle aged lawyer named Pete (Bradley Whitford). With the marriage come Pete’s two ex-wives, the stern, perfectionist doctor, Diane (Marcia Gay Harden) and the flaky, flamboyant, new age Jackie (Michaela Watkins), as well as Pete’s three children: overachieving good girl Hillary (Bailee Madison), slacker Warren (Ryan Lee), and adopted Asian-American son Bert (Albert Tsai). The series explores the marriage and generation gap between Kate and Pete, along with the modern family dynamics between them, the ex-wives, and their respective children. (Wikipedia link)

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Extension of this to trophy husband (OED above) and also to trophy boyfriend; from Urban Dictionary:

Trophy Boyfriend: A boyfriend that a girl is proud of being with. She thinks a lot of him and in some cases can feel he is superior to most. She wants to go everywhere with him so everyone can see them together and she can “show him off”. – by KandysGurl 2/5/10

In these straight-world uses, a trophy husband or boyfriend is displayed primarily for the admiration of other women: the guy is a tool in the competition between women in the romantic and sexual marketplaces.

A parallel gay sense of trophy boyfriend or trophy boy would make sense — there is certainly a competition between men in the romantic and sexual marketplace, competition for desirable young men as partners — and no doubt these expressions have been used that way, but trophy boy seems to have been specialized still further, to focus on the purely physical: the young men’s muscles and penises: their meat, in two senses. And then uberqueer underwear designer Andrew Christian got his hands on the expression, and went for the dick (and, secondarily, the ass):

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The underwear comes as jock, brief, or boxer, all with generous big pouches. A brief boy:

(#4)

All the Trophy Boy models are deeply expressionless in the ads; they are nothing but prominent cocks and, oh yes, muscles. (They might well have been the inspiration for the SRS episode.) Then there’s the 2013 AC Trophy Boy twerk video, showing two gangs in an intense twerk-off contest, all aggressive butt-shaking and dick-jiggling; you can watch it on the Underwear Expert site here. (Like most AC videos it’s simultaneously a send-up and a sexual provocation, designed to make you chuckle and get a hard-on.)

Beef. The story of sexual slang beef is pretty much the story of sexual slang meat (in the US at least, beef is the central, prototypical item in the MEAT category). In particular, slang beef is prominently used to refer to muscles (hence, beefy as an adjective for a body type and the slang noun beefcake) and to the penis (so that the Wendy’s fast-food slogan “Where’s the beef?” from 1984 worked in part because of the double entendre). A summary of the GDoS entry for beef:

1 the vagina [first cite 1538] 2 (also piece of beef) a sexually appealing man or woman [first cite c1597 Henry IV Part 1] 3 (also beef-steak) the penis [first cite Measure for Measure] 4 human flesh 5 physical strength, power, muscles 7 (US) (also piece of beef) a well-built male; used by both heterosexuals and homosexuals; thus beef on the hoof, a number of such men [first cite 1929]

A sampling of the ‘penis’ cites:

1971 Frank Zappa ‘Latex Solar Beef’: All groupies must bow down / In the sacred presence of the latex solar beef.

1980 Edith Folb runnin’ down some lines: the language and culture of black teenagers: The penis is referred to as a piece of meat: beef, meat, or tube steak.

1987 Ice-T ‘Rhyme Pays’: But whether your names’s Lucy, Terry, Laura or Cindy / Ice got beef and this ain’t Wendy’s.

Searching on prime beef gets lots of cuts of meat, raw and cooked, but also a bunch of gay porn videos, with titles or captions like:

Prime Beef (Young and Old Muscle)
Italian raw prime beef [with raw ‘bareback, condomless’]
prime Chilean beef inspected at urinals
Fabio strokes the full 9.5″ of Prime Beef between his legs

Fabio Stallone in the last (prime beef between his legs not shown):

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Searching on beef hunk gets an even wider assortment, also including lots of photos of beefy hunks, plus cans of dog and cat food.

So much for the penis, the insertive participant in parking the beef bus in tuches town. On to the receptive participant, the anus, or (metonymically) the buttocks.

Tuches. This is the Yiddish English vulgar slang noun for ‘buttocks’ (also ‘anus’) usually spelled tuches in AmE — with many alternative spellings, though tokhes (with o representing the close, short and lax vowel [O]) or tukhes (with u representing the close, short and lax vowel [U]) are closest to actual Yiddish. In AmE the first vowel is pronounced [ʌ].

The medial consonant in Yiddish is a voiceless velar fricative [x], but in AmE it’s a [k], so that tuches in AmE is pronounced [tʌkIs] or [tʌkǝs], and the tuch part rhymes with fuck, a fact that makes tuches more satisfying in sexual contexts.

The latest bulletin from Pinterest featured a Reaper Jokes board maintained by Kathy-Lynn Cross. More Grim Reaper cartoons, including one that especially caught my eye because of the two idioms in the text. A Mark Parisi showing one (angry) Reaper confronting another (disconsolate) Reaper: “I’ve had it with you! From now on, you’re alive to me!”. Nice reversal of the idiomatic you’re dead to me ‘I disown you, cut you off, will never see or speak to you again’. Spoken by Death to Death, you’re alive to me conveys the same.

More on this cartoon, then two more Grim Reapers, to add to the 14 already posted on this blog; it’s a very popular cartoon meme.

(I’m not posting the cartoon here, just quoting the text, because Parisi’s lawyers insist on a fee for reproducing his work.)

Two sentences of text, each with an English idiom: in the first sentence, have had it (up to here) with sth./so. ‘not be willing to continue to deal with so. or sth., be unable to tolerate so. or sth. any longer’ (combining glosses from Cambridge and Oxford dictionary sites); in the second, you’re dead to me (as above; the idiom is sometimes extended to other subjects and objects).

An expression of the second sentiment, but without the be dead to wording: from the film The Godfather, Part II:

Michael Corleone: Fredo, you’re nothing to me now. You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend. I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance, so I won’t be there. You understand?

And then the precise wording, from the film Zoolander:

Coal miner father to male model son: You’re dead to me, boy. You’re more dead to me than your dead mother.

Earlier on this blog:

on 4/15/12,  “Cartoon matters”: Grim Reaper cartoon by Bob Mankoff

on 5/16/12, “The Reaperclone”: the “I’ve come for your X” snowclone, with 4 cartoons

on 6/14/12,  “Death at play”: 4 Grim Reaper gag cartoons

on 5/7/14,  “After Cinco de Mayo”: #2 Grim Reaper cartoon (Bizarro)

on 10/17/15, “Autumn, Halloween, and Death”: 2 Grim Reaper cartoons, one by Mark Parisi

on 12/30/15, “Five cartoons for the penultimate day”: 2 Grim Reaper cartoons

And now two more from Pinterest:

(#1)

Death on the couch

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

An instance of the Grim Reaper meme and the Psychiatrist meme.

(#2)

The Reaper and his multi-purpose pocket knife. (Another cartoon on a similar theme: Michael Crawford’s French Army Knife, #4 here.)

The artist for #2, Lonnie Easterling (and his Spud Comics website), is new to this blog. Two other Spuds with language play in them:

(#3)

The pickled peppers are there only to make the tongue twister tricky, but there are always critics who insist on looking at things logically.

(#4)

Crucial background knowledge: monkeys in zoos are famous for flinging poo at visitors; that’s Winnie the Pooh in the middle. poo / Pooh, what’s the difference?

xx

(Not primarily about language, but there is a bit in there.)

From this issue: a Flatiron Building cover by Harry Bliss; a Rob Leighton cartoon on the Dear John letter, nit-picking, and self-awareness; and a Will McPhail cartoon about duck hunters.

Harry Bliss. Another in a series of Bliss drawings of New York landmarks, “Fashion District”: the Flatiron Building seen looking south — but with the scene playfully amended by a clothesline stretching across Fifth Avenue from a window halfway up the building.

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From Wikipedia:

The Flatiron Building, originally the Fuller Building, is a triangular 22-story steel-framed landmarked building located at 175 Fifth Avenue in the borough of Manhattan, New York City, and is considered to be a groundbreaking skyscraper. Upon completion in 1902, it was one of the tallest buildings in the city at 20 floors high and one of only two skyscrapers north of 14th Street – the other being the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, one block east. The building sits on a triangular block formed by Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and East 22nd Street, with 23rd Street grazing the triangle’s northern (uptown) peak. As with numerous other wedge-shaped buildings, the name “Flatiron” derives from its resemblance to a cast-iron clothes iron.

The building, which has been called “one of the world’s most iconic skyscrapers and a quintessential symbol of New York City”, anchors the south (downtown) end of Madison Square and the north (uptown) end of the Ladies’ Mile Historic District. The neighborhood around it is called the Flatiron District after its signature building, which has become an icon of New York City.

The building in a fairly recent photo, with Fifth Avenue going south on the right, Broadway going south on the left:

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The building gets its name from the shape of an old-fashioned flatiron (or flat iron):

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From NOAD2:

flatiron: historical  an iron that was heated externally and used for pressing clothes.

There are Flatiron Buildings in other cities (Chicago and San Francisco, for example), which get their names for similar reasons.

About the cover, on the New Yorker site:

“I’ve nearly met my demise many times by stepping in front of traffic as I search the skyline for inspiration,” Harry Bliss says, about his drawing of the Flatiron Building, the cover of this week’s issue.

Rob Leighton. In the cartoon, a man is raging on the phone to the writer of a Dear John letter he’s just gotten:

(#4)

The letter obviously complains about his nit-picking. And in raging about the letter he picks nits (about hyphen use), revealing that he is unaware that he does in fact pick nits.

NOAD2 on relevant lexical items:

Dear John letter (also Dear John): informal a letter from a woman to a man, especially a serviceman, terminating a personal relationship: a young officer gets his Dear John letter. [using John as a generic name for a man]

nit: the egg or young form of a louse or other parasitic insect, especially the egg of a head louse attached to a human hair.

pick nits: chiefly North American look for and criticize small or insignificant faults or errors; nitpick. [metaphorical, treating looking for small faults as similar to searching for tiny nits in someone’s hair]

The generally preferred spelling for the verb related to pick nits is in fact solid, without a hyphen, as above: nitpick. But some writers like the hyphen (I do myself), and it’s nitpicking (or nit-picking) to insist that only one alternative is acceptable.

On the artist, from Wikipedia:

Robert Leighton is an American writer and artist, cartoonist, puzzle writer, illustrator, and humorist. He lives and works in New York City. His cartoons have appeared regularly in The New Yorker and other periodicals. In 1996, with Mike Shenk and Amy Goldstein, Leighton co-founded Puzzability, a puzzle-writing company. As part of Puzzability, Leighton has coauthored many books of puzzles, as well as puzzle-oriented Op-Ed pieces for The New York Times.

Asked why he creates cartoons and puzzles, two apparently different kinds of work, Leighton replied: “I think a puzzle is like a cartoon, like a joke, because the puzzle is the setup and the solution is the punch line. A good puzzle keeps you in suspense while you’re working on it, like a cartoon. And the ‘aha!’ is the equivalent of the laugh when a joke is resolved.”

Will McPhail. I picked this one out because I admired its elegant drawing and its formal composition, and because I caught a surprising allusion in the figures of the two hunters, so similar to two of the four principals of the tv show Duck Dynasty, while expressing a sentiment I would have thought utterly alien to them:

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The hunters in the cartoon seem to assume that when the conditions are good, the ducks will come to them. But one of the premises of the tv show is that the ducks have to be attracted — by the duck calls the family makes. On the other hand, McPhail’s cartoons are often (intentionally) absurd.

On the show, from Wikipedia:

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Jase, Si, Willie, Phil (if I’ve got them right)

Duck Dynasty is an American reality television series on A&E that portrays the lives of the Robertson family, who became successful from their family-operated business, Duck Commander. The West Monroe, Louisiana business makes products for duck hunters, primarily a duck call called Duck Commander. The Robertson men — brothers Phil and Si, and Phil’s sons Jase, Willie, and Jep — are known for their long beards and their Christian views. The family was previously featured on the series Benelli Presents Duck Commander and its spin-off, Buck Commander, on the Outdoor Channel

Not much information about the artist on his website, but here are two more of his absurdist cartoons for the New Yorker:

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No caption, but here’s a description: God Dunks.

It’s May Day, an ancient spring festival — think maypoles and all that — so, the beginning of the cycle of the seasons. (Everybody knows the Vivaldi. Try listening instead to the Haydn, here.) And it’s the first of the month, an occasion for still other rituals, including one that calls for everyone to greet the new month, upon awakening, by saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” (or some variant thereof). There’s even a Rabbit Rabbit Day Facebook community, with this page art (not attributed to an artist):

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The three-rabbit variant is the one I’m familiar with. (I got it as an adult from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky. Since she was from the South, I thought it was a specifically Southern thing. But today I learned, from an astonishingly detailed Wikipedia page, that that is very much not so.)

Today also brought a Facebook posting from my friend Mary Ballard, to whom the whole inaugural-rabbit thing was news, and, by good fortune, three cartoons from various sources: a Bizarro I’ve already posted about; a Mother Goose and Grimm with an outrageous bit of language play; and a Calvin and Hobbes reflection on the meaning of the verb read.

rabbit rabbit rabbit. The Wikipedia piece, almost in its entirety:

“Rabbit rabbit rabbit” is one variant of a superstition found in Britain and North America that states that a person should say or repeat the word “rabbit” or “rabbits”, or “white rabbits”, or some combination of these elements, out loud upon waking on the first day of the month, because doing so will ensure good luck for the duration of that month.

The exact origin of the superstition is unknown, though it was recorded in Notes and Queries as being said by children in 1909:

“My two daughters are in the habit of saying ‘Rabbits!’ on the first day of each month. The word must be spoken aloud, and be the first word said in the month. It brings luck for that month. Other children, I find, use the same formula. [So in the earliest citations, it’s childlore.]

In response to this note another contributor said that his daughter believed that the outcome would be a present, and that the word must be spoken up the chimney to be most effective; another pointed out that the word rabbit was often used in expletives, and suggested that the superstition may be a survival of the ancient belief in swearing as a means of avoiding evil. [There are attestations of rabbit as a milder version of drat, itself a euphemism for damn.] People continue to express curiosity about the origins of this superstition and draw upon it for inspiration in making calendars suggestive of the Labors of the Months, thus linking the rabbit rabbit superstition to seasonal fertility.

It appeared in a work of fiction in 1922:

“Why,” the man in the brown hat laughed at him, “I thought everybody knew ‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.’ If you say ‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit’—three times, just like that—first thing in the morning on the first of the month, even before you say your prayers, you’ll get a present before the end of the month.

Chapter 1 of the Trixie Belden story The Mystery of the Emeralds (1962) is titled “Rabbit! Rabbit!” and discusses the tradition:

Trixie Belden awoke slowly, with the sound of a summer rain beating against her window. She half-opened her eyes, stretched her arms above her head, and then, catching sight of a large sign tied to the foot of her bed, yelled out, “Rabbit! Rabbit!” She bounced out of bed and ran out of her room and down the hall. “I’ve finally done it!” she cried […] “Well, ever since I was Bobby’s age I’ve been trying to remember to say ‘Rabbit! Rabbit!’ and make a wish just before going to sleep on the last night of the month. If you say it again in the morning, before you’ve said another word, your wish comes true.” Trixie laughed.

In the United States the tradition appears especially well-known in northern New England although, like all folklore, determining its exact area of distribution is difficult. The superstition may be related to the broader belief in the rabbit or hare being a “lucky” animal, as exhibited in the practice of carrying a rabbit’s foot for luck.

During the mid-1990s, U.S. children’s cable channel Nickelodeon helped popularize the superstition in the United States as part of its “Nick Days,” where during commercial breaks it would show an ad about the significance of the current date, whether it be an actual holiday, a largely uncelebrated unofficial holiday, or a made-up day if nothing else is going on that specific day. (The latter would be identified as a “Nickelodeon holiday.”) Nickelodeon would promote the last day of each month as “Rabbit Rabbit Day” and to remind kids to say it the next day, unless the last day of that specific month was an actual holiday, such as Halloween or New Year’s Eve. This practice stopped by the late 1990s.

… As with most folklore, which is traditionally spread by word of mouth, there are numerous variants of the superstition, in some cases specific to a certain time period or region.

– “When I was a very little boy I was advised to always murmur ‘White rabbits’ on the first of every month if I wanted to be lucky. From sheer force of unreasoning habit I do it still — when I think of it. I know it to be preposterously ludicrous, but that does not deter me.” – Sir Herbert Russell, 1925.

– “Even Mr. Roosevelt, the President of the United States, has confessed to a friend that he says ‘Rabbits’ on the first of every month — and, what is more, he would not think of omitting the utterance on any account.” – Newspaper article, 1935.

– “On the first day of the month say ‘Rabbit! rabbit! rabbit!’ and the first thing you know you will get a present from someone you like very much.” Collected by the researcher Frank C. Brown in North Carolina in the years between 1913 and 1943.

– “If you say ‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit’ the first thing when you wake up in the morning on the first of each month you will have good luck all month.” Collected by Wayland D. Hand in Pennsylvania before 1964.

– “Say ‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit’ at the first of the month for good luck and money.” Collected by Ernest W. Baughman in New Mexico before 1964.

– “…it must be ‘White Rabbit’ … but you must also say ‘Brown Rabbit’ at night and walk downstairs backwards.” Reported in a small survey that took place in Exeter, Devon in 1972.

– “Ever since I was 4 years old, I have said ‘White Rabbits’ at the very moment of waking on every single first day of every single month that has passed.” Simon Winchester, 2006.

– “…the more common version ‘rabbit, rabbit, white rabbit’ should be said upon waking on the first day of each new month to bring good luck.” Sunday Mirror, 2007.

(Sources for all the citations are given as footnotes in the Wikipedia article.)

The three cartoons. The Bizarro played on a recent Pepsi ad exploiting protestor-police interactions. The other two:

(#2)

(Note that this is a meta-cartoon, in which the characters recognize that they are in fact characters in a cartoon.)

The idiom leave no stone unturned ‘try every possible course of action in order to achieve something’, with the /ston/ and /trn/ pieces interchanged (spooneristically), taking advantage of the ambiguities in /trn/: (verb turned, noun tern) and /ston/ (noun stone, adjectival use of the PSP stoned ‘under the influence of marijuana’.

‘ (#3)

Calvin extends the use of the verb read not only to cover the territory of skim ‘read (something) quickly or cursorily so as to note only the important points’ (NOAD2), as people sometimes do, hopefully or deceptively, but goes all the way to ‘turn the pages from beginning to end’ (without any engagement of eyes on text, much less extraction of meaning).

The One Big Happy in my comics feed today:

Rockefellers / rocky fellows. How was Ruthie to know her grandmother was using a proper name? And fellers is a familiar dialect variant for fellows – and an old one (Americans have been labeling feller an “impropriety” or “provincialism”, with an “excrescent” r, since at least 1795, according to DARE).

Ruthie undoubtedly also didn’t know that the Rockefeller family has long been seen as the richest family in the world, hence as the, um, gold standard of wealth. Which gives We’re no / not Rockefellers as an idiom meaning, roughly, ‘We’re not rich’.

And the idiomatic simile as rich as Rockefeller, as in the line from “On the Sunny Side of the Street”:

Now if I never made one cent
I’ll still be rich as Rockefeller
There will be gold dust at my feet
On the sunny
On the sunny, sunny side of the street

(You can listen to a fine Louis Armstrong performance here.)

From Wikipedia:

“On the Sunny Side of the Street” is a 1930 song, with credited music composed by Jimmy McHugh and lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Some authors say that Fats Waller was actually the composer, but he sold the rights for the money. It was introduced in the Broadway musical Lew Leslie’s International Revue, starring Harry Richman and Gertrude Lawrence.

Having become a jazz standard, it was played by such greats as Louis Armstrong, Ted Lewis, Dave Brubeck, Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Erroll Garner, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, James Booker, Count Basie and Lester Young.

Now, the name Rockefeller. Etymologically, there are neither rocks nor fellows in it: according to ancestry.com (not the best source of information, but the best I found in a quick search), the name refers to someone from the village of Rockenfeld in Rhineland-Pfalz, Germany (where the Pennsylvania Dutch come from!), named in Middle High German from rocke ‘rye (the grain)’  + feld ‘open country’. (Mod.Gm. has Roggen for ‘rye (the grain)’.) So a placename ‘rye field’.  (The noun rock has a Romance etymology; fellow is Germanic, originally ‘partner, colleague, buddy, mate’.)

The village of Rockenfeld is rock solid real. It’s near Koblentz, on the way to Cologne.

This Non Sequitur cartoon by Wiley Miller:

(#1)

squid / quid. And squid as a source of ink, squid as food. .

Hat tips to Chris Hansen and Josh Simon. On the cartoon, see this Page.

Two crucial pieces of background, from NOAD2:

noun quid pro quo: a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something: the pardon was a quid pro quo for their help in releasing hostages. ORIGIN mid 16th century (denoting a medicine substituted for another): Latin, ‘something for something.’

noun calamari (also calamares): squid served as food. ORIGIN Italian, plural of calamaro, from medieval Latin calamarium ‘pen case,’ from Greek kalamos ‘pen’ (with reference to the squid’s long tapering internal shell and its ink). The variant calamares is Spanish.

(Grammatical note: the English noun calamari can be either (SG) M (this calamari is) or PL (C) (these calamari are). The M treatment seems to be more common, but both are well attested.)

The pun squid pro quo has been exploited by one cartoonist after another. Three more, from Rhymes With Orange, a cartoon regularly featured here; from Courtoons: daily legal cartoons by David Mills; and from Marcus Connor’s Brainless Tales (which I’ll take up in another posting):

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)

xx

(Warning: there will be talk of penises and mansex.)

On The Hill site on 5/21, “Tillerson: ‘Not my first sword dance’ in Saudi Arabia”, by Jill Manchester:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Sunday that his sword dance the previous night in Saudi Arabia was not his first.

“I hadn’t been practicing, Chris, but it was not my first sword dance,” Tillerson told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace.

Tillerson and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross linked arms during the dance with Saudi performers on Saturday night. [REDACTED] also took part, swaying to the music, and appeared to enjoy the ceremonial dance. The event took place on [REDACTED]’s first day visiting Saudi Arabia, his first stop on his first foreign trip as president.

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Ross and Tillerson sword-dancing among Saudis

(Ceremonial sword dances are common in many cultures. You can watch the Saudi sword-dance video here.)

Tillerson was using “not my first sword dance” literally, saying that he had in fact performed other sword dances in the past, but also alluding to the metaphorical idiom not be someone’s first rodeo (or not be someone’s first time at the rodeo), with the negation realized as is not, isn’t, or (most commonly) ain’t. Gloss from NOAD2:

NORTH AMERICAN used to indicate that someone is not naive or inexperienced. “I’m a professional. This ain’t my first time at the rodeo”

The idiom literally denotes naivety, lack of experience, but the rodeo-riding image adds a tinge of sexual allusion, so that This ain’t my first time at the rodeo can serve as an alternative to the metaphorical I ain’t no virgin (at this), a possibility exploited in this Zazzle t-shirt:

(#2)

— conveying something like ‘I’m no virgin, and I’m available; ride with me, baby’.

The source of the rodeo formula? Either it originated in a line from the 1981 film Mommie Dearest, or the use of the expression in that movie was the vehicle for its spread:

(#3)

[addressing the men in the Pepsi boardroom] Joan Crawford: Don’t fuck with me fellas. This ain’t my first time at the rodeo.

The sexual connotations of the rodeo version spill over onto the sword dance version, where they reinforce the phallic imagery of swords, exploited in the gay sexual slang swordplay / swordfight. From my 9/6/11 posting “Penis-to-penis”:

Probably not everyone knows that one way two men can interact with one another is through their penises — actually two ways, in mock play (referred to metaphorically as swordplay or a swordfight, with the figure of penis as sword) or amiably (in what I’ll call cockversation).

Swordplay/swordfights can be primarily contests (using dicks as if they were weapons) or primarily sexual (rubbing or striking dicks together as a sex act, aimed at ejaculation for both men), though the line between the two types of interactions can easily be crossed.

Illustrations in a 1/17/15 AZBlogX posting.

(An Urban Dictionary entry says that swordplay is also used for three-way het sex, with one man penetrating a woman vaginally, the other anally.)

On ADS-L, poster Shawnee Moon picked up on a possible gay resonance in sword dance:

Not at all meaning to be crude, but “sword dance” immediately made me think it was a reference to gay men dancing, as I have heard “sword fight” used in reference to gay male sexual shenanigans.

I very much doubt that Rex Tillerson is aware of a possible gay angle to sword dances. Sometimes a sword dance is just a sword dance.

Today’s Zippy pits Griffy against a familiar figure in the strip, a Muffler Man roadside fiberglass figure — in this case a lumberjack figure, selling tires rather than mufflers, but still part of an automotive theme:

Not just selling tires, but presenting himself as hypermasculinely disdainful of analytic academics.

MachoJackMan ends with a doubly dismissive sentence of the form:

taste NP, AddressNominal!

— a dismissive imperative of the form taste NP!, plus a dismissive address term.

The imperative echoes other dismissive imperatives, in particular Bart Simpson’s Eat my shorts! (from the tv show The Simpsons), or Eat/Bite me!, with verbs of ingestion rather than taste — conveying either ‘Fuck off!’ or ‘Bullshit! and more distantly echoing dismissive Suck my dick! (cf. Flo’s Kiss my grits! from the tv show Alice, which is most closely modeled on Kiss my ass!).

Possibly hovering around the edges here is the mocking idiom Eat my dust!, directed at a defeated rival, especially in auto racing, which would work the automotive theme into things. Also possibly the automotive idiom lay rubber ‘accelerate a vehicle enough to leave a patch of burnt rubber on the road.

What make the last panel especially delicious is the complexity and specificity of the two nominal expressions in it: the direct object steel-belted radial (note use of radial ‘radial tire’ as a M(ass) N); and the address Nominal over-analyzing culture geek. When MachoJackMan speaks, he’s far from laconic.

Four language-related strips in my comics feed on Sunday the 4th, which this year was Pentecost,

the Christian festival celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Jesus after his Ascension, held on the seventh Sunday after Easter. (NOAD2)

KJV Acts 2:3: And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them

The word came down. In One Big Happy, Rhymes Wth Orange, Zits, and xkcd.

I’ll get to the comics in a little while. But first, a digression on flaming tongues: in music, in the plant world, and in mansex.

Musical tongues. The biblical story worked into a hymn, “Come Thy Fount of Every Blessing”:

Come thou fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of God’s unchanging love.

From Wikipedia:

“Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is a Christian hymn written by the 18th century pastor and hymnist Robert Robinson. Robert Robinson penned the words at age 22 in the year 1757.

It’s been set to a number of different tunes; some discussion in my 12/23/11 posting “Come Thou Fount”.

And then there’s the rock music by Daniel Menche, released in 2005 and 2006:

(#1)

Botanical tongues. The daylily cultivar ‘Flaming Tongues’:

(#2)

Men wielding flaming tongues in sex. Two shots, the first of intensely rainbow man-kissing (suitable for Pride Month):

(#3)

And then of a flaming togue working its way south:

(#4)

On to the comics. In a bunch:

(#5)

(#6)

(#7)

(#8)

OBH: rhododendron. In #5, a spelling problem. Nick, the kids’ grandfather, identifies a plant as a rhododendron, not a rose, but when his neighbor challenges him to spell the name, he decides that it’s a rose after all.

A grand display of rhododendrons (rhodies to their fans):

(#9)

From Wikipedia:

Rhododendron (from Ancient Greek ῥόδον rhódon “rose” and δένδρον déndron “tree”) is a genus of 1,024 species of woody plants in the heath family (Ericaceae), either evergreen or deciduous, and found mainly in Asia, although it is also widespread throughout the Southern Highlands of the Appalachian Mountains of North America. It is the national flower of Nepal. Most species have brightly coloured flowers which bloom from late winter through to early summer.

Azaleas make up two subgenera of Rhododendron. They are distinguished from “true” rhododendrons by having only five anthers per flower.

Here in Palo Alto the rhododendrons are almost finished blooming.

Etymological note: it’s a nice twist that the first element in the name rhododendron is in fact the Greek for ‘rose’.

Bonus: in another nice twist, my friend Ned Deily affects not to distinguish any flowers, identifying them all as roses, so for him rhododendrons are indeed kinds of roses.

Rhymes: hold the anchovies. On #6. From NOAD2:

verb hold: North American informal refrain from adding or using (something, typically an item of food or drink): a strawberry margarita, but hold the tequila.

This use of hold is pretty much restricted to the BSE form of the verb: in the imperative (as in the dictionary example); in to-infinitivals (I wanted them to hold the tequila); in unmarked infinitivals, as in complements to modals (I’ll hold the tequila, sir); or in forms identical to the BSE, in particular the PRS, as in Whenever the customer asks, I hold the tequila. Other forms are at best odd: ?The waitress held the tequila (cf. What the waitress did was hold the tequila).

The most frequent use of this hold is probably in the imperative, as in the Burger King jingle with the couplet:

Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce;
Special orders don’t upset us.

(which is a perfect rhyme for some, but only a half-rhyme for those who have a high unaccented vowel in the final syllable of lettuce, but a lower one in upset us).

On the Burger King ad campaign, from Subba Rao Chaganti’s blog BuildingPharmaBrands:

(#10)

Burger King came out with a slogan of Have It Your Way in 1974. This slogan summed up its difference with its rival McDonald’s. The slogan fits well with the emphasis in pop culture and on individuality. The line makes total sense at a time when self-expression and mass customization are critical elements of culture.

Burger King abandoned the slogan four years later in favor of forgettable themes such as Best Darn Burger (1978), Burger King Town (1986), and The Whopper Says (2001). The company, thirty years later, however realized that the retro culture is in and had gone into a back-to-future mode in its advertising. It returned to Have It Your Way in 2004 in TV ads from Crispin Porter + Borgusky, its former agency.

Research indicated Have It Your Way was still the theme that most resonated despite other campaigns. When you have an ad campaign that is sticky, it is foolish to go against said Russ Klein, the global marketing officer of Burger King. That’s the reason they returned to their earlier slogan.

Here’s a jingle that Burger King produced and used in the 70s in response to McDonald’s Big Mac song. The jingle has been modified several times and reused it. The lyrics proclaimed that Burger King would serve you a customized product (you can have whatever toppings you wanted on a burger, or even plain) living up to its slogan Have It Your Way.

Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce;
Special orders don’t upset us.
All we ask is that you let us serve it your way…
We can serve your broiled beef Whopper
Fresh with everything on topper.
Anyway you think is proper; have it your way…
(Chorus) Have it your way, have it your way! At Burger King, eat at Burger King!

Zits: blurting out the truth. About #7. Jeremy is given to saying out loud (to his parents) what he’s actually thinking, rather than what he realizes his parents want to hear. So his words are sometimes unfortunate.

Back on May 22nd, I posted (in “Prepositions matter”) about one such incident, in which Jeremy announces that he’s going off to study Sara, then corrects that to to study with Sara. In #7, he blurts out about beer pong, then hastily alters that to the innocent ping pong.

xkcd: state words. Finally, #8 has an xkcd (#1845) State Word Map, in which Randall Munroe mocks US maps based on some purported survey about the favored custom (often, word usage) in each state. Nobody checks this stuff out, so map-makers are pretty much free to make things up.

In the map in #8, my natal state (Pennsylvania) gets the word amplifying (as in amplifying random noise), my immediate-past state (Ohio) gets just, and my current state (California) gets little but.

The word but came down to California in a flaming cloud?

From Wilson Gray on ADS-L on the 6th, in a discussion of a joke that turns on a structural ambiguity, a totally different joke of this sort:

A drunk is staggering along the sidewalk muttering to himself, “It can’t be done! I couldn’t do it!” A passer-by comments, “Damn, man, you all fucked up!, It must have been something terrible! What couldn’t you do?!” The drunk answers, “Drink Canada dry!”

The joke doesn’t quite work in print like this, unless you use all-caps, the way artist Richard Prince did in this “joke painting”:

(#1)

Untitled (Drink Canada Dry), acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 1998

The joke of course also works fine in speech. (Early occurrences in print have only either Canada Dry or Canada dry, with text that points the reader towards the other.)

Two things: the joke and its history

The joke plays on an ambiguity in DRINK CANADA DRY:

simple transitive (simptr): a BSE-form VP drink Canada Dry — drink has one non-subject argument, a direct object NP, the compound N Canada Dry:

[ drink ] [ [ Canada ] [ Dry ] ]

resultative transitive (restr): a BSE-form VP drink Canada dry — drink has two non-subject arguments, a direct object NP, the N Canada, plus a (predicative) complement AdjP, the Adj dry:

 [ drink ] [ Canada ] [ dry ]

In the restr reading, Canada is treated as a container (cf. drink the bottle dry) and the interpretation involves a partitive rather than holistic reading of Canada: ‘drink from/of the bottle  so that it was / until it became  dry’.

Wikipedia  (amended beyond recognition) on resultatives:

In linguistics, [resultative constructions (there seem to be several)] … express that something or someone has undergone a change in state as the result of the completion of an event. [A resultative construction involves] a verb (denoting the event), a postverbal noun phrase (denoting the entity that has undergone a change), and a [predicative phrase](denoting the state achieved as the result of the action named by the verb) which may be represented by an adjective, a prepositional phrase, or a particle, among others. For example, in the [clause] the man wiped the table clean, the adjective clean denotes the state achieved by the table as a result of the event [of wiping].

The semantics of the man cleaned the table is then a composite of ‘the man worked at table-cleaning’ and ‘as a result, the table became clean’.

The full range of facts about resultatives is very complex. Many verbs in these constructions are quite choosy about the predicatives they occur with, to the point where the combination looks idiomatic. You can laugh or drink yourself sick or silly, maybe helpless or goofy, but anything decidedly positive — happy, wise, well — is notably odd, at least without a lot of contextual set-up.

The history of the joke. Barry Popik, on his blog, has done this one up pretty well. From the entry of 8/24/13, “Drink Canada Dry” (joke):

Canada Dry is a brand of soft drinks owned since 2008 by the Texas-based Dr Pepper Snapple Group. For over a century Canada Dry has been known for its ginger ale, though the company also manufactures a number of other soft drinks and mixers. Although Canada Dry originated in its namesake country, it is now produced in many countries around the globe, including the United States, Mexico, Colombia, the Middle East, Europe and Japan.

The “Dry” in the brand’s name refers to not being sweet, as in a dry wine. When John J. McLaughlin, who first formulated “Canada Dry Pale Ginger Ale”, originally made his new soft drink, it was far less sweet than other ginger ales then available; as a result, he labelled it “dry”.

(#2)

A vintage metal advertising sign

Early cites of the joke:

11 October 1927, Middlesboro (KY) Daily News, “Allen’s Sawdust,” pg. 4, col. 6:

Waiter—“Would you like to drink Canada Dry, sir?”
Tourist—“I’d love to, but I’m only here for a week.”

29 January 1928, Boston (MA) Herald, Editorial-Social Section, pg. 7, col. 4:

Waiter: “Would you like to drink Canada Dry, Sir?”
Customer: “I’d love to, but I’m here for only a week.”

— Cleveland News.

10 March 1929, Springfield (MA) Sunday Union and Republican, pg. 3F, col. 4:

Canadian (to American)—“How would you like to drink Canada dry?”
American (parched)—“Can’t. Won’t live long enough.”

Plus later occurrences.

… you’ll do better dressing a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Rhymes With Orange from the 9th:

Wolves and sheep share a basic body pattern (four legs, tail, etc.), but foxes and chickens diverge substantially. A wolf might pass for a sheep, but not a fox for a hen.

Then there’s the fox/sheep idiom, from Wikipedia:

A Wolf in sheep’s clothing is an idiom of Biblical origin used to describe those playing a role contrary to their real character with whom contact is dangerous, particularly false teachers. As a fable it has been falsely credited to Aesop and the theme is now numbered 451 in the Perry Index. The confusion has arisen from the similarity of the theme with fables of Aesop concerning wolves that are mistakenly trusted by shepherds; the moral drawn from these is that one’s basic nature eventually betrays itself.

The phrase originates in a sermon by Jesus recorded in the Christian New Testament: Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves (Gospel of Matthew 7:15, King James Version). The sermon then suggests that their true nature will be revealed by their actions (by their fruits shall ye know them, verse 16). In the centuries following, the phrase was used many times in the Latin writings of the Church Fathers and later on in European vernacular literature. A Latin proverb also emerged, Pelle sub agnina latitat mens saepe lupina (Under a sheep’s skin often hides a wolfish mind).

There’s a vein of cartoons in which wolves dress in sheep’s clothing, not to prey upon the unsuspecting sheep, but because they enjoy dressing in sheep drag. Under a wolf’s skin sometimes hides a sheepish mind.

(There will be discussions of men’s naughty bits and pictures of these barely covered. Sometimes celebratory, sometimes silly, but not at all (I think) arousing. Still, if that’s not you want to read or see, pass on to something else.)

It began with this arresting photo from Carson Link on the Stealthy Cam Men Facebook site on the 24th, dated “Yesterday New York, NY” [that is, on the 23rd]:

(#1)

Link’s text:

Caught him off guard they were getting ready for a parade from the E. Village [Tompkins Square Park] to the West Village

If Link has the dates right, then this was the annual NYC Drag March, from Tompkins Square Park to the Stonewall Inn (note the guy in heels on the left) — though the central figure in the photo looks like he came from the June 11th Body Pride Parade (also annual), from Tompkins Square Park to Washington Square Park, and everyone in the photo looks like they’d find a place in the big Pride Parade on the 25th (for which there are many sub-celebrations).

In any case, Sock Man on Parade is, um, remarkable, as a piece of living sculpture, if nothing else.

Background 1. On put a sock in it. BrE colloq. ‘be quiet, don’t make so much noise, shut up!’ (because a sock gags the mouth). GDoS has put / shove / stck / stuff a sock in it from 1921 in Notes & Queries, indicating prior use. The idiom illustrated:

(#2)

Background 2. On put a sock on it. A safe-sex slogan based on the idiom put a sock in it and the metaphorical use of sock to mean ‘condom’, as in this Durex ad:

(#3)

From a site with innovative condom ads:

Some men think that wearing a c0ndom is like wearing a sock, but not with Durex … apparently. They are playing up on the fact that you can get full protection with the ultra slim Durex c0ndoms. It’s a great selling point, because men like to be able to feel with their banana.

That’s metaphorical sock. But the sock in #1 is literal.

Background 3. On the Stealthy Cam Men site, men post photographs of hot guys they have surreptitously photographed or videotaped. Even if you admire the objects of this exercise, the premise is creepy. Sock Man on Parade, however, is displaying himself intentionally in a very public place, so I have no qualms about posting the picture.

Background 4. Gay? At least one commenter on #1 noted that the context is an event with significant gay content, but in the commenter’s opinion Sock Man on Parade is only questionbly gay, because his cock sock doesn’t match his foot socks. I object: the two sock patterns are complementary, with the yellow and navy bands reversed, and that points to a high degree of fashion sense, worthy of a certifiable queer.

Background 5. NYC Body Pride. From a NYC calendar of events, for this year’s (June 11th) march:

You have a body, be proud of it!
The Body Pride parade is for all those who have a body and are not afraid to show it.
We will gather at Tompkins park at 12:00pm and march to Washington sq. There will be looping, there will be drum circles, there will be casual nudity.
We will bring large signs we can paint body positive messages on. If anyone else wants to bring signs, glitter, paint and art supplies please do!
At 2:00pm we march!
If you have a drum or other musical instruments please bring them too!
Recommended that you travel light and have a bag that will easily fit all your belongings.
We will rally by the basketball courts, then spontaneously remove articles of clothing and proceed to march!
This year’s theme is «Just got ONE body!». Be extravagant, be courageous, be proud!

Though rainbow features are not uncommon at the parade — rainbow thongs and the like — the emphasis of the event is exposing the body, as in this (rather contrived) mass photo from the march a few years ago:

(#4)

The intended message is that all bodies should be celebrated: female and male, old and young, flabby and fit, fat and thin, black and white, gay and straight, trans and cis. And add some body paint and glitter.

Background 6. NYC Drag March. On the 23rd. Calendar notice:

Beglitter your beard, cram into your platforms, or feel your gender illusion any way that feels right at this annual march from Tompkins Square Park to the Stonewall. This year’s joyous, body-positive celebration honors Drag March founder and Rainbow flag creator Gilbert Baker.

From an earlier Drag March:

(#5)

Background 7. Penis sheaths. The cock sock in #1 functions much like the penis sheaths of New Guinea: it protects the genitals, it conceals them, and at the same time it ostentatiously calls attention to them. The device in #1 does not, however, index the wearer’s cultural group, as decorations on New Guinea penis sheaths do. From Wikipedia:

(#6)

Penis sheath from western (Indonesian) New Guinea

The koteka, horim, or penis gourd is a penis sheath traditionally worn by native male inhabitants of some (mainly highland) ethnic groups in New Guinea to cover their genitals. They are normally made from a dried-out gourd, Lagenaria siceraria, although other species, such as Nepenthes mirabilis, are also used. They are held in place by a small loop of fiber attached to the base of the koteka and placed around the scrotum. There is a secondary loop placed around the chest or abdomen and attached to the main body of the koteka. Men choose kotekas similar to ones worn by other men in their cultural group.

Think of the designs as analogous to club ties or gang insignia.

Background 8. Modern cock socks. In a 6/14/11 AZBlogX posting “Today’s remarkable underwear”, a series of undergarments that cover the genitals while simultaneously calling attention to them (in the case of the first set, displaying them quite visibly through a light mesh fabric).

Actual socks and sock-simulacra. The guy in #1 is using an actual sock as a penis sheath. He could have used an ankle sock (which would have done the job of minimally covering his junk), and he could have chosen one in a neutral solid color (drawing as little attention to his junk as possible), but instead he used a kneelength sock (so that lots of sock dangles in public) with a eye-catching pattern. Like a koteka, it exaggerates the size of the wearer’s penis and draws attention to it through a colorful design. It’s a covering and an advertisement.

A digression. In the New Guinea highlands, men of native groups traditionally don’t wear pants / trousers of any sort. They’re bare-assed in what looks to Western eyes like extremely minimal underwear. (The Indonesian government has gone to great lengths to force native men into wearing pants and native women dresses.)

But in the U.S, generally, going bare-assed in public counts as public indecency, as does going about in your underwear, especially minimal and genital-displaying underwear. Laws against such public indecency may be suspended in certain places and on certain occasions, but in general guys are expected to wear pants with both front and back panels.

The Drag March and Body Pride Parade are two NYC events (among a number) in which the usual strictures are lifted.

The guy in #1 is wearing an actual sock on his cock, but the modern cock socks alluded to just above are cock-simulacra, undergarments that fit on a penis the way a sock fits on the foot. There are two types: cock socks primarily designed to provide warmth and protection; and those primarily designed to display the penis.

The first type are sometimes given playful names, like willy warmer and peter heater, and they’re usually knitted, often in fanciful phallic forms (resembling a banana, pickle, elephant’s trunk, etc.). My favorites are those in rainbow colors, like this set:

(#7)

The second type is made of much lighter material, as in this collection of cock socks:

(#8)

Cock socks of this type in use:

(#9)

As minimal as minimal gets.

Minimal cock socks need some scheme for keeping them in place. The ones in #8 and #9 depend on firm elastic around the base of the testicles — not a reliable device at all. The knitted ones have ties for this purpose — also not reliable.

The guy in #1 has a better solution: a light harness to hold his sock up, just as suspenders would.

A cock sock can be stabilized by a more substantial strap, yielding the mankini, or slingshot thong:

(#10)

Alternatively, a cock sock like those in #8 and #9 can be partially stabilized by suspending it from an elastic waistband, as in the cock socks from Pikante:

(#11)

However, unless the elastic around the base of the testicles is very tight, the garment is still not very stable, since the sock can easily slide off. To solve this problem, just add a buttocks strap, and you’ve got the classic thong:

(#12)

So many, many ways to put a sock on it, for parading about in.

An exchange reported on Facebook this morning, by one of the participants, EF:

JK: It’s a matter of which came first, the horse or the egg.
EF: [stares at him] Do you realize what you just said?
JK: [long silence] This is going to end up in a Facebook post, isn’t it?
EF: Yes. Yes it is.

Meanwhile, don’t put the cart before the chicken.

In pictures:

(#1) Horse and egg

(#2) Chicken and cart

As with transposition / exchange / Spoonerism errors, idiom blens (aka malaphors) are sometimes committed intentionally, for jocular or rhetorical effect, as in this 1/24/14 tweet (by Will Hayllar):

Which came first, the horse or the egg? Meat industry could learn much from the way the egg industry responded to its past crises

A recent tv commercial for Jack Link’s beef jerky builds up to the punch line, the claim that the jerky

beats the snack out of other snacks

ostentatiously using snack as a euphemism for shit.

Ostentatious euphemisms are a subtype of ostentatious taboo avoidance, in which the point is to show off the taboo vocabulary — to draw attention to a commercial product through naughty talk, or just to talk naughty for fun without actually uttering the taboo words.

Three examples of shit euphemism from earlier postings here:

on 2/18/11 in “Shaving Cream”: a joke song in which the content and rhyme scheme both call for the word shit, but it’s replaced by shaving cream

on 4/14/13 in “ship my pants”: a Kmart ad with ship ostentatiously avoiding shit

on 8/14/13 in “Today’s baffling taboo avoidance”: Kraft ads with “Get your chef together”, with chef ostentatiously avoiding shit

On to the Jack Link’s commercial, which you can watch here. From a site on tv commercials:

Screen shot from the middle of the ad

Jack Link’s Jerky “beats the snack out of other snacks” – this is what the brand of beef jerky aims to highlight in its latest campaign, titled “Versus”.

The campaign, done by Carmichael Lynch, includes a series of spots featuring various tests run on Jack Link’s Jerky and other snacks, using instruments like polygraph, protein detector, microscope, speed gun, and others.

In one of the spots, a woman is using a protein detector on a Choco Nut Snack Bar, Cheese Made of String and Jack Link’s Original Beef Jerky to check the amount of protein they have, and it turns out that while the first two have 8g and 6 g, respectively, Jack Link’s has 10g of protein per serving.

“As you can see by our irrefutable science, Jack Link’s has more protein and better music than these other snacks.” – says the voiceover at the end of the spot, concluding that “Jack Link’s Jerky beats the snack out of other snacks”.

The words snack /snæk/ and shit /šɪt/ are not all that close phonologically, but the idiom context in beat the ___ out of s.o. pretty much determines what the middle word must be (similarly with scare the ___ out of s.o.).

(Men’s bodies, underwear, snarky captions, and some slang.)

A recent offer from Daily Jocks, SUP BRO t-shirts from the Australian company Supawear:

(#1)

That’s my shirt bro
It comes from A U
I’m Buster Brown
Look for me down there too

The Supawear firm likes to play on its name — as here, with the play on AmE slang ‘sup, bro?, short for whassup, bro?, a casual-speech variant (probably originally from black street speech) of what’s up, bro?, combining the informal idiomatic query what’s up? with the address term bro, which (like ‘sup?) has diffused from black street speech into much wider use among young men.

From GDoS:

what’s up? (also ‘sup? wassup? whassup? wha’s up? what up? whazzap? wuzzup? ‘zup?) 1 a general enquiry or greeting [first cite 1855] 2 what’s the matter? esp. in what’s up with you/her? etc. [first cite 1837] 3 what is happening? what’s going on? [first cite 1912]

what’s up, G? (also what up G?) (orig. US black) a greeting [1991 cite as campus slang; other cites from black sources] with [generic address term] G (derived from ‘Gangster’) ‘Whasup G?’

The main entry lists syntactic variants (what up?, with omitted auxiliary, alongside what’s up?) and phonological variants (what’s up?, wassup?, ‘sup?; variation between /a/ and /ʌ/ in the variants of what; variation between /s/ and /z/ in the reduced auxiliary) and possibly mere orthographic variation. The full range of facts about the variants and their contexts of use is extremely complex; a dictionary can’t be expected to go much beyond cataloguing the variants that occur in texts and mentioning a few of the social parameters that seem to be relevant.

Bro is complex as well. From a 4/28/16 posting:

The story of the address term bro in relatively recent years begins with its use by black men to black men, roughly (but not exactly) like the widely used American buddy — a term of male affiliation. It then spread into the wider culture, serving as a mark of male solidarity. This is what I called in a 4/12/16 posting “good”, positive, bro. But male solidarity tends to come with a dark side: rejection of anything perceived as feminine, played out as sturdy misogyny and homo-hatred in general; and the elevation of boys’ clubs (formed for whatever reasons) to boys-only clubs, aggressively hostile to women and to men perceived as inferior. When these guys use bro to address (or refer to) one another, then we’ve got what I called “bad”, negative, bro.

Regular use of bad bro between men in groups, for instance by fraternity boys and so-called brogrammers, has led to a steady pejoration of the term for people outside those male groups; bro is now a tainted term for many people, calling up unpleasant images of aggressive masculinity.

Bro has made its way to Australia, where it seems to fit in well with the macho strain in the culture. The Supaware ads play on it as a marker of male solidarity and combine that edgily with the homoerotic currents of premium men’s underwear advertising in general, and Supaware in particular: the advertising is offering underwear, swimwear, and gymwear, but it’s also offering the model’s bodies as objects of desire.

Here’s the model in #1 displaying his body in Supawear Rainforest briefs:

(#2)

In the Cairns
Rainforest,
Buster became a
Fruit bat.

A frontal offer, of a smoothly masculine body. Another frontal offer, from the European firm Code 22, this time a scruffily masculine body:

(#3)

El Caimán
Lays in wait for
Spanish boys in
La laguna azul.

On to the often outrageous Canadian firm PUMP! From a 9/2/15 posting about

[PUMP!’s] larger catalogue, which tends to feature underwear models “projecting steamy desirability” (as I put it in my Rafael Nadal posting) — in fact projecting a male-hustler persona while teasingly flaunting the pleasures of their bodies.

And on 11/9/15:

PUMP! specializes in gym-oriented images (pumping iron and all that), though they also have a few pretty-boy models and a lot of models doing the slutty rentboy look

Their models do front displays in bodywear that sets off their pouches strikingly, and several models specialize in rear displays — for example:

(#4)

(#5)

L’Ami en Rose, from his
Tattoo and the song, sometimes
Le Miracle de la Rose, from the
Rosebud of his body, à la Genet.

A recent cartoon by Wayno, passed on to me by Chris Hansen:

To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize that the setting — one or two people on a small, otherwise uninhabited, island with a lone palm tree — is a cartoon meme, and that such  a setting is referred to in English by the idiom desert island. (You also, of course, need to recognize the items on the island as desserts; and to know how to spell desert and dessert.)

On desert island, from Wikipedia:

A deserted island or uninhabited island is an island that is not permanently populated by humans. Uninhabited islands are often used in movies or stories about shipwrecked people, and are also used as stereotypes for the idea of “paradise”.

… Uninhabited islands are sometimes also called “deserted islands” or “desert islands”. In the latter, the adjective “desert” connotes not desert climate conditions, but rather “desolate and sparsely occupied or unoccupied”. The word “desert” has been “formerly applied more widely to any wild, uninhabited region, including forest-land”, and it is this archaic meaning that appears in the phrase “desert island”. Similarly, the term “deserted island” does not imply that the island was previously inhabited and later deserted.

The term “desert island” is also commonly used figuratively to refer to objects or behavior in conditions of social isolation and limited material means.

As for the cartoonist, you can find information about Wayno and his Waynovision strip on this website.

Yesterday’s medical adventure, set off by my shortness of breath during exertion, especially in hot weather (which we’ve been having a lot of; my symptoms became worrisome on a weekend in May when the temperature in Palo Alto reached 107 F). I was referred to a cardiologist; alarmed, she set up yesterday’s myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) test, specifically via single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). Details to follow.

The test involved hours at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, much of it sitting around between its parts. The actual imaging parts of the test took place in astonishingly icy rooms — which I came to refer to as medical Antarctica — so that I was shivering with cold when I left after 5 hours.

In the sitting-around parts of the event, I read through most of the latest (August 7th and 14th) issue of the New Yorker. To leaven the stark medical details, I’ll report on one of the pieces (Lauren Collins’s “Identity crisis: Notes from a names obsessive”), one of the cartoons (by Joe Dator), and a set of “spots”, small illustrations by Nishant Choksi sprinkled throughout the issue.

Medical background. When the shortness of breath became an issue, my family doctor referred me to a cardiologist, who ordered the MPI; altered my medication significantly (doubling the heart medications, replacing one diuretic by a much stronger one, and adding baby aspirin); told me to go on a very low-salt diet; recommended that I continue my senior fitness classes at the Y but at a reduced level of exertion (in particular, doing all the exercises in a chair, rather than moving around on my feet); and told me not to schedule cataract surgery until after my cardiac situation was clarified (at my age, you accumulate medical conditions, and the treatments often compete with one another).

The fitness classes have been very satisfying. My arms and legs are stronger, my disabled right arm moves more easily, and my balance improved so much that six weeks ago I was able to give up using a cane (on the street) and a walker (in exercise class). The instructors and the other participants are supportive and encouraging; we buoy each other up.

But on hot days my face flushed in exertion and I panted for breath. Not good. (The sort-of-good news is that I haven’t had any chest pain.) In any case, both the insertion of stents in one or more of my coronary arteries — there are three of them — and bypass surgery were mentioned. Frankly, terrifying.

Break: Lauren Collins on selecting a baby name. The New Yorker piece is entitled “Identity crisis: Notes from a names obsessive” in print, “Notes from a baby-name obsessive: My son was almost due. What would I call him?” on-line.

Collins, an American, and her French husband Olivier are wrestling with a name for their impending son (they already have two daughters). They’re trying to find a name that will work with both sides of the family and won’t subject their son to ridicule. Not an easy task.

On the American side, there are many naming patterns that strike Europeans (including the Britons as well as the French) as peculiar or absurd. On the French side, naming patterns have gone through several convulsions, including (until fairly recently) a period in which only the names of Roman Catholic saints could be registered legally. Collins writes:

Today, a registrar is required to accept any name, except one he deems not in a child’s best interest, in which case he will refer the matter to a judge. In recent years, French courts have rejected such names as Nutella, Prince-William, and, for a pair of twins, Joyeux (Happy) and Patriste (a phonetic take on Not Sad [pas triste]). “The names of ‘Joyeux’ and ‘Patriste’ are of a nature, because of their fanciful, even ridiculous, character, to create difficulties and embarrassment for the child,” the opinion read. “It is therefore necessary to confirm the judgment taken with regard to the suppression of these two names, which must be replaced by the first names of ‘Roger’ and ‘Raymond.’ ”

We wanted something squarely French, but not, as John F. Kennedy once warned Jackie in advance of a state dinner, “too Frenchy.”

As the due date loomed,

Olivier, who tends to take a rational approach to problem-solving, came home … with a spreadsheet. He had input the top two hundred and fifty Parisian boys’ names for 2016, the number of births corresponding to each, and his comments on the entries. Sacha: “Too Russian?” Neil: “Ask Lauren.” Leonardo: “Too DiCaprio.” Ferdinand: “1st World War.” Aurèle: “J’aime bien.” Charlie: “Charlie Hebdo.” Sure enough, next to Kevin he’d written, “Silly.” [In France, it seems to be seen as a name for an idiot.]

We went through the list together, filling in the missing cells.

“Timothée,” I read out.

“Timothée douche,” Olivier said.

“What’s Timothée douche?”

“A bath gel.”

No. 90 was Lenny, one of a number of English names that have recently gained traction with French parents.

“You put ‘Why not?’ next to Lenny?” I said. “Have you ever heard of a book called ‘Of Mice and Men’?”

Eventually, they settle on Louis.

Funny and charming, with light digressions into the history of naming practices, nominal determinism, and the like.

Medical moment: the MPI test. (MPI is always going to call up the Max-Planck Institutes for me, especially the Max-Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. But for present purposes, it’s all about myocardial perfusion imaging.) From the American Heart Association on MPI, “What is a myocardial perfusion imaging test?”:

Myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) is a non-invasive imaging test that shows how well blood flows through (perfuses) your heart muscle. It can show areas of the heart muscle that aren’t getting enough blood flow. This test is often called a nuclear stress test. It can also show how well the heart muscle is pumping.

There are 2 techniques for MPI: single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and positron emission tomography (PET).

MPI is useful in patients with chest discomfort to see if the discomfort comes from lack of blood flow to the heart muscle caused by narrowed or blocked heart arteries (angina). Myocardial perfusion imaging doesn’t show the heart arteries themselves, but can tell your doctor with good certainty if any heart arteries are blocked and how many. MPI can also show if you’ve previously had a heart attack.

My SPECT in outline: injection of a radiopharmaceutical, rest, and then 15 minutes of imaging; 2 hrs. rest, then stressing (often on a treadmill but in my case, via a drug that increases blood flow to the heart and makes it beat faster), another shot of the radiopharmaceutical; rest, and another 15 minutes of imaging.

For drug-induced stressing, the radiologist administers the drug and then sticks around talking to you and encouraging you to report the sensations you’re undergoing — usually, a big physical rush associated with suddenly expanded coronary arteries. I was one of a minority — about 10%, apparently — of patients who experience nothing at all. So the radiologist, the nurse, Kim Darnell, and I engaged in banter about language, our academic degrees, and undergraduate education at Stanford (a bit of this was Kim and the radiologist chatting in Japanese).

Break: Joe Dator. In the midst of all this, I laughed out loud at this Joe Dator cartoon (the artist now has his own Page on this blog):

(#1) “You weren’t supposed to see this.”

Not especially language-related, but a great pleasure during a difficult day.

Medical moment: what now? So now I wait for messages about the MPI test. Meanwhile, lipid test results have come back with continued splendid good cholesterol/bad cholesterol ratios; my blood sugar levels continue to be good (I have type 2 diabetes, under control); and an earlier echo cardiogram showed that my heart valves are in good shape, so I try to be hopeful.

Final New Yorker flourish. Though I’ve been staying away from material on Squire Grabpussy, the latest New Yorker (in print and on-line) has a series of hilarious small illustrations by Nishant Choksi poking pointedly at the Squire, and I just can’t resist. Choksi describes himself, laconically, on his website:

Nishant Choksi is an illustrator based in the UK. He regularly contributes to many publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal as well as working with advertising agencies and publishers.

Recently, he’s achieved some fame for this expression of the European reaction to Grabpussy, on the cover of Der Spiegel:

(#2)

Five of the New Yorker illustrations, with commentary (and my titles):

(#3) All hat and no cattle/cowboy

My favorite of the set. From Wiktionary:

all hat and no cattle: (US, idiomatic) Full of big talk but lacking action, power, or substance; pretentious.

A few cites from Wiktionary:

1980, Patricia Calvert, The Snowbird: A fortune can be made on the prairie, and that’s what me and Mr. B aim to do. Don’t aim to be all hat and no cattle forever, let me tell you!

1998, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “I Only Have Eyes for You”:

Drusilla: It’s time, Angel. She’s ready for you now, she’s dancing, dancing with death.

Spike: Big deal, he won’t do anything. Our man Angel here likes to talk, but he’s not much for action. All hat and no cattle.

1999, Randy Newman, “Big Hat, No Cattle”, from the album Bad Love, refrain:

“Big Hat, no cattle / Big head, no brain / Big snake, no rattle”.

Plus:

an epithet said to have been applied by then-governor Ann Richards to [George W.] Bush in an effort to classify him as a pretend cowboy who dresses and talks the part, but is pretending to be what he isn’t (link)

I’m partial to the (also well-attested) variant all hat and no cowboy. On a shirt:

(#4)

(#5) Loose cannon

noun loose cannon: an unpredictable or uncontrolled person who is likely to cause unintentional damage. (NOAD2)

(#6) Kremlin President / The Russian Connection

noun onion dome: a dome that bulges in the middle and rises to a point, used especially in Russian church architecture. (NOAD2)

(#7) The Kremlin Palace in Moscow, with onion domes

(#8) Gasbag

noun gasbag: 1 informal a person who talks too much, typically about unimportant things. 2 the container holding the gas in a balloon or airship. (NOAD2)

(#9) Grabpussy in Lilliput

(#10) On the island of Lilliput: a color print from an 1860s edition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

In the August 28th New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section, announcing the end of this year’s HVSF season:

Beautiful natural vistas, drama, and history come together at Boscobel House and Gardens, home of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, about ninety minutes north of the city. Exciting unplanned confluences, such as a convoy of helicopters flying over “Macbeth,” occur regularly [thus making a virtue out of inconvenience]. “A Week of Revolution” (Aug. 27-Sept. 4) will include reënactments, picnics, hikes, and a staging of Richard Nelson’s play “The General from America,” about Benedict Arnold, who tried to hand his command of West Point — visible across the river — over to the British.

An intriguing program, but what caught my eye was the name Boscobel for the house and estate. Long familiar to me, but seen in a new light after two Bosco postings on this blog: from the 20th, on Bosco chocolate syrup and the 25th, on Don Bosco (St. Giovanni / John Bosco).

Eventually this will lead us to Miltonian bosky dells and dogs named Bosco (one of whom got elected mayor of Sunol CA some years ago).

Bosky basics. Start with the Italian surname Bosco. From ancestry.com:

Bosco Name Meaning. Italian: topographic name for someone living or working in a wood, from Late Latin boscus ‘shrub’, ‘undergrowth’ (of Gallic or Germanic origin), or a habitational name from a place named with this word. [Compare the English surnames Forest, Wood, Woods, Bush.] De Felice suggests that in some cases it may have been an occupational name for a woodsman or forester and, by extension, a nickname for a surly or rough person.

Then English bosky. From NOAD2:

adj bosky wooded; covered by trees or bushes: a river meandering between bosky banks. ORIGIN late 16th century: from Middle English bosk, variant of bush.

OED2’s story on bosk has it related to bush — but it entertains the possibility that “the modern literary word may have evolved < bosky” — and has it attested in the sense ‘bush’ in ME. The ‘bush’ sense went obsolete, and in the 19th century bosk reappeared as a literary word, now in the sense ‘a thicket of bushes and underwood; a small wood’.

(Also in this literary word family, from NOAD2: noun boscage (also boskage) massed trees or shrubs: the lush subtropical boscage.)

So in the Italian noun bosco and adj boscoso and in the English noun bosk and adjective bosky, we have a, um, lexical thicket involving two (obviously related) clusters of meanings ‘bush, shrub, undergrowth’ and ‘a wood, woods, wooded area’, moving in some complex way between Germanic and Late Latin.

Boscobel, the name. From Wikipedia on Boscobel:

[In the early 19th century:] With the interest on a sizable annuity granted him by Sir William Erskine, [States] Dyckman intended to build an estate on 250 acres near Montrose and named it Boscobel, perhaps after Boscobel House in Shropshire (itself named for the Italianate charm of Bosco Bello, “pretty woodland”), symbolizing his Anglophilia.

Boscobel, the NY house. More from Wikipedia:

(#1) Main house at Boscobel in New York

Boscobel is an estate overlooking the Hudson River built in the early 19th century by States Dyckman. It is considered an outstanding example of the Federal style of American architecture, augmented by Dyckman’s extensive collection of period decorations and furniture. Today it is a historic house museum and popular tourist attraction.

It was originally located in the Westchester County village of Montrose. Restoration efforts in the mid-20th century moved it 15 miles (24 km) upriver to where it currently stands, on NY 9D a mile south of the village of Cold Spring in Putnam County:

(#2)

Boscobel, the Shropshire house. From Wikipedia:

(#3)

Boscobel House is a … building in the parish of Boscobel in Shropshire. It has been, at various times, a farmhouse, a hunting lodge, and a holiday home; but it is most famous for its role in the escape of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Today it is managed by English Heritage.

… Boscobel House was created around 1632, when landowner John Giffard of White Ladies Priory converted a timber-framed farmhouse, built some time in the 16th century on the lands of White Ladies Priory, into a hunting lodge. [It was later extended and rebuilt over the years.]

(#4) English Midlands (Wales on the left)

Both houses lie in beautiful woodland, bosco bello.

The HVSF. From the website for the 2017 festival:

(#5) The Hudson, with surrounding bosky dells, viewed from Boscobel

With its breathtaking views of the Hudson River, Boscobel provides the perfect setting for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s 30th Anniversary summer season. For three decades HVSF has brought world-class performance to the Hudson Highlands as the only professional Shakespeare company in the region.

HVSF has established a reputation for lucid, imaginative, engaging and highly inventive productions staged on Boscobel’s historic Great Lawn with a backdrop of stunning vistas overlooking the Hudson River. The Festival’s productions, tours and education programs reach more than 90,000 people throughout the tri-state region each year.

Boscobel’s magnificent grounds open two hours before the show (5:30pm) for pre-theater picnicking. Bring your own picnic or enjoy prepared foods available for purchase on site.

bosky dell. The English noun bosk is obsolete, the adjective bosky distinctly literary in register. The collocation bosky dell has, or at least had, a status as a somewhat formulaic expression, a not very transparent semi-idiom: both of its parts, the adjective bosky and the noun dell ‘valley’, being rare and archaic-sounding lexical items.

Looking for examples of bosky dell as a common noun expression (on the proper name Bosky Dell, see below), I came across this passage from Edward Bulwer-Lytton (in The Disowned), in which he treats dingle and bosky dell (dingle ‘deep wooded valley or dell’) as a quotation, from some work he expected his readers to recognize:

I remember a time when you thought no happiness could exist out of ‘dingle and bosky dell.’

I then spent a fair amount of time trying to track down the source of dingle and bosky dell. Well, it turns out the actual quotation has dingle and bushy dell, with the adjective bosky in a clause right after this coordination. From John Milton’s Comus, in iambic pentameter:

Comus. I know each lane, and every alley green,
Dingle, or bushy dell, of this wild wood.
And every bosky bourn from side to side.
My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood;
And, if your stray attendance be yet lodged,
Or shroud within these limits, I shall know
Ere morrow wake, or the low-roosted lark
From her thatched pallet rouse.

On the play, from Wikipedia:

Comus (A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634) is a masque in honour of chastity, written by John Milton. It was first presented on Michaelmas, 1634, before John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater at Ludlow Castle in celebration of the Earl’s new post as Lord President of Wales. Known colloquially as Comus

So the original had bushy dell and bosky bourn (bourn ‘a small stream’). But apparently these two nominals of Milton’s were eventually compressed into bosky dell. Look at the Google Ngram for bushy dell and bosky dell (which picks up Bosky Dell as well):

(#6)

Up to the middle of the 19th century, Milton’s original bushy dell predominates heavily. Then it plummets, and bosky dell ascends, until late in the 19th century, when they decline gracefully together towards insignificance.

The golden days of bosky dell left their mark, however,as the nominal came to be used as a proper noun connoting pleasurable secluded woodsy wildness — in, for example the name Bosky Dell Natives, for a plant nursery (at 23311 SW Bosky Dell Ln, West Linn, OR) specializing in native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees:

(#7)

Bosco the dog. Bosco is a moderately common name for male dogs (and a very rare one as a personal name for men — think Fido, Spot, Snoopy, Fang, and Whisk(e)y), presumably originally from its wild and rough connotations, but eventually such names can become unmoored from their historical associations and become just arbitrary names. (You can find people on the net wondering if Bosco as a dog’s name comes from the chocolate syrup — so it would be a suitable name for a chocolate lab, say.)

Some movie Boscos live up to the rough and violent image. From Wikipedia:

Marmaduke is a 2010 American family comedy film adaptation of Brad Anderson’s comic strip of the same name.

… Marmaduke [a Great Dane voiced by Owen Wilson] meets a beautiful Rough Collie named Jezebel (Fergie), whose boyfriend is Bosco (Kiefer Sutherland), a violent Beauceron with two Miniature Pinscher minions named Thunder and Lightning (Damon Wayans, Jr. and Marlon Wayans). Bosco intimidates Marmaduke, who does not want to fight.

Other movie Boscos are sweet. Again from Wikipedia:

The Voices is a 2014 black comedy horror film. Directed by Marjane Satrapi and written by Michael R. Perry, the film stars Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arterton, Anna Kendrick and Jacki Weaver.

Jerry (Ryan Reynolds) is an upbeat man who works at a bathtub factory, and lives in a modified apartment above a bowling alley with his dog, Bosco, and his cat, Mr. Whiskers. Jerry is a man with an innocent, almost childlike, demeanor and suffers from delusions and hallucinations that manifest in the form of his pets talking to him. Bosco often represents his good intentions while Mr. Whiskers represents his more violent nature.

And then there’s a significant real-life Bosco, a political dog. From Wikipedia:

Bosco Ramos was a dog elected honorary mayor of the [very small] unincorporated community of Sunol, California [in Alameda County, near Pleasanton and Fremont.. He was a black Labrador retriever and Rottweiler mix, usually known simply as “Bosco”. Bosco defeated two humans to win the honorary mayoral election in 1981, and served until his death in 1994. Bosco achieved international attention in 1984 when the British tabloid the Daily Star covered his election, describing Sunol as “the wackiest town in the world.” He appeared with his owner, Tom Stillman, as a contestant on the game show 3rd Degree, where the panelists failed to guess Bosco’s occupation. In 1990, the Chinese newspaper the People’s Daily reported on his tenure as an alleged example of the failings of the American electoral process, but in response, Sunol residents commented that the dog’s office was “merely a joke”. A statue of Bosco [by Lena Toritch, a Russian artist living in Salt Lake City] was erected in front of the town Post Office in 2008:

(#8)

But wait! The story now veers into the annals of bad taste. From the Roadside America site on Bosco:

Though no animal (or human) filled the vacancy, Sunol wasn’t ready to forget their leader — though the town is split on the degree of reverence required. A restaurant calling itself Bosco’s Bones and Brew opened in 1999 featuring a specially engineered, Bosco-like stuffed dead dog behind the bar.

The dog pees!

The bartender lifts the dog’s left rear leg to draw a pint of beer. Bosco’s Bones & Brew is under new ownership, but the dog is still tapped and sampled daily. When we visited, bartender Michelle coaxed the dead dog into streaming Michelob Dark.

(#8)

When you explore something on the net, your searches come back to you in messages of all sorts. So when I looked around at rubber ducks / duckies — for a posting on the 9th — I set off duck alarms in several quarters, most impressively at amazon.com, which is now enticing me with a gigantic array of artificial quackers, in all sizes, colors, and types. I am especially taken with these little guys:

The Fun Express Assorted Rubber Ducks, 50 little pieces in a bag, from Rhode Island Novelty, elsewhere described as a “Vinyl Rubber Ducky Assortment”.

As I noted in earlier postings, rubber duck and rubber ducky have become fixed idiomatic expressions. In at least some of their occurrences, these expressions no longer contain rubber referring to a substance or material — thus allowing vinyl rubber ducks (above), which would otherwise be as oxymoronic as plastic glass bowl or aluminum steel rod.

I noted in the earlier postings that rubber duck is also resembloid rather than subsective, thus allowing both

cowboy rubber duck, dragon rubber duck dragon, penguin rubber duck, cow rubber duck,… : X rubber duck ‘rubber duck representing an X’

and also

rubber duck cowboy, rubber duck dragon, rubber duck penguin, rubber duck cow,… : rubber duck X ‘X-simulacrum in the form of a rubber duck’

They’re sold as party favors and decorations. They won’t float in water; in fact, they’re reported to sink like little stones. They’re mini-ducks, only about 1 3/4 in high, and they come loose in a bag, in a random assortment. All 50 for only US$20.06, on sale.