Yesterday’s Zippy:

(#1)

Steak bomb as the name of a type of steak sandwich was new to me. Steak sandwiches in general are torpedo-shaped, hence bomboid, but the point of the name is probably to assert that it is in fact the/da bomb, the best: the best of all possible steak sandwiches, because it has everything.

The play of steak bomb vs. stink bomb then just makes the name more memorable.

From the Wikipedia steak sandwich entry:

(#2) Steak bomb from Jitto’s Super Steak, Portsmouth NH

A steak bomb is a hot grinder sandwich [grinder is an item in the submarine sandwich lexical set, which also includes sub, hoagie, and Italian sandwich; see my 8/22/11 posting on the names] consisting of shaved steak [some New Englanders insist this must be steak tips, not steak shavings] and melted provolone or mozzarella cheese with grilled onions, sautéed red and green bell peppers, mushrooms, and peppered shaved steak all on a grinder sandwich roll. It is a variation on the steak submarine sandwich, as is the cheese steak. It is most closely associated with the New England region of the United States, where steak sandwiches are made by quickly grilling shaved steak on a griddle and then adding either cheese, or grilling the steak together with peppers and onions or mushrooms. If all three are combined together it becomes a steak bomb. The addition of salami or other preserved meats or pickles is optional and exact recipes and proportions vary widely. Nearly every pizzeria and sub shop in New England has their own version of the various steak sandwiches and the steak bomb.

The SUB category embraces a number of subcategories (sorry about that), including the STEAK SANDWICH category, which itself embraces a number of finer types, including those named by the expressions Philly cheesesteak / Philly steak sandwich and steak bomb / steakbomb (some discussion of subtypes in a 12/19/15 posting).

More cultural background from a 8/28/17 posting “You Have to Try These 8 Amazing New Hampshire Steakbombs”:

The steakbomb is a New Hampshire tradition stuffed with steak, cheese, salami or pepperoni, peppers, onions, and mushrooms (sometimes pickles too!). There’s something uniquely hearty, savory, and delightful about these sandwiches, and if you haven’t tried one yet these 8 spots are great places to start.

On Jitto’s:

You know a place that calls itself “Home of the Steak Bomb” has to make a good one – and Jitto’s delivers. This isn’t just a sub shop either – you can hang out in their bar and stay a while. Try it at 3131 Layfayette Rd Portsmouth, NH.

But there’s been some bomb-throwing in NH. From the SoGood Blog back in 2007, “Who Owns the Steak Bomb?”:

What is a steak bomb? As a New England boy I know the answer to this question: It’s a sandwich that is overstuffed with steak, cheese, salami (or pepperoni), peppers, onions and mushrooms. You travel around New England and you come across this sandwich somewhat frequently, at many different delis.

So what did USA Subs in Derry, NH do? They went to the U.S. patent office and had the term “steak bomb” trademarked. Then they promptly fired off a letter to their nearest competitor asking them to take the steak bomb off their menu.

But their competitor, Great America Subs (are all New Hampshire sub shops so uber-patriotic?) is crying foul. Timothy Faris, the owner of the store remarks:

“I think whoever let this trademark go through in Washington, D.C., probably had never been to New England and didn’t realize that every sub shop has a steak bomb”

As far as I can tell, the USA Subs campaign came to naught. Steak bombs continue to sizzle all over New England.

Note on the/da bomb.This expressive bit of slang has found its way into many places in pop culture — including other parts of food culture. From the word of hot sauces, this entertaining commercial product:

(#3)

Da’ Bomb Hot Sauce Bundle has three of the hottest bad boys on the market. By buying all three, you can take your pick of the Ground Zero, Ghost Pepper or Beyond Insanity, or mix all three together for a culinary explosion. Great gift for the hot sauce fan in your life or the perfect addition to your hot sauce collection.

From GDoS, subentry 11 for the noun bomb:

(US black/campus) constr. with the [or da] the best [first cite 1960]

Stink bomb. The idiomatic compound explained in Wikipedia:

A stink bomb is a device designed to create an unpleasant smell. They range in effectiveness from simple pranks to military grade malodorants or riot control chemical agents.

The Guinness Book of Records lists two smelliest substances. One is “US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor”; a mixture of eight chemicals with a stench resembling human feces, only much stronger, designed to test the efficacy of deodorizers and air fresheners. Another one, “Who me?”, is a mixture of five sulfur-containing chemicals and smells like rotting food and carcasses.

Much, much less savory than a steak bomb.

… via Greek-American food in Old Saybrook CT. A Zippyesque journey in today’s strip:

(#1)

Marbles. Having all of them, lacking some, losing them.

From NOAD2:

noun marble: 3 (one’s marbles) informal one’s mental faculties: I thought she’d lost her marbles, asking a question like that.

And from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words site on 9/9/06:

The earliest example given in the standard references is from It’s Up to You; A Story of Domestic Bliss, by George V Hobart, dated 1902: “I see-sawed back and forth between Clara J. and the smoke-holder like a man who is shy some of his marbles.”

That certainly sounds like the modern meaning of marbles, which as you say refers to one’s sanity. But in an earlier appearance, the writer used it to mean angry, not insane (mad, that is, in the common US sense rather than the British one). It was printed in the Lima News of Ohio in July 1898: “He picked up the Right Honorable Mr Hughes on a technicality, and although that gentleman is reverential in appearance as Father Abraham and as patient as Job, he had, to use an expression of the street, lost his ‘marbles’ most beautifully and stomped on the irascible Harmon, very much à la Bull in the china shop.”

The origin must surely come from the boys’ game of marbles, which was very common at the time. To play was always to run the risk of losing all one’s marbles and the result might easily be anger, frustration, and despair. That would account for the 1898 example and it’s hardly a step from there to the wider meaning of mad — to do something senseless or stupid.

Barbats. Or bar bats. A frequent Zippy-related topic on this blog. See, for example, my 12/31/12 posting “The Dingburger bar bat, or barbat”, about Poindexter barbats.

Apropos of nothing in particular (beyond the fact that this blog has been short of shirtless men recently), here’s a Romanian barbat:

(#2) Rom. barbat ‘man’ (illustrating gratuitous shirtlessness)

The number 93. I have no idea.

The Old Saybrook Diner. Aka the Parthenon Diner in Old Saybrook CT:

(#3) Welcome to the Parthenon Diner Restaurant: Serving the CT Shoreline with 2 locations (Old Saybrook and Branford)

The beginning of their ad copy:

The Parthenon Diner Restaurant is a family business started in 1985. It has won many awards for Best Diner, Best Breakfast ad Best Greek Food for many years by the New Haven Advocate Readers Poll.

Old Saybrook, on the southern coast of New England:

(#4) At the bottom: eastern tip of Long Island NY. Top left: CT. Top right: RI. To the north (not on this map): MA.

Breakfast at the Old Saybrook          :

   (#5)

(#6)

There’s a lot here to reflect on. The diner is ornamentally Greek, which is to say, vaguely Greek-American here and there (feta cheese, spinach, olives), and mostly it’s classic American plain diner fare with large numbers of borrowings from other food cultures, American and otherwise: Nutella, the mixed grill, California cuisine (avocados, a California yoghurt bowl — yoghut with granola and fresh fruit — under the name Greek yoghurt parfait, meaning [Greek yoghurt][parfait]), New Orleans, Mexican, a Philly steak sandwich (well, steak and American cheese) folded into an omelette, and more. Two notable bows to Jewish cuisine (conveying New York City here): bagels (especially with lox and cream cheese) and challah bread, plain or as toast.

The challah especially caught my eye, since we’re now in the High Holidays / High Holy Days (Rosh Hashana was last week, Yom Kippur is in a couple of days), prime time for challah baking.

From Wikipedia:

(#7) Braided challahs (though round challahs are customary for the High Holidays)

Challah (plural: challot or challos) is a special Jewish bread, usually braided and typically eaten on ceremonial occasions such as Sabbath and major Jewish holidays (other than Passover). Ritually-acceptable challah is made of dough from which a small portion has been set aside as an offering.

… Most traditional Ashkenazi challah recipes use numerous eggs, fine white flour, water, sugar, yeast, and salt, but “water challah” made without eggs and having a texture not unlike French baguettes also exists. Modern recipes may replace white flour with whole wheat, oat, or spelt flour or sugar with honey or molasses.

… Poppy or sesame (Ashkenazi) and anise or sesame (Sephardic) seeds may be added to the dough or sprinkled on top. Both egg and water challah are usually brushed with an egg wash before baking to add a golden sheen.

Yes, there’s a lot of variation, and a certain amount of disagreement about which style is best. This is what happens when you start with marbles and barbats.

The Zippy from September 30th, featuring Mary’s Coffee Shop, which also offers grinders:

(#1)

Plays on several senses of grind, plus the idiom one-hit wonder (with its phonological play on /wʌn/).

The coffee shop. Faced with a Zippy set in a diner, a coffee shop, or a fast-food restaurant, my first move is to identify the place. Surely, Mary’s Coffee Shop and grinders would get a quick hit, right?

Well, Mary’s Coffee Shop, sure — but it’s a place in Brooklyn that doesn’t look remotely like the place in the cartoon, and seems not to offer grinders (the submarine sandwiches).

And then any search with coffee and grinders in it nets lots of coffee grinders, devices for grinding coffee beans, but no coffee shops that sell subs.

So I still don’t know what actual coffee shop is depicted in the cartoon.

Grinding it out. From NOAD2:

noun grinder: 1 a machine used for grinding something: a coffee grinder; a person employed to grind cutlery, tools, or cereals. 2 a molar tooth; (grinders) informal the teeth. 3 US informal another term for submarine sandwich.

noun grind: … hard dull work: relief from the daily grind.

the daily grind is semantically transparent, but it’s also a cliché, a conventional way of referring to the hard dull work of daily routine.

The title of the cartoon, the daily grinder, is a portmanteau of the daily grind and grinder, referring both to submarine sandwiches and to coffee grinders; Mary’s is, after all, both a coffee shop and a grinder shop.

More on the submarine sandwich, from Wikipedia:

Grinder: A common term [attested since the 1950s] in New England, its origin has several possibilities. One theory has the name coming from Italian-American slang for a dock worker, among whom the sandwich was popular. Others say it was called a grinder because it took a lot of chewing to eat the hard crust of the bread used. [Still another: that it was a favorite of studious college students; NOAD2 on the noun grind: US informal an excessively hard-working student.]

In Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, and parts of New England the term grinder usually refers to a hot submarine sandwich (meatball; sausage; etc.), whereas a cold sandwich (e.g., cold cuts) is usually just simply called a “sub”.

Meanwhile, the name grinders has spread far from the northeast U.S. I give you: Grinders Submarine Sandwiches, a shop in Oakland CA.

One-hit wonders. From Wikipedia:

A one-hit wonder is any entity that achieves mainstream popularity and success for a very short period of time, often for only one piece of work, and becomes known among the general public solely for that momentary success. The term is most commonly used in regard to music performers with only one top-40 hit single that overshadows their other work. Sometimes, artists dubbed “one-hit wonders” in a particular country have had great success in others. [And the classification as a hit or success is subjective.]

Some examples, U.S. oriented, from the Wikipedia article, from pop music and from classical music:

Pop: Billy Ray Cyrus, “Achy Breaky Heart”; Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”; The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star”; Nana, “99 Luftballons”; The Archies, “Sugar Sugar”; Baha Men, “Who Let the Dogs Out?”; Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”

Classical: Maurice Ravel, “Bolero”; Johann Pachelbel, Canon in D; Samuel Barber. Adagio for Strings; Jeremiah Clarke, “Trumpet Voluntary”; Léo Delibes, “The Flower Duet” from Lakme; Amilcare Ponchielli, “Dance of the Hours” from La Gioconda

(The bold-faced items are the featured pieces of music in a forthcoming posting on musical flash mobs. Stay tuned.)

But now the one-hit wonders from 1965 mentioned in the cartoon: Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, with “Wooly Bully”; and Barry McGuire, with “Eve of Destruction”.

On Sam the Sham, from Wikipedia:

(#2) Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, 1965

Domingo “Sam” Samudio (born 28 February 1937, Dallas, Texas), better known by his stage name Sam the Sham, is a retired American rock and roll singer. Sam the Sham was known for his camp robe and turban and hauling his equipment in a 1952 Packard hearse with maroon velvet curtains. As the front man for the Pharaohs, he sang on several Top 40 hits in the mid-1960s, notably the Billboard Hot 100 runners up “Wooly Bully” and “Li’l Red Riding Hood”.

Possibly Sam the Sham should be classified as a two-hit wonder, but “Wooly Bully” was certainly the one big hit for which he’s remembered. You can watch Sam and the Pharaohs performing it here.

Then Barry McGuire and “Eve of Destruction”. From Wikipedia:

(#3)

“Eve of Destruction” is a protest song [alluding to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and especially the civil rights movement] written by P. F. Sloan in mid-1964. [“But you tell me over and over and over again my friend / Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction”] Several artists have recorded it, but the best-known recording was by Barry McGuire. This recording was made between July 12 and July 15, 1965 and released by Dunhill Records. The accompanying musicians were top-tier LA session players: P. F. Sloan on guitar, Hal Blaine (of Phil Spector’s “Wrecking Crew”) on drums, and Larry Knechtel on bass. The vocal track was thrown on as a rough mix and was not intended to be the final version, but a copy of the recording “leaked” out to a DJ, who began playing it. The song was an instant hit and as a result the more polished vocal track that was at first envisioned was never recorded.

You can watch McGuire’s performance here. On the singer, from Wikipedia:

Barry McGuire (born October 15, 1935) is an American singer-songwriter. He is known for the hit song “Eve of Destruction”, and later as a pioneering singer and songwriter of contemporary Christian music.

Today is National Noodle Day. Yes, an event fabricated by people in the food indusry to showcase their products and sell them, on a date no doubt chosen only because it hadn’t already been claimed by any other food. But noodles are delicious, they’re multicultural, and they’re fun.

I celebrated the occasion at lunch with some porcini mushroom and truffle triangoli (stuffed ravioli, but triangular rather than square) from Trader Joe’s, with arrabiatta sauce (a spicy tomato sauce). Pasta in English food talk for Italian food, but  noodles in English food talk for Chinese (and other East Asian and Southeast Asian) food — so today they’re noodles to me. (I recommend a broadminded view on what counts as noodles.)

I also recommend that we adopt a symbolic figure for the occasion, something like the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Halloween pumpkins and witches, Pilgrims for Thanksgiving, the New Year baby, and so on. I suggest the Flying Spaghetti Monster, with his noodly appendages.

But first let’s get down to some recent noodling with formulaic expressions in the comics: One Big Happy (an idiom), Rhymes With Orange (a frequent collocation or an idiom, depending on who you read), and Mother Goose and Grimm (a proverb):

(#1) more fun than a barrel of monkeys

(#2) checkered past

(#3) beggars can’t be choosers

#1: more fun than a barrel of monkeys. The greatest challenge to comics understanding of these three, since neither the source expression nor any of its parts occurs in the strip, though a (literal) barrel of monkeys is depicted.

A dictionary entry:

be more fun than a barrel of monkeys: To be very fun and enjoyable. Primarily heard in UK. I always have a great time when Katie’s around — she’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys! (Farlex Dictionary of Idioms 2015 ) (link)

I don’t know the history of the idiom, but the sense development probably depends on two things: the image of monkeys as playful creatures (found throughout the word) and the development of the container and measure nouns barrel (container fill a barrel with wine, measure a barrel and a half of wine) into the quantificational noun barrel ‘lots of” in barrel of fun and then barrel of laughs (in the late 19th and early 20th century, and not in OED2):

noun barrel of fun: 1. a tremendous amount of fun. We have a barrel of fun at the zoo. 2, a person who is a lot of fun. Taylor is just a barrel of fun on dates. (McGraw-Hill’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions, 2006)

A monkey-barrel bonus:

(#4)

Barrel of Monkeys is a toy game released by Lakeside Toys in 1965. It was created by Leonard Marks and Milton Dinhofer in 1961, and in 1964, Herman Kesler partnered to sell it to Lakeside Toys. Lakeside Toys released it in 1965 and today it is produced by the Milton Bradley Company within the Hasbro corporation. Milton Bradley’s editions consist of a toy barrel in either blue, yellow, red, purple, orange, gray or green. The barrel contains 12 monkeys but can hold 24, their color usually corresponding to the barrel’s color. The instructions state, “Dump monkeys onto table. Pick up one monkey by an arm. Hook other arm through a second monkey’s arm. Continue making a chain. Your turn is over when a monkey is dropped.” In addition to these basic instructions, the barrel also contains instructions for playing alone or with two or more players.  (Wikipedia link)

In the cartoon we’ve got a literal barrel of monkeys — something that has probably occurred in the real world only during animal smuggling operations, if at all; certainly, zoos don’t ship monkeys in barrels. On the other hand, wine is regularly shipped in barrels, or casks. And then, the barrel mix-up.

#2: checkered past. Ruthie and Joe’s mother and grandmother talked about Brandi’s checkered past, an exoression Ruthie wasn’t familiar with, so she used what she could pull out of her experience, namely that the adjective checkered is used of clothes, and she takes /pæst/ to be the phonologically similar clothing noun/pænts/; everybody‘s seen checkered pants.

From NOAD2:

adj. checkered: having a pattern of alternating squares of different colors; marked by periods of varied fortune or discreditable incidents: his checkered past might hurt his electability.

An illustration of  the literal sense: 2017 men’s fashion in plaid / checks (I’m not recommending this, just reporting it):

(#5)

The NOAD2 entry treats the checkered (roughly ‘alternating between good and bad’) of checkered past as just a metaphoric extension of the pattern adjective. Though checkered does modify some other nouns — in checkered career, for instance — it’s collocated with past at a very high frequency, so some dictionaries treat checkered past as an idiom.

#3: beggars can’t be choosers. A sentiment that has been frozen into a proverb. In Merriam-Webster Online’s generous formulation:

used to say that people who need something should be satisfied with what they get even if it is not exactly what they wanted

Less generously: if you accept charity, you have no say in what you get, but must take whatever the donor gives you.

This understanding is discernible to some extent in the form of the proverb, though beggars must be understood as applying to a much larger population of supplicants and charity recipients than literal beggars, and the infrequent noun choosers must be understood more narrowly than ‘those who choose (things)’.

In the cartoon, Grimm plays deliberately on the form of the proverb. Well, the artist, Mike Peters, sets things up elaborately for Grimm’s punch line by having the grocery-store bagger (with /æ/, rather than the /ɛ/ of beggar) suggest choosing paper rather than plastic.

Back in the real world, there are serious moral and social policy issues about how we treat recipients of charity. In general, the prevailing scheme is that beggars in fact can’t be choosers: in accepting aid, to some degree you give up your right to structure your own life, you cede rights to the donor.  There are counter-proposals, in particular something along the lines of a guaranteed minimum income, with few ior no strings. From Wikipedia:

Guaranteed minimum income (GMI), also called minimum income, is a system of social welfare provision that guarantees that all citizens or families have an income sufficient to live on, provided they meet certain conditions. Eligibility is typically determined by citizenship, a means test, and either availability for the labour market or a willingness to perform community services. The primary goal of a guaranteed minimum income is to reduce poverty. If citizenship is the only requirement, the system turns into a universal basic income.

Noodle time: playing around. Above, three cartoons that noodle around with formulaic expressions in English. From NOAD2:

verb noodle: [no object] informal improvise or play casually on a musical instrument: tapes of him noodling on his guitar

(The origin is uncertain.)

Noodle time: the foodstuff. From NOAD2:

noun noodle (usually noodles): a strip, ring, or tube [or, if we include Asian noodles, string] of pasta or a similar dough, typically made with egg and usually eaten with a sauce or in a soup.

My Noodle Day lunch today was based on:

(#6) Yummy lunch for Noodle Day

(Trader Giotto’s is an Italian-sounding play on Trader Joe’s. The actual Italian name would be Giuseppe, or some nickname based on it, like Giù.)

The pasta is in fact egg pasta, so I hereby declare it to be noodles, at least for the purposes of Noodle Day celebrations.

Noodle time: the Pastafarian holy day. I also propose that, in light of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s noodly appendages and the Pastafarian colander headgear, Noodle Day should be declared the holy day of Pastafarianism. See my 7/31/11 posting “Critical thinking” for discussion of the FSM, deliciously drenched in all things noodle.

The FSM has received scant attention in the comics I regularly follow, but last year Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon had a whole sequence featuring the FSM (but irreverently).

(Earlier posting on this blog on the strip on 5/28/16. The central characters of Sherman’s Lagoon are Sherman and Megan, a married couple of great white sharks in a tropical lagoon.)

Three FSM episodes of the strip:

(#7) 5/2/16

(#8) 5/3/16

(#9) 5/4/16

Have I mentioned the colander that sits on my kitchen counter?

Today is the baleful day Friday the 13th, and in the Halloween season to boot, so the Michael Lucas gay porn film company has packaged a $13 membership offer featuring Friday the 13th‘s Jason, in his hockey mask, brandishing a tremendous meat-sword. A cropped version:

(#1)

The raw, in several senses, photo can be viewed on AZBlogX, here. The size of gay porn Jason’s member is relevant to the ad, because of the ad slogan “Feeling lucky?” — an allusion to sexual satisfaction, via the slang idiom get lucky. From NOAD2:

v. get lucky: informal experience good luck: if you’re flying into Toronto from the south you might get lucky and see Niagara Falls| we got lucky with the weather; have sex, especially in the context of a casual encounter: that girl definitely gave you the eye — you might get lucky tonight!

Pay your $13, and LucasMen will help you get lucky.

Now, slasher Jason. From Wikipedia:

(#2)

Friday the 13th is an American horror franchise that comprises twelve slasher films, a television show, novels, comic books, video games, and tie‑in merchandise, as of 2017. The franchise mainly focuses on the fictional character Jason Voorhees, who drowned as a boy at Camp Crystal Lake due to the negligence of the camp staff. Decades later, the lake is rumored to be “cursed” and is the setting for a series of mass murders. Jason is featured in all of the films, as either the killer or the motivation for the killings.

… The first film [1980] was created to cash in on the success of Halloween (1978)

Jason uses a hockey mask to hide his face.

The gustatory-political text for today:

Rage against the media is political Wagyu for the president’s base. (NYT, “[REDACTED]’s Attacks on the Press: Telling Escalation From Empty Threats” by Michael M. Grynbaum on 10/12/17 on-line)

The sentence in its context:

[REDACTED] usually ignores the criticism that comes his way from MSNBC, the reliably liberal cable channel that, his advisers argue, will attack his administration no matter what.

But two reports by the channel’s parent network, NBC News — including a scoop that the president sought to expand the nation’s nuclear arsenal — set off some of [REDACTED]’s most hostile rhetoric yet about the freedom of the press.

“Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked,” he wrote on Twitter. “Not fair to public!”

A few caveats to keep in mind. Rage against the media is political Wagyu for the president’s base. And [REDACTED]’s notion of suspending licenses — along with his proposal, tweeted last week, that late-night comedians be subject to the “equal time” rule — is essentially unworkable, given how government regulation of the airwaves actually works.

Start with wagyu / Wagyu. From Wikipedia:

American wagyu beef

Wagyu (Wagyū, “Japanese cow” [Wa ‘Japanese’ + gyu ‘cow’]) is any of four Japanese breeds of beef cattle, the most desired of which is genetically predisposed to intense marbling and to producing a high percentage of oleaginous unsaturated fat. The meat from such wagyu cattle is known for its quality, and commands a high price.

So wagyu beef is very highly valued beef. And beef is the prototypical red meat. From Wiktionary:

noun red meat: meats such as beef that are dark red in colour when uncooked

Red meat — and especially rare red meat — is associated in American culture (and some other Western cultures) with characteristics of high masculinity: athleticism, contentiousness, competitiveness, strength, aggressiveness, and the like. Those associations led to the development of an idiomatic sense of red meat, especially in a political context. From the same Wiktionary entry:

fresh, inspiring, or inflammatory topics or information

Some typical cites show the vividness of the meat image in the idiom:

providing me with red meat for campaign speeches; she threw no red meat to the audience; gives the City some red meat to chew on; taxes and other topics that are red meat to economic conservatives

So if wagyu beef is the primest of prime beef, and beef is the reddest of red meat, metaphorical wagyu is the freshest, most inspiring, or most inflammatory topics or information: really, really red meat. Stuff that will turn them into slavering beasts.

Assembled in a group photo, three pleasingly thoughtful household gifts:

(#1) A penguin tea towel and a purple plant mister flanked by two hand-blown flared glasses

The tea towel with penguin slogan (the penguin is one of my totem animals) brought back from the New England Aquarium (in Boston) for me by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky. The purple plant mister given to me by Kim Darnell (who found them on-line) to mist my mini-phal (which likes high humidity, but not wet roots). The flared glasses blown by Amanda Walker, who made them for me so I could grasp them firmly with my damaged right hand..

A little festival of household furnishings and English N + N compounds as well: tea towel, distantly related to tea (referring to the hot drink made from the leaves of the tea plant); the synthetic AGT compound plant mister; the synthetic PSP compound hand-blown; and the compound punty mark, the (totally opaque) name Amanda gave to the glassy scars at the bottom of the glasses.

And, oh yes, the idiom in the tea towel slogan. Let’s start with that.

Idiom time. The metaphorical idiom

march to one’s own beat, march to the beat of one’s own drum: ‘to do something, act, or behave in a manner that does not conform to the standard, prevalent, or popular societal norm’ (Farlex Dictionary of Idioms, 2015)

Also: march to the beat of a different drummer. (I don’t know the history.)

Penguins, with their march-like waddling, sometimes in group movements, provide natural illustrations of the idiom. Consider the movie March of the Penguins:

(#2)

March of the Penguins (French La Marche de l’empereur) is a 2005 French feature-length nature documentary directed and co-written by Luc Jacquet, and co-produced by Bonne Pioche and the National Geographic Society. The documentary depicts the yearly journey of the emperor penguins of Antarctica. In autumn, all the penguins of breeding age (five years old and over) leave the ocean, their normal habitat, to walk inland to their ancestral breeding grounds. (Wikipedia link)

Tea towels. For the object in the background of #1, I prefer tea towel (or tea-towel or teatowel), though it’s not the term I grew up with (dish cloth, or in my Pa. Dutch grandmother’s version, dish clout); but I think that’s the term Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky) used, and it certainly was the ordinary term when I lived in the UK. In any case, it’s very much not transparent semantically: what does the towel (of an especially absorbent fabric used for drying dishes, without leaving lint on glasses and the like) have to do with tea?

Cobbled together from NOAD2 and OED2:

noun tea towel: chiefly British term for dish towel [or dish cloth]. Also OED2 tea-towel (and teatowel) = tea-cloth ‘a cloth used for wiping tea-things after washing them’ [tea-things ‘the articles used for serving tea at table, as tea-pot, milk-jug, sugar-basin, cups, saucers, plates, etc., together forming a tea-set or tea-service’]

Tea-things are used for serving tea, and then tea towels are used for drying tea-things after they’ve been washed, so tea towel is a couple of degrees removed from tea referring to the hot drink, and a further degree removed from the leaves of the tea plant.

The purple plant mister. Parsed

[purple] [plant mister]. not

[purple plant] [mister]

(just like “Purple people eater” in the song). And involving the

AGT synthetic compound plant mister ‘device for misting plants’ (incorporating the DO plant of the V mist)

verb mist: cover with [causative] or become covered with [inchoative] mist; [specialized sense] spray (something, especially a plant) with a fine cloud of water droplets

This particular mister, in glorious purple glass, serves to humidify the world of a mini-phalaenopsis orchid plant. See my 4/24/17 posting “A mini-phal”.

Hand-blown flared glass. My right hand, having suffered considerable nerve damage in the Great Necrotizing Fasciitis Disaster of 2003, doesn’t do well at grasping ordinary (round) glasses, though square glasses have corners that provide some purchase. But flared glasses like those in #1 are the best; many thanks to Amanda for making a couple of them for me.

On the PSP synthetic compound:

hand-blown ‘blown by hand’ (incorporating the PO hand [with P by] of the V blow)

verb blow: (of a person) expel air through pursed lips; [specialized sense] force air through a tube into (molten glass) in order to create an artifact

Punty marks. Being hand-blown, my flared glasses have glassy scars on their bottoms.

From Wiktionary:

(#3) Blowpipe pontil scar on the base of an 1850 “calabash” bottle

noun pontil mark (also punty mark, punt mark, pontil scar): A ring-shaped or irregular scar on a glass object from where it was joined with a pontil or blowpipe. Common on bottles prior to the 1830s.

And from NOAD2:

noun punty (also pontil): (in glassmaking) an iron rod used to hold or shape soft glass. ORIGIN mid 17th century: from French pontil [apparently from Italian pontello ‘small point,’ diminutive of punto]

I said, “You glassblowers must have a name for this bit of glass on the bottom here”, and Amanda said she called them punty marks. A totally opaque lexical item for specialists; that’s just what they’re called. Most of us, of course, don’t need a name, but then we’re not glassblowers.

A comment on the vulgar noun crapola in yesterday’s posting “A portmantriple”, from David Preston:

[cited by AZ] “-ola, a suffix used humorously to extend standard words.”

Wasn’t the original ‘ola’ the shoe-polish brand Shinola? Then it became humorous with the phrase “know shit from Shinola.”

Actually, playful -ola didn’t start with Shinola, though Shinola appeared fairly early in the history.

From Michael Quinion’s Affixes site on 9/23/08, about -ola:, which lists [a] diminutives; [b] trade names; [c] humorous or dismissive formations:

[a] A few words in this ending come directly from Latin, usually with a diminutive sense: areola (Latin, diminutive of area, area), a small circular area, in particular the ring of pigmented skin surrounding a nipple; cupola (Latin cupula, small cask or burying vault, diminutive of cupa, cask), a rounded dome forming or adorning a roof or ceiling; pergola (Latin pergula, projecting roof, from pergere, come or go forward), an archway in a garden or park.

[b] This diminutive sense may have been the inspiration for various US trade names (Pianola, a mechanical piano [late 19th c.]; Victrola, a type of phonograph [ca. 1900]; Moviola [ca. 1925], a type of film editing machine; Granola [late 19th c.], a kind of breakfast cereal), mostly now generic or obsolete. [Crayola crayons from 1903. Shinola shoe polish: name trademarked 1903, company founded 1907; went out of business in 1960.]

[c] From the 1920s in the US the ending began to be added to a variety of nouns and adjectives to make humorous slang terms. Many of these were only temporary, but two of several that have survived are boffola (from slang boff, a hearty laugh), a joke or a line in a script meant to get a laugh, and crapola (from crap, excrement), total rubbish. One that has become standard English is payola, the practice of bribing someone to use their influence or position to promote a particular product, from which have evolved drugola, payola in the form of drugs, and plugola, payment to get favourable mention or display (a plug) for a product in a film or on radio or television. The ending is mainly limited to the US.

And then the idiom (not) know shit from Shinola ‘be completely ignorant’, of WWII vintage — which has been subject to scientific investigation. From the Neatorama site on 2/11/14, “Spectroscopic Discrimination of Shit from Shinola”, quoting an article from The Annals of Improbable Research by Thomas H. Painter, Michael E. Schaepman, Wolf Schweizer, and Jason Brazile. With the conclusion:

… it is evident that to the human eye, shit and Shinola are inseparable given similar morphology [‘form’]`, whereas with near-infrared spectroscopy shit is easily known from Shinola.

(Adapted and expanded from a Facebook comment of mine a while back. Some coarse sexual language, notably from American newsmakers, but also enough about sexual bodies and mansex from me to make the posting dubious for kids and the sexually modest.)

Every so often, MSNBC commentator Ali Velshi tartly notes — alluding to the Imperator Grabpussy’s smears of President Barack Obama as a Muslim born in Kenya — that he is a Muslim who was born in Kenya (though he grew up in Canada).

There’s a linguistic point here, having to do with relevance and implicature. Why does Velshi say this? Yes, it’s true, but then “The freezing point of water is 32F” is true, but if Velshi had said that it would have been bizarre, because it would have been irrelevant in the context. So Velshi’s religion and nativity are relevant in the context. Cutting through a whole lot of stuff, I would claim that Velshi is implicating something like “Being one myself, I know from Muslims born in Kenya, and I know that Barack Obama is no Muslim born in Kenya”. And THAT brings me to a piece I’ve been wrestling with some time, about Grabpussy Jr. jeering at Mitt Romney, taunting him by calling him a pussy. (I have a Velshian response of my own to that.)

Hang on; this will go in several directions.

Note: smearing and taunting. Grabpussy’s fabrication about Obama and Grabpussy Jr.’s jeer at Romney. From NOAD:

verb smear: … 2 damage the reputation of (someone) by false accusations; slander: someone was trying to smear her by faking letters.

verb taunt: [a] [with object] provoke or challenge (someone) with insulting remarks: students began taunting her about her weight…

The way the taunt definition characterizes the purpose of the insult — provocation or challenge — seems too mild to me. The Wikipedia entry captures harsher purposes:

A taunt is a battle cry, sarcastic remark, gesture, or insult intended to demoralize the recipient, or to anger them and encourage reactionary behaviors

Grabpussy Jr.’s intent in “Mom Jeans. Because you’re a pussy” was pretty clearly to demoralize Romney and to degrade him in the eyes of others. The 2/5 Instagram posting:

(#1)

Pussies. The rest of my FB comment:

(Yes, schoolyard bullying, insulting a boy by indirectly calling him a fag, a mere receptacle for anal penetration, doing that by referring to him as a girl, and doing that indirectly as well, by treating her as merely a projection of her vagina, her pussy.) To which I want to say, Velshi-style, “Why, I am a pussy”. (This is fact.) Implicating something like “Being one myself, I know from [male] pussies, and I know that Mitt Romney is not one”. It’s also true that by mentioning it explicitly, Ali Velshi is conveying that he’s not ashamed of his identity. And I do the same.

In my 8/19/12 posting “The pussy patrol”, there’s a digression on on the tangled semantic web of the word pussy. A summary of material in OED3 (Dec. 2007):

— “colloquial” senses including ‘a girl or woman exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat, esp. sweetness or amiability’

— “slang” senses (chiefly North American) including ‘a sweet or effeminate male’;  ‘a weakling, a coward, a sissy’;  ‘a male homosexual’ (OED takes these to be historical developments from the feline sense, but current usage suggests that they are now primarily viewed as related to the genital senses (Note that historical sense developments do not necessarily align well with the sense clusters of the contemporary language; knowing the etymology doesn’t necessarily tell you a lot about current usage.)

— “coarse slang” senses including ‘the female genitals’; ‘a woman, or women collectively, regarded as a source of sexual intercourse’; in male homosexual usage: ‘the anus … of a man, as an object of sexual penetration’; also: ‘a man or boy viewed in this way’

The last two of these bring me to my own usages.

First, in the vocabulary of the anus, I distinguish my asshole, which is the anus viewed as an organ of defecation; and my pussy (or sometimes cunt), which is the anus viewed as an organ of receptive intercourse, an organ of sexual pleasure. Pussy is just a metaphor, not an assertion of identity; you want a word for the anus as a male sexual organ, you look for parallels, and vaginas are obvious analogues. That doesn’t mean you think your anus is a vagina, or that by using such language you are identifying as a woman.

(Bit of a digression. There are alternatives to metaphorizing. For instance, the N + N compound fuckhole lit. ‘hole for fucking’ — which has the advantage of being usable for both sexes, and having the powerful noun fuck in it.)

Second, in the vocabulary of reference to persons as sexual beings, there’s the part-for-whole metonymy, or synecdoche, in referring to someone via a term for their sexual parts, specifically in referring to a man who takes the receptive role in anal intercourse via a lexical item for his anus viewed as a sexual organ: pussy, cunt, or fuckhole. See my “Why, I am a pussy” above.

From my 2/17/20 posting “Preference labels and little pockets”

(#2) “the shameless effrontery of CERTIFIED PUSSY BOY [on a t-shirt], which I truly admire”

(On occasion, I have described myself as a full-bore pussy.)

And then, from my 5/17/18 posting “Deshagged and pedicured”, a note on the basis for this self-identification:

I’ve been long out of the fuck market, but not because I’ve renounced it as wickedness; in fact, getting fucked is the central event of my very rich fantasy sexual life. (Insert paean to masturbation here.)

“I know from X”. An idiom I used above twice, the second time in: “Being one myself, I know from [male] pussies, and I know that Mitt Romney is not one”. Heidi Harley admired my FB comment, adding that she loved my deployment of to know from. Indeed, it was carefully chosen; what I said to Heidi:

One of many gifts of Yiddish to English. The first time I heard it (long ago, when velociraptors scrunched up smaller creatures) I saw that it had a wonderful subtlety to it, a meaning component of great utility.

The history is wonderful. From HDAS:

[not] know from nothing [Yid tsu visn fun gornisht ‘to be ignorant’; lit., ‘to know from nothing’] to know absolutely nothing. Hence know from to know about. [1st positive know from example from 1977 (the film The Boys in Company C) He knows from baseball like I know from polo; later 1992 (in The New Yorker) Mr. Perkoff knows from bar-mitzvah parties … He has played at over a thousand bar mitzvahs

So, from the negative idiom to know from nothing, a syntactically back-formed positive to know from, loosely glossed ‘to know about’, but as you can see from the examples above, it conveys ‘to know about from personal experience’, and that accords exactly with the way I use the idiom: I don’t just know about male pussies (say, from having read the literature on male homosexuality), I know about them from my own experience.

More taunting. Around the same time as Grabpussy Jr.’s Instagram taunt, the folks on ADS-L were discussing a childhood game and its many names. From Wikipedia:

Keep Away, also called Monkey in the Middle, Piggy in the Middle, Pickle in a Dish, or Pickle in the Middle, or Monkey, is a children’s game in which two or more players must pass a ball to one another, while a player in the middle attempts to intercept it. The game could be considered a reverse form of dodgeball, because instead of trying to hit people in the middle with the ball, players attempt to keep the ball away from him or her. The game is played worldwide.

I suppose this game must have been played on the grounds of the West Lawn Elementary School when I was a student there, but I don’t recall it. What I do recall is the taunting variant of it, in which a pack of boys abuse a boy they perceive as inferior to them — geeky, artsy, unathletic, insufficiently masculine (probably a fairy), friendly with girls, small, unmuscular, funny-looking, wrong race or ethnicity, the list is endless, so many ways to be inadequate — surround him, grab some belonging of his (classically, a cap), passing it from one to another while he tries to snatch it back, all the time abusing him verbally. The immediate aim is to make him beg, if possible reduce him to tears. The long-range goal is to prove that he is worthless and contemptible in comparison to them, who are lords of their world.

Rarely does the target get his object back undamaged; sometimes it’s literally destroyed. And then the kid has to try to explain that away.

There are lots of good things in the world of boys in packs: cooperation in sports teams, all sorts of friendly but tough competitions, buddies doing all sorts of things in groups for companionship (and protection from the world). And then there’s the world of bully boys.

(These days I have trouble enduring any appearance by Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who strikes me as a hateful grown-up version of a bully boy, with political power to boot.)

This afternoon my grand-daughter Opal arrived at my house (dutifully standing about 7 feet away and wearing a mask (as I was) to deliver two items: the DVD of Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (“It says GUB”), which she’d borrowed from me, oh, three years ago; and a celebratory Pride t-shirt from my daughter Elizabeth, whose bold NSFW message in Pride rainbow colors I defer to under the fold.

(#1) Complete with a smiling cupcake with a, um, cherry on top; design by Angela Tarantula on threadless

It’s a fair cop, guv.

(I assume the shirt was entirely a present for Pride Month, and not in any way associated with Fathers Day (this coming Sunday), a holiday Elizabeth and I both view with rolled eyes.)

GAY AS FUCK is available as a slogan on an extraordinary number of t-shirts, in all sorts of presentations, on a variety of types of shirts, in many colors. Two I found especially fetching:

(#2) Especialy intense; from Trending LGBT Tees on Amazon

(#3) Gay cat; Rainbow Cat Purride (don’t blame me!) LGBT Shirt from Pop Shirt

On the expression, from my 12/27/17 posting “Expletive syntax: I will marry the crap out of you, Sean Spencer”, a cataogue of grammatical constructions (or idiom clusters) crucially involving fuck, shit, hell, etc, in the section on Postmodifiers:

7a. AF: Adj as expletive ‘really, extremely Adj’.  Comparative as fuck/ hell /shit.

Linguists are inquisitive as fuck.

Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with songs you just can’t get out of your head:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

A wonderful collision of worlds, set off by the idiomatic (and colorfully metaphorical) N + N compound earworm: the world of DJs — the ear world (disc jockeys providing sonic pleasures for the ear) — and the world of caterpillars — the worm world (caterpillars being one type of worm in colloquial English).

Earworms. Brief refresher from NOAD:

noun earworm: …  2 informal a catchy song or tune that runs continually through a person’s mind.

On this blog, my 5/30/15 posting “Earworms, snowmen, and parodies”.

The worm part. I’ll start with this because it’s the simpler part (though not without its complexities). From NOAD:

noun worm:  1 [a] any of a number of creeping or burrowing invertebrate animals with long, slender soft bodies and no limbs. Phyla Annelida (segmented worms), Nematoda (roundworms), and Platyhelminthes (flatworms), and up to twelve minor phyla. [b] short for earthworm. [c] (worms) intestinal or other internal parasites. [d] used in names of long slender insect larvae, especially those in fruit or wood, e.g. army worm, woodworm [AZ:the sense in the cartoon]. [e] used in names of other animals that resemble worms in some way, e.g. slow-worm, shipworm. [f] a maggot supposed to eat buried corpses: food for worms. …

The  NOAD entry privileges the use of worm as a semi-technical term by biologists, as if the other senses are metaphorical offshoots of that. But an everyday category of creepy-crawly things referred to by the label worm is of course the older usage, which biologists then adapted to their purposes, as they did with fly and bug, among other labels.

The DJ part. This is really complex. One entry point, from NOAD:

noun disc jockey (also disk jockey): a person who introduces and plays recorded popular music, especially on radio or at a disco [AZ: conventionally abbreviated in the initialism DJ]

From OED3 (Dec. 2013 on: disc ‘recording’ + jockey ‘disc jockey’:

originally U.S.; 1st cite 1941 in Variety; as DJ in a discotheque [see below], 1st cite 1964

DJ (also from OED3), sense 2a:

A person who plays recorded music for people to dance to at a nightclub or party, typically (in later use) using techniques such as mixing, beat-matching, scratching, sampling, etc.; (more generally) a person who plays, records, or produces music using these techniques, esp. a person who plays such music as part of a group of rap musicians … Frequently with distinguishing word, as club DJ, disco DJ, techno DJ, etc.

A DJ in action,from the Always a Party site in Niagara Falls NY, renting services for parties

(#2)

Ok, now that’s another N + N compound, so that has two parts, the disc part and the jockey part.

On disc (also from OED3), among the specializations of the root sense of disc as a flat circular object:

5. Any of various types of thin circular plate on which sound may be recorded; (originally) = record …; (now chiefly) = compact disc … Also: a piece of music or other audio recording on a record, compact disc, etc. Also: (as a mass noun) such discs as a recording medium (chiefly in on disc). [1st cite 1879 Popular Science Monthy on phonograph disks]

As for jockey, the sense development is from jockey ‘rider in horse races’; to ‘driver of a motor vehicle’ (a pretty straightforward metaphor); to ‘player of recorded music’, managing the discs like a horse or motor vehicle (a somewhat more complex metaphor).

Lubricious footnotes.Two of them.

Number 1, from my 3/30/11 posting “Male vanity”

shock jock [for men’s underwear incorporating a cup insert, enhancing the wearer’s pouch] is adapted from the slang for a radio broadcaster who uses humor that some of the audience might find shocking, with jock clipped from jockey, itself truncated from disc jockey.)

Number 2, the obvious queer extension of the image of a jockey riding his horse to tops riding bottoms in gay anal sex.Surprising to me, GDoS seems to lack the items ass jockey and  butt jockey, though Urban Dictionary has them both.

Today’s morning name, the PSP form of the English idiom go to seed, originally botanical, then metaphorically extended to use for people.

From NOAD:

go (or run) to seed: [a] (of a plant) cease flowering as the seeds develop. [b] [AZ: metaphorical extension of sense a] deteriorate in condition, strength, or efficiency: Mark knows he has allowed himself to go to seed.

Plus, a near-synonym, one sense (1d below) of one of the verbs bolt (the ‘rapid movement’ verb bolt). From NOAD:

verb bolt-2: 1 [a] [no object] (of a horse or other animal) run away suddenly out of control: the horses shied and bolted. [b] (of a person) move or run away suddenly: they bolted down the stairs. [c] [with object] (in hunting) cause (a rabbit or fox) to run out of its burrow or hole. [d] (of a plant) grow tall quickly and stop flowering as seeds develop: the lettuces have bolted. …

Two images (from a great many that are available).

(#1) Dandelions gone to seed (flickr photo by arbyreed in Utah County UT,  taken 4/23/17)

(#2) Bolted lettuce (photo by Lynn Jones on the North Coast Journal site)

From the North Coast Journal (Humboldt County CA) site “Going to seed: Organized chaos in the garden” by Ari Levaux on 8/23/12:

The expression “gone to seed” usually has a negative connotation, meaning disheveled, declining or otherwise post-prime. When vegetable or herbs go to seed, or “bolt,” they quit being what you planted and become gangly towers looming over the garden. In this respect they’re more like teenagers than elders, but anthropomorphisms aside, the plant’s formerly edible parts are now shriveled, bitter and woody. While this can understandably look like a bad end for your endive patch, crops that are going or have gone to seed can still play an important role in the garden.

A garden plant that has run its course and produced seeds is, naturally, a source of seed. Depending on the plant’s propensity to crossbreed, the seeds it produces might be true to the parent, or a mix of parent and some similar plant. (For this reason it’s inadvisable to replant seeds from garden squash, because squash hybrids can be foul tasting or poisonous.) Or the seed might be sterile and not sprout at all.

Seed saving is another discussion, full of complexity and art, and it’s more commitment than I care to take on personally. Instead, when the greens bolt I simply let the seeds fall where they may. If any of them happen to sprout next month, or next spring, great — any time a yummy plant wants to grow up between my garlic or tomato plants is fine with me. I’d much rather have edible crops volunteering themselves than many of the weeds I know.

The first plants to bolt are generally the leafy cold-weather plants like spinach, lettuce, escarole and cilantro, and they make their moves when spring turns to summer. The newly aged old farts crowd the garden with their blossomed stalks, providing cooler, moist shade that allows the later blooming plants to maintain their tender youth a little longer. Newly sprouted plants are thus sheltered as well.

On the slogan in my posting yesterday “Come a long way, long way still to go” (A), a chiastic formula conveying:

Things have improved, but still we’re far from the goal (and there are constant threats to take back the gains)

(A) is a poetically compressed version of (B):

We have come a long way, but we have a long way still to go

(which presents two metaphorical idioms in parallel, with their contrast between the opposed motion verbs come and go).

So there’s a lot of linguistic interest here.

The idioms. Both the come and go idioms have caught the interest of lexicographers.

On the first, from the Collins Dictionary site:

phrase
If you say that someone or something has come a long way, you mean that they have developed, progressed, or become very successful. He has come a long way since the days he could only afford one meal a day

and from the Merriam-Webster site:

come a long way idiom

1: to rise to a much higher level of success: to become very successful // He’s come a long way from his days as a young reporter. Now he’s one of the country’s most respected journalists.

2: to make a great amount of progress // Medicine has come a long way in recent years.

On the second, from the Merriam-Webster site:

a long way to go idiom

:much more to do // We’ve accomplished a lot, but we still have a long way to go.

and from the Macmillan Dictionary site:

phrase have a long way to go

to need to do a lot more before you are successful We’ve raised $500 so far, but we still have a long way to go.

Both idioms are part of the larger metaphorical constellation is which life is viewed as a journey, specifically a journey towards success and accomplishment.

Parallelism and chiasmus. (B) has roughly parallel conjuncts, come a long way and have a long way to go — but the first has a long way associated with a subject (as an adverbial modifier of come), while the second has it associated with an object (of have, though it’s also understood as an adverbial modifier of go). So, as I said, roughly parallel, but the syntax and semantics are complex.

(A), however, is straightforwardy chiastic: the first conjunct is of the form

motion verb  (come) + a long way

while the second is of the form

a long way + motion verb (go)

— so, transpositional in character (and poetically satisfying).

My 6/1/18 posting “A chiastic bird” has extensive discussion of chiasmus of several kinds, spurred by this Bizarro cartoon entitled “To Mock a Killingbird”:

To Kill a Mockingbird vs. to mock a killingbird

Today’s morning name. Briefly, from NOAD:

noun wazoo: US informal the anus. PHRASES up (or out) the wazoo US informal very much; in great quantity; to a great degree: he’s insured out the wazoo | Jack and I have got work up the wazoo already. ORIGIN 1960s: of unknown origin.

The phrases are straightforwardly idioms — the fact that they are degree adverbials is unpredictable from the meanings of the parts — though they can be varied a bit: by extension with the modifying adjective old (up/out the old/ol’ wazoo), or the with the noun ass ‘asshole’ instead of wazoo (to have problems up/out the ass); it’s likely that wazoo in these phrases is, historically, an ornamental replacement for ass in them (see below).

But wazoo, on its own, has no parts, so it can’t literally be an idiom. However, it’s restricted in its collocations — formally non-compositional, if not semantically non-compositional.

In most of its occurrences, wazoo has the determiner the (occasionally a possessive determiner instead), and it’s far from having the full syntax of ass ‘anus, asshole’. In particular, as far as I can tell, wazoo doesn’t occur at all as the first element of compounds in the place of ass ‘anus, asshole’, as in ass balm ‘soothing medication for the anus’ (but not wazoo balm); ass-licker ‘someone who (literally or figuratively) licks assholes’ (but not wazoo-licker); and so on. Nor is it used as a bare noun parallel to ass in eat/lick/munch/… ass (no eat wazoo). Nor does it have a plural, though ass ‘anus, asshole’ does (no wazoos). There’s more, but  this should suffice to make the point.

As it happens, I’ve looked at wazoo on this blog before. And that coverage can be improved by revisions of the OED.

Previously on this blog, in the 8/28/15 posting “Robots up the wazoo”:

On the noun wazoo, from NOAD2 [above]

… This is essentially the content of the OED3 (March 2006) entry, though there’s a bit more in the OED, which notes that wazoo is used

Freq. as a (euphemistic) substitute for ass in fig. phrases, as pain in the wazoo, etc.

and gives as its earliest cite in the sense ‘… the anus’:

1961 Calif. Pelican (Univ. Calif., Berkeley) May (back cover) Run it up yer ol’ wazoo!

and as its earliest cite in up (also out) the wazoo:

1981 Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald-Jrnl. 5 Jan. d8/3 There comes a time in performing when you just do it. You can have theory up the wazoo.

I would have thought that wazoo in up the wazoo was just another euphemistic substitute for ass — in up the ass ‘in great quantity’, which certainly occurs now. And probably it is; the difficulty is that the OED‘s entry for ass is mostly antique and lacks this use. NOAD2, which also lacks up (or out) the ass, merely mirrors the OED in this respect.

Notes:

— on the 1961 Calif. Pelican cite: its sense is literal (referring to an actual anus); it has possessed wazoo; it has the extension with ol’; and it occurs with up. Lots going on there.

— later cites from OED3: 1971 in the wazoo [with literal ‘ass’]; 1975 pain in the wazoo (OED3 note on wazoo: Frequently as a (euphemistic) substitute for ass in figurative phrases, as pain in the wazoo, etc); 1995 we can expect spears up the wazoo [ figurative spears in a literal wazoo]; 2002 possessed (sails) out of Possessor’s wazoo [entirely figurative]

Improved coverage of ass. OED3 (Sept. 2018) under ass has the phrases:

P16. up the ass: to a great or excessive extent or degree. Originally short for up to the ass: cf. up to one’s (also the) ass at Phrases 3. [1st cite: 1963 J. Rechy City of Night  ii. 149 He shows me this collection.. — all kindsa weird costumes. An boots! — boots an costumes up the ass.]

P18. out the ass: to a great or excessive degree. [1st cite: 1972 J. W. Haldeman War Year iv. 42 We got clerks out the ass in this company.]

So: degree up/out the ass appeared in the 60s and 70s — I would have guessed earlier, but the Antiquity Illusion is as strong as the Recency Illusion — and then up/out the wazoo appeared in 1981 — again, I would have guessed earlier — suggesting that wazoo was a playful elaboration on ass in this context.

Wazoo in the wider culture. This turns out to be a surprisingly huge topic, from which I’m picking just two little bits having to do with brand names.

Wazoo as a brand name for a loud kazoo. From the Kazoobie Kazoos site:

(#1) The Wazoo kazoo

The Wazoo is the “excessively LOUD kazoo.” The horn on the top amplifies and projects the sound of the kazoo. It’s one of the loudest kazoos we’ve ever made!

The Wazoo is the perfect kazoo for live performance and marching in parades. It really projects the sound. Plus, it looks really cool.

Get the Wazoo and you’ll be playing music “out the wazoo!”

The Wazoo comes in assorted colors.

Wazoo as a brand name for a chewy candy. From the Amazon page for “Chewy Fruity Candy Sprinkled with Crunchies” (made by Topps):

(#2) It comes in the flavors Blue Razz and WildBerriez (spelled that way to avoid claiming that any actual berries were implicated in its creation)

Somewhere in the first Presidential “debate”, or its immediate surrounding net discussion, the phrase goon squad appeared and seized my attention, so that I repeated it like a mantra. I was in the grip of onomatomania

Logo of the League of Legends South African esports team Goon Squad

goon and goon squad. Brief intro on goon from NOAD:

noun goon: informal 1 a silly, foolish, or eccentric person 2 chiefly North American a bully or thug, especially one hired to terrorize or do away with opposition: a squad of goons waving pistols

And then on goon squad, from Wikipedia:

In the United States, a goon squad is a group of criminals or mercenaries commonly associated with either pro-union violence or anti-union violence In the case of pro-union violence, a goon squad may be formed by union leaders to intimidate or assault non-union workers, strikebreakers, or parties who do not cooperate with the directives of union leadership. In the case of anti-union violence, goon squads are traditionally hired by employers as an attempt at union busting, and resort to many of the same tactics, including intimidation, espionage, and assault.

During the labor unrest of the late 19th century in the United States, businessmen hired Pinkerton agent goon squads to infiltrate unions, and as guards to keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories. One of the best known such confrontations was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to enforce the strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, who was abroad; the ensuing conflicts between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to several deaths on both sides. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania, as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

… The term “goon” was reputedly coined by F. L. Allen in 1921, perhaps a variant of the US slang “gooney” which had been around since at least 1872, meaning a simpleton or fool, which may have derived from “gony”, applied by sailors to the albatross and similar big, clumsy birds (c.1839). In the late 1930s, E. C. Segar’s comic strip Popeye had a character named “Alice the Goon”. It was from this character that large stupid people or stupid things came to popularly be called “goons” and the term entered into general use.”Goon” evolved into slang for a thug (1938), someone hired by racketeers to terrorize political or industrial opponents (1938), a German stalag guard for American POWs (1945).

onomatomania. From my 11/27/19 posting “At the onomatomania dinette”:

Zippy compulsively repeats a phrase he finds in some way attractive or pleasing, starting with the name of the diner he’s in: Do-Nut Dinette... This repetition, treating the phrase as a kind of mantra, has come up in Zippy strips under various names; see my 10/3/17 posting “Repetitive phrase disorder”, with several alternative labels for “Word attraction extended to the phrase level and made into a satisfying (though compulsive) verbal routine.” — of which onomatomania is my current favorite.

(the full set: found mantras, onomatomania, phrase repetition disorder, repetitive phrase disorder)

From the American tv series Emergency! S7 E11 “The Convention” (from 7/3/79), a tv movie following the regular series. Two women end up serving as a paramedic team together — female paramedics were a new thing at the time, only grudgingly accepted, and they were normally paired with a male partner — so a male paramedic tells them the watch commander wouldn’t approve of the women teaming up. One of the women good-naturedly but pointedly snaps back at him:

(1a) How would you like a thick lip, to go with your thick head? No offense.

With the idiomatic tag No offense — a shorter version of No offense intended — literally meaning something like ‘I intend/mean you no offense by saying this’, but almost always conveying something more complex than that.

The tag is very often introductory, and followed by but, rather than appended:

(1b) No offense, but how would you like a thick lip, to go with your thick head?

Quite commonly the speaker does in fact intend to offend, criticize, or insult the addressee, but piously disavows these intentions so as to deflect negative reactions by the addressee. What’s going on in (1a) is, however, a bit more indirect than that.

The show. On the (complex) episode of Emergency!, from the IMDb plot summary:

San Francisco firefighters and paramedics rescue a man trapped on the rigging of a schooner. A paramedic convention brings [Los Angeles paramedics] [John] Gage [Randolph Mantooth] and [Roy] DeSoto [Kevin Tighe] back to San Francisco, where they assist a choking victim in a restaurant, then deliver a baby while two female paramedics [Gail (Patty McCormack) and Laurie (Deirdre Lenihan)] treat a sniper’s shooting victims. [more action follows]

It’s a nice touch that John and Roy deliver the baby, while Gail and Laurie treat the shooting victims.

The idiom. Then from the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary site:

no offense idiom — used before a statement to indicate that one does not want to cause a person or group to feel hurt, angry, or upset by what is about to be said // No offense, but I think you are mistaken. // “No offense, but you’re nutty as a fruitcake.”— Carl Hiaasen

The first example is a simple softening of unwelcome news, but the Hiaasen is a deliberately offensive no offense, with the tag serving as mere deflection. Merely deflective no offense is so common in actual practice that some take it to be the norm, as in this meme:

(#1)

And on the net, merely deflective no offense is so common that it has an initialistic abbreviation:

(#2)

But earnestly softening no offense (as in Merriam-Webster’s first example) isn’t rare, as in this touching example from FOUND magazine:  “No Offense Intended”,  found by Sam in San Francisco:

Just saw this note on the ground after leaving a coffee shop at 18th Ave. and Geary Blvd., and thought it was a pretty fair and balanced proposition for a casual “dudes only” hookup.

(#3)

[Digression on if you’re down (for a hookup). From NOAD:
adj. down: … 4 [predicative] US informal supporting or going along with someone or something: you got to be down with me | she was totally down for a selfie | “You going to the movies?” “Yo, I’m down.”.]

The note-writer did his best on the task of attempting to negotiate a sexual connection while not knowing how his offer would be taken — while recognizing that many straight guys are enraged on learning that some other men might find them sexually desirable. (Presumably because being an object of other men’s sexual desire is being “treated like a woman”, and that’s a deep threat to their masculinity.)

But back to (1a), which is neither earnestly softening nor merely deflective, but something in between. The female paramedic who uttered (1a) was in fact wielding no offense to bring her male colleague into line, by telling him the hard truth that he was behaving badly, but doing this with enough empathy for him as a colleague that he should be able to see that her words weren’t a matter of personal animus against him, and doing this with some humor (the mock-threatened thick lip). She was teaching him a lesson. In the actual story, it seems to have had the appropriately sympathetic but chastening effect. A very nice example of female assertiveness, cleverly and humanely deployed.

(I should note that this episode comes very close to the end of the show, which for years was extraordinarily male-oriented, with only the head nurse Dixie McCall (played by Julie London) playing a major role, as the highly empathetic tough broad at Rampart General Hospital — though she was a truly wonderful character. Now, it’s not fair to criticize this show in particular for its heavy male orientation, since that was pretty much the style of the time, and the show was actually quite good at depicting male friendship, male competition, the sexual marketplace, and symbolic displays of masculinity, all with some subtlety and good humor. But until the late episodes, the character Dixie McCall pretty much had to carry the weight for more than half of humanity.)

Deflections. No offense (intended) is frequently deployed as a deflection, and it’s just one in a whole armamentarium of deflections, among them: I don’t mean to critcize/complain, but … ; Not to criticize/carp, but …; and so on — all going on to express criticism, complaint, and accusation, while at the same time refusing to accept responsibility for these judgments and so trying to avert the weight of their targets’ pain and outrage. The strategy is sometimes referred to as “politeness”, but it’s rarely experienced as such.

Three cartoons from the 10/26 New Yorker: two of linguistic interest (by Amy Hwang and Roz Chast), one (by Christopher Weyant) yet another Desert Island cartoon.

Hwang: jam beans. On p. 28:

(#1)

Suddenly you realize that both parts of the N + N compound jelly bean are resembloid — metaphorical — rather than literal. This is very clear in the NOAD entry:

noun jelly bean: a bean-shaped candy with a jellylike center and a firm sugar coating.

For the head N: bean-shaped (not actually a bean, but like a bean). For the modifier N: jellylike (not actually jelly, but like jelly). So the compound is thoroughly idiomatic, a fact that the cartoon plays with by varying the N jelly with its culinary counterpart jam.

Chast: NO. On p. 42:

(#2)

Chast’s riff on uses of the determiner no starts with straightforward exclusionary admonitions — no swimming, etc. — and then roams through a variety of more formulaic and idiomatic examples, like no way and no business like show business.

Weyant: Desert Island. On p. 69:

(#3) “Why didn’t you tell me your parents were coming to visit?”

The message in a bottle.

Desert Island cartoons are by definition goofy and preposterous — their underlying premise doesn’t bear more than a moment of reflection — but this one is doubly so. Like the guy should have known that his parents were traveling to the desert island in a (huge) bottle.

In the latest (12/21) New Yorker, two cartoons that especially caught my eye: one by a very old hand in the business, George Booth (now 94); the other by two young women (roughly 30), Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski (both of whom are writers as well as artists). The Booth is an absurd literalization of the idiom (put the) cart before the horse. The SLJ/SS is wryly funny as it stands, but gains immeasurably if you know about a particular children’s book.

Booth, carts, and horses. The cartoon, including reactions from a Booth dog:

(#1)

The horse, with enormous hooves firmly planted on the ground, seems decidedly alarmed. And then the passerby appears to be assuming, preposterously, that the cart before the horse is some kind of accident or lapse of attention. (Compare: “Excuse me, sir, have you noticed that your child is all eyes?”)

From Wikipedia:

The expression cart before the horse is an idiom or proverb used to suggest something is done contrary to a convention or culturally expected order or relationship. A cart is a vehicle which is ordinarily pulled by a horse, so to put the cart before the horse is an analogy for doing things in the wrong order.

But in the phrase cart before the horse itself things are not merely in the wrong order, as if you’d served dessert before the main course, but in an impossibly wrong order: if the cart is literally before the horse (as in Booth’s cartoon), the purpose of pairing cart with horse is utterly defeated.

As an idiom, however, the phrase is understood only figuratively, with the muted ‘wrong order’ understanding. No cart impedes the efforts of any horse; it’s just an analogy.

As for Booth and his cartoons, there’s a page on these on this blog.

Genuine hunger, or eating out of boredom. The SS/SJL cartoon:

“Are you sure you’re very hungry? Or are you maybe just eating because you’re bored?” (#2)

Caterpillars are by nature voracious; they’re storing up food for their metamorphosis. In the cartoon, however, the caterpillar speaker opts instead for a shallow analysis of motive. That’s funny as it stands.

But that is not just any very hungry caterpillar. That’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the title character of the 1969 children’s picture book (about metamophosis), designed, illustrated, and written by Eric Carle. Carle’s caterpillar:

(#3)

(More on the Carle in a section of my 7/27/15 posting “Bacteriological picture books”.)

SLJ and SS haven’t appeared on this blog, so a few words about them.

The “about” section from Sophia Lucido Johnson’s website begins:

Sophie is a cartoonist and writer who lives in Chicago.
Here’s a collection of Sophie’s published writing.
Here’re her cartoons slash comics.
Here’s stuff about the book she wrote.

(with links to each of these, plus other links as well).

And the “about” section of Sammi Skolmoski’s website tells us that she’s a writer/artist who currently lives and works in Chicago; and that she teaches courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

I note that both view their writing as of equal significance to their artwork.

Today’s Ada@Home cartoon by Rob Harrell exemplifies the restriction of lexical items to specific collocations:

(Hat tip to reader Verdant on my Twitter account.)

From NOAD:

verb stub: [with object] 1 accidentally strike (one’s toe) against something: I stubbed my toe, swore, and tripped. …

Here the collocational restriction of stub is indicated by (one’s toe): stub  is restricted to combining with an object referring to this specific bodypart; it doesn’t combine with just any object, in particular it doesn’t combine with objects in the same semantic domain as toe (*I stubbed my finger / foot).

An entertaining example using the mildly off-color slang noun wazoo, treated in my 9/29/20 posting “wazoo”:

wazoo, on its own, has no parts, so it can’t literally be an idiom. However, it’s restricted in its collocations — [it’s] formally non-compositional

… [Although NOAD glosses wazoo as ‘the anus’,] it’s far from having the full syntax of ass ‘anus, asshole’ [ — this point is then made at some length]

(The Wikipedia entry on collocational restriction doesn’t concern itself with such cases at all, but deals instead with a different phenomenon, lexical items that have specialized semantics in some two-word combinations — for example, the adjective dry having the meaning ‘not sweet’ only in combination with the noun wine.)

A Roz Chast cartoon in the latest (2/1/21) New Yorker:

Questions asked often enough that they border on clichés. They’re frequently asked questions — but they’re not Frequently Asked Questions, Frequently Asked Questions being an idiomatic expression usually reduced to an alphabetic abbreviation, the noun FAQ.

FAQ. From NOAD:

noun FAQ [with pronunciation as an initialism]: a list of questions and answers relating to a particular subject, especially one giving basic information for users of a website.

Expanded discussion in Wikipedia:

A frequently asked questions (FAQ) forum is often used in articles, websites, email lists, and online forums where common questions tend to recur, for example through posts or queries by new users related to common knowledge gaps. The purpose of an FAQ is generally to provide information on frequent questions or concerns; however, the format is a useful means of organizing information, and text consisting of questions and their answers may thus be called an FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked.

Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual media, its pronunciation varies. FAQ is most commonly pronounced as an initialism, “F-A-Q”, but may also be pronounced as an acronym, “FAQ” [ /fæk/ — very rarely, in my experience].

Chast’s cartoon recovers something like a literal sense for the expression frequently asked questions. There are contexts where the expression is to be taken entirely literally. As on the glassdoor site in “How To Give Original Answers To 7 Cliché [that is, so frequently asked that they count as clichés] Interview Questions” by Heather Huhman on 7/17/19:

Your answers to the cliché questions say a lot about you. They can make or break your chance at landing the job. It’s essential to prepare original answers for the cliché questions you know you’ll hear at your next job interview. The strongest answers are unique and will give you a leg up in the competition.

Here are seven of the most cliché interview questions and how to answer them with originality

— 1. Tell me about yourself.
— 2. Why do you want to work here?
— 3. What are your biggest strengths?
— 4. What is your biggest weakness?
— 5. Where do you see yourself in five/ten years?
— 6. How do you handle conflict?
— 7. Why should we hire you?