Cultural references

Ann Burlingham has written me about the headline

Mau Mauing the Flesh Eaters

on Jennifer Schuessler’s review of Jonathan Safran Froer’s Eating Animals (in the November 15 New York Times Book Review). She just didn’t get it. But Wikipedia’s article on the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s had the crucial clue, all the way at the bottom: a reference to Tom Wolfe’s 1970 article “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (combined with another Wolfe article to make the 1971 book Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers).

Cultural references are the very devil.

Cheese or font? The sequel

In the first installment on this topic, I looked at pasttimes presenting players with a disjunctive questions: Is this thing an X or a Y? These questions are framed so that they’ll be taken as involving exclusive disjunction; the answer “both” isn’t offered.

Sometimes this seems reasonable. For X-Face or O-Face?, it’s unlikely (though not impossible) for a guitarist, say, to be expressing great emotional involvement with the music and experiencing sexual climax at the very same moment, so that the answer “both” would very rarely be appropriate. Things are different for Gay or Eurotrash?, and different in another way for Cheese or Font?

It is certainly possible for someone to be both gay and Eurotrash, and in such cases the answer “both” to the question “Is Gilles gay or Eurotrash?”, conveying ‘Gilles is gay and Gilles is Eurotrash’, would be accurate.

(In fact, Gay or Eurotrash? usually doesn’t come with real-world answers, but is played as a game of opinion. For each photograph, a program tots up the judgments given by a number of players and then reports the group opinion. Gay or Metrosexual? is usually played the same way.)

However, for Cheese or Font?, the answer “both” is the right answer in some cases, but that answer doesn’t mean that there is some referent that is both a cheese and a font (hard to imagine what such a thing would be like). Instead, it means that there’s a cheese with some name and there’s also a font with this name; strictly speaking, we’re dealing with homophonous names here.

Romano is a cheese, and Romano is a font — meaning that Romano is the name of a type of cheese and Romano is the name of a type of font. Saying that Romano is both a cheese and a font exploits the very frequent metonymy of name and thing.

Similarly, if there’s a disease and a plant with the same name. (There probably are, but I haven’t yet found them.) A game of Disease or Plant? would then have to admit the answer “both” in this case.

Short shot #17: Fanshawe the mononome

Ian Frazier’s “Fanshawe”, a humor piece in the November 2 New Yorker, begins:

Fanshawe had just the one name.

Later:

In college, Fanshawe’s social set had included an unusual number of men–Neuman,Farrel, Fogel, Harrison, Fegley, Carson, Foster, Ferguson, Sapers, Miles, Northon, Winslow–who were mononomes like himself.

Mononome is a wonderful morphological invention, immediately interpretable in context.

Fanshawe the mononome immediately reminded me of Mr. Spiggott in the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch “One Leg Too Few”, about a one-legged actor auditioning for the part of Tarzan, “a role which traditionally involves the use of a two-legged actor” and so wouldn’t normally be taken by a “unidexter”.

Swish Exhibitionism

A little silliness for the weekend.

My e-mail from commercial “gay supplies sites” has recently brought me several more instances of homoerotic photos of shirt-lifting (in the more or less literal sense of the word, in which shirts are lifted), one of which (from 10percent.com, below) has a listing of lines of t-shirts carried by the company.

Among these is the deliciously named Swish Embassy — a name that clearly codes the audience the company is aiming for. From the website:

Swish Embassy is a Gay-owned and operated casual apparel company started in 2008. The inspiration for starting Swish Embassy was the observation that there should more options for fun, suggestive, relevant and appropriately fitted wear for gay men than the oversaturated chains that cater to Tweens rather than Queens.

The t-shirt slogans shy away from representing male genitalia, but they’re often frank in their language. Some of the shirts are indirect (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) in their approach: one with an image of a rooster, conveying cock. Then they get progressively more direct:

i like it dirty

I ♥ [image of a caulking gun, again conveying cock]

SOFA KING GREAT

Dimitry’s GREEK-STYLE Deli, with an image of a chef tending the vertical spit on which gyros are cooked, with the caption Eat the meat!

EATIN GOOD IN THE GAYBORHOOD, with a hot dog in a bun

LET’S COMPARE BATS, with crossed baseball bats

Cockylicious & Addictive, with a gold rooster

BUTT PIRATE, with a pirate’s head

No gag reflex

I’ve got more than enough to reach the back of your throat!

Does my cock look fat in these jeans?

FURRY FUCKER

There’s more, including more ordinary puns, visual puns, and allusions to sexual content.

[Language Log has touched several times (for instance, here and here) on playful word formation with -Vlicious, seen above in cockylicious, which (as far as I can tell) wasn't covered in these postings, though bootylicious and hunkalicious were. Lots and lots of webhits for cockylicious, and a fair number for cockalicious too.]

Now, I’m not at all opposed to politically provocative t-shirts and the like, and have been known to wear such apparel on occasion. Some of the t-shirts above are merely sexually suggestive, but some amount to sexual advertisements and boasts, and these I would be very reluctant to display in public.

Engines that could(n’t)

Another playful allusion, this time from Dennis Baron in his excellent and thought-provoking new book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. From chapter 11  (“The Dark Side of the Web”), page 215, on Google in China:

Steering readers is exactly what search engines are suposed to do. It’s just that most searches aim to give users what they want, not hide it from them. Google’s Chinese adventure creates a search engine that couldn’t. Users who tried to access forbidden sites were greeted with this message: “Because of legal restrictions, your search cannot be completed.”

Note “the search engine that couldn’t”. This is an allusion to the moralistic children’s story The Little Engine That Could (Wikipedia page here), the little engine that succeeds (in pulling a train over a mountain) via the motto “I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can”. Baron’s characterization of Google in China as “the search engine that couldn’t” (succeed in finding things) is an ironic echo of the plucky engine in the story.

(Probably I should stop posting about playful allusions. There are just too many of them around.)

Someday, a Bill Will Pass

Speakers and writers use all sorts of stock items — words, idioms, clichés, proverbs, quotations, snowclones, common collocations, morphological patterns, syntactic constructions, and more — stuff “pulled off the shelf”. But they also play with this material, in many ways, all the time. As in the headline “Someday, a Bill Will Pass” on a Gail Collins op-ed piece about a bill to reform the student loan program, now being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives (in the NYT on September 17).

The head is a playful allusion to the song title  ”Someday, My Prince Will Come”, originally from the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, since recorded in many different versions. (The title appears in several variants: with initial Someday or — an older spelling – Some Day, with or without a comma following that expression.)

What’s carried over from the song title is the template

(T) Someday, NP will V

Now, you can understand the headline (and other instances of (T)) perfectly well even if you don’t catch the echo of the song. But what the allusion to the song contributes is the emotion of wishful longing in the Snow White original.

(T) isn’t a snowclone, at least yet. It isn’t a conventionalized pattern conveying wishful longing; instead, hearers and readers have to work out this connotation for themselves. (Over the years I’ve posted on Language Log several times about distinguishing playful allusions from snowclones: here, here, here, and here, for instance.)

No doubt, connecting the headline to the song title is facilitated by their having the same prosody. “Someday, a Student Loan Reform Bill Will Be Passed in the House” really wouldn’t work as well.

To the next level

Ann Burlingham writes (under the heading “rama-lama-ding-dong”) to report a sighting of diorama-o-rama, with -o(-)rama attached to diorama (there are several variant spellings), and with roughly the meaning ‘a display or exhibit of dioramas’. Lots of hits, many of them for a Dallas art happening and fundraiser (poster below), which includes of course a display of dioramas, but some for people who’ve assembled displays of their own dioramas (sometimes referred to by the clipped version dios).

Formations in -((o)r)ama (that is -orama, -rama, -ama) are playful in tone, like formations in -((e)t)eria for names of shops (carpeteria and the like; some discussion here). Michael Quinion’s Ologies and Isms: Word Beginnings and Endings (Oxford, 2002) treats them under the heading -orama; there’s an on-line version of the entry here, with a compact history of the formative, from panorama (ca. 1789) through several waves of fashion in innovation: cyclorama and diorama early on, then later inventions like Futurama, Cinerama, sensorama, Scout-O-Rama, and more. Now it’s been taken to the next level with diorama-o-rama.

[A note on Quinion's terminology.  He refers to the formatives in his book as "affixes", but they are in many ways more like the elements of compound words than like ordinary derivational affixes. True, they are bound elements (except for a handful, like ism and ology, that have been liberated into use as independent words as well as word-internal morphemes), but they have an accent of their own and have the semantics of elements of compound words.

The formatives in Quinion's books have a variety of sources. A great many (like thermo-, pneumo-, and multi-) are derived from technical terminology built on Greek or Latin roots. Others (like -ploitation and, yes, -orama) come from creative recutting of other words.]

Mock eggcorns and their kin

Ellen Kaisse wrote me recently with a query about intentional eggcorn-like creations, particularly as names of companies or products: Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a Dupont business that develops and supplies “advanced plant genetics”. The name reproduces a common eggcorn (in the eggcorn database here), in which hybrid (OED2 etymology: “L. hybrida, more correctly hibrida (ibrida), offspring of a tame sow and wild boar”) is reanalyzed (with several alternative spellings) as a combination of high and bred. Ellen wondered if there was a name for such things.

Well, sort of. A while back, the ADS mailing list had some discussion of deliberate coinings that look like malapropisms. Your run-of-the-mill eggcorn is a species of (classical) malapropism, so it fits into the larger category of (as I called them on ADS-L) mock, or play, malaprops. I’ll replay some of this discussion in a bit. But first, some background comments.

Puns for the weekend

To inaugurate the weekend, a little pun package from Hilary Price:

This is a species of pun in which the parts of an idiom are unpacked and interpreted literally (or at least in non-idiomatic senses available for the parts). And, in this case, with an unlikely juxtaposition of ideas.

Zippy Schwippy … uh, Schmippy

Bill Griffith misfires on his Yiddish/Yinglish, and has Zippy producing SCHW-reduplication rather than the normative SCHM-reduplication:

I somehow missed this in my comics feed, but got it in e-mail from Danny Bloom, who posted it in his blog. Bloom wrote Griffith, who understood immediately, saying in reply, “BLOOM! SCHMOOM!”