Today’s Pearls Before Swine:
The idiom golden throat ‘a widely admired singing or speaking voice’ is both metonymic (throat for ‘voice’) and metaphorical (golden ‘like gold in value’), but it’s complex enough that someone could not see that. Rat, of course, just turns things to his own ends.
Today’s Zippy:
Zippy’s been reading the texts on food products, finding deep messages there.
Love the idea of “advanced socioeconomic degrees in … Manwich & Beefaroni Symbology”.
From the 1988 movie version of Hairspray (which I watched for Mothers Day):
You better brace yourself for a whole lot of ugly coming from a never-ending parade of stupid.
(with reference to the consequences of integrating a teen dance show on tv).
Mass-nouning of ugly and stupid, in a single sentence. It might be relevant that the line comes from a black character, Motormouth Maybelle (played by Ruth Brown).
On nounings of stupid in several senses, with links to other discussions, see this posting.
Commenting on Facebook on my note about the punk band Pissed Jeans, Chris Ambidge mischievously asked about the names Manly Panda and Bitch Bovine (half-rhyming and alliterative, respectively) — mischievously, because the names are soc.motss pseudonyms for Chris and Michael Palmer, respectively. Apparently, though, the names haven’t been taken for band names.
How do I know this? Well, there’s a database.
Found by accident, the punk band Pissed Jeans:
Pissed Jeans are an American noise rock/hardcore punk band from Allentown, Pennsylvania. [AZ side note: I was born in Allentown PA.] The band claims to play “loud, heavy, noisy, punk rock” and is influenced by 1980s hardcore punk and post-hardcore bands. The band have released several 7″ singles and four albums, and are currently signed to Sub Pop.
The members of Pissed Jeans all attended Nazareth High School and initially planned to use the name Unrequited Hard-On before settling on Pissed Jeans. As [band member] Matt Kosloff explains,
The idea was to start a different kinda Punk band focused on dead ended carnal cravings, sexual depression … that sort of thing. Mainly we just wanted to bludgeon the listener will dull, monotonous droning rock music that just sucks the energy out of you, the musical equivalent to watching a toilet flush.
The attractions of vulgarity never pale.
(If you’re looking for actual pissed jeans — the are lots of images and videos on the net — you’ll need to find indirect ways to call up the stuff or be willing to wade through pages and pages of refereces to the band.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a pun on page:
A pun of a type that juxtaposes two strikingly different contexts (here, court life in a monarchy, on the one hand, and the internet, on the other) in such a way that two different senses of an expression are both applicable.
Today’s Zippy has our pinhead hero looking for a clue:
A play on the ambiguity of clue and clueless. And an allusion to the board game Clue.
(About phallicity rather than language.)
From Chris Ambidge, in Trawna, this entertaining movie poster:
Guns as phallic symbols come up again and again on this blog and AZBlogX.
My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed full of playfulness, silliness, and absurdity, much of it linguistic.
Today’s Zippy:
Griffy and Mr. (the) Toad in a meta-comic, about comics. On the growing elevation of comics to the status of an art form — as has happened many times before with other pop cultural genres (like movies and jazz).
