An eCard:
Well, smartass isn’t directly a compound of the adjective smart ’impertinent’ and the noun ass; instead, -ass serves here as an expressive extension of smart (as in sweet-ass ‘really sweet, big-ass ‘really big’, dumb-ass ‘really dumb’, etc.) — note He’s always asking smart-ass / dumb-ass questions — and the extended adjective was then nouned, giving an alternative to smart aleck, smartypants, and in fact the noun smarty.
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.
Today’s Bizarro plays on the association between penguins and tuxedos — with penguins in t-shirts and open-necked shirts instead of tuxedos:
(#1)
There are other cartoons about penguins and tuxedos (and other cartoons about Casual Fridays, though I won’t look at them here); in fact, there are vast numbers of cartoons about penguins, which are easily anthropomorphized (they walk, or waddle, on two legs, and have arm-like, flipper-like wings) and are fascinatingly anomalous creatures (flightless birds that feed underwater and live in extreme climates and terrain). They are also gregarious and gather in large numbers, leading to cartoons about the difficulty of telling one penguin from another.
Now some words about actual penguins, and how some of them can easily be seen as wearing tuxedos, leading to altered photos of penguins *in* tuxedos and penguins as the emblems of tuexo rental stores; about tuxedos; and about Casual Fridays. Then a selection of penguin cartoons that haven’t already appeared on this blog.
From various people on Facebook, this WPA poster with the compound fag bag:
The fag here is the fag of cigarette smoking, though it turns out that there are now two notable uses of fag bag involving the sexual slur fag: for reference to a fanny pack and as a personal slur.
In Today’s Zippy, our pinhead reverts to adolescence on a snowboard:
The slang in the body of the strip — airdog, boned out, shred, shred the gnar, pop, nollie, pow-wow — is all genuine snowboarder slang, listed in the enormous collection of snowboarding terms here. The title, “Shagnasty”, is slang, but apparently not slang specific to snowboarding.
Passed on by Karen Erickson on Facebook (with general agreement from the readers that I would appreciate it), this photo on the HappyPlace site from 9/10/12:
HappyPlace commentary:
Jon Hamm’s penis photographed shopping on Madison Avenue
It was a pretty muggy in New York this past week, and like most penises suffering through the humidity, Jon Hamm’s apparently tried its best to get a little fresh air. Either those are some very thin pants, or the ridges of his member are as well-defined as his jawline. We can practically count the veins. Never has junk sagged with such gravitas. (Also, his dick looks fat.)
The local landscape has been brightened for some time by flowering pear trees, which are planted all over the place; there’s even a Flowering Pear Drive in Cupertino. These are mostly Callery pears. Whole trees in bloom, and some flowers close up:
The Wikipedia page on the plant leads us to bodily secretions:
That’s the title of an entertaining op-chart by Ben Schott in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times yesterday. The framing text:
By now, we’re all fluent in the language of corporate coffee – from Dunkaccinos® to Caffè Vanilla Frappuccinos®. But across America, independent coffee bars have developed private vocabularies to describe the intricate beverages they brew and the idiosyncrasies of those who order them.
The chart gives a wide selection of these two types of vocabularies.
Two points. One, that a great deal of slang is extraordinarily local, a fact that means that a complete, comprehensive slang dictionary is an impossibility. Two, that the instinct for language play is strong; given any opening, people will engage in all sorts of playful language (clippings, portmanteaus, rhyming and alliteration, puns, colorful metaphors, allusions, and so on).
