Playing with ambiguity:

— a One Big Happy cartoon with: I feel like a tuna fish sandwich

— a domestic exchange about: I will make a dessert of my youth

— a Pearls Before Swine cartoon with: Tell me roughly

— a photograph, labeled Schrödinger’s Dumpster, of a dumpster with the signage: EMPTY WHEN FULL

The example data; then some comments on ambiguity as a characteristic of language.

I feel like a tunafish sandwich. The One Big Happy strip from 12/5/19 (appearing more recently in my comics feed):

(#1)

We’ve been here before, sort of, on this blog. From my 2/19/12 posting “I feel like sushi”, about a Rhymes With Orange strip:

(#2)

Among the many uses of the verb feel is is the one OED2 glosses as:

to feel like (doing something): to have an inclination for

with the usage note “(? orig. U.S.; now common)” and the usage label “colloq. or vulgar” (I wouldn’t say that vulgar is appropriate now, even if it was in 1989, but colloquial is about right). In the cartoon, this sense competes with a sense in which the subject of the verb is the source of a touch perception (with the experiencer of this perception optionally expressed by a PP in to).

OED2’s gloss for the second sense:

Used (like taste, smell) in quasi-passive sense with complement: To be felt as having a specified quality; to produce a certain impression on the senses (esp. that of touch) or the sensibilities; to seem.

So: something feels rough, like sandpaper, as if it was sanded (to me).

Call the activity idiom involving feel, activity feel like.

The second sense of feel above is used here with the P like, so call this feel like combination prepositional feel like: the P functions semantically like a conjunction: feel like sushi ‘feel the way sushi feels’.

But I feel the way sushi feels is itself ambiguous, between the referent of sushi (also of the higher subject I) serving in the participant role Source (of a sensation — sushi feels slippery and fishy, somewhat meaty and chewy; if I feel like sushi, so do I) ; and the referent of sushi (also of I) in the participant role Experiencer (of a sensation — sushi feels that it has been prepared to be eaten by diners; if I feel like sushi, I feel similarly threatened). Source P feel like versus Experiencer P feel like.

The ambiguity in #2 is between activity feel like and Source P feel like; in  #1 (with tuna on toast rather than sushi), between activity feel like and Experiencer P feel like.

Then in my 2/24/15 posting “Ode to Almond Joy”, on the candy jingle “Sometimes you feel like a nut / Sometimes you don’t”, turning on the ambiguity of feel + like (in combination with the ambiguity of nut (the foodstuff vs. ‘wild and crazy guy’): activity feel like plus foodstuff nut giving the interpretation ‘have an inclination to have (that is, eat) a nut’; versus yet another sense of feel, roughly ‘believe’, specifically ‘believe to be’,  plus crazy/eccentric person nut, giving an interpretation along the lines of ‘believe to be like a nutty person’.

(For completeness, I note still other prepositional feel like idioms: positive-affect feel like a million bucks ‘feel wonderful’, negative-affect feel like shit / crap / hell ‘feel terrible’.)

I will make a dessert of my youth. From a 12/21/19 Facebook posting reporting on an household exchange between Chris Waigl and her wife Melinda Shore:

Chris: I will make a dessert of my youth.
Melinda: You will take your youth and turn it into a dessert?

First, on the food, Dr. Oetker Milchkaffee. From Wikipedia:

Dr. Oetker is a German multinational company that produces baking powder, cake mixes, frozen pizza, pudding, cake decoration, cornflakes, and various other products.

The company is a wholly owned branch of the Oetker Group, headquartered in Bielefeld.

(#3) ParadiesCreme ‘Paradise Cream, Cream of Paradise’

A dried dessert powder for a heavenly dessert cream flavor (add chilled milk, whisk for 3 minutes, and serve) — schmeckt locker-leicht und cremig ‘tastes airy-light and creamy’

(Comes in various flavors: vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate, nougat, caramel, and more)

Then, the ambiguity centered on the verb make: make a dessert of my youth. Part of the story is an ambiguity in argument structures, famously exploited in jokes:

Make me a sandwich / Poof, you’re a sandwich

My mother made me a homosexual / If I paid her a hundred dollars, would she make one for me too?

Skimming over most of the details, we’re looking at VPs of the form:

make NP1 NP2

understood as either of:

make NP2 for NP1 (roughly, benefactive)

make NP1 into NP2 (roughly, transformative)

But wait, there’s more. In addition to this argument structure ambiguity, there’s a structural ambiguity, with the PP of my youth parsed either as a postnominal modifier in the NP a dessert of my youth, or as an argument (an oblique object) of the verb make.

Tell me roughly. Then, from Facebook on 12/21/19, from Mike Pope, this Pearls Before Swine cartoon of 12/20:

(#4)

Tell me roughly, elliptical for ‘Tell me roughly how much we pay’.

Again, a structural ambiguity and a lexical ambiguity work together. The adverb roughly functions either as a VP adverbial or as a degree adverbial (an approximative) modifying how much (we pay).

The VP adverbial is the –ly counterpart to the adjective rough in NOAD‘s sense 2a:

adj. rough: … 2 [a] (of a person or their behavior) not gentle; violent or boisterous: strollers should be capable of withstanding rough treatment.

The degree adverbial is the –ly counterpart to the adjective rough in NOAD‘s sense 3d:

adj. rough: … 3[a] not finished tidily or decoratively; plain and basic: the customers sat at rough wooden tables. [b] put together without the proper materials or skill; makeshift: he had one arm in a rough sling. [c]lacking sophistication or refinement: she took care of him in her rough, kindly way. [d] not worked out or correct in every detail: he had a rough draft of his new novel.

Similarly, in AHD5 sense 6:

Not perfected, completed, or fully detailed: a rough drawing; rough carpentry.

(Neither quite gets at the further development to ‘inexact, approximate’, as in a rough estimate, but that’s not directly relevant to the Pearls ambiguity.)

EMPTY WHEN FULL. Another ambiguity passed around on Facebook back in December, an ambiguity in labeling / signage (in part a result of the abbreviated form of signs) that has come to be known as:

(#5)

(apparently suggesting that the dumpster is somehow simultaneously empty and full, like Schrödinger’s cat, which is somehow simultaneousy alive and dead)

Again, a constructional and lexical ambiguity working hand in hand: empty as a verb (the intended reading), in an imperative sentence (parallel to the label or sign USE AS NEEDED); vs. empty as an adjective (the Schrödinger reading), in a declarative sentence (parallel to the label or sign SLIPPERY WHEN WET).

Schrödinger might be on its way to serving as a cartoon meme. Three examples:

— on 3/26/15 in “The cat at the vet’s”, with Benjamin Schwartz’s “Schrödinger’s cat at the vet’s”

— in Mark Liberman’s 5/21/17 Language Log posting “Schrödinger’s pundit”: an SMBC, with a pundit both opposing and favoring a bill

— on 6/27/19 in “The Desert Island Reaper”: #10 the Schwartz cartoon

Why is ambiguity seen as a defect? Speakers of English are inclined to view examples like the ones above as entertaining demonstrations of unfortunate defects in the language: a properly designed language wouldn’t allow for any such thing. (Well, they can’t know this, but every language in the world appears to be jam-packed with just such ambiguities, so there obviously must be something deeper going on.)

Typical despondent views of ambiguity in fact turn on a piece of language ideology that is most vibrantly expressed in European Rationalist thought, in particular in the dream of a perfect language, in which you say exacty what you mean, no more and no less.

In my 9/27/18 posting “Mike Lynch”. I wrote that

[Peter Mark] Roget’s obsessive [Thesaurus] project … stood squarely in two related intellectual traditions: the devising of (universal) “philosophical languages” in the 17th century (George Dalgarno, John Wilkins, Gottfried Leibniz); and then the projects of the Enlightenment in the 18th, especially the French Encyclopédie, the great catalogue of all the things in the world.

(So: not only a perfect language, but a complete one, capable of expressing all ideas.)

The desire for a perfect language seems inarguable to many people these days, accustomed as we have become to the metaphorical usage of the word language for systems of symbols and rules for writing computer programs or algorithms. But the dream of a perfect language was of a sign system people could use in speaking and writing.

The nature of a perfect language. In brief, these components:

— perfect morphosyntax: one form / one meaning: neither ambiguity (one form, several alternative meanings) nor variability (one meaning, several alternative forms)

— perfect exponence: no redundancy (more than one co-occurring exponent of some meaning; so, among other things, no agreement) or omission (missing exponents for some meaning: no ellipsis, truncation, etc.) or inexplicitness (no abbreviation, indirection, allusion, etc.); Omit Needless Words (ONW), Include All Necessary Words (IANW)

— perfect lexicon: no lexical gaps, in particular neither lexical underdifferentiation (English cousin, no separate simple words for ‘female cousin’ and ‘male cousin’) nor lexical overdifferentiation (English niece and nephew, no simple word for the two of them taken together)

But but but. Language is not only a system of signs but also a system of sociocultural practice. These two aspects of language are indissoluble.

Most of the “defects” of ordinary language above — ambiguity, variability, redundancy, omission, inexplicitness — can be seen as devices serving the purposes of language in its sociocultural context: signaling shared information or belief, aspects of surrounding text, participants’ goals or intentions in engaging in the exchange, participants’ presentations of themselves in the interaction, and more.

Ambiguity, in particular, allows for compactness of expressions –“perfect” languages require astounding amounts of text to convey messages adequately — while using participants’ abilities to exploit background knowledge and the richness of context to winkle out each other’s intentions. They don’t do this perfectly, of course, but then they don’t have to. They only have to be good enough most of the time.

They are human systems for human uses.

(And then since there’s a considerable amount of randomness in linguistic history, some stuff just is, without a deeper meaning. For instance, the lexical overdifferentiation and underdifferentiation examples above.)

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip (Wayno’s title: “Farm to Slab”):

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

A combination of two cartoon memes: the familiar Caveman meme, plus  a Remarkable Restaurant meme that’s a specialty of the Bizarro strips.

Plus the portmanteau word play in filet magnon (filet mignon + cro-magnon). And a subtle play on a systematic ambiguity between raw and cooked understandings in certain food names, in particular for cuts of meat. You ask for a filet at the Paleo Cafe, you get a hunk of raw meat.

Remakable Restaurants. Previous postings on this theme include two with restaurants catering to anteaters and serving ants, and one on a restaurant catering to dragons and serving knights in armor.

From my 5/29/18 posting “Chez Le Fourmilier”:

(#2)

A strenuous exercise in cartoon understanding: you need to be familiar with a certain kind of (seafood) restaurant, and to recognize both anteaters and a children’s educational toy known as an ant farm. And then to understand that the cartoon embodies a metaphorical translation from a seafood restaurant world to an anteater world.

(On such translations, see my 5/22/18 posting “I just can’t stop it”.)

Another version in my 3/27/20 posting “Chez Le Fourmilier II”:

(#3)

And then in my 5/21/20 posting “Knight bibs”. a restaurant serving knights for a clientele of dragons:

(#4)

Then in #1, a restaurant servng raw meat to cavemen. The ultimate paleo diet. From my 7/23/20 posting “Let’s go paleo”, outside another Remarkable Restaurant, the Totally Natural Foods Cafe, where “They appear to be chasing a mastodon around with rocks and clubs.”

(#5)

Implementing the Paleolitic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, Stone Age diet, or hunter-gatherer diet, right along with the appropriate hunting practices, for the appropriate prey.

From my 10/23/14 posting “Miss Florence and the Paleo diet” on the diet: “a modern nutritional diet designed to emulate, insofar as possible using modern foods, the diet of wild plants and animals eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era” (Wikipedia).

filet magnon. First the food, then the European early modern humans.

From Wikipedia:

Filet mignon (French, lit. '”tender, delicate, or fine fillet”‘) is a steak cut of beef taken from the smaller end of the tenderloin, or psoas major of the cow carcass, usually a steer or heifer. In French, this cut is always called filet de bœuf (“beef fillet”), as filet mignon refers to pork tenderloin.

The tenderloin runs along both sides of the spine, and is usually harvested as two long snake-shaped cuts of beef. The tenderloin is sometimes sold whole. When sliced along the short dimension, creating roughly round cuts, and tube cuts, the cuts (fillets) from the small forward end are considered to be filet mignon. Those from the center are tournedos; however, some butchers in the United States label all types of tenderloin steaks “filet mignon”. In fact, the shape of the true filet mignon may be a hindrance when cooking, so most restaurants sell steaks from the wider end of the tenderloin – it is both cheaper and much more presentable.

(#6) Filet mignon with mashed potato, string beans and mushrooms (Wikipedia photo)

The tenderloin is the most tender cut of beef, making it one of the more desirable cuts. This, combined with the small amount given by any one steer or heifer (no more than 500 grams), makes filet mignon generally the most expensive cut. Because the muscle is not weight-bearing, it contains less connective tissue than other cuts, and so is more tender. However, it is generally not as flavorful as some other cuts of beef (e.g. prime rib cuts). For this reason it is often wrapped in bacon to enhance flavor, and/or served with a sauce.

Then the early humans. From Wikipedia:

“European early modern humans” (EEMH) is a term for the earliest populations of anatomically modern humans in Europe, during the Upper Paleolithic. It is taken to include fossils from throughout the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), covering the period of about 48,000 to 15,000 years ago (48–15 ka), spanning the Bohunician, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian periods.

… The term EEMH is equivalent to Cro-Magnon Man, or “Cro-Magnons”, a term derived from the Cro-Magnon rock shelter in southwestern France, where the first EEMH were found in 1868. Louis Lartet (1869) proposed Homo sapiens fossilis as the systematic name for “Cro-Magnon Man”. W. K. Gregory (1921) proposed the subspecies name Homo sapiens cro-magnonensis. In literature published since the late 1990s, the term EEMH is generally preferred over the common name Cro-Magnon, which has no formal taxonomic status, as “it refers neither to a species or subspecies nor to an archaeological phase or culture”.

Still, even specialists often use the term Cro-Magnon (or Cro Magnon) in their writings, because of its familiarity. So in Marcel Otte’s book Cro Magnon (Perrin, 2008):

(#7) The cover shows an artist’s reconstruction of a Cro-Magnon man — looking very much like current humans; the caveman of cartoons is some composite of Neanderthal features and brutish fantasy

The raw and the cooked. Suppose I go into a modern restaurant and order filet mignon with new potatoes and asparagus on the side — and I am then presented with something like the filet mignon below, plus some raw potatoes and raw asparagus:

(#8) From the Kansas City Steak Company, “4 signature, butter-tender USDA Prime Filet Mignon, 6 oz each cut from the best of the best beef available” ($150) (signature, butter-tender, and best of the best, all in one short description!)

(Compare the filet magnon in #1.)

Now of course, this isn’t going to happen — well, it would be an outrage if it did — because the default for these three menu items (filet mignon, potatoes, asparagus) is that they are they are all cooked dishes, not raw material. Meanwhile, at the butcher’s shop, if you order filet mignon, you don’t expect to get something like #6.

In general, out of context, there’s a systematic (metonymy-based) ambiguity, for a large class of lexical items, which can refer to edible foodstuffs or to cooked preparations of them. As with other such ambiguities — for example, between reference to some concrete object or to a simulacrum of it — we largely negotiate these semantic spaces without appreciating the complexities in them.

We are good at using our background knowledge, information about the context we are in, and estimations of what other people are trying to achieve in our interactions, to pick out the appropriate interpretations of the words they use, and we rarely notice that all this stuff is happening off-stage.

In today’s cartoon feed, two contributions to the Is It Art? theme on this blog: from Rhymes With Orange (with a Caveman twist on the theme); and from Zippy the Pinhead (on responses to a public sculpture):

Rhymes: caveman critics.

(#1)

Everyone’s a critic! Even in the Stone Age.

Meanwhile, we get three characteristic bits of (English-based) Caveman Talk, a pidgin-like version of English widespread in fictional representations of “primitive” people of all sorts, not just cavemen but also all manner of aboriginals. See my 9/10/19 posting “Him wear saurian monitor”, with a section on Caveman Talk.

Zippy the art critic. Confronting a two-faced piece of public statuary:

(#2)

Now, a little puzzle. In my experience, Bill Griffith never shows a work of art unless it’s a real piece; if Zippy says this is a big piece of public art, then it is, from somewhere in the world.

Unfortunately, a very long search on images turned up nothing like this:

(#3)

— and Google Images recognized this only as a comic, so turned up no art images at all. (There are, of course, a huge number of two-faced art works, from many different times and cultures, signifying many different things, but I found nothing close to #3. Maybe some search-adept reader can do better.)

But is it Art? A perennial topic on this blog, since the label of Art is so often used invidiously. The label is associated with a (relatively) modern ethic of Art for its own sake, not just some function — which highlights the artist’s intentions, and also the artists’ location within a loosely organized art world, embracing galleries, dealers, museums, and art criticism, plus elaborate social networks of artists. The makeup of this world changes over time, so that particular makers of artistic materials who were formerly excluded from the art world or at best questionably resident there can become part of the next wave of Artists.

Now, an inventory of some postings of mine on Is It Art? It doesn’t cover everything that’s relevant, so if you want to pursue things further, you might check out:

performance art, outsider art, Dada, surrealism, Magritte, Duchamp, Warhol

— on 12/5/10 in “But is it art?”: Ryan North‘s webcomic Dinosaur Comics (is it even a comic?)

— on 2/20/11 in “Conceptual art”: conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer

— on 11/16/11 in “X is the real Y”, on the web comic A Softer World, “which lies somewhere in that gray zone between cartooning and Art”

— on 11/24/12 in “Barbara Kruger”, on conceptual art: Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Jenny Holzer, Ed Ruscha, Luis Camnitzer

— on 1/11/13 in “Realism plus”: Zippy: “Is comic art really art?”

— on 6/6/14 in “Ralph Steadman”: cartoonist, illustrator, graphic designer, and caricaturist Steadman, almost never referred to simply as an artist

— on 6/28/14 in “What’s art and what’s not on the High Line”

— on 6/28/14 in “But is it art? More Jeff Koons” (at the Whitney)

— on 6/28/14 in “But is it art? At MoMA”

— on 6/29/14 in “But is it art? Abstraction”, on Morris Louis

— on 7/17/14  in “Things we doubt Louis XIV envisioned”, on Jeff Koons’s Puppy

— on 7/21/14 in “Peter Mendelsund”: book jacket artst Mendelsund

— on 6/8/15 in “Guys in heat”, on the gay porn flick Guys in Heat:

But is it art? Well, it has a structure in both space and time that adheres to conventions (some genre-specific) that viewers can recognize and appreciate. And, like porn in general, it’s an entertainment, intended for pleasure, in this case the pleasure of sexual release.

… I don’t see any great art in gay porn — the economics of the business pretty much precludes that from happening — but I do see significant pockets of well-made entertainment

— on 12/7/16 in “More doodleages”: XXX-rated doodle collage: “But is it art?, Superman wondered, as the penguins surfed”

— on 9/22/17 in “Three rocks”: Zippy: “Is comic art really art?”

— on 3/25/18 in “Art objects and utilitarian objects”

— on 5/6/18 in “Said the rapper to the geek”:  M.C. Escher

— on 7/20/18 in “Jurassic Jeff”: gigantic Jeff Goldblum statue in London

— on 7/28/18 in “Hockney paints Daley”: “Tom Daley Poses Nude for Painter David Hockney”

— on 11/30/18 in “Green flowers”: flower aranging

— on 5/20/20 in “Balloon quotes”: Michael James Schneider

Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, a Psychiatrist strip (Wayno’s title: “Out of Frame”):

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

And now we’re in the world of phobias, extreme or irrational fears of or aversions to particular things. People are exceptionally fond of finding or inventing unusual phobias — and, correspondingly, of finding or inventing unusual philias (attachments, especially sexually fetishistic attachments, to particular things).

Fear of furniture, as it turns out, is real but rare. There is even a celebrity afflicted with it.

A posting from Quora, which is not generally dependable as a source of information, but the report in it accords with other reports, and it introduces an entertaining piece of technical terminology: epiplaphobia, for fear of furniture (and in passing, cathedraphobia, for fear of chairs specifically, and argyrophobia,  for fear of silvery things).

From Quora on 7/22/17 from Paul Philips:

Furniture phobia (or epiplaphobia) as the name indicates is the extreme, irrational and often unwarranted fear of furniture. Some people might be afraid only of certain types of furniture; still others are specifically afraid only of antiques. One of the most famous celebrities having the extreme fear of antique furniture is Billy Bob Thornton, who, reportedly, is also afraid of silver ([a]rgyrophobia is the fear of silvery things, especially silverware. This phobia is usually triggered back in early childhood, e.g. by getting poked by a fork.) However, Billy claimed that his furniture phobia is greatly exaggerated since he can easily withstand chairs and tables. He is only afraid of antiques with carved lion/tiger heads or old drapes or French/English furniture with mildew. Basically, says the actor, he cannot stand “the stuff kings were around”. As a result of this phobia, he is known to refuse housing up in residences or hotels having stuff from before 1950.

A specific fear of chairs is known as [c]athedraphobia . [from Latin cathedra ‘seat’, itself from Greek kathédra ‘chair of a teacher, throne’]

These phobia names are based on classical, mostly Greek, roots. The other main option is just to dragoon an English word for combination with –phobia: as in the attested invention furniturephobia.

(I will get back to Billy Bob Thornton; I promise.)

epiplaphobia. I was baffled by the term, not recognizing the classical root in the first part. Eventually, I found it, but in a discussion of epiplaphilia.

From Dr Mark Griffiths’s WordPress blog, the posting “Seats of yearning: A brief look at ‘furniture sex’ and the naming of a new paraphilia” on 2/3/13:

What’s the first thing that comes into your head when you hear the words ‘furniture sex’? Maybe you think about people having sex on particular items of furniture? Maybe you think of specially designed ‘sexy furniture’ such as the items featured on the Pinterest website? Maybe you think about people displayed and used as pieces of human furniture (see my previous blog on forniphilia if you have no idea what I am talking about). There are also those who design bespoke furniture to enhance sexual pleasure. For instance, a recent article in The Frisky examined the ‘sex furniture’ designed by Josh and Jasmine whose entire house is furnished with sex furniture. According to the article “each piece [of furniture] supposedly accommodates multiple positions and enhances orgasm”.

The origin for this blog came when I read a September 2012 story in both the Smoking Gun and The Inquisitor about an American married man (46-year old Gerard Streator) who was accused of having sex with a yellow sofa that had been abandoned on the pavement in Waukesha (Wisconsin, US). At 11pm on September 3rd (2012), Streator had the misfortune to be spotted by an off-duty policeman (Officer Ryan Edwards), who saw Mr. Streator copulating with the sofa while he was out on a late night run. The police officer was quoted as seeing:

“A subject leaning over the couch facing down and it looked like he was having sexual relations with someone on the couch. [I] could see the male’s hips thrusting up and down on the couch [and] could see that the defendant’s penis was erect. [He] had been thrusting his pelvic area against the cushions and trying to sexually gratify himself by rubbing his penis between the two cushions. [He was] thrusting his hips as if he was having sex with a person”

The officer chased Mr. Streator back to the suspect’s apartment and was arrested the following day for the criminal misdemeanor at the County Springs Hotel where Streator worked. The article in The Inquisitor described Streator as a “couch fetishist” who engaged in “bizarre sexual conduct with the abandoned couch”. [other examples follow, all funny-sad, like this one]

… [the terminological payoff:] one of my research colleagues (from Greece) informed me that ‘epiplo’ is the singular for furniture and that ‘epipla’ is the plural. [AZ: well, apparently epiplo ‘furniture’ is a mass noun in Greek as in English, but there’s a corresponding plural epipla ‘furnishings, pieces of furniture’] I am therefore going to name those with a ‘furniture sex’ paraphilia as engaging in epiplophilia. Additionally, given that some individuals seem to only like seated furniture, I found out that the word ‘throne’ is of Greek origin (from the word ‘thronos’). Therefore, in the absence of any other names for paraphilias involving seated furniture, I hereby name this as ‘thronosphilia’ that I will operationally define not just as the gaining of sexual pleasure and arousal from furniture chairs and seating.

And then, if there’s epiplaphilia, there can also be epiplaphobia.

BBT. I could have sworn that I’d posted about Billy Bob Thornton before, but apparently not. He’s a premier member of what I’ve called the acting corps, of hard-working and talented (but often little-noticed) actors — except, of course, that he’s become a celebrity.

From Wikipedia:

(#2) From a 2014 story about his vegan diet

Billy Bob Thornton (born August 4, 1955) is an American actor, writer, director, and musician [whose credits include the movies Sling Blade (1996), Primary Colors (1998), Monster’s Ball (2001), Friday Night Lights (2004), and the tv series Fargo.]

He specializes in nuanced portrayals of strongly masculine characters. Worth watching.

For we will sit together as happy as can be
For I’ll tickle Nancy, and Nancy’ll tickle me

— Uncle Dave Macon’s “I’ll Tickle Nancy” (apparently first recorded in 1935)

Yesterday’s (7/31) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip, in which Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy character takes up textual analysis (Wayno’s title:”Beating Around the Bushmiller”), explaining the intricacies of cartoon characters to her buddy Sluggo (and of course the three rocks):

(#1) On the Bushmiller rocks, see my 9/2/17 posting “Three rocks”, with a Zippy strip in which the rocks talk (and if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

Pretty much the purest form of cartoon self-reference: a cartoon character expounding on the nature of cartoon characters. (Also note Sluggo’s body language, with his hands in his pockets, often conveying disaffection or suspicion.)

What follows is about Nancys and, especially, nancies.

The Bushmiller Nancy. From my 2/11/19 posting “Age cannot wither them”: “Nancy and Sluggo are always and forever 8 years old” — with a section on the Nancy strip, a great favorite of Bill Griffith’s that gets frequent coverage in his Zippy strips.

(#2) A 1995 commemorative stamp

nancy (boy): nasty but kind of quaint. Now into the swamp. The short story, from NOAD:

noun nancy: informal, offensive (also nancy boy) an effeminate or homosexual man. ORIGIN late 19th century: pet form [Nan or Nancy] of the given name Ann.

The corresponding weapon of verbal abuse used against me as a child was fairy (boy): I was able to fend off physical abuse with crazed aggression against the bullies, but the verbal abuse rained down on me pretty much constantly for years. My offense was not actual effeminacy (at the age of 8 I had a flagrantly effeminate buddy, and I understood that our ways were very different — though he did give me an early appreciation of opera; his intense enthusiasm for women’s high fashion didn’t take for me, but then you don’t expect your friends to share all your interests), but failure to conform to normative masculinity: I was nerdy and academically oriented; artistic (all that classical piano); deeply unathletic; profoundly uninterested in sports fandom; unaggressive; and given to friendships with girls.

Boys form themselves into loosely organized gangs, which enforce norms of masculinity amongst themselves; and those all-male groups continue into male associations in adolescence and adulthood. I have never been acceptable to these male groups, though I’ve sometimes been able to patch together a spot for myself off to the side, offering expertise, entertainment, or amiability.

In any case, a male who doesn’t fit these norms of masculinity is perceived as feminine — this is a binary world — and treated as “no better than a woman” (the extraordinary devaluing of women is central to the whole business), which is actually quite alarming, since fems and fags and all the rest of us deviants are living exemplars of what could happen if you don’t satisfy the requirements of the male codes.

(Note: my sense of myself has always been, uncomplicatedly, that I am both male and masculine, just a non-standard form of masculine in which queerness, as defined by sexual desire,  takes center stage. I am baffled by people who insist that my gender is non-binary. I have no problem with trans people and non-binary people, but I don’t think I’m among their number.)

But back to the slurs. As I said, fairy (boy) was the verbal weapon of my childhood, in a particular time and social place. I recognized at the time that nancy (boy) had been used as the rough equivalent in my parents’ generation, but it sounded kind of quaint to me. (Others will have had different experiences, of course.) Not long after, fag / faggot took over as the most widespread verbal weapon. By then, my response was to embrace it, throw it in my oppressors’ face, and normalize it. Ditto with fairy (boy). I am a faggot fairy — oh, a pansy too — don’t mess with me.

nancy, alas, is lost to me, as just too quaint to have any resonance, However, it is clearly alive for others. So now, three ways of treating the slur.

Reporting the slur. From the History News Network “Who are You Calling Nancy Boy?”, a review by Bruce Chadwck on 5/6/13:

The ‘nance,’ or Nancy Boy, was a gay burlesque character from the 1930s who brought guffaws and belly laughs as he pranced about the stage, creating campy scenes and sketches of gay life. He put on an outrageous show and audiences loved him. In the late 1930s, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, fearful of how the lurid burlesque shows would make his city look in the upcoming World’s Fair of 1939, cracked down on the houses.

Part of LaGuardia’s anger was aimed at the Nance, whom critics said created audiences of lusty gay men having sex in the dark balconies of the burlesque emporiums. It was an outrage, the Mayor said, and police began swooping down on burlesque shows, closing many and forcing others to drop the nance act or greatly curb it.

The Nance, that just opened in New York, is the very funny, deeply emotional, and winning, story about that crackdown.

(#2) Nathan Lane in the play

The play stars the marvelously gifted Broadway veteran Nathan Lane as Chauncey Miles, a veteran Nance who worked at the Irving Place theater (an actual theater in the ‘20s where burlesque shows were staged and nances worked). He is set in his life on stage and off stage as a homosexual who prowls clubs, parks, and even Horn and Hardart cafeterias for men. One night he meets Ned, a married man from Buffalo, and falls in love with him. The plays tell dual story of their love, and problems, and the fate of Chauncey’s burlesque show. It is a poignant look at gay life in the Depression.

Embracing the slur. The bad (recent) news first:

From the hoodline site: “Beauty supply e-tailer Nancy Boy closes Hayes Valley storefront permanently after 15 years” by Teresa Hammerl on 5/5/20.

(#3) The shop in better times

Because coronavirus.

About the shop, from the SFGate site (SF Chronicle), “Nancy Boy caters to the picky” by Lord Martine on 2/2/02:

Its name chimes like the new fantastic — even though it’s old cockney slang [so the writer claimed, but I see nothing in collections of Cockney rhyming slang]. Its logo is pinchable. The product itself comes with high-performance claims and smells fabulous, naturally. But will gay men buy it?

(#4) A bar of soap and an elegant wooden soapdish from the company

Nancy Boy, a modest line of hair and skin care products packaged and marketed specifically for gay men, “was created to stop beauty-product aficionados dead in their tracks. And that, the press release hyping the line reads, “goes from the consummate style-chaser to the pickiest of boyfriends.”

We’re nancy boys, and we’re fabulous. Love it.

Agonizing over the identity. From Wikipedia:

(#5) One cover for the song

“Nancy Boy” is a song by British alternative rock band Placebo, released on 20 January 1997, as the fourth single from their debut album self-titled album, released on Hut Records. As with their first single “Come Home”, the single edit is a re-recorded version, noticeably different from the album version. “Nancy Boy” contains themes of drugs, sex, gender confusion and bisexuality.

Some lyrics:

Alcoholic kind of mood
Lose my clothes
Lose my lube
Cruising for a piece of fun
Looking out for number one
Different partner every night
So narcotic outta sight
What a gas
what a beautiful ass

[chorus] And it all breaks down at the role reversal
Got the muse in my head she’s universal
Spinnin’ me round she’s coming over me
And it all breaks down at the first rehearsal
Got the muse in my head she’s universal
Spinnin’ me round she’s coming over me

Kind of buzz that lasts for days
Had some help from insect ways
Comes across all shy and coy
Just another nancy boy
Woman man or modern monkey
Just another happy junkie
Fifty pounds
Press my button
Going down

You can watch a live performance here.

A world away from elegant soap and even from the nances of the burlesque stage.

The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 8/7 features a housefly couple telling the story of how they met:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

Where to begin? Well, it’s a decidedly meta cartoon, in which the characters know they are cartoon characters and comment on that fact. And it’s a cartoon in which parallel worlds are aligned and translated from one to the other: a world of conventional American  domesticity (in which couples meet and form relationships, and entertain friends in their home); and a world of fly jokes, turning on the appearance of houseflies in soup at restaurants.

All this held together by a story type in film-making: the meet cute form, in which unlikely accidents of meeting lead to romantic involvements.

Background 1: meeting cute. From my 6/26/13 posting “meet cute”, citing OED3 (June 2001):

to meet cute: (in film-makers’ jargon, of two characters) to have an accidental meeting which leads to or is followed by romantic involvement.

In #1, the meeting was the accident of the two flies having appeared in the same restaurant-soup fly joke — who could have predicted that? — and then fallen into a relationship. They met cute.

Background 2: the fly-in-the-soup joke family. From my 10/8/18 posting “Fly formulaicity”, a note on the Bizarro of 10/3/18, about a set-up line for jokes (with a collection of examples):

(#2)

“Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup”. With many ripostes (and also a related family of waiter-and-food jokes). Don’t know the history, but people have collected the jokes.

(Just a passing note: the flies in #2 are much closer to 4-limbed human beings than the 6-limbed flies in #1. Which of the two worlds do you take your details from? The cartoonist’s task is not an easy one.)

The band name in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, a cute play on Blue Öyster Cult (if you don’t know about Blue Öyster Cult, then the cartoon will be pretty much of a mystery to you):

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

A band of lobsters. They have an umlaut. They have cowbell.

It’s all an elaborate play on BÖC.

From Wikipedia

Blue Öyster Cult (often abbreviated BÖC or BOC) is an American rock band formed in Stony Brook, New York, in 1967, best known for the singles “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”, “Burnin’ for You”, “Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll”, and “Godzilla.”

Blue Öyster Cult was formed in 1967 as Soft White Underbelly in a communal house at Stony Brook University on Long Island when rock critic Sandy Pearlman overheard a jam session consisting of fellow Stony Brook classmate Donald “Buck” Dharma and his friends. Pearlman offered to become the band’s manager and creative partner, which the band agreed to. The band’s original lineup consisted of guitarist Dharma, drummer Albert Bouchard, keyboardist Allen Lanier, singers Jeff Kagel (aka Krishna Das) and Les Braunstein and bassist Andrew Winters. Pearlman wanted the group to be the American answer to Black Sabbath.

In October 1967, Soft White Underbelly made their debut performance as Steve Noonan’s backing band at the Stony Brook University Gymnasium, a gig booked by Pearlman. The band’s name came from Winston Churchill’s description of Italy as “the soft underbelly of the Axis.”

… The name “Blue Öyster Cult” came from a 1960s poem written by manager Sandy Pearlman. It was part of his “Imaginos” poetry, later used more extensively on their album Imaginos (1988). Pearlman had also come up with the band’s earlier name, “Soft White Underbelly”, from a phrase used by Winston Churchill in describing Italy during World War II. In Pearlman’s poetry, the “Blue Oyster Cult” was a group of aliens who had assembled secretly to guide Earth’s history. “Initially, the band was not happy with the name, but settled for it, and went to work preparing to record their first release…

… The addition of an umlaut was suggested by Allen Lanier, but rock critic Richard Meltzer claims to have suggested it just after Pearlman came up with the name, reportedly “because of the Wagnerian aspect of Metal”. Other bands later copied the practice of using umlauts or diacritic marks in their own band names, such as Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, Queensrÿche and parodied by Spın̈al Tap.

.. Blue Öyster Cult have been influential to the realm of hard rock and heavy metal, leading them to being referred to as “the thinking man’s heavy metal band” due to their often cryptic lyrics, literate songwriting, and links to famous authors.

And on the specific song alluded to be “don’t fear the steamer” in the cartoon. From Wikipedia:

(#2)

“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” is a song by American rock band Blue Öyster Cult from the band’s 1976 album Agents of Fortune. The song, written and sung by lead guitarist Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser, deals with eternal love and the inevitability of death. Dharma wrote the song while picturing an early death for himself.

Cowbell. Nothing in what I’ve said so far would prepare you for this, but it turns on a Saturday Night Live sketch. From Wikipedia:

“More Cowbell” is a comedy sketch that aired on Saturday Night Live on April 8, 2000. The sketch is presented as an episode of VH1’s documentary series Behind the Music that fictionalizes the recording of the song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult. The sketch featured guest host Christopher Walken as music producer “The Bruce Dickinson”, and regular cast member Will Ferrell, who wrote the sketch with playwright Donnell Campbell, as fictional cowbell player Gene Frenkle, whose overzealous playing annoys his bandmates but pleases producer Dickinson. The sketch also starred Chris Parnell as Eric Bloom, Jimmy Fallon as Albert Bouchard, Chris Kattan as Buck Dharma and Horatio Sanz as Joe Bouchard.

The sketch is often considered one of the greatest SNL sketches ever made

… As a result of its popularity, “more cowbell” became an American pop culture catchphrase.

You can view the SNL sketch here. The take-away quote: “I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell.”

And on the cowbell itself, from Wikipedia:

(#3)

The cowbell is an idiophone hand percussion instrument used in various styles of music including salsa and infrequently in popular music. It is named after the similar bell historically used by herdsmen to keep track of the whereabouts of cows.

In #1, you can see the cowbell being used by the gray (unsteamed — red lobsters have been cooked) lobster in the upper left-hand corner.

Finally, the steamer in #1. This would be a piece of cookware for steaming lobsters, crabs, and clams (or anything else). As in this steamer (pretty much what Ann Daingerfield and I had in Columbus OH) — from the Granite Ware company on Amazon, a 19-quart enamel-on-steel 2-tier clam and lobster steamer:

(#4)

The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro of 10/19, with yet another variant of the Desert Island cartoon meme:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

The allusion is (ultimately) to the BBC 4 radio program(me) Desert Island Discs.

On Desert Island Discs, from Wikipedia:

(#2) Illustration from the Daily Mirror site, “70 years of Desert Island Discs – what did George Clooney, Elton John and others choose?” by Steve Myall on 1/28/12

Desert Island Discs is a radio programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It was first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme on 29 January 1942.

Each week a guest, called a ‘castaway’ during the programme, is asked to choose eight recordings (usually, but not always, music), a book and a luxury item that they would take if they were to be cast away on a desert island, whilst discussing their lives and the reasons for their choices. It was devised and originally presented by Roy Plomley. Since 2018 the programme has been presented by Lauren Laverne.

More than 3,000 episodes have been recorded

… Guests are invited to imagine themselves cast away on a desert island, and choose eight recordings, originally gramophone records, to take with them; discussion of their choices permits a review of their life. Excerpts from their choices are played or, in the case of short pieces, the whole work. At the end of the programme they choose the one piece they regard most highly. Guests are also automatically given the Complete Works of Shakespeare and either the Bible or another appropriate religious or philosophical work. They are then prompted to select a third book to accompany them. Popular choices include Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Actress Judi Dench, who has macular degeneration, was permitted to take an audiobook in place of a printed manuscript.

Guests also choose one luxury, which must be inanimate and of no use in escaping the island or allowing communication from outside. Roy Plomley enforced these rules strictly. He did, however, grant a special dispensation to Princess Michael of Kent, who chose her pet cat. The rules are, however, less strictly enforced today; for instance, Lawley allowed John Cleese to take Michael Palin with him, on the condition that he was dead and stuffed. Examples of luxuries have included champagne and a piano, the latter of which is one of the most requested luxuries.

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.

On Facebook, Joelle Stepien Baillard posted an old cartoon (pubished 8/8/94) by New Yorker cartoonist Sam Gross:

(#1)

A cartoon with a translation from one world to another. There’s the world of cats, in which they go outside to hunt small animals; and then, simultaneously, the world of (human) household relationships, in which someone going out on an errand will often ask if they can get something for the others while they’re out.

That gives us a talking cat.

On voles. From Wikipedia:

(#2) The bank vole (Myodes glareolus) lives in woodland areas in Europe and Asia (photo from Wikipedia)

Voles are small rodents that are relatives of lemmings and hamsters, but with a stouter body; a shorter, hairy tail; a slightly rounder head; smaller ears and eyes; and differently formed molars (high-crowned with angular cusps instead of low-crowned with rounded cusps). They are sometimes known as meadow mice or field mice in North America and Australia.

… Voles thrive on small plants yet, like shrews, they will eat dead animals and, like mice or rats, they can live on almost any nut or fruit. In addition, voles target plants more than most other small animals, making their presence evident. Voles readily girdle small trees and ground cover much like a porcupine. This girdling can easily kill young plants and is not healthy for trees or other shrubs.

Voles often eat succulent root systems and burrow under plants or ground cover and eat away until the plant is dead. Bulbs in the ground are another favorite target for voles; their excellent burrowing and tunnelling skills give them access to sensitive areas without clear or early warning. The presence of large numbers of voles is often only identifiable after they have destroyed a number of plants. However, like other burrowing rodents, they also play beneficial roles, including dispersing nutrients throughout the upper soil layers.

In our Columbus OH garden, voles were a threat to the crocuses planted in one specific bed.

From Ryan Tamares, a gay Xmas and pandemic-chasing card “Adam Likes Santa: Red Santa”, featuring cartoonist Bobo Nisi’s gay bear character Bobo-Bear (sometimes Bobobear or Bobo Bear):

(#1) The card

(Also demonstrating some newly recovered abilities of mine at formatting my blog postings.)

On the Bobo-Bear Facebook page:

A supermarket worker who dreamed to draw, bought some pencils, moved to London and now shares his art on t-shirts. Follow if you like bears [of the gay male variety]. Grrr!

Drawn by Bobo Nisi, a supermarket worker who dreamed to draw, said goodbye to the aisles, bought some pencils and imagined these gay sexy bears.

An overview of some Bobo-Bear characters:

(#2) Six characters

The Bobo-Bear site also sells merchandise (of course):

(#3) Shirtless Bobo-Bear modeling a mask

(#4) Bobo-Bear swimwear, with a butt bear

The 12/11 Zippy cartoon contemplates fear of death on a New Yorker desert island:

(#1) No, no, the fount of desert island gags is inexhaustible!

The strip is self-referential: Zippy reflects on his being in a cartoon. It is a Desert Island cartoon, and with its reference to the fear of dying, it alludes to another cartoon meme, the Grim Reaper.

Zippy has, in a sense, been here before: in my 5/12/12 posting “Gag cartoons”:

(#2) Again, bemoaning the dearth of Desert Island gags

An earlier, explicit,  combination of Desert Island and Grim Reaper, in my 6/27/19 posting “The Desert Island Grim Reaper”:

(#3) A Rhymes With Orange cartoon

Then a few bonus items. First, another combination of Grim Reaper and Psychiatrist (I have posted others):

(#4) From the (apparently now defunct) cartoon Closet & Home in 9/14

Meanwhile, Grim Reaper cartoons are something of a specialty in Bizarro. Here are two that haven’t already been posted:

(#5) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in this 7/2/17 cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

(#6) Dan Piraro says there are 4 of his symbols in this Wayno/Piraro Bizarro (from 8/3/18)

In the most recent (12/28/20) New Yorker — the Cartoon Issue — a Colin Tom Desert Island strip, in which the castaway is importuned by messages in a bottle:

Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink;
Bottles, bottles everywhere
But nothing but a CLINK!

(The Desert Island cartoon meme appears to be indefinitely flexible.)

Colin Tom is new to this blog. From a webpage about New Yorker cartoonists, Tom’s bio:

I’m a Brooklyn-based artist and doodler. I was born in Singapore and moved around a lot as a kid, but I predominantly grew up between the Bay Area, California, and Atlanta, Georgia.

I received a BFA in painting and a BA in magazine journalism from the University of Georgia. As soon as I graduated, I threw all of my things in a U-haul with my friends, and moved to Brooklyn — bartending in night clubs and bars, and art handling in galleries and museums to make ends meet.

I’ve always had a drawing and painting practice while I’ve lived here, but I didn’t start drawing for The New Yorker until I saw an episode of Sixty Minutes on the submission process. I made my first batch with nothing more than the intention of seeing the inside of The New Yorker offices and having a meeting with Bob Mankoff. Once I got a taste for the rejection I kept showing up. I began submitting in 2014 and was published for the first time in 2015.

I am once again impressed by artists, musicians, and writers (not to mention many teachers) who manage to paste together complex lives hustling on the gig economy. (In a number of ways, I have had an extraordinarily lucky life.)

In place of the usual last page with a simple captioning contest, the 12/28/20 New Yorker — the Cartoon Issue — has a cartoon by E. S. Glenn (a Santa Psychiatrist cartoon, for the season), with no fewer that 19 captions proposed by professional comedians:

In the most recent (1/4&11/21) New Yorker, this E.S. Glenn cartoon with still another variant of the Desert Island meme:

(#1)

Somehow they started out paddling a lovers’ swan boat — note the heart — in the pond of a park but ended up beached on a desert island in the Pacific (or whatever tropical spot cartoon desert islands are located in). Yes, he should have let her ask for directions.

A large swan pedal boat for rental at Echo Park in Los Angeles:

(#2)

The lovers have somehow slipped the surly bonds of the pond and sailed the sea on swan-white wings. With, apparently, a wrong turn at Catalina.

The artist. E. S. Glenn is not primarily a gag cartoonist, but instead a comic book / graphic artist tackling ambitious themes. Consider his 2020 Unsmooth #1 from Floating World Comics.

(#3)

From the company on the book:

Floating World Comics: E. S. Glenn had bad luck when it came to producing and selling his artwork. Witness the portrait of an artist as he enters the criminal underworld. Rendered in a clean line European style, Unsmooth is a semi-autobiographical graphic album that introduces the reader to the idiosyncratic world of artist turned petty thief turned assassin, E. S. Glenn.

(Glenn is an American black man living as an ex-pat in Berlin.)

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, framed as an instance of the Psychiatrist cartoon meme:

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

The patient is lying on the therapeutic couch, but he’s also flat on hs back suffering the affective disorder that comes to many with the winter solstice (Wayno’s title for the cartoon: “Bummer Solstice” — playing on summer solstice).

Then the title “Tropical Depression”, ordinarily referring to a meterological phenomenon, involving lowered atmospheric pressure (depression) arising in the tropics  (the geographical band surrounding the equator); but here referring to a mental condition (depression, characterized by lowered energy and affect), in this case, specifically, seasonal affective disorder (aka seasonal melancholy) triggered by the short, dark, cold days around the winter solstice — which the patient seems to be counteracting with cultural symbols  associated with the bright, hot, and humid tropics (Hawaii, to be specific): beachcomber hat, lei, coconut drink, ukulele, and Hawaiian beach shorts.

So: ambiguity. From NOAD on senses of the noun depression:

1 [a] feelings of severe despondency and dejection: self-doubt creeps in and that swiftly turns to depression. [b] Psychiatry a mental condition characterized by feelings of severe despondency and dejection, typically also with feelings of inadequacy and guilt, often accompanied by lack of energy and disturbance of appetite and sleep: she was referred by a psychiatrist treating her for depression. 2 [a] a long and severe recession in an economy or market: the depression in the housing market. [b] (the Depression or the Great Depression) the financial and industrial slump of 1929 and subsequent years. 3 [a] the action of lowering something or pressing something down: depression of the plunger delivers two units of insulin. [b] a sunken place or hollow on a surface: the original shallow depressions were slowly converted to creeks. 4 Meteorology a region of lower atmospheric pressure, especially a cyclonic weather system: hurricanes start off as loose regions of bad weather known as tropical depressions. … ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin depressio(n-), from deprimere ‘press down’).

The senses in 3 are the older ones, close to the etymological original ‘pressed down’. The others are metaphorical developments from this, involving various ways in which something can be pressed down: mental state in 1; the economy or market in 2; atmospheric pressure in 4. The cartoon plays with 1 vs. 4.

At the same time, the cartoon plays with a subtler ambiguity in tropical ‘having to to with the tropics’. Background, from NOAD:

noun tropic: [a] the parallel of latitude 23°26ʹ north (tropic of Cancer) or south (tropic of Capricorn) of the equator… [c] (the tropics) the region between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

The adjective tropical can then be merely a geographical term (as in the meteorological expression tropical depression, or in tropical rainforest or tropical medicine); or it can index the cultural associations of the tropics, in references to tropical drinks, tropical music and dances, tropical clothing, and the like.  The cartoon title “Tropical Depression” then plays on these two senses of tropical as well on two senses of depression.

Next, on seasonal affective disorder, from Wikipedia:

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a mood disorder subset in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year exhibit depressive symptoms at the same time each year, most commonly in winter. Common symptoms include sleeping too much and having little to no energy, and overeating.

… SAD in the United States affects from 1.4% of the population in Florida to 9.9% in Alaska. SAD was formally described and named in 1984 by Norman E. Rosenthal and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health.

And finally, the culturally tropical symbols in the cartoon. Most of these are familiar or have been taken up in other postings on this blog. Two deserve a bit of commentary.

First, the beachcomber hat — that’s what it’s known as in the clothing business — of straw. From the Windy City Novelties site:

(#2) ad copy: “Our 16″ natural straw Beachcomber Hat is the perfect accent for your Luau or Beach party. Get a feel for the tropics at your party with this straw Beachcomber Hat”

And then the coconut drink: a drink (probably alcoholic) in a whole coconut with holes drilled in it and a straw inserted in one of the holes — a form of coconut drink I think I’ve seen only in the comic strips. In real life, the top bit of a coconut is sawed off and a drink is mixed in the hollow of the coconut, as in these piña coladas (complete with straws) from the lovetoknow site’s “21 Coconut Rum Drink Recipes That Are Irresistibly Easy”:

(#3)

On Pinterest recently, a board devoted to Bizarro cartoons, including a fair number relevant to this blog but not previously posted here — from which, the three below (all the work of Dan Piraro alone, without Wayno’s collaboration). Two are about parrots and crackers (the first is also an instance of the Psychiatrist cartoon meme); the third offers a groaner pun on a sexual idiom previously discussed on this blog. (I’ll start with a digression on the most common way parrots figure in cartoons, as adjuncts to pirates.)

Digression: parrots and their pirates. An illustration, from my 9/1719 posting “The amazing talking pirate”:

(#1) PirateTalk + ParrotTalk, with a cartoon reversal of roles

A classic image:

(#2) The Hostage (1911), illustration by N.C. Wyeth for Stevenson’s Treasure Island: Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver with his parrot

From he website Atlas Obscura, “The Surprising Truth About Pirates and Parrots” by Dan Nosowitz on 1/19/15:

Ever since Long John Silver clomped around on a wooden leg with a parrot on his shoulder, the literary and pop-culture conception of pirates has involved the parrot. But at this point, fact is very hard to separate from fiction. What, exactly, about a classic pirate Halloween costume … is actually real? Is any of it real?

“The parrot trope is almost certainly grounded in reality,” says Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Long John Silver, the star of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, was the first major fictional pirate character to walk around with a pet parrot, but this, according to Woodard and other experts in the field of classic piracy I spoke to, was based on real truths. And the reasons why the parrot became associated with pirates actually give us a pretty good glimpse at the real, true-life existence of a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy.

… The Golden Age of Piracy, a period lasting from, in the broadest sense, the mid-1600s through around 1730, encompassed a few different major geopolitical and economic movements that created a space for pirates.

… pirates, depending as they did on robbing ships, mostly had to go where the ships were. They followed trade routes, which means they ended up in specific places; you didn’t see pirates flocking to deep South America or anywhere in the Pacific Ocean. They stayed with the ships, and ended up largely in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian Ocean’s coasts.

On long trips, whether conducted legally or illegally, pets were desired but would need careful vetting. These long voyages, remember, could last weeks or months, and mostly, they were incredibly boring and uncomfortable. A companion animal could help ease the way. What kind?

… pirates were traveling to exotic lands, had quite a bit of free time, had disposable income, and thus had no particular reason to restrict themselves to ordinary European pets like cats and dogs. Monkeys were not uncommon, and the concept of a pet monkey made its way into fiction as well — Captain Barbossa, in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, has one. But a parrot was more sensible. They don’t eat much, compared to a dog or a monkey, and what they do eat (seeds, fruits, nuts) can be easily stored on board. They’re colorful, and intelligent, and funny, and for a pirate (or a legal sailor) wanting to show off in port, a parrot would do nicely.

I’m doing parrots and their pirates first (and parrots and their crackers afterwards), in part because the pirate artistic convention is so common, in cartoons as elsewhere; and in part because the pirate artistic convention turns out to be grounded in fact — while the cracker artistic convention (“Polly Wanna Cracker”) is something of a factual conundrum.

Parrots and their crackers. The two Bizarro cartoons, on the theme Is That All There Is?:

(#3) From 3/16/10, the parrot in psychotherapy, hoping to get beyond crackers

(#4) From 12/29/10, the parrot wants to check out the alternatives

First, a note on the name Polly for a parrot, to get some feel for dates and places. From OED3 (Sept. 2006):

noun Polly: A parrot. Chiefly as a conventional proper or pet name. Cf. Poll n.3 [1st cite 1826; all five of the OED‘s cites are from British sources, though it’s clear that the parrot name was used by Americans in the 19th century (see discussion below)]

noun Poll-3: A conventional proper or pet name for a parrot. Hence: a parrot. [1st cite 1600 Ben Jonson Every Man out of his Humor; other cites through 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, initially almost entirely from British sources]

Then from the A Way with Words site, “Polly Wanna Cracker?”, posted by Grant Barrett on 2/28/09:

A man who owns a parrot says that when people see his bird, they invariably ask the question “Polly wanna cracker?” He wonders about the origin of that psittacine phrase, meaning parrot-like. One of the earliest uses of the phrase so far found is this fake advertisement from the mock newspaper the Bunkum Flag-Staff and Independent Echo published in 1849 in The Knickerbocker magazine. It starts, “For sale, a Poll Parrot, cheap. He says a remarkable variety of words and phrases, cries, ‘Fire! fire!; and ‘You rascal!’ and ‘Polly want a cracker,’ and would not be parted with, but having been brought up with a sea-captain he is profane and swears too much.” Here is a cartoon from The John-Donkey, July 29, 1848, p. 47, via Proquest American Periodical Series. The John-Donkey was a short-lived humorous and satirical magazine edited by Thomas Dunn English.

(#5) A pun on cracker: the boy is threatening to crack the parrot’s head

Grant’s examples are from American sources, and that’s a good thing, because cracker for a kind of biscuit was originally an American usage, and still is primarily American; OED2 has the sense ‘a thin hard biscuit’ as originally (1st cite 1739) and still chiefly U.S.

But do (or did) parrots eat crackers (in this sense)? They mostly eat seeds, nuts, and fruits, though some will eat (unsalted) crackers if these are offered to them. I haven’t, however, seen any reports of parrots seeking them out.

This is a sticking-point for accounts of the development of the parrot+cracker artistic convention. At the moment, it seems to come down to two speculations (both can be found on the net): a speculation about feeding parrots on board 19th-century American vessels with crackers (stored there for the sailors), when seeds and nuts would suit the parrots much better (the parrots would have to be trained to accept crackers as regular food) and would be much more nutritious, for both parrots and sailors, than crackers; or a speculation about pet owners offering crackers as treats to their household pets and then training them to not only accept them but to seek them out.

But if we’re speculating, we might equally speculate that there is simply a fashion for teaching parrots to say “Polly Wanna Cracker”, because the expression is fairly easy for them to learn (no judgments of food quality on the parrots’ part are involved) — just as there clearly is a fashion for teaching them to say “Pretty Bird” (no judgments of beauty on the parrots’ part are involved).

The pear-tree pun.

(#6) The Bizarro of 5/2/13, in which a farmer exhorts a tree to Grow a pear!

But the preceding C’mon, man! makes the whole thing into a pun on exhortations to someone to Grow a pair! — to develop a pair of balls / testicles (with the testicles viewed as the locus of masculine power).

The Wiktionary entry for grow a pair:

(vulgar, idiomatic) To be brave; to show some courage, especially in a situation in which one has so far failed to do so. Etymology: Abbreviation of grow a pair of testicles.

And from my 3/14/19 posting “Caribou with a pair”:

The idiom grow a pair. Roughly ‘man up’, involving the truncation …  a pair ‘a pair of (literal or figurative) balls/testicles’.

… edited by Bob Eckstein and published by Princeton Architectural Press:

The Ultimate Cartoon Book of Book Cartoons (by the World’s Greatest Cartoonists), 2019. (33 contributors)

(#1) Bob and the Book Cartoons cover

Everyone’s a Critic: The Ultimate Cartoon Book (by the World’s Greatest Cartoonists), 2020. (37 contributors)

(#2) The Critic cover

The books are physically beautiful; they are also affectionate tributes to independent bookstores and to cartoonists as a group. (The very American boast world’s greatest points to the strongly American focus of the books — a very heavy concentration of New Yorker cartoonists, in fact, though others are included.)

Both books include a list of contributors, with thumbnail descriptions for each (and a list of the page numbers for their cartoons in this book). The descriptions mostly provide straightforward biographical and career details, but there are a few eccentric, obviously self-created entries, like this one for Nick Downes (who will appear below) in the first book (his entry in the second book is more conventional):

Nick Downes … dedicated himself to becoming a magazine cartoonist back when there were magazines. He persisted in this endeavor after learning that his fallback career, pinsetter [in a bowling alley], had also become obsolete.

The physical and commercial books. Both are book-lover’s books, hard-bound in sewn bindings, on heavy acid-free paper, with the cartoons handsomely reproduced, one per page  — and offered at the ridiculously low list price of $20 each (well, the absurd $19.95), so that they are easily affordable. Hard to beat.

Themes, tropes, or memes. A number of these can be discerned in the books. One from Eckstein’s Introduction to the first volume (p. 4):

One of the all-time great cartoon tropes is the “Meet the Author” cartoon (see pages 40, 50, 63, 118, 122, 127, 128, and 135). I think this is because the release of tension is a key component in making a joke work, and there is nothing more tense than a book event. As any bookstore owner will tell you, a lot can go wrong at a book event…

I’ll turn now to a different cartoon meme, Identify This, for cartoons that are puzzles in understanding, because they depend on the viewer recognizing a character or author and a piece of writing associated with them, all without any explicit identification in the cartoon.

Three Identify This examples from the first volume.

— Nick Downes’s girl with the broken-glass injuries:

(#3)

Ah, that’s Alice! From Wikipedia:

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (also known as Alice Through the Looking-Glass or simply Through the Looking-Glass) is a novel published on 27 December 1871 (though indicated as 1872) by Lewis Carroll and the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a mirror into the world that she can see beyond it.

— Paul Noth‘s tragic young man with with the rare heart ailment:

(#4)

Ah, that’s Edgar Allan Poe, and the beating heart belongs to a murder victim in one of his stories. From Wikipedia:

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1843. It is related by an unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of the narrator’s sanity while simultaneously describing a murder the narrator committed.

The body is under the floor, and its heart continues to beat, quite audibly (or, at least, the murderer thinks so).

— Sam Gross‘s Puritan woman who got an A confronts a neighbor who got an A+:

(#5)

Ah, that’s Hester Prynne, the Nathaniel Hawthorne character! From Wikipedia:

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a work of historical fiction by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. Set in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity.

In the novel, Hester’s scarlet A (for Adultery) is a mark of public shame she is obliged to display.

Extra: a missed opportunity. Among the New Yorker cartoonists in the two books is William Haefeli (4 contributions to Book Cartoons, 7 to Critic). In my 6/30/10 posting “Footnote on marriage equality”, I note that the cartoon there — where in a trendy diner, a gay man complains to his male partner: “I refuse to squabble in public until we’re legally married.” — is

One of a long series of Haefeli cartoons on upscale — this is the New Yorker, after all — gay male life in NYC, or a metropolis very much like it.

Not only on upscale gay male life in NYC, but especially on these men living together as couples. A world that is very poorly represented in cartooning. Or, for that matter, in popular culture in general, even given advances in recent years. In fact, this poor representation was the subject of another Haefeli cartoon, in my 7/12/10 posting “Fair and balanced”, showing a gay male couple at home, watching tv, one man griping to the other:

I actually saw ten gay characters on television this week — which alnost balanced  out the 2,174 straight characters I saw.

Yes, hyperbole. But you see the point. And since gay male couples are a significant theme in Haefeli’s work and he’s drawn some wryly funny cartoons on that theme, it’s disappointing not to see a single one of them in these books.

The Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 4/25/18, yet another instance of the cartoon meme of Ahab and the whale, this time showing only the whale —  but the whale in communication with  Ahab via their smartphones:

v

(See the Page on this blog on comic conventions, including the cartoon meme of Ahab and the whale.)

(Hat tip to Susan Fischer on FB earlier today.)

It appears that the two antagonists, linked to one another since Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, now are joined by very modern technology. From Wikipedia:

A smartphone is a mobile device that combines cellular and mobile computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which facilitate wider software, internet (including web browsing over mobile broadband), and multimedia functionality (including music, video, cameras, and gaming), alongside core phone functions such as voice calls and text messaging.

 

From the latest issue of the New Yorker (for 4/26 & 5/3 2021), two cartoons (by Benjamin Schwartz and Zach Kanin) that qualify the magazine to be, not only the Technology Issue, but also the Size Issue: body size in the Schwartz, penis size in the Kanin.

Ahab and the whale. The Schwartz is a drawing for the weeks’ cartoon caption contest, showing Ahab and the whale, Moby-Dick, at the supermarket (Ahab and the whale is a cartoon meme frequently appearing on this blog; links on my Page on comic conventions).

(#1) This isn’t bad as a wordless cartoon, with a cute but gigantic whale looming over a decidedly anxious Ahab

Notes on size. In fact, the whale in #1 is, in proportion to Ahab and to the everyday fixtures in the cartoon, only about one-tenth the size of an actual blue whale: the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is the largest known animal, with the largest specimens being on the order of 100 feet in length. So Schwartz’s adorable creature is unrealistically small. But then it’s pushing a grocery cart in a supermarket, right behind a peglegged whaling captain (with his own cart), so I suppose we can forgive Schwartz for taking some other liberties with realism. Some things are different in CartoonWorld.

[Amendment on 4/24. As Robert Coren notes in a comment, Moby-Dick was not a blue whale, but a sperm whale, the species hunted for whale oil. Not as big as the blue whale, but still huge. From Wikipedia:

The sperm whale or cachalot (Physeter macrocephalus) is the largest of the toothed whales and the largest toothed predator.

… Mature males average 16 metres (52 ft) in length but some may reach 20.7 metres (68 ft)

]

Then, looking ahead to Kanin’s cartoon, I note that, in line with its body size, the blue whale has the largest penis of any animal, averaging in length from about 8 ft. to a bit under 10 ft., but quite thin (information from Wikipedia‘s entry on the blue whale penis). [Added 4/24. Sperm whale penises are apparently nearly as long.] Since Moby-Dick’s dick is longer than Ahab is tall, Ahab might feel anxious over what he would see as a threat to his masculinity (not to mention his physical safety).

The penis-exposure machine. A kind of masculine nightmare version of the airport scanner machine. The Kanin cartoon:

(#2) American size anxiety

Background: the scanner. From Wikipedia:

A full-body scanner is a device that detects objects on or inside a person’s body for security screening purposes, without physically removing clothes or making physical contact.

Background: penis size. One large study: British Journal of Urology International, “Am I normal? A systematic review and construction of nomograms for flaccid and erect penis length and circumference in up to 15 521 men” by David Veale, Sarah Miles, Sally Bramley, Gordon Muir,  John Hodsoll, published 12/8/14. According to this study, the average length of a flaccid penis is 3.61 inches, while the average length of an erect penis is 5.16 inches.

These figures are quite a bit lower than what American men believe to be average dick sizes, so that since these men tend to associate dick size with power and masculinity, there’s plenty of free-floating anxiety on their part about the size of their own penises. As above.

(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about penis size.)