Everything You Know About English Is Wrong » humor

Gov. DagwoodSand-o-Wich

Bill Brohaugh — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 12:41:28 +0000

The Ridger weighs in with a great comment on my post yesterday about the potential eponym value of Madoff-pronounced-MadeOff:

It’s considerably more Dickensian than Blagojevich, that’s for sure. Kathleen Parker said in the Washington Post last Wednesday:

Among his other activities, Blagojevich — whose Dickensian name rings nearly eponymous — allegedly has been busy trying to get certain members of the Tribune’s editorial board fired by threatening to withhold state assistance for the financing or sale of Wrigley Field (Tribune also owns the Chicago Cubs).

I’m REALLY not sure what she means by “rings nearly eponymous”.

Agreed, Ridger. One characteristic of eponyms we use today—boycott, bowdlerize, maverick, as examples—are (like, oh, at least a handful of words in the language) pronounceable. Machiavellian and Celsius give us a challenge, yes, but we can still get them out of our mouths without counting the syllables and mentally watching where our tongues go as we slog through the syllables in slow motion, as we would do with Dag-nab-o-glitch, or however it’s pronounced. I believe we should all pronounce the eventual near-eponym with a Jerry Lewis jabber, the way Jon Stewart does.

And what would a Dag-nab-o-glitch be, anyway? Someone who tries to sell political appointments? Someone who attempts outrageous indiscretions and denies them equally outrageously? A hairstyle that protects your face like an awning?

I would suggest that we brohaugh the notion (mock with silly suggestions), except for that little pronounceability factor . . . and the fact that the meaning wouldn’t be significantly different from “stewarting the notion.”

Let me use this as a jumping-off point for some verbal silliness on The Daily Show last week. Stewart shows a clip of an unnamed reporter referring to the DagwoodSand-o-Wich affair as:

This political drama played out on the national stage is much more than that. It’s human soap opera, as a matter of fact.

Stewart responds, “I see. So this would be like a soap opera except—and this would be the twist—with human roles.” As a matter of fact.

As a capper, the unnamed reporter is jabbering over a display of the words “GOVERNOR’S FAMILY FUED.”

Check out the episode of the Daily Show, enjoy this and some other wordplay there (the czar schtick is fun), and then join me in wondering: What the hell does “nearly eponymous” mean?

May Day

Bill Brohaugh — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:32:01 +0000

When I first saw the name Bernard Madoff (playing the Ponz in that Wall Street sitcom Unhappy Days), I read it as “Mad-off,” short A. A day or two later I heard the last name pronounced: MAY-doff. I wondered why this revelation had taken so long to reach me, because “Made-Off with my money” was a perfect pun no one had, to my knowledge, yet executed. It’s such a delicious pun that I’m certain that we’ll eventually see some bullshitternet notymology claiming that the phrase “made off” is a Bernie-inspired eponym. So if some wags have already mounted that pun, I apologize for my lack of perceptiveness. If I’ve beaten any of you to the punch, shame on your punsterish hides.

I did see an elegant literary reference to the punnish potential of the name recently, though. In his Time.com article “How I Got Screwed by Bernie Madoff,” Robert Chew writes:

Of course, we never heard the name Madoff — which has a peculiarly Dickensian ring now . . .

Poor investing, Mr. Chew, but some damn good phrasing.

Me, I’m going not for the literary but for the cheap shots. Says the Ponz,
“Made-Ay!”

Tittle-ation

Bill Brohaugh — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 11:56:08 +0000

I recently stumbled on a blog called The Frisky (”a daily romp on the sexy side”) and its list of “15 Most Unfortunately Named Fashion Items.” Wendy Atterberry takes jabs at garment names including skort and skong, mukluk and spat, and a few R-rated designations, as well (R is for romp, after all).

I love the shot at cummerbund (which, by the way, is Persian for “loin-band”):

A broad waist sash worn with dinner jackets and tuxedos, a cummerbund sounds more like a grammatical error you might learn to avoid in 8th grade English class. “Molly, your sentence had a incorrect gerund, a dangling preposition and an awkward cummerbund. Please re-write.”

In language land, The Frisky might be interested to note the linguistic terms that sound a bit rompish. For instance, take the title of the blog itself: The Frisky. You see the (wink-wink) tittle there, right? Yes, I spelled it right. Tittle. That’s the dot above the letter i. Cross your T’s, and tittle your I’s. Sounds positively ribald.

Glad to . . . I gotta . . . not think so

Bill Brohaugh — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:33:26 +0000

Klaatu Barada Nikto is not the name of the president-elect (though when I Google “Klaatu Obama,” I get a few hundred pun-intended returns). Instead, these words compose what Frederick S. Clarke of Cinefantastique magazine called “the most famous phrase ever spoken by an extraterrestrial.” (This was some time before “E.T. phone home.”) They are spoken in the 1951 original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still (though apparently not, I note in my third parenthetical in this paragraph, in the 2008 remake I’m in no rush to see, and not in “Farewell to the Master,” the Harry Bates short story that serves as source material).

It’s a phrase so famous that the “In Popular Culture” section of its Wokkawokkapedia entry contains dozens of references, including one of my favorites: “klaatu barada necktie” in Army of Darkness. Here’s one to add to the section: “Klaatu barada stinko,” in the headline of Alonso Duralde’s msnbc.com panning of the 2008 revisit.

No great art to that pun, but I like it, particularly because it so accurately reflects Mr. Duralde’s snarky slapdown of the film. And because it’s Sunday, and I’m lazy, I’ll leave all snarkdom to Mr. Duralde today. Believe me, he’s doing a good job. Here’s my favorite line from the review, as it touches on things linguistic:

The new “Day” can’t be bothered to include the thought-provoking dialogue of the original, choosing instead to bury the audience with special effects that are visually impressive but no substitute for an actual script. And what words do remain are so exquisitely awful that they provide some of the season’s biggest laughs. My personal favorite? Astro-biologist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) takes alien Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) to see a Nobel Prize–winning scientist and notes that her colleague was honored “for his work in biological altruism.” What would that entail, exactly? Helping frogs cross the street?

Partially sage, Rosemary and thyme

Bill Brohaugh — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:33:03 +0000

The 11/23/08 installment of the Frazz comic strip begins with this exchange (at least in some papers it does; it is a Sunday intro panel that papers can eliminate for space):

Young female student (looking at open books): “There’s only one word that rhymes with ‘rhyme,’ that’s spelled like ‘rhyme.’”

Frazz: “A sage observation, Rosemary.”

I admire the delicate touch employed by cartoonist Jeff Mallett. Here he didn’t need to flap the word thyme at us like a semaphore flag; in fact, he didn’t use the word at all. But we know it anyway.

And everything we know about English is wrong. Have I established that yet?

Let me allow you to digest the fact that another word spelled like rhyme also rhymes with rhyme. And once digested, that fact will be chyme. In two literal senses. Chyme, you see, is the intermediate substance that results when your stomach’s gastric juices partially digests food, including herbs, leading to partial sage, rosemary and . . . thyme.

(And happy Thanksgiving!)

Faust things first

Bill Brohaugh — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:34:59 +0000

I get bedazzled by online gadgets for their industry, their creativity, their fun, and their potential for wisecrackery. Mostly for the first three items but also for the fourth is my interest in ofaust.com (with a nod to one of the commenters at Language Log for the alert). Submit a bit of writing through the site’s interface, and O’Faust reports whose classic writing the text most closely resembles.

Fearing for the mockery such evaluations would send my way, I first tested O’Faust on the “Late for the Sky” blog perpetrated by my friend and fellow radio comedy writer JohnnyB (his song parodies are superb). JohnnyB’s “Come Fly With Me” installment was gauged to be most like Frank Baum, with 24% similarity. His “I Love LA” entry was gauged, with less confidence at 14%, to be most like Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Note to JohnnyB: my evaluation that you exist in your own fantasy world has been independently confirmed.) Oh, and a song parody. JohnnyB’s “Country (First) Rogue”—political parody of John Wasilla’s . . . um, John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads”—gets a nicely complimentary 65% similarity to Oscar Wilde.

Feeling then safe to apply the test to my own writing in this blog, I submitted “Chile is not chilly, chili is not chilly, and never the twain shall meet,” and was given a 23% nod to Edgar Allen Poe. Chills indeed. (As an aside, for the radio show JohnnyB and I wrote for, I composed an ode to an NFL game in which the Baltimore Ravens dominated the Cincinnati Bengals: “Quoth the Ravens, never score”). My “Slurry up and wait” nudged up to 25%, and pointed to Mark Twain. My “Rerenaming names” slipped again to 23% and named—oh, shit—Frank Baum.

Deciding to conduct the ultimate test, I then submitted:

Chapter 1 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: 93% similarity to Mark Twain. Well done, Mr. Twain, but could you work on your Twain homage 7% harder?
Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”: 99%! Mr. Poe, you’re ruining the curve.
Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” translated to Esperanto: 98% similarity to Leonardo da Vinci. Boy, am I feeling a new Dan Brown plot coming on.
Prologue to Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales (in Middle English): 47% similarity to Shakespeare. 0, now the Shakespeare’s-plays-were-written-by-several-people theorists are dancing in their study carrels!
Prologue to Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales (in modern English): 23% similarity to . . . Shakespeare! Dan Brown! Why aren’t you accepting my calls?!
And, finally, some circular testing—I submit the very blog entry you’re reading at this moment: and . . . sonuvabitch! 68% Poe. I was hoping for Dan Brown.

Sing a Song of Pig Puns, Pocket Full of Wry

Bill Brohaugh — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:51:13 +0000

My wife and I are just back from 20th Annual Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue, a little disappointed—in the context of this blog, at least. I devoted a full chapter of my book The Grill of Victory: Hot Competition on the Barbecue Circuit to clever team names. With 60+ teams BBQ gathered in Lynchburg, Tennessee, for this prestigious competition, I fully expected to be collecting a pigpun full of additional daring, inventive BBQ team names. Especially considering that the teams hailed not only from across the continential U.S., but also from across the world—including Canada, England, Ireland, Estonia, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey and Poland.

There were a couple of inventive names I’d not seen before. “Moonswiners,” “Charlotte’s Rib,” “Pellet Envy” and “The Will Deal Catering and BBQ Co.” tested the limits of punning, and “Carcass Cookers” and “4 Legs Up BBQ” brought a bit of smokey poetry to the game. Other than those, and others I’ve already chronicled (such as “Natural Born Grillers”), the names weren’t nearly as delightful as I’d hoped. But then again, these teams were in Lynchburg to compete in Jack Daniel’s cooking competition, not my private wordplay competition. And 4 Legs Up BBQ won the competition they had set out from Great Bend, Kansas, to win.

Word-roasting aside, I was happy with our days visiting friends, sampling BBQ, quaffing beers (but no Jack Daniel’s—how did I let that happen?). How happy? Happy as one of the teams that’s been around for a while. Happy as:

By the by, you can read my chapter on competitive BBQ team names, at “Sing a Song of Pig Puns, Pocket Full of Wry.”

Dead parrots and dead-on parody

Bill Brohaugh — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:17:21 +0000

I like to pretend sometimes that the word euphemism is really a contraction of the phrase “euthenasiac optimism,” kind of a killer blindness. In many cases, euphemisms should pass away . . . no, euphemisms should die.

Or maybe crash.

For a crash-course in weasel wordery, I encourage you to visit JohnnyB’s Late for the Sky entry on a particularly topical euphemism. I shall say no more than that, so as not to telegraph any punch lines. Not that you can truly telegraph JohnnyB’s witty, insightful (and inciteful), creative perspective.

Long aside alert: JohnnyB and I were fellow writers for the recently retired Gary Burbank radio comedy show, broadcast out of Cincinnati and for a time syndicated nationally. The show was very successful, I might add, winning national awards and lasting more than two decades in Cincinnati and for years in other markets before that. JohnnyB and I were ourselves along for the ride for most of those two-plus decades. John started not long before I did, and when the show ended with Burbank’s voluntary retirement, the final comedy bit aired was, of course, John’s. So, I offer high praise for my submitted final comedy bit for the show, which was rejected even though it was much funnier than his, and curse the jackass for topping me once again. Hummph! End long aside alert.

In Alphabottlecal Order, or “A Is for Oh-Oh”

Bill Brohaugh — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 16:31:47 +0000

One of my favorite movies is Steve Martin’s LA Story, a smartly written, mildly surreal love story and a paeon to a wacky city that Shakespeare so loved (you have to see the movie). And let’s not overlook its healthy dose of pre-Sex in the City Sarah Jessica Parker.

At one point, Martin as TV weatherman Harris K. Telemacher speaks of “the interesting word usements I structure.” In that context, I was delighted to findsome interesting word usements in the real story of LA, in an LA Times section displaying reader-submitted photos. Here are some samples:

The Most Ironic Business Name

Nothing like a nice cold bear

Only in Chinatown

Fine FINDS!

Expensive apple pie

Only Dead Animals, Please

And now, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the Story:

I’ve run out of fingers and toes to count on

Bill Brohaugh — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:36:35 +0000

This is (in case anyone is confused) a language blog. But for the moment, let’s stop doing the English and start doing the math. From a recent news story:

Mathematicians in California could be in line for a $100,000 prize (£54,000) for finding a new prime number which has 13 million digits.

Prime numbers can be divided only by themselves and one.

Not that I’m truly fretting about it, but let’s consider the goal of this contest. Was the goal set out as “Find a new prime number” (with this story reporting the successful discovery of one that involved 13 million digits)? Or was it set out “Find a new prime number with 13 million digits, no more and no less” (which the California math geeks have discovered)? I suspect the former—in which case, a little comma would have clarified.

“A new prime number which has 13 million digits,” without a comma after number, seems restrictive in the way that saying “a new prime number that has 13 million digits” would restrict. I think I perceive it this way because of the function of sound and timing a comma introduces in such situations, in that restrictive clauses beginning with that aren’t preceded with a comma, while nonrestrictive clauses beginning with which are.

I say, couldn’t a number with 13 million digits have been able to lend a comma to that sentence? Not one?

By the way, a bit of word history that you will see on the bullshitternet soon because I’m making it up: The term “prime number” derives from the financial world. It is created by adding 1 to the “sub-prime number”—the number of dollars involved in the recently proposed government bailout of collapsing sub-prime-deluded banks, which also involves 13 million digits.