A commercial for Cyvita is currently going the rounds. It promises

Longer, stronger, and more frequent erections

It begins with two rhyming trochees (SW SW), then branches out into two more complex feet, trochaic in feel but with leading weak (extrametrical) syllables ( ( WW ) SW and ( W ) SW).

Trochees are everywhere in English, and tetrameter is the predominant meter for folk verse of all kinds.

On trochee fixation, see this xkcd cartoon, posted by Mark Libermnan on Language Log on 2/14/11.

On Cyvita, from Wikipedia:

Cyvita is a formulation of two common forms of the metabolite carnitine, Glycine propionyl-l-carnitine and Acetyl L-carnitine, that is supposed to “enhance” the performance of Viagra (Sildenafil) in male users.

Note: I’m not claiming that the ad agency is consciously framing material as trochaic tetrameter, only that the meter comes naturally (and unconsciously) to speakers of English; it “sounds right”.

Passed on from several sources (e.g. here), this 1957 ad “for the gayest Easter Eggs”:

When this was posted on Facebook, I wrote there:

Wish the text were easier to read. the photos are vividly fabulous. or fabulously vivid.

Only the largest type is easily legible.

The McCormick people presumably intended gay in the sense ‘brightly colored; showy; brilliant’ (NOAD2), but many Facebook readers were inclined to read the word in a much more modern ‘campy’ sense. Intensely colored eggs, seriously pink cake. (The eggs are just hard-boiled eggs, but the cake looks tooth-achingly sweet.)

In response to my legibility complaint, Chris Ambidge rejconstructed the whole text, preserving (he says) the spelling in the original: (I’ve bold-faced two especially entertaining rhetorical flourishes):

For the gayest Easter Eggs … for Tastier Cakes

[graphic of food color bottles and packages]

… use the finest food colors and vanilla!

[graphic of pink iced cake and eggs being colored]

McCormick-Schilling Food Colors and Vanilla give perfect results every time! *More* Color, *Richer* Flavor!

To dye Easter Eggs perfectly all you do is use your regular McCormick or Schilling Pure Food Colors. You’ll be amazed at how perfectly they color Easter Eggs: you’l be delighted with the glowing colors. All you do is add 1 teaspoon vinegar to 1/2 – 3/4 cup boiling water. Then add about 20 drops (1/8 teaspoon) of color desired. To blend shades follow chart on package. Four bright colors blend to twelve different shades. And use these popular food colors also to add eye and appetite appeal to your Easter desserts. A little color gives your cakes, cookies, puddings, icings a really festive Easter note!

[logo: McCormick and Schilling / one famous emblem - two great brands]

The *Magic* Spoonful (R)

Made from teh finest Vanilla Beans teh world provides, McCormick and Schilling Vanilla is porcessed by experts so that teh richer, finer flavor is wholly preserved. So, when you buy vanilla do what’most everybody’s doing — ask for McCormick or Schilling Vanilla, the Magic Spoonful!

(c)1957 McCormick & Co, Inc      McCORMICK … THE HOUSE OF FLAVOR

Have a gay Easter!

In my e-mail this morning, an ad for gay porn from the Falcon / Raging Stallion Studios for Holy Week, with hot porn actor Adam Ramzi posing as Jesus (and the playful commercial slogan “It’s a Good Friday when it kicks off savings like this!”):

I haven’t been a believing (or practicing) Christian for decades, but still I found the image (in this context) unsettling at best.

Eventually I’ll post some X-rated images of Ramzi on AZBlogX and then add a link from this posting to that one: here.

Today’s crop of cartoons includes a Bizarro, a Zippy, and a Mother Goose and Grimm:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

In #1, the kid is obviously a cartoon character, while his parents are represented as what count as “ordinary people” in the comics, that is, “realistically” (think Mary Worth), though the father looks suspiciously like the God figure in Zippy. In any case, it’s a metacartoon.

In #2, for four panels Griffy ruminates on astrophysics while Zippy quotes advertising slogans. An odd sort of antiphony, the two voices having nothing whatsoever to do with one another. (Antiphony is normally a kind of conversation between voices.)

Finally, in #3, we find edible punctuation, and more. On the first two diner stools we have a question mark and an explanation point, and the latter is ordering donut holes (not necessarily understood as puctuation marks, plus donut asterisks (* makes a tricky baking), and corned beef and hashtags (note phrasal overlap portmanteau: corned beef and hash + hashtag, marked by #).

Then on the last stool, a percent sign, and behind the counter, a dollar sign. On the order board, three punctuational puns, naming things to drink or eat (with the colon, the comma, and the caret).

Among the many teas sold by Tazo (from South Seattle WA) are three green teas that my daughter got for me recently, to replenish my supplies. The company is into lush, poetic descriptions of its products — quite entertaining, if you’re in the right mood.

The descriptive material comes in two parts: one part characterizes the taste of a tea, the other is copy poetically evoking a scene or feelings associated with it. Sometimes I think these are cool, but often I think they’re just funny.

The three cases at hand

chun mee green: Pure green tea from China with a unique, baked flavor.

[copy] Clouds tumble down a lush mountainside go meet artfully arched, pencil-thin leaves that are aptly named chun mee, “precious eyebrows” in Chinese. A pleasantly earthy, slightly smoky copy of brow-unfurrowing bliss. [stock image in clouds tumbling down a lush mountainside; brow-unfurrowing is nice; and note the go + V construction in [clouds] go meet [leaves] (a “quasi-serial verb” in some of the syntactic literature)]

china green tips: Fine fresh-tasting, spring-harvested green teas from China.

[copy] Linger in the pure, steam-fired broth of this first-flush green tea thinking clear, peaceful thoughts. Like watching mist rise off a thermal spring, hidden behind a wooded glen and only accessible by trampoline. [a "broth" of a tea; the rising mist, thermal spring, and wooded glen are pretty much stock images -- but the trampoline?]

green ginger: This bright green tea blend has a kick from ginger & a sweet note of pear.

[copy] Smooth green tea takes root in the fiery depths of ginger, yet runs lithely through the lemongrass. It pauses only to pluck the juiciest of pears from bowed branches (and to thank you for inviting us in to warm up your daydreams). [highly animate tea that runs lithely, pauses,  can pluck pears, and thanks people; plus alliterations]

From yesterday, a Luann passed on by David Craig on Facebook, and a Basic Instructions passed on by Scott  Meyer, also  on Facebook:

(#1)

(#2)

On the wording of ads, and on aggressive humor (in this case, knock-knock jokes).

Earlier postings of these two strips on Language Log:

Luann: ML, 7/15/07: Luann doesn’t read Language Log (link)

Basic Instructions: ML, 9/1/08: The art of the (non-) apology (link)

Notes on the strips:

Luann is a syndicated newspaper comic strip launched by North America Syndicate on March 17, 1985. Luann is written and drawn by Greg Evans, who won the 2003 Reuben Award as Cartoonist of the Year.

… The strip takes place in an unnamed suburban setting and is mostly about teenager Luann DeGroot, dealing with school, her love interests, family and friends (Wikipedia link)

Basic Instructions is a webcomic by artist, comedian and writer Scott Meyer. The comic has been available on LiveJournal since 2003 and on the author’s Web site since 2006.[

… Each comic purports to provide instructions on a “how to” topic seemingly taken from everyday life, such as “How to Lie for Recreational Purposes” or “How to Win at Monopoly Without Losing a Friend”, and then deals with the subject in a frequently perverse or unexpected manner. The characters in the comic are Scott Meyer himself and representations of the people he interacts with on a daily basis, such as his wife, his boss, and his best friend. (Wikipedia link)

Today’s Zippy:

(#1)

Fleer’s product was pink (hence the strip’s title, “In the pink”), apparently because that was the only coloring the inventor had on hand.

From Wikipedia:

Dubble Bubble is a [rhyming] brand of pink-colored bubblegum invented by Walter Diemer, an accountant at Philadelphia based Fleer Chewing Gum Company, in 1928. One of Diemer’s hobbies was concocting recipes for chewing gum based on the original Fleer ingredients. Though founder Frank Fleer had come up with his own bubble gum recipe in 1906, it was shelved due to its being too sticky and breaking apart too easily. It would be another 20 years until Diemer would use the original idea as inspiration for his invention.

… The original gum featured a color comic strip, known as the Fleer Funnies, which was included with the gum. The featured characters, ‘Dub and Bub’, were introduced in 1930 but were replaced by the iconic Pud and his pals in 1950. Originally, Pud was much more rotund than the slimmed down version seen in the 1960s. The early comics were especially large and colorful.

(#2)

Some kids were said to have bought the stuff primarily for these little comics rather than for the gum.

[Pud's name was pronounced /pʌd/, with the /ʌ/ of double and bubble -- rather than /pʊd/, with /ʊ/, as in pudding, which is used as a (British) clipping of pudding 'dessert' and also as coarse slang for 'penis', as in the expression pull one's pud 'masturbate'.]

As for bubblegum rock… from Wikipedia:

Bubblegum pop (also known as bubblegum rock, bubblegum music, or simply bubblegum) is a genre of pop music with an upbeat sound contrived and marketed to appeal to pre-teens and teenagers, that may be produced in an assembly-line process, driven by producers and often using unknown singers. Bubblegum’s classic period ran from 1967 to 1972. A second wave of bubblegum started two years later and ran until 1977 when disco took over and punk rock emerged.

Examples cited in #1 (“Sugar Honey” is a terrible earworm for me).

Victor Steinbok found this on Google+ and passed it on to me; a great many sites have versions of it:

Note: These Tasty Crackers are Australian; the sale price is in Australian dollars.

Lots of people will do a double-take on seeing that sale sticker, which comes very close to offering tasty-ass crackers.

Of course, the ass here is just an abbreviation of assorted. Why didn’t these p;eople notice the tasty-ass possibility, involving the suffix-like extension -ass of adjectives (big-ass hair, etc.)?

One possibility is that the designers of the sticker just didn’t see what they’d done; if your intentions are clear in your own mind, you’re disinclined to read things as other people (the “innocents”) would. Goodness  knows such things happen.

But another possibility is that the extension -ass was simply unfamiliar to the designers of the sticker. My impression is that it’s an American thing (so that -ass just isn’t in the repertoire of most Australian speakers) — though it may well be that it’s now spreading among younger speakers outside of America. In any case, it’s a qauestion on which at least preliminary research can be done

(Mostly about gay sexuality rather than language.)

As usual, purveyors of gay porn have special offers for a holiday, in this case Mother’s Day. TitanMen thinks Mom is aching for hours and hours of big dick, in the collection Daddy Meat 2. (This is not to deny that some women like ‘em big.)

The ad copy, unsurprisingly, doesn’t mention mothers, or indeed any women at all:

If you like your Daddy Meat twice as thick and twice as juicy you’ve come to the right place! Daddy Meat 2 features six hardcore scenes of the very best in hot, hairy TitanMen Daddies fill up this best-of series volume 2. Hand-picked scenes by Bruce Cam and Brian Mills feature the most iconic Daddies in the TitanMen vault: Donkey dicked Cliff Rhodes, silver fox Allen Silver and more! Over 2 hours of the hottest hairy and hung daddies fucking, sucking and rimming their way right into your hearts. A true collector’s item for the connoisseur of masculine, muscular and hairy men.

It’s pitched at gay men.

From Ryan Tamares recently, a piece of a Subway Flatizza box. The box woudn’t scan for me, but what it says is Flatizza™:  “Cheesy & delicious meets crispy & square” (easily readable as tetrameter, with front-accented feet). Square flatbread with pizza toppings: cheese, pepperoni, spicy Italian, veggie.

Flatizza is of course a portmanteau of flatbread (contributing flat-) and pizza (contributing -izza), without overlap between the two parts.

Here’s the Spicy Italian, with its ornamental ad copy:

In the copy: meaty (twice), great to eat, super crispy, topped, melty, flavorful, delicious, perfect for… If saying can make it so …

This morning: a classic Doonesbury on foul language; a Rhymes With Orange citing the spurious “rule” that an English clause must not end in a preposition; and a Zippy looking back at an ad icon of the 1940s and 50s (“drink more flavored liqueurs”, says Judge Arrow).

1. It was forty years ago today. The classic Doonesbury (from 1974) for the occasion, labeled as such:

(#1)

All you really need to know about the speakers in this little play is that P is the President of the United States, Richard Nixon at the time, who was famous for the crudity of his speech (away from the microphones and cameras). All the speakers are profane, but Nixon (according to Garry Trudeau) takes the cake (“unbelievably gross and offensive expletive deleted”; we can but imagine).

2. P at end. There are a number of points that serious writers on English usage agree on, despite their diversity in other cases; these are the ” “rules” that are not rules”, “usage fictions”, or whatever — widely disseminated pieces of advice that totally fail to fit with the practice of careful educated speakers and writers of the language (and in many cases have never fit such usage). They are absurd bits of superstition, messing with people’s minds:

(#2)

Hostility towards “P at end” (of clauses, in fact, though most people remember it as a claim about sentences) — or “stranded Ps” — is widespread, but entirely without foundation in actual usage. There are simply two alternative constructions, both acceptable in most contexts, but with sometimes subtle factors favoring one or the other in particular contexts.

(Note that Price’s subheading for this strip,”These voices — what do they speak of?”, is about as natural with fronted — “Of what do they speak?” — as with stranded P; both are stiff and rather unnatural. It all depends on the V and P involved; stranded “What do they talk about?” beats fronted “About what do they talk?” all hollow.)

3. Zippy ad icons. Bill Griffith collects all sorts of advertising arcana, as here:

(#3)

Judge Arrow was totally new to me, but here he is in an up-to-the-minute paranoid version.

An 11/7/46 newspaper ad (from the Danville Bee) for the Judge’s sloe gin:

(#4)

(It doesn’t enlarge well.)

A remarkable find, for an object of a sort I didn’t know existed: the lucky coin, or token, for a product (the Judge’s liqueurs, specifically his blackberry flavored brandy). The obverse and reverse of the coin:

(#4)

(#5)

Spin the coin and the Judge dances!

On Tuesday, Ned Deily and I were investigating the workings of my scanner, after it had behaved  oddly for me on several occasions (garbage on scanning some black-and-white images, very odd colors when scanning some Jane Austen colored cards). The problem was traced back to some scanner settings I hadn’t known were there, so we re-set those and tried scanning one card of each type, using items I’d gotten in the mail (from Chris Ambidge). Herewith the results.

For color scanning, I found yet another Jane Austen quotation, this time from Mansfield Park:

(#1)

Color fine now. You’d really want to see the context for run mad, with mad ‘crazy’, apparently conveying, roughly, ‘run wild’.

For b&w, an Ikea ad for sheets and pillowcases:

(#2)

Somewhat sharpened, this scanned just fine. But I was puzzled by the copy: four identifiers, in English, French, and Spanish (this is for North American stores), where I didn’t get the (apparently three) French identifiers.

Duh. This is just the French version split over two lines:

Deux Places / Grand Deux Places

Grand deux places corresponding to English queen-(size) was news to me, but then the terminology of commerce is often a surprise (and in this case, it’s the English and Spanish that stand out for using a special bit of terminology, queen).

Meanwhile Spanish gives us the modifier of adjectives tamaño ‘such a big, so big a’ (using the masc. noun  tamaño ‘size’).

Anthony Lane, reviewing The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in the May 5th New Yorker:

I lost count of the scenes in which Gwen and Peter thrash out the question of whether they should be a couple, and there is a sigh of relief in the cinema when she, deploying what philosophers would call a performative utterance, says simply, “I break up with you,” leaving us to wonder if she pulls the same trick in bed: “And now we approach the orgasm.”

On performative utterances:

In his 1955 William James lecture series, which were later published under the title How to Do Things with Words [(1962)], [J.L.] Austin argued against a positivist philosophical claim that the utterances always “describe” or “constate” something and are thus always true or false. After mentioning several examples of sentences which are not so used, and not truth-evaluable (among them non-sensical sentences, interrogatives, directives and “ethical” propositions), he introduces “performative” sentences as another instance.

When uttered by the appropriate person in the appropriate circumstances, a performative utterance doesn’t just describe reality, but actually changes the social reality. “I bet you $5 that it will rain today” makes a bet (entailing certain obigations between the speaker and the addressee).

When the conditions aren’t satisfied, the performative utterance is infelicitous, as in this Esurance tv commercial, in which a woman [Beatrice the Over-Sharer] boasts to some strangers about how much money she’s saved on insurance.

Another woman in the room says “I saved more than that in half the time.” Beatrice isn’t pleased “I unfriend you” as if they were all in a social network [failed attempt at issuing a performative]. The woman replies “That’s not how it works! That’s not how any of this works!”

Now on my desk, a box of Pomegranate notecards, originally posters by Emilio Camilio Leopoldo Tafani for London public transport in 1915, now in the London Transport Museum. Art, plants, and advertising.

From the website:

Day trips to the ancient forests bordering London remain a popular poster theme. Landscape artists, such as Walter Spradbery and Gregory Brown, set new standards in the depiction of trees and woodland scenes. Many of the posters feature Epping Forest, originally reached by motor bus until the extension of the Central line in the 1940s.

In a previous posting, I looked at posters, by various artists, exhorting people to take public transport to the London zoo. Now it’s plants. But still public art for advertising purposes.

Four colorful and elegant poster notecards in the set I bought, from a larger number by Tafani: (#1) Epping by bus, for the wild roses; (#2) Kew by tram from Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush, for the laburnum and lilacs; (#3) Harrow Weald by bus and tram, for the honeysuckle; and (#4) hay-making time in Sudbury, with meadowsweet. (Kew and Harrow Weald are now suburban districts within London; Epping and Sudbury are further out.)

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)

I assume that roses, lilacs, and honeysuckle are familiar to my readers. Very brief notes on laburnum and meadowsweet:

Laburnum, commonly called golden chain, is a genus of two species of small trees in the subfamily Faboideae of the pea family Fabaceae. … They have yellow pea-flowers in pendulous racemes 10–30 cm (4–12 in) long in spring, which makes them very popular garden trees. (link)

Filipendula ulmaria, commonly known as meadowsweet or mead wort, is a perennial herb in the family Rosaceae that grows in damp meadows. It is native throughout most of Europe and Western Asia (Near east and Middle east). It has been introduced and naturalised in North America. … Meadowsweet has delicate, graceful, creamy-white flowers clustered close together in handsome irregularly-branched cymes, having a very strong, sweet smell. (link)

I haven’t found much about the artist, beyond that he lived from 1885 to 1963, was educated in Florence, Livorno, and Milan, and designed posters for the Underground Group in 1915-20.

My morning mail on Wednesday the 4th brought me six suitable cartoons for this blog. Two I have already posted about: a Doonesbury with Duke hallucinating a lizard; and a Bizarro with a diner asking for eggs without any sense of style. The others: a One Big Happy on the attractions of “diet” versions of foods; a Zits on hearing and listening; a Zippy with (among other things) more better; and a Mother Goose and Grimm with a symbolic ambiguity.

1. diet X: a snowclonelet composite conveying ‘a food suitable for someone who is dieting’ (in particular, one that is low in fats and sugars, or at least lower than is customary). In the cartoon, Ruthie and Joe continue their involvement with a 10k race (now that they understand what a tenkay is):

(#1)

Well, the label diet X is a selling point.

2. Hearing and listening. Jeremy and Sarah in Zits:

(#2)

The usual story is that hearing involves perceiving with the ear, while listening involves paying attention and taking to heart. This continues to hold broadly, but each verb shows some inclination; in particular, hear often gets strengthened, as in “I hear you, buddy”.

3. more better. The combination of these two comparatives often serves merely as a (non-standard) emphatic version of better. But a genuine double comparative (‘better than X to a greater degree than Y is better than X’) is also possible:

(#3)

(This is, of course, a side point in #3,. which is about a Zippyesque history of television.)

4. Symbols are just marks in some medium, devoid of intrinsic meaning and so available for many uses (while granting that some symbols lend themselves to iconic use). Which brings us to the double cross, number sign, or pound sign:

(#4)

It’s the hashtag sign and the tic-tac-toe grid (and more).

From Andrea K. Scott’s review “Parklife: Playing hide-and-seek at a sculpture show on the High Line” in the New Yorker of June 9th and 16th, about

Josh Kline’s brilliant “Skittles,” near the Standard hotel. An illuminated deli display case is stocked with rows of colorful drinks in ridiculous flavors — “Williamsburg,” “Big Data,” “Nightlife” — made from surprising ingredients. (“Condo” blends coconut water, HDMI cable, infant formula, turmeric, and yoga mats.) Think of “Skittles” as Duchamp’s “Bottle Rack,” updated for the age of aspirational marketing, when even a smoothie can be spun as a status symbol. The case is locked and the bottles are beyond reach, but you can press your nose to the glass.

The piece is a hoot.

(I plan to eventually post more on Scott’s review; this is just the bit on Kline, which is the conclusion of the review.)

A photo (not great quality) of the whole case:

(#1)

And two close-ups, so you can read the ingredients:

(#2)

(#3)

Web presence for conceptual artist Josh Kline here and here.

(Warning: Very high (gay) sexual content in the text of this posting. Pass on if you are under 18 or if such content doesn’t suit you.)

Father’s (or Fathers or Fathers’) Day is about to be upon us, so of course purveyors of porn are offering dad-oriented films. Well, daddy-oriented films, daddy-boy relationships being a gay specialty, in real life and even more in the fantasy world of Gayland, where DILFs abound.

DILF is ‘Daddy/Dad I’d like to Fuck’, the term modeled on the earlier MILF,  ‘Mother/Mom/Mum I’d Like to Fuck’, but with the twist that in the gay context, X fucks Y can embrace X as the receptive partner in anal intercourse as well as the insertive partner.

On Daddy-Boy roles/relationships according to Wikipedia:

A Daddy in gay culture is a slang term meaning an older man sexually involved in a relationship or having a sexual interest in a younger man. The age gap may differ, but the relationship involves the traditional parental hierarchy of father-son dynamics, the daddy providing emotional support and guidance along with sexual encouragement and nurturing to the inexperienced and vulnerable partner.

Now on to C1R and its ad. Top part: a heading and two captioned shots from what are presented as Daddy-Boy videos:

 (#1)

(I’ve cropped the images so as to suppress genitalia for WordPress readers.) The visible age difference between the Daddies (or Daddys) and their Boys is slight, though for the most part the Daddies tend to be a bit beefier and the Boys a bit leaner.

Captions for two more videos:

 (#2)

The text is advertising text, for the most part full of vivid word choices. (The exception is relatively neutral hole for asshole — or, more vividly, shithole — although even there we also get the expanded cum holes instead of the simple holes.) So we get slangy nouns (meat for cock or dick), expanded nouns (cum loads, donkey-meat), vivid verbs (draining, feeds), and, especially, ornamental adjectives (juicy twice in this small sample, in juicy donkey-meat and juicy cum-hole; raunchy dad; eager mouth; enormous 9-inch meat — what 9-inch cock is not enormoous?).

The ornamental adjectives are familiar from the domain of enthusiastic food writing, especially on restaurant menus. From p. 89 of Zwicky & Zwicky, “America’s national dish: The style of restaurant menus” (available on-line here):

TASTY ADJECTIVES . Adjectives that do not refer specifically to methods of preparation are common but often uninformative.

So with porn puff, designed to make the reader hungry to sample the videos.

(Mostly, but not entirely, about men’s underwear.)

On Facebook, a link passed on by Matthew Melmon  to a June 13th posting on the Metro (U.K.) website, “Amazing news! Now you too can own this delightful swimming ‘sock’ “, showing a lateral flash thong on the ITV2 reality tv show TOWIE (The Only Way Is Essex):

(#1)

A remarkable garment indeed: how does it stay up? And who wears something like this in public (outside of outrageous precincts like TOWIE)?

You’ll note from the tan lines that the model/actor is accustomed to wearing more conventional swimsuits.

You’ll also note how smooth the model’s body is; extreme u-garments for men (underwear, swimsuits, jockstraps, posing straps, dance belts, genital displaywear, etc.) are almost always modeled by hairless men — smooth by nature or smooth by the hand of man, that is, by (d)epilation. The aim is to focus fully on the man’s package as contained (or not) by his u-garment, without any distraction by hair.

The brand name for the lateral thong in #1 is Alter, a line of underwear with the slogan tu otro yo ‘your other self’ and the logo:

(#2)

The Alter number in #1 comes from the French men’s underwear and swimwear firm Inderwear (more on the name below); English-language website here. The lateral flash thong comes in three colors (white, red, and blue, of course) and three sizes (small, medium, large), and sells for £17.69 plus postage. Front and rear illustrations from the website:

(#3)

(#4)

For the wearer, the garment looks simultaneously perilous and uncomfortable. But entertaining for the observer.

The name Inderwear.A bit of cross-language complexity: the name is designed to get as close as you can in French to the English name Underwear, with its initial accented / Ʌn /, spelled UN (phonetic note: the Ʌ is nasalized before the n closing its syllable).

The closest you can get to accented Ʌ in French is œ, which occurs both oral and nasalized. Nasalized œ (spelled UN, as in the indefinite article UN) is then about as close as you can get to English nasalized Ʌ (plus n), so the spelling UN would have worked to convey an approximation to the pronunciation of English UN.

However, French nasalized œ has been shifting to nasalized ɛ, which is spelled IN (as in VIN ‘wine’). And that gives us Inderwear, with the initial IN pronounced as nasalized ɛ. Whew! (The rest of English Underwear also has to be adapted to French, of course.)

Now from Taco Bell, a hybrid food with a hybrid (portmanteau) name. You can critique the food — a double-Mexican combo, of quesadilla and burrito — or the name (Quesarito, which strikes me as reasonably euphonious, unlike cronut or Flatizza), or both. (Links to foodmanteau postings, up to mid-2013, here.)

Not everyone has found the Quesarito tasty, however.

Here’s Will Gordon on the Deadspin site yesterday, with “Taco Bell’s Quesarito: A Fast-Food Love Affair Gone Awry”:

Hybrid foods are hit or miss. When they’re honest attempts to expand the human dining experience by combining the virtues of two or more complementary yet previously segregated items, the results can be extraordinary. Pizza bagels, peanut butter cups, and Jell-O shots are classic examples of disparate foods joining forces to increase global happiness. [For me, peanut butter cups are at the top of the pop-food pantheon. Pizza bagels are ok. And I've never done Jell-O shots, because I don't care for Jell-O, and I want my alcohol to have an attractive taste of its own.]

But far too often, you end up with a worthless joke of a Frankenfood that was clearly cobbled together just for the sake of novelty. Ramen burgers, turduckens, and car bomb shots are prime examples of compound foodstuffs that would have been better left to their own devices.

… Now [Taco Bell is] coming at us with the Quesarito, a half-assed collision of preexisting conditions masquerading as the cronut for the Mountain Dew-in-the-morning set. A Quesarito is a quesadilla wrapped around a burrito. This means that instead of having cheese inside a normal burrito, you have it trapped inside the double-hulled tortilla of your burrito. The innovation here is to give you more bland, pasty tortilla to chaw through on your way to the underwhelming mess of rice, meat, sour cream, and not-hot sauce trapped inside.

Gordon seethes on from there.

Meanwhile, I have

Ay, ay, ay, ay …
Quesalito lindo

stuck in my head.

Four items from the front matter in today’s New York Times Magazine: the compound poolside memoirs; the euphemism go to Spain; the term binky ‘pacifier’; and citronella for warding off mosquitoes.

poolside memoirs. From the chart (p. 11) “Assessing Poolside Memoirs” by Eliot Glazer, in which writers are ranked on two scales (“awesomeness of name”, with Colson Whitehead at the top, and “intellectual prowess”, from Rob Lowe at the bottom to Barbara Ehrenreich at the top.

An especially well-behaved N1 + N2 compound has two properties. First, it is subsective: speaking loosely, an N1 + N2 is an N2. Poolside memoir is fine on this score, since a poolside memoir is a memoir.

Second, the relationship between the referents of N2 and N1 is close, drawn from a small collection of canonical relationships in compounds (agent, etc.). But poolside memoir involves a distant relationship (other writers use other terms), one that can be appreciated only by knowing a lot about memoirs and poolsides in context. A poolside memoir is one especially suited for reading by the side of a pool (or in a similar setting), on vacation. You have to know the sociocultural context to understand the compound.

One more example of a phenomenon amply illustrated on this blog and Language Log.

go to Spain. This is from the “Judge John Hodgman Rules” column (of jokey advice) on p. 11:

Fred writes: My family is getting a puppy, and we are trying to establish consistent commands. We agree on some, but disagree on bodily functions. My daughter and I want to use the question “Want to go to Spain?” My wife wants to use boring old “Go do your business” or “Go make wee-wee/poopie.”

I’ve learned the hard way that dogs don’t grasp euphemism and that it is offensive to equate Spain with a toilet. But I don’t approve of infantile language, even when addressing a perpetual infant (an alternate definition of “dog”). Of options presented, “do your business” is your best/least-gross option.

I’ve never heard go to Spain as a euphemism for ‘go to the bathroom’ (nor do I see examples of it on the net), and I don’t see a source for it. For all I know, Hodgman just made it up for fun.

binky. Then on p. 16, this week’s “Who Made That?” column, by Dashka Slater, on pacifiers, from which I learned that the term binky is in fact the trademarked name Binky.

On pacifiers, from Wikipedia:

A pacifier (American and Canadian English), dummy (Britain, and other Commonwealth countries), binky, or soother (in other countries) is a rubber, plastic, or silicone nipple given to an infant or other young child to suck upon. In its standard appearance it has a teat, mouth shield, and handle. The mouth shield and/or the handle is large enough to avoid the danger of the child choking on it or swallowing it.

Now Slater on binky:

By the time Christian W. Meinecke applied for a patent for “a new and original Design for a Baby Comforter” in 1901, people had been giving babies soothing objects to suck on for centuries: knotted rags dipped in water or honey, wooden beads or “gum sticks” made of stone, bone or coral. But nothing would ever be quite as popular as the pacifier.

… Despite … warnings, sales of the pacifier continued to grow. Latex and silicone nipples replaced the India rubber ones; plastic substituted for the bone and ivory shields and rings. By the 1940s, one company, Binky Baby Products of New York, had sold so many pacifiers that the brand would become a generic term for the thing itself. (The trademark is now owned by Playtex.)

Accept no substitute; buy a real Binky!

citronella. Back on p. 11, Bronson van Wyck’s good-living note on “How to Give an Outdoor Cocktail Party”: to stave off mosquitoes, “Put citronella candles everywhere; use torches and fill them with citronella.” (Authorities differ on the effectiveness of citronella for this purpose. The EU, with its customary caution, bans it.)

Citronella here is short for citronella oil:

Citronella oil is one of the essential oils obtained from the leaves and stems of different species of Cymbopogon (lemongrass). The oil is used extensively as a source of perfumery chemicals … Citronella oil is also a plant-based insect repellent, and has been registered for this use in the United States since 1948. (Wikipedia link)

Cymbopogon, commonly known as lemongrass is a genus of about 45 species of grasses, (of which the type species is Cymbopogon citratus …) (Wikipedia link)

Meanwhile, lemongrass is a flavoring in a number of Asian cuisines. It’s easy to grow — roots easily in water, then in soil. I’ve grown it myself.

(Confusingly, the Latin name Citronella is used for an entirely different group of plants, “a genus of [mostly tropical] trees and shrubs in the family Cardiopteridaceae”  (link).)

What Cymbopogon and Citronella share is the lemony scent/taste, which occurs in other plants, for example lemon balm (or just balm for short), botanically Melissa officinalis (in the family Lamiaceae, formerly Labiatae); discussion of the plant, with photos, on this blog, here.

(Reminder about the names of botanical families. In the long-standing naming tradition, a family name described, insofar as possible, the characteristic inflorescence of plants in the family — Labiatae for labiate ‘lipped’ flowers. In the newer system, each family is named for a “type genus” within the family — Lamiaceae for the genus Lamium, of dead-nettles.)