CSotD: Laughing with Language (Pedantry Warning)
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What they did when I lived in Plattsburgh was come down to the state park on Lake Champlain. Whamond addresses things from an anglophone angle, but our tourists were francophones from Montreal, which made them particularly uptown and Continental.
Which meant that when my son was 16 and working the snack shack on the beach, he made sure to know all the Slushie flavors and other menu items en français, and when word got out that the tall kid spoke French, he wound up with a line of cute city girls in fashionably tiny bikinis at his station. Education makes a difference, people.
The Quebecers also came down on June 24, which is the feast of Jean Baptiste and Fête nationale du Québec and they tended to stick around throughout la vacance.
When I was a kid, however, I lived within an hour of Kingston, which is quite anglophonic, and so I’ll add this cultural note that years later, when SCTV had Doug and Bob use the term “hoser,” I about fell out of my chair, because it was a slang term on both sides of the St. Lawrence that replaced expressions beginning with the letter F.
Contemptible people were “hosers,” and if you came out on the short end of a deal, you had gotten “hosed” and its variations were equally as vulgar as their F-word equivalents.
I’m not sure the expression reached past the Kingston/Brockville stretch of the 401 before the McKenzie Brothers turned it into an international PG-rated catch-phrase.
Pedantic Juxtaposition of the Day
Dan Thompson is a punmaster, but his Sunday strip stopped me because that kind of lettuce can be en-Dive or on-Deev and the pun only works one way. I was going to let it slide until this one dropped the next day, and nobody says “cheeves,” unless some ancient ancestor of the author of The Wapshot Scandal used to harvest them.
I’ve been fascinated with the gentrification of the term “dive bar,” but Thompson depicts it as I’ve always thought of it. I gather the concept has softened, however, because it sure doesn’t mean what it used to.
I’ve been in some dives, but guardedly. I remember going with an ex-con friend to watch a Ron Lyle fight on TV at a place where, if a parole officer wandered in, he could violate everyone except me. It was like a meeting of the Cañon City Alumni Association, only they aren’t supposed to meet up on the outside.
Stephan Pastis is another notable punster, but his speciality is long, drawn-out, ridiculous shaggy-dog style puns where the actual pun becomes bathos after the absurd build-up. Which I happen to like, having had an elementary school principal who told long meandering stories that ended with wisdom like “People who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.”
We’re headed the other direction today, however, and for this Northern New Yorker, Pig summons up the ghost of Melvil Dewey, who invented the Dewey Decimal System that everyone adopted and a system of simplified spelling that nobody did.
Dewey was a unique character, and not in a good way. But the thing with numbering the books worked, so there’s that.
This probably fits under the category of real nit-picking, but, then again, you shouldn’t stick unnecessary nits into your work for pedants to pick, and I’d have chosen a different last name, given that wearing halos and walking around on clouds is a purely Christian theological fantasy.
Granted, “Schwartz” is not a specifically Jewish last name, but it is a common one and at least some of us wince every time a famous Jew dies and is depicted in an obituary cartoon at the Golden Gates.
Which is why everyone got such a laugh in 2011 when Matt Bors addressed the overall issue in this obituary cartoon for Steve Jobs.
Anyway, Schwartz and its variants just mean “black” and the name exists in a variety of languages and religions and cultures, but, as said, the joke would have played better with a name that wasn’t so common in Yiddish.
Though, granted, I’m easily confused. The first time I drove through Hanover and saw the sign for Dartmouth’s “Black Family Visual Arts Center,” I was really surprised because, well, Dartmouth isn’t exactly Howard and I didn’t think there were likely a whole lot of Black families in the area.
They’re trying to change the name, but not for that reason. Dartmouth also isn’t Berkeley, but it did start admitting women, about a decade after it provided Chris Murphy a model for Animal House. Better late than never.
A discursion that sets us up for another
Juxtaposition of the Day
Someone said the other day that, since divorce is no longer nigh-impossible, people aren’t as reluctant to marry as they once were.
This is a load of hooey. People have always gotten married for stupid reasons, and the change in divorce laws coincided roughly with the development of antibiotics, which factors cancel each other out.
“Marry in haste and repent at leisure” remains as true as always, because however badly things may be ganging aglee, divorce remains not only a hassle but an admission that you screwed up, though perhaps not as quickly as in Bravo’s cartoon.
Then-wife and I made 13 years, which isn’t bad, and to go to Speed Bump, we did listen to our marriage counselor, but when, after many meetings of the three of us, we told him we were going to pull the rip cord, he actually got angry with us. Apparently however lousy we felt about the whole thing, he felt even worse. Poor baby!
Getting back to the development of penicillin, in War and Peace, Pierre marries the beautiful Helene because everybody seems to think he should, and she marries him because he’s just come into a major inheritance. Since that enormous novel is largely about Pierre getting his act together, their dysfunctional marriage becomes a major problem which Tolstoy resolves (spoiler alert) by having Helene conveniently die.
A survey of pre-1928 literature will find this a common plot development. Me, I’d rather work things out with penicillin and lawyers.
Bon fêtes!
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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