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.
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?
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:
Two recent word coinages chronicled over at Word Spy speak to principles of neology at its best, and at its worst—each locution representing both qualities:
Interestingly, both are business-related, which, I might venture, may be mostly a function of changing business conditions fueling the need for coinage (pun absolutely intended).
As coinages, these two words represent opposites of sorts:
Social notworking is the blatant pun, used to describe “Surfing a social networking site instead of working.” Call it social porn.
Murketing is a subtler construction, possibly considered a pun and possibly considered a portmanteau—meshing two words (murky and marketing). Murketing describes “A form of marketing where the product or service is not mentioned or shown” (think of those TV ads that leave you with that deep “Huh?”-response.) Whereas notworking is an opposite of the original word, murketing is a shade of the original—a quieter shade.
These represent neology at its worst because on their surfaces, neither word accomplishes what their definitions claim they do. To my ear, social notworking speaks a cynical implication that social networking itself is not working, rather than workers are not working because of social networking. And to that same ear (or maybe the other one), murketing sounds equally cynical, a drudging insult with surreptitious resonances of murk—not only the dark, clouded denotations of the word itself, but also the swallowed, secretive pronunciation of the word when spoken aloud. Marketing is a happier, broader, more open word. Murketing is a huddling, skulking word.
So why are these examples of neology at its best? I’m a cynic; I’d like to think that my suggested misinterpretations are true.
By the by, Mr. Everything You Know About English Is Wrong now looks forward to quitting his day job and notworking when he receives expected checks from all major companies—as in this blog he has not mentioned or shown any of your products or services. He’s a murketing genius!
“Do you want a headline for that savings-bank story?” a colleague emailed me the other day. We were working on a magazine article that employed a herd of piggy-banks as a photo illustration, and he continued, “Maybe something pig-related, like ‘A Pig on a Post’?”
“It’s ‘pig in a poke’—a poke being a type of bag,” I replied in mild correction of his idiotism—and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Honest. I indeed used idiotism here in the nicest possible way, as a synonym of idiom. The first recorded use of idiotism was in 1588, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, preceding the word’s use as a synonym of idiocy by a hair of something’s chinny-chin-chin (first recording, 1592). And 1913’s Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, lists the “idiomatic” meaning as its primary meaning. Idiom, idiot and idiosyncracy have roots that stretch back to Greek words indicating singularity or peculiarity.
Idiotism-synonymous-with-idiom is now obsolete, but perhaps it should be revived when idiomatic cliches get mangled as they so often do these days, whether intentionally (as I suspect my colleague was doing) or unintentionally. When “toe the line” becomes “tow the line,” we are crossing the line from idiom to idiotism. So, too, when “wreaking havoc” becomes “reeking havoc” or “wrecking havoc,” or when “for all intents and purposes” becomes “for all intensive purposes.”
But perhaps the greatest idiotism is when “Pig in a poke” becomes a pig in a post—a blog post.
Over at the Late for This Guy blog (co-misunderstood by all peripheral Jimi Hendrix fans, ’scuse me), my friend JohnnyB discusses the high magic in low puns. It’s a fun read (yes, read as noun; live with it).
Shortly after posting said punditry, JohnnyB dropped me an email on a topic he likely believed had no connection with his pun-blog post. John alerted me to this story, from msnbc (which stands for “Messin’ be? Si!”). The story puts this mad stampede of syllables in motion:
JohnnyB asks first, “Did an agent perform an operation? What or who was released?” Indeed, the sentence implies that all this is the work of “a cameraman that was released.” Because cameramen, released or otherwise, regularly shoot, I’d ask if he was released in his pajamas, but that’s getting ahead of the story.
After those initial questions, the true purpose of JohnnyB’s email was released (in his pajamas). The purpose was a challenge: “Diagram that sentence.”
Them’s writin’ words!, I responded. And my response was indeed a diagram that points obscurely to the answer. What’s more, my response, despite Mr. B’s expectations, had much to do with his pun-blog post:
(As a side note, Captain Spaulding’s first name is Ray. Who? Ray. Who? Ray. Whoray!)
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.
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