μ μ

(but the bull was real butch about it, and anyway that’s the Greek Way)

Meanwhile, the Greek letter mu is wide open for cow cartoons, like this recent one (from February 1st) by Scott Hilburn, passed on to me by Facebook friends:

(#1)

Note on cows. Versus bulls, or not, and on horns. From NOAD :

noun cow: [a] a fully grown female animal of a domesticated breed of ox, used as a source of milk or beef: a dairy cow. [b] (loosely) a domestic bovine animal, regardless of sex or age [hence, colloquial cows ‘cattle’].

Beyond that, cattle of both sexes are born with horns — though there are some breeds with hornless females, and dairy cows are generally dehorned in infancy.

Note on what cows say in Greek. Cows in Modern Greek go μου μου — just like cows in English going moo moo.

Note on pronouncing the name of the letter μ mu in Greek. From Wikipedia:

In Ancient Greek, the name of the letter was written μῦ and pronounced [mŷː] [the diacritics indicate tones]. In Modern Greek, the letter is spelled μι and pronounced [mi].

So Modern Greek cows going μ μ μ sound in fact like animals going [mi mi mi], like English me me me. On the other hand, English-speaking Greek cows uttering μ μ μ are going [mju mju mju] mew mew mew — or [mu mu mu] moo moo moo, if they’re more clasically inclined.

Two more versions of the μ-cow joke:

A 2/17/17 version from the dribble site:

(#2) “We run a weekly programming comic at comic.browserling.com. In this cartoon we illustrated Greek cows. Greek cows are different, they don’t say moo, they say μ. They’re super scientific.” Source here.

And from the Forbes magazine site on 3/11/17, an Andy Singer version:

(#3)

And then a charming variant by Christina Skelton in 2003, showing the development of the letter of the alphabet through the ages:

(#4)

Then to Hercules and the Cretan bull. Oh those Greeks! Ok, my play with Greek referring to anal intercourse above was a cheap shot. On to the myth, from Wikipedia:

In Greek mythology, the Cretan Bull (Greek: Κρὴς ταῦρος) was the bull Pasiphaë fell in love with, giving birth to the Minotaur.

Minos was king in Crete. In order to confirm his right to rule, rather than any of his brothers, he prayed Poseidon send him a snow-white bull as a sign. Poseidon sent Minos the bull, with the understanding that it would be sacrificed to the god. Deciding that Poseidon’s bull was too fine a specimen to kill, Minos sent it to his herds and substituted another, inferior bull for sacrifice. Enraged, Poseidon had Aphrodite cause Pasiphaë, wife of Minos, to fall in love with the bull. She subsequently gave birth to the half-man, half-bull, Minotaur. Poseidon passed on his rage to the bull, causing it lay waste the land.

After consulting the oracle at Delphi, Minos had Daedalus construct the Labyrinth to hold the Minotaur.

Heracles was sent to capture the bull by Eurystheus as his seventh task. He sailed to Crete, whereupon Minos gave Heracles permission to take the bull away as it had been wreaking havoc on Crete by uprooting crops and leveling orchard walls. Heracles captured the bull, and then shipped it to Eurystheus in Tiryns. [The bull escapes, is captured by Theseus, and eventually killed by him.]

This brings us to one of the many depictions of the seventh labor of Hercules, taming the Cretan bull, in this highly charged bronze-coated zinc sculpture by August Kriesmann (1853) outside Schwerin Castle in northern Germany:

(#5)

On the castle, from Wikipedia:

The Schwerin Palace, also known as Schwerin Castle (German: Schweriner Schloss), is a palatial schloss located in the city of Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state, Germany. It is situated on an island in the city’s main lake, the Lake Schwerin.

For centuries the palace was the home of the dukes and grand dukes of Mecklenburg and later Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Today it serves as the residence of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state parliament

The current castle and its grounds (built between 1845 and 1857):

(#6)

From the bon appétit magazine site on 7/19/18, “A Fruit Sando Is a Dessert Sandwich Filled with Joy and Whipped Cream: I’m obsessed with this Japanese dessert and was dying for a recipe. Now we have one.” by Elyse Inamine:

(#1) furūtsu sando ‘fruit sandwich’: strawberry, kiwi, peach (or mango) (photo from the magazine)

Hi, my name is Elyse and I have a fruit sando problem. Whenever I see those tiny triangles layered with sliced strawberries, nubs of kiwi, and Cool Whip-esque fluff, which is more often than you’d expect, I always order it. The fruit sando is exactly what you think it is. A sandwich made of fruit, with a Japanese accent. (Technically, it’s called “furutsu sando,” but I like “fruit sando,” as a third-gen Japanese American. Both Japanese and American!).

Imagine those delicate little sandwiches at bridal showers, tea parties, etc. Then imagine Takashi Murakami made them. That’s the fruit sando. Its edges are a work of art, a mosaic of jewel-like cuts of fruit that are outlined by barely sweet whipped cream. Soft shokupan, a simple bread made of flour, warm milk, and eggs also known as Japanese milk bread, holds the fruit sando together. Each bite is sweet, squishy, and immensely satisfying

The Japanese name is all borrowings from English: furūtsu < fruit, sando < sandwich. Though American-inspired, sando are thoroughly Japanese; most of their many varieties bear little resembance to Western sandwiches. In particular, though to American eyes the Japanese fruit sandwich or fruit sando is some kind of sandwich (the compound fruit sandwich is subsective), it’s very far from a prototypical sandwich; there’s nothing really like it in Western food.

katakana notes. On the word sando: as a borrowed word, it’s written in katakana (symbols representing phonological units — roughly, syllables) rather than kanji (symbols adapted from Chinese characters):

(#2) Three katakana: SA N DO, where N is the mora nasal (so three moras, but two syllables); also note that the sando is treated as an anime character, with a cute face

(The mora is a timing unit smaller than a syllable. I said that the system of katakana is only roughly syllabic.)

Then the whole compound:

(#3) furūtsu in katakana: FU RU — TSU

The — is a symbol indicating that the vowel it follows is long. Yes, furūtsu has four moras, but three syllables. (What’s transliterated TS is a single consonant, an affricate much like the initial consonant of German Zeit ‘time’.)

More food. An especially popular sando is one enclosing pieces of deep-fried pork cutlet: tonkatsu sando ‘pork cutlet sadwich’ (often abbreviated to katsu sando ‘cutlet sandwich’, though other meat cutlets can be used in sando):

(#4) Plain tonkatsu sando; sometimes there is shredded lettuce or cabbage

Visible in this photo is another distinctly Japanese version of a Western foodstuff: tonkatsu sauce. From Wikipedia:

Tonkatsu sauce is a thick brown sauce commonly served over tonkatsu (breaded deep-fried pork cutlets).

While generally similar to a traditional brown sauce, it is vegetarian. The Bull-Dog brand of tonkatsu sauce [the most popular brand], for example, is made from malt vinegar, yeast, and vegetable and fruit purees, pastes, and extracts.

(#5)

Tonkatsu sauce is derived from Worcestershire sauce, with additional vegetable and fruit ingredients to better suit the Japanese palate.

Another common sando is tamago sando ‘egg sandwich’, which can be either a Japanese omelette in a sando or a Japanese version of egg salad in a sando, as here:

(#6)

Finally, in upscale restaurants, including some in the US, you can get wagyukatsu sando, a Japanese steak sandwich using the highly valued (and fabulously expensive) wagyu beef. (On the beef, see my 10/13/17 posting “Political wagyu”.) A single sandwich like this one could set you back $70 to $150:

(#7)

Much less extravagant sando are available at take-out places and convenience stores all over the country. From the Fine Food Dude site on 8/28/14, “Japanese convenience store sandwiches – Everywhere, Japan”:

(#8)

We all have food fetishes, from banana and marmite on toast to spreading butter on Weetabix. I have more than a few, but one of the more repeatable is my obsession with Japanese convenience store pre-packed sandwiches. Sober or sake’d up, at breakfast or midnight, the fridges of 7-11, Lawson and Circle K Sunkus beckon me in with holy trinities of egg mayonnaise, tuna and tonkatsu, always squashed together, always gloriously crust-less.

The bread may be industrial white-sliced, but it retains the perfect softness and yield, without ever getting soggy. The mayonnaise is the sweetened Japanese kewpie version and all the better for it. Eggs are stunning orange-gold suns, tonkatsu somehow keeps its crunch and even the tuna tastes like it wasn’t long out of Tsukiji.

From a recent chain of postings on Facebook, a 1/9/14 Bizarro strip rendered en français:

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

Il faut mettre l’œil avant le scarabée, sauf si le participe passé est placé devant le serpent. (more or less literally) ‘It is necessary to put the eye before the beetle, except if the past participle is placed in front of the snake.’

(It came to me from Susan Fischer, who got it from the Facebook group Improbables Librairies, Improbables Bibliothèques, which — predictably, I suppose — tells us nothing about who did the translation.)

The English original, which I posted about on 1/9/14 in “Early writing in the comics”:

(#2) Piraro’s hieroglyphic version of “It’s I before E, except after C”: It’s eye [the 2nd glyph] before flea [the 1st glyph, an insect], except after sea [the 3rd glyph, water]

It turns out that the 2014 version re-uses the artwork from an even earlier Bizarro:

(#3) (I see only two Bizarro symbols in this one; the speech balloons cover space where two of the Bizarro symbols are placed in #1/#2)

The 1st glyph in this version is a bird (maybe a falcon) rather than an insect as in #1/#2; the 2nd row 2nd glyph is a flower rather than the Bizarro eye symbol as in #1/#2; otherwise the glyphs are as in #1/#2:

… – 2  eye – 3 wiggly line [actually, water] – 4 beetle

1 goose – … – 3 lump [actually, loaf of bread] – 4 bird [of some kind] – 5 snake

(except that two partial glyphs at the right edge of #1/#2 have been erased).

Re-use, recycle.

Bonuses. Piraro has turned to hieroglyphic writing for humor on at least two other occasions.

In my 2/16/17 posting “Emoji are the hieroglyphs of the future”:

(#4) The Bizarro of 2/16/17, with 4 Bizarro symbols (plus an emoji and some hieroglyphs) — basically the same artwork as in #1-#3, but  reversed

Another bash at the hieroglyph-emoji relationship. For discussion, see my 10/28/16 posting “Emoji days” (with two cartoons on the subject), where I note that emoji are primaily ideographic / pictographic, while hieroglyphs are primarily linguistic (representing specific words or phonological material).

And then some totally different artwork:

(#5) From 10/22/12 (with 5 Bizarro symbols in it)

From Wikipedia:

A spelling bee is a competition in which contestants are asked to spell a broad selection of words, usually with a varying degree of difficulty. The concept is thought to have originated in the United States, and spelling bee events, along with variants, are now also held in some other countries around the world. The first winner of an official spelling bee was Frank Neuhauser, who won the 1st National Spelling Bee (now known as the Scripps National Spelling Bee) in Washington, D.C. in 1925 at age eleven.

There’s a conventional format for these events. In part, as illustrated above: the contestant is given a word by the moderator, and can ask the moderator for a definition. Then proceeds by pronouncing the word (signalling the beginning of the spelling), spelling it out loud (pronouncing the names of the letters in it, in order), and then pronouncing the whole word again (signalling the end of the spelling).

David Bowie seems to have a considerable following in Russia, to judge from the Pinterest materials about him, for instance this album:

(#1) Дэвид Боуи: David Bowie in Cyrillic transiteration

Боуи gets the [wi] of Bowie just right, but to Latin-alphabet-oriented eyes that уи looks like YU [ju], so Боуи looks like Boyu: Boy oh Boyu!

And you well might be exclaiming over David Bowie: see my 3/17/19 posting “Bidding farewell to /ǰæk/”, about David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, their very prominent baskets, and their attachment to the Union Jack. Bowie, basket, and flag in this photo (with Bowie’s wife Iman):

(#2)

Elsewhere on Pinterest, a site with David Bowie merchandise for sale, including this (mass-produced) plaster bust of Bowie as Ziggy Stardust:

(#3) 2,000 rubles: ca. $32 US

The image is from the cover of Alladin Sane. From Wikipedia:

(#3)

Aladdin Sane is the sixth studio album by English musician David Bowie, released by RCA Records on 13 April 1973. The follow-up to his breakthrough The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, it was the first album he wrote and released from a position of stardom. The album cover featuring a lightning bolt across his face is regarded as one of Bowie’s most iconic images.

Exclamations. The basic exclamation / interjection is boy! (cf. exclamatory man!), glossed in NOAD as follows:

excl. boy: informal used to express strong feelings, especially of excitement or admiration: oh boy, that’s wonderful!

The example is for oh boy! rather than simple boy!, and in fact NOAD lists oh boy! separately:

excl. oh boy: used to express surprise or excitement.

Now my impression is that, although they overlap very considerably in import, boy!, oh boy!, and boy oh boy! are subtly different in their functions in some contexts (and are probably subject to social variation as well). Introspection about how we use them is surely not going to provide useful answers, though it might suggest lines of inquiry in doing a large-scale data study — an intriguing but daunting challenge.

In my comics feed for today, May 16th, three excellent strips: a Zits on learning how to use a computer (and coping with explanations for how to use it from the deeply tech-embedded, like the 17-year-old Jeremy Duncan in this strip); a Rhymes With Orange with a truly bizarre way for spelling your name when ordering drinks at the neighborhood cafe; and a Bizarro with a high-groan pun.

The Zits. This one leapt out at me because I’ve just recently recovered from a very specific apraxia, the inability to create postings on this blog (accompanied by a specific nominal aphasia, the inability to retrieve any of the vocabulary for performing this task). I was able to surmount this suite of cognitive deficits through the coaching of helpers who were willing to to work with me by understanding that I was in fact utterly ignorant of all of this and would have to be introduced to it in bits and pieces, patiently, from the ground up.

This is immensely hard for people to do. Jeremy in the cartoon is simply unable to help his father learn about something that Jeremy believes any child would know:

(#1)

From Wikipedia (which of course presumes considerable background knowledge):

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as “natural” or “organic” results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate ftom different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.

SEO is designed to get your stuff in front of people’s eyes first. (Of course, there’s a lot here behind your stuff, people’s eyes, in front of, and get.)

The Rhymes. At the Ancient Semitic Cafe (in Egypt, Phoenicia, Palestine, or Arabia), ordering a hot drink. The server asks for your name, so they can write it down and then call it out when your drink is ready. (I know, nothing like this happened in ancient Semitic lands. The situation is entirely one of the modern world, but realized in a fictive setting, with aspects of the second world corresponding to aspects of the real-world model —  the cartoon shows some situation from everyday life (which you have to know about) juxtaposed with, or translated into, another more remarkable world (which you also need to know details of). I frequently post on cartoons that exploit such a world-to-world translation.)

(#2)

What’s at the crux of the cartoon is the set of practices surrounding asking someone’s name (for whatever purpose), getting a reply, and recording the answer (so that the name can be retrieved later). Note that the characters are presumed to be literate, which is generally true in our modern world but was not generally the case in the ancient Semitic lands, though the societies in question did have writing systems, with symbols (each representing a word, syllable, or phoneme) derived at some time-depth from hieroglyphs, stylized pictures of objects.

For many purposes, it suffices to say your name, in which case you depend on your interlocutor’s recognizing the name and knowing how to spell it

Responses to a request for your name might be given more helpfully in an extended form that supplies the correct spelling. So, not just Arnold, but: Arnold, A, R, N, O, L, D. Or, if you’re in a hurry, just the spelling: A, R, N, O, L, D.

The characters in the Rhymes scenario jump right to the last of these options, which is fine, except that they don’t pronounce the symbols of their Semitic writing system; instead, absurdly, they describe the hieroglyphs those symbols are descended from. Now I remind you that the letters of the alphabet we use in spelling English are also descended from Phoenician symbols, which have an even more distant hieroglyphic origin. So it’s as if I gave my name at the local Coupa Cafe by saying: picture of an ox-head, next to a human head, a snake, a human eye, an ox-goad or cattle-prod, and a fish (or perhaps a door).

Giggles.

The Bizarro. A truly monstrous pun on Darth Vader, with Vader > Waders:

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

On the one hand, we have Darth Vader from Star Wars; if you don’t know about Darth Vader, this cartoon is dead to you.  On the other hand, we have waders, as from NOAD:

noun wader: … 2 (waders) high waterproof boots, or a waterproof garment for the legs and body, used especially by anglers when fishing.

— as modeled by Darth in #3 above. Oh, massive groan.

Wayno’s title for the cartoon — “The Retirement Years” — takes things in a different direction, suggesting that when Darth Vader retires from his career as super-villain, he’ll take up the hobby of fly-fishing and outfit himself in waders for that purpose.

Neutrogena hand cream (for dry or chapped hands), specifically. Which I’ve used as a moisturizer for dry skin and a healing cream for abraded skin, on various parts of my body (especially as an adjunct to the coconut oil I use daily on my feet, legs, hands, and arms); it comes in almond-scented and unscented versions. Unremarkable until recently. But yesterday it excited the interest of four linguists, in exchanges on Facebook.

Set off by Monica Macaulay:

— MM: This is a new one on me. I ordered some Neutrogena lotion and the picture looked like what I’m used to, but look what came!!! Is that Turkish? Something went awry with the space-time-language continuum? I’m very puzzled.

(#1) EL KREMİ in its tube

— Geoffrey Nathan: Definitely Turkish — i’s without dots, c-cedillas, s-cedillas. No idea what it means, however. Just remembered — eller means ‘hands’. From a morphology problem.

— AZ [who, once a teacher of introductory morphology, also recognized eller]: Had the same experience a little while back. The lotion seems to be unchanged, but the packaging was a surprise.

— MM > AZ: Really?!? So this is a known unknown? Very, very strange.

— AZ > MM: Well, known to me. You’re only the second person in my experience to have gotten Neutrogena in Turkish.

— MM: The almost empty English tube I have says “Norwegian Formula hand cream, fragrance free, just a dab heals dry skin”.

(#2) In English (for the scented product); information from the website: “Just a dab of this glycerin-enriched formula instantly relieves and protects seriously dry or chapped hands”

— GN: Google translate [for #1] says ‘Instant relief and 24-hour hydration for dry and cracked hands. A single drop is enough’ … This is fun!

— Bill Poser: I’d say its a good thing. You’re probably bored reading the English label. Now you can entertain yourself practicing your Turkish.

— AZ: My initial image was that the stuff was now provided by EL KREMİ, the (obviously Turkish — note dot on the cap İ, which is a different letter from the dotless cap I) [hirsute and hunky] GOD OF LUBE, so that Neutrogena had suddenly gotten down and dirty.

……..

The company is echt American, despite the bow to Norway, the Norwegian flag, and the dry and cracked hands of the sturdy Norwegian people; and now despite the packaging in Turkish, which no doubt reflects the modern complexities of supply chains (certainly not the customer base). From Wikipedia:

Neutrogena Corporation … is an American company that produces cosmetics, skin care and hair care … owned by parent company Kenvue and … headquartered in Los Angeles, California. According to product advertising at their website, Neutrogena products are distributed in more than 70 countries.

Neutrogena was founded in 1930 by Emanuel Stolaroff, and was originally a cosmetics company named Natone. Johnson & Johnson acquired the independent company in 1994.

The company originally supplied to department stores and salons that catered for the Hollywood film industry.