Archive for 1998
I realize that it's not polite to make fun of writing that's been translated poorly from another language. I suspect that mocking Japanglish, Franglais, and Chinglish can be considered politically incorrect at best and racist at worst. But I can't help myself. I find myself vastly entertained by the weird English that translators come up […]
While flying across the country last week, I realized that I couldn't remember which advertising jingle went with the airline I was flying on. Was it "Something special in the air," or was that some other airline? So here's a quiz: match the slogan to the company or product. Some of these are just slogans; […]
Here's a rough transcription of a tune not entirely unlike that for "Little Rabbit Foo Foo," in abc ASCII music transcription format: X:321 T:Little Rabbit Foo Foo C:Unknown origin M:4/4 K:C Q:200 C>C C>D E2 E2|D>C D>E C2 G,2| w:Lit- tle Rab- bit Foo Foo, I don't wan- na see you C>C C>D E2 E>E|(3DCC […]
Almost everyone I know has had some encounter with the song "Little Rabbit Foo Foo." But I've found, to my dismay, that about half the people who've heard the song are totally unaware of the punchline/moral that justifies the song. A quick explanation for those few of you who have no idea what I'm talking […]
Have you been looking for a good slang dictionary? Me too. It can be hard to tell, on a cursory inspection, which are reasonably accurate and which are outdated, miss shades of meaning, or are just plain wrong. I've taken to checking a few particular words that I feel reasonably confident I know the current […]
Elliott notes that he was the one who quoted "A plan, a man, a canam: analpa!" to me, but that he heard it from Geoff Hopcraft, who he thinks originated it. Ranjit writes, "By far the best palindrome book I've found, for its clever original palindromes and quirky drawings, is Ana, Nab a Banana by […]
Everyone knows what a palindrome is: a word that reads the same backwards as forwards (except for spaces and punctuation). Maybe the fact that everyone knows about them is why it's taken me a year and a half to get around to writing about them. The most famous palindrome is probably "Madam, I'm Adam." Perhaps […]
In a 1985 column, world's greatest columnist Jon Carroll asked for information about the phrase "I stand before you to sit behind you..." He was deluged with comments. Like many of his correspondents, I had heard a version of the phrase as a child; it's the start of a contradictory nonsense verse. The verse generally […]
I don't know how long people have been coming up with odd names for groups of musical performers, but the practice dates back at least to the 1930s. (Before that there were named musical groups, but the names were usually descriptive (and often place-linked), like "The London Philharmonic Orchestra," rather than fanciful.) Bands with names […]
Joe Robins provides a pointer to another archive of misheard lyrics that I hadn't previously known about. It includes entertaining stories about how the submitters found out they were wrong. I forgot to mention some other items I misheard for years: Where the wild mountain Ty rose around the blue wind Heather... Really: Where the […]