triple pun
August 31st, 2013 | Uncategorized
I love seeing these Sears cartop storage things. Here’s the logo…
… a cartoon snail combined with the word “X-cargo.” Meaning extra cargo space. But it’s also a pun on escargot, the French word for snail. And a snail carries its house on its back. So it’s like a bilingual pun and a visual pun all together.
I don’t know if I read about this somewhere or figured it out myself. It was a long time ago when I first noticed it.
20 Responses to “triple pun”
Interesting. I’ve been trying to figure out what the “X” in Space-X. the orbital rocket company founded by Elon Musk, stands for.
There used to be a joke about a new car called the “S car”. Look at that S car go!
This is truth – Chevy couldn’t sell its Nova car in Mexico because “no va” in Spanish means “doesn’t go”.
Hey, where’d everybody go? Did you hear that Diana Nyad did what she has been trying to do since 1978? She just swam from Cuba to Florida!
Nissan also makes a small van named the S-Cargo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_S-Cargo
The longer version of the joke is that Sammy the Snail won the lottery and decided to buy the fastest sportscar he could, and to make sure everyone knew who owned it, he had a huge letter S painted on each door and the hood, inscribed on the hubcaps, and with personalized license plates reading ‘SS’… and everywhere he went, people stared and said, “Look at that S car go!”
I’m trying to figure out if Kate L is serious. The “X” in “Space X” is for “exploration.” One only has to go to Wikipedia: “Space Exploration Technologies Corporation” is “SpaceX” when abbreviated (I guess because SETC doesn’t sound as cool).
Kudos to Nyad, who accomplished the feat on her fifth try, at age 64, without an anti-shark cage. Imagine being a snail without the shell, vulnerable to escargot-loving omnivores. (Yeah, I know the garden slug is a cousin to the hard-topped mollusk, not sure if it’s considered edible sans slime).
I’ve been underwater for a while, just coming up for air now and I see a lot has gone on here during my hiatus.
Condolences and hugs to AB et familia on Helen’s passing.
The off-Broadway premiere of Fun Home might be a tad bittersweet. I can imagine how Helen might have simultaneously experienced the production as a fellow theatre person, and then as an interpretation of her own life experiences, as experienced and interpreted by AB. Sort of like the triple dressing mirrors that reflect each other into infinity. At some point, it loses verisimilitude and seems oh so odd, it seems like your life but doesn’t quite FEEL like your life.
No doubt AB will be having similar experience/interpretation analysis and disconnects when she views the production, but it will be from the author’s vantage point. I’ll bet there will be a lot of “What would Mom think of this?” moments for AB.
I particularly liked the quote from Joseph Campbell in the article that Kate L cited, “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
I think Helen Bechdel (whom I never met) would have appreciated that quote. She seemed comfortable in her own skin, something which many of us (myself included) have worked hard at achieving. So perhaps she would have viewed Fun Home, The Musical, with the necessary detachment to enjoy it without all the self-conscious baggage.
Last, but not least, L’Shanah Tovah, y’all.
(… goes back to her underwater lair of work/eat/sleep, in unbalanced proportions …)
Anonymous (#5) Okay, okay, but riddle me this… what does the “X” in the X-Men stand for? I’ve been trying to figure that one out since the original X-Men comic in 1963! 🙂
Hi, hairball (#6)!!!!
The snail could also be viewed as a metaphor for the slow moving traffic.
Welcome back, Hair.mbsll.
Kate L, here are some thoughts on the X:
http://hotword.dictionary.com/x-men/
Kate L–Google is your friend. Apparently, there are several options: The “X” comes from “Professor X” (Charles Xavier); the “X” comes from the “X-factor gene.”
Stan Lee, in his book Son of Origins of Marvel Comics, says that he devised the series title after Marvel publisher Martin Goodman turned down the initial name, “The Mutants.”
I imagine there is an allusion there to “G-men” from the FBI. There is probably also an allusion there to “X-rays.” But, yeah, I would try an authoritative history of the strip–the one from Stan Lee sounds useful.
Given that it is fiction, does it really matter what the “X” stands for other than the sound of the letter and the look of it? Maybe they just thought it sounded cool and then invented a backstory to go along with it. It’s fiction. They made it up.
Thanks, all. And, Happy Birthday, A.B.!
Hi all – check out this interesting article:
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/singing-the-lesbian-blues-in-1920s-harlem/
Have a great B-day tomorrow!
Yes, happy birthday!
[Folks in the Pheonix area may be interested in knowing that AB will be giving a talk there on Tues Sept 17. Details [HERE].
(Also see the Events page above.)
For those not in the Pheonix area, the link also contains a nice interview. –Mentor]
… as if to commemorate A.B.’s special day, NASA held a press conference today to announce that the Voyager 1 spacecraft has become the first object built by humans to leave the influence of the Sun, and enter interstellar space!
… I think it’s kind of fitting that it was Voyager that first achieved interstellar flight. We’re on the timeline that leads to Janeway and the Federation for sure! 🙂
You are the only other person I know who seems to truly appreciate this unexpected bit of cleverness from Sears!