If all goes according to plan, on Thursday morning at 9:20 President Obama will arrive in the city of Oslo in his helicopter. That’s thirty minutes after his plane has landed at Gardemoen — not bad going! I’m sometimes still in the duty-free half an hour after my plane’s landed. At one p.m. the King will present him with the Nobel Peace Prize at the Oslo Rådhus or town hall (above). Preparations for the ceremony are underway, causing long traffic tailbacks and the rerouting of public transport. At a cost of several billion kroner all of central Oslo’s manhole covers have been welded shut, just in case of something or other. We should all avoid going to the city centre for the next few days unless our trip is really necessary. Don’t bother trying to get to work, especially if you commute via the extensive network of sewer tunnels.
A Bad Guide 
I think I have seen those shoes before …
Ah, but never upside down.
Oh yes! sticking up just like this.
Really? You’re not thinking of this one?
Of course not. There are no shoes there. I think you showed the picture a long time ago, perhaps before you started A Bad Guide.
Doch. Look again, m-l. Scroll down to the bottom. Or rather to the shoes.
Someone’s been reading too much Sjöwal and Wahlöö.
Ah, I knew I had seen them somewhere and they were connected with you, but I did not remember the double reversal.
How do they keep the shoes shined?
Normally two City employees are suspended from the laces. At eleven a.m. on weekdays, carrying long brushes, they swing in arcs. It’s quite a tourist attraction. However, work has been suspended because of the helicopter landing on the roof.
“The American President Is To Visit To Oslo”: the city of his birth, for all anyone knows.
Thank you, dearie. A correction has been made.
So, in Oslo, “well-heeled visitors” are those who have entered the city by helicopter?
Is the tower on the right hinting that clocked stockings are preferred?
Oslo has considerably promoted the technique that Luhmann calls symbolic generalization.
AJP: You’ve got me googling all over the place. “Clocked” stockings have a decorated motif stitched into the sides of the leg. As for Baz Luhrmann’s musical about symbolic generalization, it’s too hard for me to understand at ten in the morning.
all of central Oslo’s manhole covers have been welded shut
I hope this doesn’t lead to constipation.
AJP: I’m more worried about the precipitation.
Why do you go to the duty-free after landing in the Oosh?
Why do you go to the duty-free?
It’s a little-known fact that you can buy all your booze and cameras when you arrive at Oslo Gardemoen. Tax /duty (I’ve never understood the difference) on these things is very high in Norway, so it’s important. Immediately before you get to the Immigration & luggage, there is a well-stocked duty-free shop. This means you aren’t required to take heavy bottles with you on a long, carbon-emitting journey. It seems very sensible as well as profitable and I don’t know why other countries don’t do it too. There’s a separate duty-free area to use when you’re leaving.
Heathrow has a duty-free on exit, so I think does Gatwick. But then, these are shopping malls with runways added on.
Normally two City employees are suspended from the laces. They must have a tough time doing the heels – no handy trouser leg to shine them on surreptitiously outside the headmaster’s study….
There are trouser legs, just no headmaster’s study.
Hard to shine the heels on masonry …
I read once, I think, that softened bread heels are good for shining shoes. That’s why they’re called heels.
Either that, or because you can loaf around in well-heeled bread.
It’s all empty’s fault. His example has liberated me from my former reluctance to commit cringe-making puns.
Did you know that a pun is the opposite of a double entendre? One word with two meanings versus two words with one meaning. I’d never thought of it. I read it at a rather good site with definitions of difficult words used in postmodern art. I don’t know if it is the blog’s author who did the defining; they are well-written, I thought.
I have my doubts about the utility of that distinction.
The notion of one word having several meanings is only one way to look at a certain phenomenon – call it A, say. By “phenomenon A” I mean simply “a word having several meanings”.
There is another way to regard phenomenon A. Namely, that we are dealing there with several words, each of which has exactly one meaning, but all of which are spelled and pronounced in the same way.
So phenomenon A, looked at in one way, is a pun phenomenon. Looked at in another way, it is a double-entendre phenomenon.
Or rather a plusieurs-entendre.
What horrid font is that blog using?? Every different font size looks like a different font. With the size I happened to have when I first looked at the site, the text looked like it had been printed on an old typewriter with gunge on the strikers (?) and an old, smeary ink ribbon.
“Double entendre” is to me just a high-tone word for “pun”, with an additional suggestion of indelicacy. “Pun” applies to phenomenon A, no matter how you regard it (the “… or …” clauses in the OED definition below are formulations of my two ways of regarding).
The OED happens to feel the same way as I do about these words:
pun The use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more meanings or different associations, or the use of two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with different meanings, so as to produce a humorous effect; a play on words.
double entendre A double meaning; a word or phrase having a double sense, esp. as used to convey an indelicate meaning.
Stu: Could we have examples of phenomenon A ?
The font looks rather like BrittanicEFLight, though I’m not 100% sure.
That Britannic has wiggly Gs. I’d vote for Helvetica, the artist’s font of choice (except Barbara Kruger, who likes Futura bold).
Stu, I’m getting the feeling you you don’t really like that site.
I’m not agin’ the site, just the attempted distinction between pun and double-entendre. I didn’t look at anything else, because the smudgy-looking font (in the size I had) put me off.
canehan: Phenomenon A is just an abbreviation for what Crown was referring to when he wrote “One word with two meanings”. I introduced the term merely in an attempt to simplify the formulation of what I had to say.
Let me comment first on 2). Crown writes as if is were absolutely, objectively clear what “one word with two meanings” is, and distinguishes it from “two words with one meaning”. What he wrote is:
Did you know that a pun is the opposite of a double entendre? One word with two meanings versus two words with one meaning.
Let’s take an example of what Crown probably means by “one word with two meanings”: “loaf”. To say that this is one word with two meanings is, to all effects and purposes, to be guided by the taxonomy of a certain (type of) English dictionary. There you might find a single “loaf” entry, with several meanings.
In another (type of) dictionary, you might find two different “loaf” entries, each with its own meaning. Duden and the Petit Robert do this, for example (the prefixed number in square brackets below indicates what is a superscripted number in Duden):
This is the second way of regarding the same phenomenon A, in the case of “loaf”. Here we have two words, each with its own meaning, but both spelled and pronounced the same way. I assumed that was what Crown was actually getting at with his expression “two words with one meaning” – since if you take the expression literally, you just have two words that mean the same thing, like “prolepsis” and “anticipation”. In that situation, you can make neither a pun nor a double-entendre, because there is only one meaning.
By the way, the CSS of the post-modern art definitions page has these fonts:
‘Lucida Grande’, ‘Lucida Sans Unicode’, Verdana, sans-serif
Times New Roman’, Times, serif
I meant “superscripted” above, not “subscripted”.
MW has separate headwords for separate parts of speech (noun, verb etc). Within each entry, several meanings can occur.
In Duden, there are separate headwords for separate parts of speech. But if you have three nouns that mean different things, you have three separate headwords, for instance Strauß.
Even so, individual entries in Duden may have several meaning sections. I guess that the individual headwords correspond to different “etymological lines”. The meanings within an etymological line have accumulated by etymological association. To take the Strauß examples again: none of the three words is etymologically related to the others.
So you could say Strauß is one word with three meanings, or three words that are homophonic and homographic.
Grumbly, you’re very kindly finding examples to make some sense out of what I said, but what I was thinking of was the Carry-On (British 1960s) films type of double entendre, where Kenneth Williams says something like “Oh! What an enormous …” anything: “bottle of pop“, “vote of confidence“, the point is that it can be taken to mean “penis” in the context of Kenneth Williams saying “enormous” while he stares at the man’s trousers. They are (I think) double entendres, but not puns. You can understand two words to mean one thing (in my example, penis and bottle of pop).
Crown, I see what you mean. I guess you could call such things examples of double entendre, but I don’t see the sense of calling them “the opposite” of a pun. They’re word-play on sentence position, where you were expecting from the context that something different would be said. They’re not word-play on meanings.
Having now looked at the definitions you linked to, I can assure you that I don’t like the site. Here are some gripy comments:
1) Introduction
The introduction to the definitions says
The first sentence suggests that the definitions will help to understand (art) academics in general. The next sentence reveals that only certain theorists have drawn up this list. What is not revealed is who these particular theorists are. There is a suggestion that axes are being ground here, so that there is not much to rely on: “theorists who have set their own standards to the meaning of each word and its terms”. The last sentence detaches this issue from traditional dictionaries, the last anchor in reality.
So the list contains definitions by certain people for words which may or may not be used with the same meanings by other people. No sources, none of the people setting the definitions are identified. So the list is not an improvement over the confusion which already reigns.
2) HEGELIANISM
Well, since Marx famously and roundly criticized Feuerbach in the Thesen über Feuerbach, it’s vague and misleading to say Feuerbach “was of particular influence” on Marx. The MARXISM entry which we are supposed to consult in this connection says nothing about Feuerbach.
3) WOMAN AS THE NOT-YET
This is ridiculous. I negate cultural productions from dawn till dusk – not that it does much good – and am just as not-yet as Mrs. I. I think Mrs. I is herself rather a has-been, since she wants to make women not just different from men, but specialler – like it was in olden times.
Instead of “but am still just as”, read “and am just as”.
Still, a double entendre can be seen as a special case of pun, where the double meaning is not in the ambiguity of the spoken word but in the expectations of the audience. It’s a pragmatic pun or pun by expectation.
I would be more interested in the definition of
WOMAN AS SHE-WHO-MUST-BE-OBEYED
or
WOMAN AS THE ONE-WHO-SUDDENLY-BRAKES-IN-FRONT-OF-YOU-ON-THE-HIGHWAY-BECAUSE-SHE-FORGOT-SOMETHING.
pun by expectation
Exactly my point too, Trond. Good expression.
I do think it’s the opposite in the sense of how it’s constructed.
Crown, when you say “opposite” here, could you also say “different” and still be saying what you want to say?
AJP: Sure. But pun is 2 meanings for “loaf” and d.e. is two words meaning “penis”. Double entendre is close to metaphor: e.g. if I were to say “That’s a nice pair of watermelons…” Not that I ever would, of course.
While I was working on that three-line paragraph, Stu said the same thing and produced a dissertation on philosophy and had it proof-read. I expect him to have given a complete lecture on comparative jocularity when I reload upon posting this.
AJP: “Grumbly Stew” is just the tip of a 40-man, 24/7 iceberg.
I don’t kno nothing about this Mrs Irigaray, but I liked:
That seems sensible to me.
Damn, I had just finished a 5-page essay on comparative jocularity when my browser froze, and I lost the text. Oh well, it’s pretty clear what I was going to say anyway, so I won’t insist.
I would agree that adding extract of woman to anything is not likely to change much – whether or not it is hierarchical and sexist. But I don’t think the feminists in question would appreciate my point of view.
They might.
I just realised that if I add something directly below a comment but “within” it, then the little bell won’t go off, or however it is that you guys know that a new comment has been added to the thread without actually looking. Anyway, I have done that above, for what it’s worth.
My computer expl0des and I have to go buy a new one, but it’s worth it to know there’s a new comment.
And I’m sorry about your five-page essay. Do you have to pay them when they lose the text in the machinery?
Good God, Language. Isn’t it past your bedtime? How is your computer, is it still broken?
No. Of course, it’s my bedtime, not yours.
d.e. is two words meaning “penis”
That’s a curious point of view. You’re counting not only the expression used that doesn’t mean “penis”, but also the expression not used that means “penis”, namely “penis”.
But that only makes two. Why don’t you also count other words that also might have been used, but were not: such as “biceps”?
Is my sarcasm running away with me here?
Crown, I may change to wordpress, because of that possibility of modifying comments (hat can do it too). Blogspot (Google) doesn’t offer that. Can you put in a good word for me with wordpress management?
AJP: Of course, but they’re very polite and they see you as new business. Just remember that your customers cannot review their comments with a preview at wordpress, and that’s why they get in the pickle of wanting to modify their comments in the first place.
No, not at all. I thought of that, but I felt I was getting bogged down in my explaining, so I ignored it; some people would call the penis “the elephant in the room”. “Elephant’s trunk” might be better.
Large and grey and long in front. What an old man sees in the mirror.
In the mirror of his imagination.
Yes, grey would be in the imagination. If not, consult a doctor.
Large and grey and long in front. What an old man sees in the mirror.
For whom the balls tell.
“the elephant in the room”
Lately this has been used in 12-step groups to mean a problem everyone can see but no one wants to say anything about, typically an alcoholic’s drinking and subsequant disruptive behaviour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_the_room
Of course the obvious solution to G-Stu’s personal problem is a trip to a nude beach on the Costa del Sol, but I fear to turn yet another thread in the direction of tanning oil.
Thanks, Nij.
I fear that if I went there nude, the area would have to be renamed Costa del LOL.
Are we talking about a prominence grise?
Der Vogel Strauss. The elephant Strunk.
Some people call a trunk a boot.
On the other hand, Kipling states that before the Crocodile got hold of it the elephant’s nose was no bigger than a boot, though much more useful.
Since we’re on the subject I want to compliment you, Ø and Stew on your punning. My favourite recently was Ø’s sea-cow-fant.
however it is that you guys know that a new comment has been added to the thread without actually looking
I subscribe to your comments via google feedreader. That’s the “comments RSS” in the “meta” section. I have noticed however that the comments take quite a while to arrive from A Bad Guide to my feedreader, when comments from my own blog arrive within the hour. Corrections to a comment do arrive eventually–if the comment is old it can be more than quite a few hours, but of course editing an old comment doesn’t add a new comment to the reader and doesn’t make the edited comment appear in the “new comments” option.
no bigger than a boot
Did they have cars in Kipling’s day? If so, the British type of “boot” might be roughly the same size as the British type of “bonnet”, and would somewhat increase the initial size of the pachyderm’s nose.
And now I’ll return you to the previously scheduled double entendre, i.e., trying to catch a glimpse of G-Stu’s etchings.
Thanks, Nij. That’s all good to know. I’ll have to investigate this RSS thing.
Kipling may have had a car himself, he didn’t die until 1936. He was related to all sorts of other interesting people like (the P.M.) Stanley Baldwin, the writer Angela Thirkell & her son Colin MacInness who wrote Absolute Beginners, and Edward Burne-Jones the Pre-Raphaelite.
I get email advisors of a new comment, which seem to be reasonably quick. When I make one, the site asks if I want to be advised of follow-ups by email, which of course I do. Wouldn’t want to miss Grumbly’s perorations ..