by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – November 7th, 2020

You can always count on Gargle Seawater for some Oy content!

Here is Baldo (1) using an embattled English expression in its traditional form, not the disputed more-modern form, and (2) making a pun out of it.

For comparison, for those who can make use of it, also providing the Spanish version.  The pun doesn’t seem to have been attempted here.

Full-on pun for *Dingbats*.

The sender says: “It’s been over 40 years since Edith Bunker died.
Has anyone used the word ‘dingbat’ as an insult since then?” Probably not, and it may take a geezer to recall it. The *word* of course remains familiar to font-heads.

Dark side of The Horse so often breaks new frontiers in cartoon-physics! And we usually call that LOL, but here there is wordplay on “airplane mode” that should qualify for an OY.

From Andréa.

Oy!

Take a wild guess at why she’s in the dark and taking a shot.

70 Comments

  2. Unknown's avatar

    There may or may not be a pun in the Spanish version of “Baldo”. The dialog appears to say “he could not import less” (potenitally referring to another foreign subcompact), but Google & Bing are unanimous that the actual meaning is “he couldn’t care less“.

  4. Unknown's avatar

    Yeah, from my school days Spanish, no importa has the simplest vernacular equivalent of it doesn’t matter. (Spanish does not have obligatory overt subject nominal, unlike English or French.) And indeed, [A él] no le podría importar menos would be awkwardly It couldn’t matter less [to him] or more colloquially He couldn’t care less.

    But it might still be an open question if a fluent bilingual speaker would, in vernacular use, stick with He couldn’t care less. or go for the modern-day casual English He could care less. The comic, it was noted, did stick with couldn’t.

  6. Unknown's avatar

    Would anybody notice anything wrong with ZZ Topless? What with the beards, nothing’d show.

    I knew about dingbats, probably got that from Steven King.

  7. Unknown's avatar

    When I saw that pun on Can’t see the florist for the trees what came to mind was the bit of lyric using the original saying in “Different Drum”, whose sound in the classic recording by Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys ( ” https://youtu.be/w9qsDgA1q8Y ” ) I had been hearing bouncing around my head for several months.

    You and I travel to the beat of a different drum
    Oh, can't you tell by the way I run
    Every time you make eyes at me? Whoa
    You cry and moan and say it will work out
    But honey child I've got my doubts
    You can't see the forest for the trees

    YouTube likes to feed you different versions of the same thing (even if you haven’t asked for it), and I soon had seen and heard about a dozen passable versions, and a half dozen very interesting or maybe great versions.

    Not really great, but interesting for the performer group name, was a version by “Syd, Jess & The Geizers” who may or may not include some Geezers.

    Very good and interesting was the 1972 original by songwriter Michael Nesmith (yes, the Monkees one) — ” https://youtu.be/jA5scf8RpCI ” — good in itself but also illuminates what a good job Linda Ronstadt and collaborators did in adapting the lyrics from the almost-conventional male don’t-pin-me-down perspective to a female singer. They did switch some pronouns, and boy/girl a couple places, but kept “honey child” and “pretty” so that the generations of female vocalists taking on this song reassure their presumptively male would-be suitors that “I ain’t sayin’ you ain’t pretty”. So smart that they kept that!

    Among the ones I would call great are some from professional singers as well as apparent amateurs. This one from 2015 by Juliana Daily (”
    https://youtu.be/j7A-g1qNFtI “) is unusual among the many clips for making its own musical interpretation and not just emulating the Linda Ronstadt / Stone Poneys performance. A little less professional but still interestingly original is this 2013 piano-and-voice version by Mel Kaufler (” https://youtu.be/7oLELiUqoF0 ” ) .

    But on the dimension of vocal power and confidence, and taking the top of your head off (listen for the line-endings on trees, only me, on me, and the decorative turn on transitional soo-oo-oooh — headphones please, and turn it up!) ; on that dimension, top award goes to original Linda / Stone Poneys, and to this 2011 quasi-live strolling video of Maya Burns:

    Honorable mentions:
    (” https://youtu.be/DdLl21Wrg9s “) Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs from their CD, very professional performance, and the YouTube stills-montage treatment is quite good, even including a youthful pic of Nesmith. But the interpretation is straightforwardly imitating Linda / Stone Poneys, though enriched instrumentation. (There are other, less formal, clips of Hoffs singing this.)

    For breaking away from the Stone Poneys approach, or folk / country altogether, there is the noise+metal treatment by “Me First and the Gimme Gimmes” ( ” https://youtu.be/6ZSR5iyOF_A “) — sloppy but challenging.

    There is one more I wanted to mention but can’t find again. It is another interesting re-interpretation, and also looks professional, but to me most notable in that the female soloist is in a lower range than all these others — let’s say she is singing as a mezzo .

    (And we really should have this one playable as the reference sound : )

  8. Unknown's avatar

    “Take a wild guess at why she’s in the dark and taking a shot.”

    … because she’s at a loss. It’s right there in the comic.

  9. Unknown's avatar

    “It’s been over 40 years since Edith Bunker died.
    Has anyone used the word ‘dingbat’ as an insult since then?” ”

    For once I have a reference when I say, “sure, it’s a common expression”.

    In the 2020 children’s movie “Over the Moon” (visually one of the most appealing animation I’ve seen in years, but story and theme wise pretty dang tepid) the protagonist has an annoying future step-brother who is talks too much and is annoying upbeat. He likes to pretend to be a bat and the protagonist says “You’re a bat, all right. A real Ding-bat!”.

    Anyway the movies intended audience is pre-teens. And the writers average age is probably mid-thirties so… yeah. They knew it and assumed children would know it.

    I’d say “dingbat” is still in common usage and recognition as it ever was. All in the family didn’t invent it and it may be the most accessible reference, I don’t think it particularly popularized it. And I really don’t think its gone away.

  10. Unknown's avatar

    “The word of course remains familiar to font-heads.”

    I think you are confusing it, as I often do too, with “Wingding”. I don’t think there is any font called “dingbat”.

  11. Unknown's avatar

    I really like that moody final comic.

    @Powers, thank you for enriching the layered puns. She does look like she has experienced a loss! But of course “at a loss” can mean just “not knowing” .

  12. Unknown's avatar

    I call my dogs ‘dingbats’ quite frequently, safe in the knowledge that they’ve no idea I’m insulting them. Also, ding-a-ling.

  16. Unknown's avatar

    Thanks for adding that info Andrea.

    I hope you realize that in no way adds to the assertion that there is no font called Dingbats, and that people referring to Dingbats as a font are just getting confused about Wingdings.

  18. Unknown's avatar

    Okay. Did you understand my earlier comment? We don’t disagree. “Dingbat” has been a traditional term used by printers for decorative elements. In modern times, designers of fonts, both physical and digital, have come up with fonts that contain symbols etc., and to which they give names incorporating “Dingbats”. Such as ” ITC Zapf Dingbats” .

  20. Unknown's avatar

    There’s a lot wrong with YouTube these days (in my opinion) but something that’s not wrong is young singers and sometimes songwriters putting their efforts out there for us to see. No filtering by the record companies and big radio to decide what what we listen to. Some of it’s not good, but some of it is really good.

  21. Unknown's avatar

    I like that Baldo uses ‘couldn’t’ instead of the irritating bur probably inevitable ‘could’ but without the pun in the Spanish version, there’s no joke at all.

    And in Spanish, ‘no me importa’ means ‘it doesn’t matter to me’. ‘Importar’ can mean ‘to import’ or ‘to matter’.

  22. Unknown's avatar

    Megacorp of Seattle gave names like Wingdings and New York and Geneva to fonts because of an interesting quirk of the copyright laws. At the time, making a computerized version of a font was not considered a copyright infringement. But the names of the fonts were copyrighted, and Megacorp would have had to pay a license fee to name a font “Zapf Dingbats”.

  23. Unknown's avatar

    “Dingbat” has a fascinating history relating to comic strips:

    http://www.toonopedia.com/dingbat.htm

    I haven’t read Shoe in a long while, but I recall there were some good groaners.

    Also, the Dark Side Of The Horse seems to have a sub-series revolving around the “Airplane Mode” pun. DSOTH makes great use of puns in English, and I believe the artist Samson runs the same comics in the his native Finnish language? I wonder how the puns work.

    I’m also wondering how “Different Drum” might sound sung in Finnish….

  26. Unknown's avatar

    “Megacorp of Seattle gave names like Wingdings and New York and Geneva to fonts because of an interesting quirk of the copyright laws. ”

    And… dang, when I’m wrong, I’m REALLY wrong….

    Dingbat. A font. A well known and historic one. Wingdings, a Johnny Come Lately generic ersatz copy.

    ….

    But I still contend Dingbat is in as common usage as it ever was and though All in the Family capitalized on it, it is not especially associated with all in the family.

    I can’t claim dingbat is anyone’s type five insult, I’d claim it’s in most peoples top hundred. No more obscure than numbskull or ditz.

  27. Unknown's avatar

    I appreciate all that font-head discussion. Certainly in the computing age there were plenty of IP* issues, but I’m not sure the players were seated around the table as some have been saying. Andréa has observed Wingdings on a Mac, and I think I recall “New York” and “Geneva” as the main fonts on early Macs.

    Apart from the roles of the big computer manufacturers, there was a lot of fun and games involved in the naming of fonts from different houses. The name could clue in customers to relations of derivation and adaptation within one house, or imitation between competitors. I don’t think “New York” was actually meant to stand in for “Times” but it is tempting to think so. But definitely “Geneva” was meant to suggest “Helvetica” (from geography), as was also “Helios” from another company (from orthographic resemblance?). “Metropolis” is described as a stand-in for “Gotham” similarly.
    --
    *Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol

  28. Unknown's avatar

    “Wingdings is a series of dingbat fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes.”

    –from Wikipedia

  30. Unknown's avatar

    I know this has nothing to do with fonts or insults, but dingbats are a type of pictographic word puzzle as well. It takes a bit of lateral thinking to solve them and I think they’re quite fun.

  31. Unknown's avatar

    @Stan, thanks for that. I had never encountered that use of “dingbat” but did some looking up and they were a familiar and fun kind of puzzle.

    Not precisely the same (not able to draw here) but this word-rebus puzzle goes back in my memory several decades:

    The envelope was marked just this way, but successfully delivered. Where was it addressed?

    WOOD
    JOHN
    MASS

  32. Unknown's avatar

    I know the answer to the envelope question (I think I first saw it in a RIPLEY’S BELIEVE IT OR NOT collection fifty or sixty years ago), but I’ll keep mum here to let others work it out.

  34. Unknown's avatar

    I like this one:

    Atlanta Braves 4 – 1 Miami Marlins
    New York Mets 4 – 1 Philadelphia Phillies
    Washington Nationals 4 – 1 Chicago Cubs
    Cincinnati Reds 4 – 1 Milwaukee Brewers
    Pittsburgh Pirates 4 – 4 St. Louis Cardinals

    (Note: Forgive me if these teams don’t play each other for whatever reason. I’m not a sports fan and I just copied a list from the internet.)

  35. Unknown's avatar

    @Stan, thanks for warning us not to take the team names too seriously, o/w I would have been throwing my arms up and exclaiming “Well am I really supposed to know who is National League and who American?!”.

    That said, even so I’m not getting far with this one. I see all the 4’s and want to say something with “for” maybe. Four-lorn? Fours (force?) against one, then for-tie. Seven against Thebes … Oh oh aha! I see it!

    Now how can I avoid spoiler but still put in my claim to have solved it?

    Maybe in the form of a clue. “A tie at 4 would in some sports be called four-all”.

  37. Unknown's avatar

    I see it too! Is it still too soon to just post an answer? I’ll try for expressing as a clue: Motto of a small band-of-brothers.

  38. Unknown's avatar

    Okay, got it now.

    During the regular season, 4-4 is a very unlikely final score. The only way would be an official game (more than five innings) called due to weather, not easy to play the remainder at a future time, and no effect on the playoff standings.

  39. Unknown's avatar

    Brian: The way I heard it at first was with UK football teams. I converted it to baseball teams as I figured more people here would have heard of the New York Mets than Everton. If the scores are wonky for baseball, I apologise.

    Anyway, if anyone wants to write the answer, please don’t let me stop you.

  40. Unknown's avatar

    I’ve figured out that it’s supposed to conclude with the Musketeers slogan “all fo(u)r one, and one fo(u)r-all“, but I have not been able to figure out how to launch into the description so that the ending makes sense.

  41. Unknown's avatar

    @Kilby, nah, that’s all there is to it! These aren’t story-jokes where you have to work your way into something. Just a somehow obscured encoding of a familiar phrase, and the riddle-fun is in working out the encoding and finding the phrase — which then is the answer (with maybe a bit of explanation if the route there is not obvious in retrospect).

  42. Unknown's avatar

    @ Danny Boy – I was hoping that the end result would be as “clean” as the “Wood/John/Mass” example, which produced a completely legible address, with no extraneous approximations. The problem with the “Musketeers” riddle is that they are not all “fo(u)r-one”, so that the resulting text would be something like “almost all fo(u)r-one, except that one’s fo(u)r-all“, as if d’Artagnan was more altruistic than the other three self-serving knaves.

  43. Unknown's avatar

    Like Chak said, what’s the joke in the Spanish version of Baldo? It’s just three panels of him being upset about his car. Why would that be funny?

    Also how does “He couldn’t [care] less” or “No le podria importar menos” make sense as a response to the situation? Clearly Baldo cares quite a lot. In English you can ignore that it doesn’t make sense, because you understand it’s just said for the pun. But in Spanish it looks completely out of nowhere.

  44. Unknown's avatar

    @ WW – Perhaps it’s simply that he “could not care less”, meaning that “he is not able to release his anger about the situation”.

  45. Unknown's avatar

    Which may come down to “often a pun cannot be translated”. (That presupposes Baldo is first written in the English version.)

  46. Unknown's avatar

    Kilby: Hm. I do see now that “He is not able to care less” does make sense as a response to the situation. But I still don’t see a joke.

  47. Unknown's avatar

    Kilby “The problem with the “Musketeers” riddle is that they are not all “fo(u)r-one”, so that the resulting text would be something like “almost all fo(u)r-one, except that one’s fo(u)r-all“

    Yea, they’re not always perfect. They often just closely suggest a phrase rather than match it precisely. The John Underwood one is very clever, but let’s be honest, that letter wouldn’t reach him unless there was only one JU in Andover, and the postal worker knew exactly where he lived since there is no street name or house number. Or zip code for that matter. Still, they’re fun to work out.

    Here’s one that works pretty well:

    MACBETH
    words words
    words words
    words words
    words words

    And another that goes along well with the theme of the comic under discussion:

    dingbat
    +
    broken arm

  48. Unknown's avatar

    “using an embattled English expression in its traditional form, not the disputed more-modern form”

    I got curious about this, and from google ngrams “couldn’t care” currently beats “could care” by a factor of 3 or 4, and the factor my which it wins has been largely constant over the last 50 years.

  49. Unknown's avatar

    I really don’t think people who say “I could care less” rather than “I couldn’t care less” are at all a majority. It’s just that people who notice really, really, really hate hearing “I could care less” whereas the people who say “I could care less” aren’t aware and never noticed that other people say “I couldn’t care less” (if they did, they wouldn’t say it) so when they first are aware there is an issue assume that everyone says “I could care less” because they’ve so seldom heard “couldn’t”.

    Just like so people who #@%$ think “The Usual Suspects” is an obscure film #@*&!

  50. Unknown's avatar

    @ Danny Boy – “…presupposes Baldo is first written in the English version…”
    The writers are bilingual: I have no idea whether they are stronger in one language than the other, but I have seen examples that indicate translations in both directions (and that’s just based on the strips that have shown up here at CIDU, I don’t follow the strip otherwise).
    P.S. @ WW – “But I still don’t see a joke.”
    There isn’t much of one (in either language), the strip is banking on the situational Schadenfreude of watching someone else having car problems.
    P.S. @ woozy – “…people who say “I could care less” aren’t aware…”
    Yes, that’s exactly the problem: they are clueless and unthinking.

  51. Unknown's avatar

    Bilingual, but Hector Cantu was born and raised in Texas. I think it’s likely his predominant language is English.

  52. Unknown's avatar

    “There isn’t much of one (in either language), the strip is banking on the situational Schadenfreude of watching someone else having car problems.”

    Well, in English we have an actual pun. In spanish, it seems, we need to rely the absurd image that the car is so worthless and frustrating he’d think a Pogo Stick is a better option. I think we can view that as a back-up joke.

    ….. Oh… but I guess the Spanish would be weird because the statement that Baldo is indifferent to the car, when he’s clearly angry wouldn’t make any sense.

  53. Unknown's avatar

    woozy: “. . . the Spanish would be weird . . .”

    I think Kilby had a reasonable explanation of that – “He can’t care less. . .” meaning “He’s not able to care less. . .”

    Actually, at some point I saw something about the history of “He could/couldn’t care less…” in English, and apparently one of the first uses of the phrase was something like “He cares about you so much. He couldn’t care less even if he wanted to,” so that the “couldn’t” form was used (correctly, in that case), to mean a lot of caring.

  54. Unknown's avatar

    When I was a kid, people said “I couldn’t care less” to mean they did not care.Then at some point they started saying “I could care less” ironically. Also when I was a kid, people (in New England at least) said “So don’t I” to mean “So do I.” I can see “I don’t like Brussels sprouts.” “So don’t I”, but they were saying like “I love chocolate ice cream.” “So don’t I.” as each of them digs into a bowl of chocolate ice cream.

  55. Unknown's avatar

    @Stan, I haven’t gotten anywhere with the additional “dingbats” you posted. Nor seen others attempting them. Can you offer some help at this point? Thanks!

    Here’s one that works pretty well:

    MACBETH
    words words
    words words
    words words
    words words

    And another that goes along well with the theme of the comic under discussion:

    dingbat
    +
    broken arm

  57. Unknown's avatar

    After some thought, I got them both. So, you guys want some hints?

    Don’t look if you don’t want hints yet

    The Macbeth one is kind of a … What’s another way of saying “pun”?

    For the other, we have gone through multiple definitions of “dingbat” in this thread. Go back to the Archie Bunker usage, and then do the math.

  59. Unknown's avatar

    I had been thinking of a Shakespeare passage that goes “Words words words” and thought “Ah but it’s not Macbeth it’s Lear. So how does it help us?” But in fact, it’s Hamlet.

    I was thinking Lear because the repetition led to association to “Never never never never never”. And then somehow a play on words via French: “N’est vert” …

  61. Unknown's avatar

    Andréa, in this thread, following the discussion of “dingbat” as a term of personal insult AND a printing term, Stan in a comment stamped NOVEMBER 7, 2020 AT 10:13 PM said it was also a name for a sort of rebus word puzzle. Several were posed, and solved. A couple were posted but not addressed, until somebody reminded us this morning. These last few comments have been about that.

  62. Unknown's avatar

    Okay, I guess we’ve solved PLAY ON WORDS

    I don’t get far with “Edith plus fracture” though

  63. Unknown's avatar

    Well I wonder if “broken arm” might work like in “cryptic clue crosswords” — literally break “ARM” into “A” and “RM” or “AR” and “M” and put the two pieces on either side of something associated with the personal-insult sense of dingbat.

  65. Unknown's avatar

    These “clues” are more cryptic than the original puzzles.

    I don’t see anybody offering clues, either as help or as claiming a solution. I see attempts at solving and thinking out loud. This complaint about something or other being more cryptic than the original puzzles is peculiarly misplaced.

  66. Unknown's avatar

    @Andréa, has your question timestamped “NOVEMBER 12, 2020 AT 1:05 PM” about what some of these puzzling posts are about, been answered?

  68. Unknown's avatar

    @ Danny Boy – Your answer “play on words” was not (yet) visible when I made my last comment, and no matter what you want to call it, the “thinking out loud” has not provided me with enough help to solve the other one.

  69. Unknown's avatar

    no matter what you want to call it, the “thinking out loud” has not provided me with enough help to solve the other one

    And why should it? “Thinking out loud” means people trying out ideas, to see if they can solve it, or if the group can. But without the presumption that it will be right or will suffice. So why do you come along and complain that it isn’t enough?

    It may be that Stan is the only one here who can answer the last one. He has provided clues, indeed, which don’t seem to give the rest of us enough of a handle.

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