Pull My Daisy

The Mother Road

“Known as The Mother Road, the nostalgic journey from Chicago to L.A. takes one back to the good old days.” A Christmas postcard from Tricia Tommerdahl.

I Say A Little Prayer

Face the Music

Unaffordable Home Design

“Clearly you need new furniture. To select exactly what you want, you need to have some Creative Decorating Ideas, which you get by purchasing about $65 worth of glossy magazines with names like Unaffordable Home Design. Inside these magazines will be exquisite color photographs of the most wondrously perfect, profoundly clean rooms anybody has ever seen, rooms where even the air molecules are arranged in attractive patterns. How, you ask yourself, can rooms look like this? Where are the hand smudges? Where is the dark spot on the carpet where the dog threw up the unidentified reptile? And how come there are never any people in these photographs?
    The answer is: These rooms are only four inches high. The magazines have them built by skilled craftsmen solely for the purpose of making your home look, by comparison, like a Roach Motel. In fact, occasionally a magazine will slip up, and you’ll see through the window of what is allegedly a rich person’s living room, what appears to be a 675-pound thumb.”
   
—Dave Barry, Subhumanize Your Living Room, from Dave Barry’s Greatest HIts, 1988.

Blue Monk

Jazz Casual

A Night in Tunisia

The bee’s knee

If you don’t know me personally, then you might not know that I have been writing an essay on the terminology of typography which I plan to submit to Verbatim, an academic lexicographic quarterly. I’m as over-ambitious for this project as I have ever been for any project, so I am determined to create a humorous but thorough and perhaps even a profound work. A comic typographic Moby Dick, if you will.
    Last night I finished it. Or I went to bed thinking I had. But this morning I was bothered by an inkling of one last term, but one that I was not at all sure of. It involved a colon and a dash, and had something to do with two balls, and a prick. So I googled two balls and a prick. The results I were interesting, but I found no reference whatsoever to punctuation or typography.
    Then I googled punctuation and colon and I was onto something. Yes, the combination of a colon and a dash, which at one time was fairly common but has now been replaced by just the colon, is sometimes referred to, according to a post at a discussion group, as a colon-dash or a dog’s prick. A dog’s prick! But no, this gets stranger. The Partridge Dictionary of Slang, according to another person, defines a dog’s prick as typographic slang for an exclamation mark! Could it refer to both, I wondered?
    Well, no. According to the 1949 third edition of the Partridge Dictionary of Slang, “the typographical colon-dash (:—)” is sometimes referred to as dog’s ballocks. And the Oxford English Dictionary, in an online ‘draft revision’ dated July 2007, concurs:

“dog’s bollocks n. (also dog’s ballocks) Brit. coarse slang (a) Typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs (see quot. 1949) (rare); (b) (with the) the very best, the acme of excellence; cf. the cat’s whiskers at CAT n.1 13l, bee’s knee n. (b) at BEE n.1 5b.”

    The bee’s knee. How could I have possibly thought, last night, that the essay was complete.

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