Steven Levine on Facebook on 8/23, reporting in from an enormously crowded Minnesota State Fair, posted this cartoon t-shirt from the fair, with a note of distress:
(#1) SL: I find this t- shirt design to be disturbing. Shades of Charlie the Tuna.
(To which I added: Eat me!) I’ll get to Charlie the vorarephilic horse mackerel (and the Ameglian Major Cow, too) in a little while. But first, on fun-food corn dogs and cob-canine corn dogs.
The compound nouns corn dog. Let’s start with the one in dictionaries, fun-food corn dog. From NOAD:
noun corn dog: North American a hot dog covered in cornmeal batter, fried, and served on a stick.
Fun-food corn dog is monumentally not a semantically transparent compound: the head N dog is a shortening of hot dog ‘frankfurter’, with the historical semantic contribution of dog unclear (possibly involving a belief that the frankfurters were sometimes made of, or with, dogmeat) — but that’s irrelevant to the current usage, anyway; and the modifier N corn is an indirect allusion to the surrounding cornmeal covering, rather than an enclosing wheaten bun.
The cob-canine corn dog on the MN State Fair t-shirt — a Canis familiaris with a corncob body, hence ‘a (pet) dog made of corn’ — conveys corn dog as a pun on this conventional compound. Then, since the t-shirt is in fact advertising corn dogs the edible treat on a stick, sold generally at state fairs, it would appear that the pet dog is offering itself to be consumed for pleasure. That sweet silly dog is, oh dear, a vorarephile (a vore, for short), a creature that wants to be eaten, to be the object of voracity (for whatever reason) — which is what Steven Levine found disturbing.
From my 4/20/24 posting “Charlie on the couch”, about a Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon with a stylized tunafish on the couch:
(#2) To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize that the patient’s not any old tuna, but Charlie, the celebrity mascot for the StarKist brand, whose widely advertised decades-long goal in life is to taste good (while — sorry, Charlie — his pursuit of good taste constantly frustrates this ambition, an experience that seems have led him to seek therapy)
Which leads to the Dish of the Day at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe; from the relevant Hitchhiker’s fandom wiki:
The Ameglian Major Cow (also referred to as the Dish of the Day) was one example of a race of artificially created, sentient creatures which were bred to want to be eaten. It appeared in the television adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and in the sixth novel, And Another Thing….
Digression: cob creatures. Yes, there’s more than one; we live in a world of wonders. To the cob-canine in #1 there corresponds cartoonist Tom Toro’s cob-fish, his corn on the cod (you are legally required to groan out loud at this point), from my 7/19/24 posting “Datoro!”:
(#3)
There are corn dogs and ten there are corn dogs. A simple fact about fun-food corn dog is that it’s a common, not proper, noun; in particular, it’s not a brand name. Which now is going to lead to some stickiness in talking about corn dogs at the MN State Fair.
Because that fair is famous for offering a special sort of corn dog, the Pronto Pup, and Pronto Pup really is a brand name; it’s also, as Steven Levine pointed out on FB, what’s being advertised on the t-shirt in #1. Pronto Pups are prepared somewhat differently from other corn dogs, and they taste different from other corn dogs too. From Wikipedia:
Pronto Pup is an amusement park and carnival food similar to a corn dog made with flour mix, which is used by restaurants and street vendors across the United States. Named for the speed of the cooking process, the Pronto Pup was invented in Rockaway Beach, Oregon [in the late 1930s], and is marketed as the original corn dog.
… Pronto Pups are made with a type of pancake batter, whereas typical corn dogs [AZ: corn dogs in the narrow sense] use variations of cornbread batter, both of which contain cornmeal [AZ: they are all corn dogs in the wide sense]. The main difference is that corn dogs are sweet, while Pronto Pups are not.
The difference between wide and narrow senses of some item is familiar in other contexts. There’s dog in the wide sense, referring to canines of both sexes, and there’s dog in the narrow sense, referring only to male dogs, in contrast to bitch. All bitches are dogs (in the wide sense), but no dogs (in the narrow sense) are bitches. There are tons of parallel examples. Ordinary conversation usually proceeds without confusion because context makes it clear which sense is intended — as in
corn dogs are sweet, while Pronto Pups are not
above, where corn dogs will be understood in the narrow sense, because it’s being contrasted with Pronto Pups.
In any case, Pronto Pups are a very big thing at the MN State Fair, as in this photo:
(#4) A Pronto Pup stand at the fair (photo from the Quick Country 96.5 website)
