Wednesday, November 25, 2015

be selective, be objective, be an asset to the collective

Couple of brief follow-ups regarding earlier stuff:

Firstly, halibut news. Doug is a man whose expertise on matters zoological I trust implicitly, so when he told me the other day that I should go and Google "olive flounder" I immediately went and did so, with only the smallest amount of suspicion that I was being pranked and that it would turn out to be some eye-watering sex act that cannot be described on a family blog. With pictures. But, mercifully, it turns out the olive flounder really is a thing, relevant to this blog because it's also apparently colloquially known as the "bastard halibut". I see no evidence for this particular flatfish being any more unpleasant, obnoxious or untrustworthy than any other, so I assume the "bastard" bit refers to its not really being a proper halibut. Getting your Paralichthyidae mixed up with your Pleuronectidae is social death where I come from. Nonetheless, I like olives, and my swimming style is best described by the word "flounder" (or, if you catch me a few minutes later, the word "drown").

Secondly, a quick update on my wildly ambitious project to catalogue the full lexicon of Daily Mail euphemisms. Anyone who follows me on Twitter (and why wouldn't you?) will have seen my occasional flagging of Mail stories with the #assetbingo hashtag - the rule being the word "assets" has to be in the main headline, and it has to unambiguously refer to tits, ideally with the word "flaunting" in there somewhere as well.

A sighting of "assets" used to describe a bodily attribute other than tits is a rare beast indeed - here's one from a couple of days ago in a bit of a non-story about a woman with fairly long legs (these being the assets in question).


Rest assured women are still "pouring their curves" into things as well: recent examples can be found here, here and here.

1 comment:

The black rabbit said...

Yes.
Halibut (whether one of the two (I think?) "proper" halibut spp. or whether one of the more numerous (of spp.) of fish sometimes called a "halibut") are all just yer basic flounder really.
Floundering and flapping around at the bottom of the sea.

It's just that the "proper" halibut are right-eyed and supposedly look like horse tongues ('hippoglossus') more than their supposedly halibesque (halioboid) piscean brethren.

So.
Is the "electric halibut" a "proper" halibut and thus right-eyed & shaped like a horse's tongue or not?
YOU DECIDE.