I'm back!

SC has returned from a most unusual week in the Sunshine State. While it was necessarily a solemn affair, your host nevertheless kept an eye out for things that would be of linguistic and/or prurient interest. He was not disappointed.

Among the more disturbing sights to be seen on I-95 South between Fort Lauderdale and Miami are two advertisements in rather close proximity. The first is for a business called "Mr. Bidet" (I am not making this up, although it's hard to get pictures at freeway speeds, and my luck was no better than anyone else's). Mr. Bidet's store features a picture of a stick figure...receiving a bath, with the caption "For a healthy clean tush". The other ad is for a carpet store owned by one Don Bailey; read here to find out why SC was traumatized to see it (Mr. Bailey is not an especially attractive physical specimen).

SC's parents fell in love immediately with a place called the Starlite Diner, which we found near our hotel on the first night in the state. Because of the unfortunate truths associated with majority rule, we proceeded to eat there four times in three days. It's not that good, folks. One amusing fact about the place is that it happened to change ownership on our second day in Florida, and so the waitresses all sported "Moonlite Diner" t-shirts from that day on. As for the diner itself, it's just like one might expect a nostalgia-driven eatery in a retirement community to be like. One orders greasy food from cigarette-voiced crones who rasp, "that all, sweetie?", and who shuffle back and forth from the kitchen with a notable lack of enthusiasm. There is a linguistic point of interest about the Starlite Diner, though; their locations include three spots in Florida, two in Moscow, Russia, and one in Cape Town, South Africa, and the menu includes a small amount of what I am guessing is Cyrillic text. This may be seen in the logo which appears on the bottom half of the second page of the linked PDF file. The second word of that text might further explain an oddity of the menu, which features a "Really Really Beeeg" Burger and Sundae, and a merely "Really Beeeg" Breakfast. The aforementioned second word resembles "Beeeg" in outline, although strictly speaking, it reads more like 3le3q.

For those with a taste for deli, and who know the Miami area for the restaurants formerly owned by Wolfie Cohen, SC will restrict his comments to saying that the Rascal House ain't what it used to be. It was, however, where SC's great-uncle would have wanted to go, and so we did after the funeral.

As far as the explicit purpose of the trip, your host will say only that "aspiration pneumonia" is a terrible way to go. The grotesque details can be found here; suffice it to say that it's a terrible thing to watch someone struggle to breathe through this. Massive amounts of morphine can relieve the pain somewhat, but it's a nevertheless grim condition.

One more linguistic item: something is more than a little odd about people who know that you went to see someone for the last time asking "so, how was your trip?". Especially with a rising intonation. It's as if I had gone off to Disney World or something. I tried experimenting on myself with a variety of other intonation contours, and I admit I couldn't persuade myself that any of them sounded particularly appropriate. It's really the reference to "your trip" that matches up so poorly with the circumstances; while "trip" and "vacation" aren't synonymous, the combination of semantic and phonological cues conveys a meaning that just doesn't say "funeral".

Many thanks to Radagast for keeping interested parties updated while I was gone. It's going to be a day or two before I catch up on other blogs, although I see that the end of my hiatus comes just in time to keep Languagehat fans from running out of workplace diversions altogether.

Comments

[ACW]

The Cyrillic at the bottom of the second page reads "Svet Zvezd", which I'm pretty sure means "Light of Stars", on the basis of two and a half terms of Russian a quarter-century ago.

[ACW]

My Russian informant informs me that the "e" in "Zvezd" is in fact a "yo", so the word should be pronounced [zvjozd]. (Imagine that j superscripted, wouldya?)

[Semantic Compositions]

Thanks for the information! I thought it might be the diner name, but I had no way to tell.