Miscellaneous Friday

Angels and Mullets

How can anybody resist the word mullet?  I wouldn’t say mullet is one of my favorite words, in the sense meant in this thread on Language Log.  I don’t think saying “mullet” is a pleasure in itself, or hearing “mullet.”  It’s the idea that I think is fascinating, with all the cloud of connotations and historical references and visualized images that follow in its trail.  I first saw a mullet, I think (at least as a distinct look, up close), in 1984, as a freshman in college, on an engineering student from one of the more distant villages of Queens County, and first heard the word about fifteen years later.  In between, I’d seen lots and lots of them.  I really didn’t know there was such a word.  By way of pointing to Christopher Orr’s review of Angels and Demons as a film about a haircut:

Robert Langdon, has returned, but without the mullet, which in the interim evidently detached itself from his scalp, crawled off to some dark corner, and grew up to be Danny McBride.

Orr says the film has been “lightly reworked.”

The Producers is being produced in Berlin.

Despite coverage of the show in local newspapers, not all Berliners have been clued in to its comic nature, Bech said. City police have received a number of complaints about posters for the production, which “provoked associations with the Nazis” despite the fact that swastikas have been replaced with images of pretzels in order to conform to German law. (Swastikas can be used onstage as part of an “artistic statement,” Bech said, but not as part of the show’s promotional materials.) 

Here's the poster, complete with pretzels.

Every so often, Michael Bérubé

. . . finds himself witnessing . . .

. . . or sometimes actually taking part in, exchanges that go like this:

First Person: Hey, what do you think of this proposal?

Second Person: Excuse me, but I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Beg pardon?

Second Person: I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Um . . . but that’s why I’m asking what you think.  I’m consulting you.  This is the consultation right now.

Second Person: I can’t believe you went ahead and did this without asking for anybody’s input.  I really think we need to talk.

First Person: ??

And no, I am never the Second Person.  When people ask me what I think about X, I simply say “kewl” or “meh” or “ZOMG” or “do not want” or some other Internets locution. 

Comments

[randomassociativethoughts?]

Mullet is also a fish that apparently isn't interested in bait (it eats *detritus* according to wiki). To catch one of them, ubiquitous in the surf along the Gulf Coast in the US, you put as many treble hooks on a line as you can, cast into a giant school of them, and violently rip the line through, hoping to snag one. Or else someone was pulling my leg. Cuz it never worked.

But yeah, the haircut is a classic, and was in need of a name.

Millet is also a nice word, but more for the sound of the thing, IMO.