Visual Verbiage
A picture may be worth a thousand words in some contexts, but give me a thousand Frost forest-themed lexemes any day to a Kinkadian scene of sylvan kitsch. I consider myself a syncretist, and in Visual Verbiage I have employed visual means to represent words and phrases. I refer to this work as “pictographic paronomasia” or “pictorial pun-ditry.”
Visual Verbiage is also the title of a book I am writing that will contain several dozen of my visual puns, along with an explication of each, given that many are obscure.
Finally, I plan to post, from time to time, pages from The Geopolitical Jungle Coloring/Cholering Book, an in-progress project by my son, Sean, and me. This project is a spinoff from our What a Zoo! published in 2005.
What A Zoo! appears to have been the inspiration for reactionary blowhard Michael Savage’s later-published and very similar Political Zoo.
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Gallery
Transpositional Triptych. Each section of this triptych is a baseball-related spoonerism,
a play on words in which the initial (usually consonantal) sounds of
two or more words are transposed. For example, “The queer old dean”
(instead of “the dear old Queen”), attributed to Reverend W. A.
Spooner, the eponym for the term spoonerism.
“Rome Hun” is a canvas sack on which are imposed a map of the Roman Empire, Attila the Hun, and phrases such as “When in Rome, sack it!” (Artistic license here: Attila did not sack Rome.)
“Balls on Bass” is a homophonic spoonerism, as balls of various types adorn a bass guitar.
“Buns Ratted In.” A rat has dug into a couple of hamburger buns, as I gleefully convert the noun rat into a verb that has nothing to do with catching rodents or squealing on someone.