Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro takes us to the world of talking tennis balls, where one of them commits a bathroom pun on the noun can ‘cylindrical metal container’:
(#1) Cylindrical metal containers are highly salient to tennis balls, because such cans are how they’re sold (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Meanwhile, Wayno’s title for #1 — “Today’s Ballsy Cartoon” — offers a different pun, on (tennis) balls, a mildly raunchy one: ballsy ‘tough, courageous”, a derivative in –y (tricky < trick, mushy < mush, etc.) from crude slang balls ‘testicles’. And my title for this posting (“In the can”) offers another pun on cylindrical container can; from NOAD:
phrase in the can: informal on tape or film and ready to be broadcast or released: all went well, the film was in the can.
Now for some details.
Toilet time. The eliminatory noun can has at least two characteristics of linguistic interest.
First, like toilet, water closet, lavatory, crude crapper, and vulgar shitter, it’s ambiguous between the appliance for elimination and the place for elimination (the room with the appliance in it); the OED3 entry (revised in 2016) for can implicitly suggests, quite plausibly, that the appliance sense is historically prior, but this would have to be demonstrated from textual studies. Meanwhile, it’s probably relevant that while all the appliance terms I know of have corresponding place senses, there are unambiguous location terms: head, latrine, privy, jakes, outhouse, and of course compounds with second element room: bathroom, restroom, men’s room, ladies’ room, etc.
Second, typical uses of eliminatory can (for both appliance and location) are arthrous, with the definite article the — as in locational I was in the can in #1; or appliance I was on the can. You use the definite article even if you urinate or defecate in a bathroom of a classy house with many bathrooms; the definiteness comes, so to speak, from the activity, not from a uniqueness of the bathroom.
In the dictionaries. First, from GDoS on the noun can (which has a great many slang senses):
… 4 as a room, place or container … (b) (US) a water closet, a lavatory [arthrous, especially in in the can and to the can, with the ‘room’ sense; with cites as well for the ‘appliance’ sense, as in on the can; 1st cite 1900, for the ‘room’ sense, in a list of college words and phrases]
Then from OED3:
… II. Slang uses … II.5. North American slang (originally and chiefly U.S.) A toilet; the room containing this [arthrous, again with cites for both the appliance and the room, and the same 1st cite]
Balls in cans. So much for the punning sense of can. On to the model sense, denoting the cylindrical metal containers in which tennis balls are sold, as here:
(#2) The Wilson company makes a variety of sporting goods
And then the balls, which are typically fluorescent yellow (as in #1) or green, so that they can be easily spotted during matches; and are labeled with the maker’s name and some code for the particular line of balls, as here:
(#3)
— and as, in much more elaborate fashion, the ball on the right in #1.
The cartoonist’s little surprise. Cartoonists often incorporate private jokes into their work, in the fashion of Easter eggs: specific scenery that has nothing to do with the point of the cartoon; textual allusions; characters with the faces of famous people, other cartoonists, or the artist’s family and friends; carefully chosen proper names; meaningful color schemes; and so on. (And then Dan Piraro has his private symbols secreted throughout Bizarro cartoons.)
#1 has one of these jokes in it. The brand name on the ball on the left is not that of some well-known sporting goods company or the name of some celebrity tennis player fronting for such a company; it’s Watson, which I took to refer to Tom Watson the celebrity golfer — a name that’s surely not accidentally so similar to Wilson. Watson as in this vintage Tom Watson golf ball:
(#4) As advertised on sale on eBay
Well, that’s my hypothesis. I’ll run this by Wayno, see what he says.
[Addendum: Well, Easter eggs are like this. The only reasonable place I could go with Watson was another sportsball guy, Tom. (Sherlock Holmes was clearly irrelevant, and IBM too.) But the hard truth:
— Wayno > AZ: The Watson comic strip by Jim Horwitz.
— Jim Horwitz > AZ: I’ve been pals with Wayno and Dan for many years. We do shout-outs to each other across strips all the time.
And I was ignorant. From the website for the strip:
WATSON is a weekly web-comic that updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The strip focuses on the relationship between a little boy, Fudgey, and his ever-watchful dog Watson. Watson and Fudgey live in the town of Good Haven, learning to navigate all the perils of life, love, and laughter together.
Watson is unique in that it is conceived and drawn as a –: a comic strip of only one frame that uses reoccurring characters and themes to create a familiar world of engaging, singular moments. As a comic strip, Watson deals with the subtleties of experience; the moments of doubt, realization, oddity, forgiveness, and love that people experience on a daily basis. While paying homage to traditional “print strips” in newspapers, Watson is something very new: It’s an online strip that celebrates the History of Comics with a renewed spirit of hope, joy, and whimsy. Watson is big and bright, colorful, and fun. – It’s “old school” in its best “new school” format.
You can also follow the strip on Horwitz’s Facebook page.]