(no subject)
I was sitting at a meeting today, looking around for something to occupy my thoughts during an intense and epochal discussion of bureaucratic minutiae, and my eye fell on a Mountain Dew bottle resting on the table a couple feet away. Over the last three decades, the Mountain Dew logo has slowly diverged from the funky, rounded letters of the 70s, each time becoming blockier and more compact. It occurred to me that most of the squarish letters in the latest incarnation would be readable upside down: the big W of Dew would become an M, of course, but the e, with its flat bottom, would look just like an a in the same font when rotated 180°, and the D, almost square, could pass for an O. And so on. I couldn't do the experiment right then, as the bottle's owner had lost the cap, and inverting the bottle would hence cause a disturbance; but once I hunted up a picture of the trademark on the Web, I could turn it over electronically. The result was surprisingly pronounceable:
I read the inverted text as "Mao uietunoW," although the t in the second word is a bit of a stretch. The second half of Uietunow looks vaguely Russian, so I pronounce it with a V sound at the end.
All in all, my Mountain Dew inversion experiment turned out disappointing. I was hoping for something like the old Sunshine Biscuit snack called "doo dads" (in all lower-case). You might not remember doo dads; it was perhaps the first of the now common assorted-snack snacks, a random mix of pretzel chunks, mini Cheez-It crackers, Chexoids, and several other, less identifiable kinds of salty morsels. Long ago, while the brother and I were happily tossing down doo dads, Dad pointed out that when the box was turned upside down, it read "spap oop." Spap Oop! BWAAAhahahaha! Something about those terminal Ps just sounds hilarious. It's such an strange thing to say: it's well-formed in English, strictly speaking, but so awkward and anti-euphonic that nobody would ever make up anything like it for reasonable and proper usage as an English word. Better yet, it gives the speaker a prime opportunity to spray the entire room.
I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that we weren't the only ones to uncover the delights of Spap Oop.
Alas, Spap Oop is no longer sold, and I couldn't even find a picture of the box on the Net. However, the manufacturer kindly wrote the trademark in an extremely common font (Futura Extra Bold, for you font enthusiasts), and thus I can recreate it:
Spap Oop! Spap Oop! Hee hee hee! Stop it-you're killing me! Choke...gasp...BAAAHAHA! Spap Oop! I can't stand it! HAW HAW HAW HAW!!!
I read the inverted text as "Mao uietunoW," although the t in the second word is a bit of a stretch. The second half of Uietunow looks vaguely Russian, so I pronounce it with a V sound at the end.
All in all, my Mountain Dew inversion experiment turned out disappointing. I was hoping for something like the old Sunshine Biscuit snack called "doo dads" (in all lower-case). You might not remember doo dads; it was perhaps the first of the now common assorted-snack snacks, a random mix of pretzel chunks, mini Cheez-It crackers, Chexoids, and several other, less identifiable kinds of salty morsels. Long ago, while the brother and I were happily tossing down doo dads, Dad pointed out that when the box was turned upside down, it read "spap oop." Spap Oop! BWAAAhahahaha! Something about those terminal Ps just sounds hilarious. It's such an strange thing to say: it's well-formed in English, strictly speaking, but so awkward and anti-euphonic that nobody would ever make up anything like it for reasonable and proper usage as an English word. Better yet, it gives the speaker a prime opportunity to spray the entire room.
I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that we weren't the only ones to uncover the delights of Spap Oop.
Alas, Spap Oop is no longer sold, and I couldn't even find a picture of the box on the Net. However, the manufacturer kindly wrote the trademark in an extremely common font (Futura Extra Bold, for you font enthusiasts), and thus I can recreate it:
Spap Oop! Spap Oop! Hee hee hee! Stop it-you're killing me! Choke...gasp...BAAAHAHA! Spap Oop! I can't stand it! HAW HAW HAW HAW!!!