Viral plums
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Ottilie Mitchell and Tiffanie Turnbull, "'Nowhere's safe': How an island of penguins ended up on Trump tariff list", BBC 4/4/2025:
Two tiny, remote Antarctic outposts populated by penguins and seals are among the obscure places targeted by the Trump administration's new tariffs.
Heard and McDonald Islands – a territory which sits 4,000km (2,485 miles) south-west of Australia – are only accessible via a seven-day boat trip from Perth, and haven't been visited by humans in almost a decade.
Australian trade minister Don Farrell told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the tariffs were "clearly a mistake".
"Poor old penguins, I don't know what they did to Trump, but, look, I think it's an indication, to be honest with you, that this was a rushed process."
There have been various other reactions to those tariffs' math and geography — but my favorite commentary was a poem:
I have tariffed
the penguins
that are on
Heard Islandand which
you were probably
assuming
did not export goodsforgive me
they were taking advantage of us
so cunning
and so cold— Janel Comeau (@verybadllama.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 3:45 PM
…which of course is an echo of William Carlos Williams' 1934 poem "This is just to say":
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
The poem's Wikipedia page links to two articles about its viral uptake: "This is just to say we have explained the plum jokes in your Twitter feed" (2017) and "This is just to say… : The parodies of that ‘plums’ poem just keep coming" (2018). And I've seen another recent pastiche about SignalGate, not to mention an example that I posted last year about RFK Jr's dead bear ("This is just to say", 8/6/2024).
PennSound has many readings by Williams, five of which include this poem. Here's a version recorded in Rutherford NJ, June 1950:
And another version, also recorded in Rutherford, from August 1950:
A recording from Harvard in December of 1951 has two readings and some relevant commentary:
In Van Nuys CA, November 1950, Williams also brings up possible psychiatric implications:
My guess is that the rhetorical virality of this poem has not been dependent on its Freudian overtones, but I'm open to discussion of the issue.
See also:
"Syllable-scale wheelbarrow spectrogram", 5/28/2019
"Accidental art", 5/30/2019
A comment by Rubrick on "Poetic sound and silence", 2/12/2016
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
April 4, 2025 @ 6:28 am
Am I alone in observing that I don't "get" the "Plums" poem at all, or is there an Emperor's New Clothes thing going on? Somebody ate someone else's plums; I mean, it's not Rilke or anything…
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 4, 2025 @ 6:57 am
@B.E.O.: some German required (re:"Pflaume" – yes, it's rather vul[g|v]ar)
Chips Mackinolty said,
April 4, 2025 @ 7:04 am
This really is the gift that keeps giving. I have imaginings of Trump, in his old age, trying to extract tariffs from penguins and seals …
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
April 4, 2025 @ 7:15 am
And the "Best Deployment of Brackets Award" goes to Olaf Zimmermann für:
Still, I'm sure Bocaccio made a few "fig" jokes, but it doesn't make for great poetry, does it?
Raphael said,
April 4, 2025 @ 8:07 am
Benjamin E. Orsatti: Well, all art is subjective, I guess. It seems to have been part of a general trend for poems in that style around that time.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 4, 2025 @ 8:16 am
@B.E.O.: You might say that, but I couldn't possibly comment ;-)
David Marjanović said,
April 4, 2025 @ 8:46 am
News to me as a native speaker. Which region are you talking about?
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 4, 2025 @ 9:18 am
@D.M. A quick google search gives me the following sinnernyms ;-) : Pflaume Fut Muschi Möse (I can make it longer if you like the style …) Frequency may vary by topolect. Plaume, Möse, seem to be more from above the river Main – a major language barrier. But we can't blame it all on the Romans, can we?
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 4, 2025 @ 9:22 am
@Raphael – ever read any Chaucer? or worse, Rabelais?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
April 4, 2025 @ 10:11 am
Olaf,
Interesting. I'd imagine if one were to do a study on cross-cultural scatological versification, you'd see a lot of bodily functions among the English (Chaucer's "let[ting] flee a fart like a thonderdent!"); disgusting things done with food by the French (Rabelais), and (often blasphemous) sexual activity among the Italians (Boccacio; but see that prude Dante).
Philip Taylor said,
April 4, 2025 @ 12:20 pm
Reluctant tho’ normally I would be to cite Wikipedia in any context, the following may be of interest to David Marjanović —
And as to Benjamin’s/Chaucer’s "let[ting] flee a fart like a thonderdent!", if were it not for the fact that I admire the original so much, I might be tempted to parody Henry Reed’s Naming of parts as Naming of farts …
Y said,
April 4, 2025 @ 2:20 pm
This brilliant soul:
https://bsky.app/profile/logopetria.bsky.social/post/3lfctvchuck2u
blended Williams and Shelley and Not-Hemingway into one poem, set to the tune of the Wallace and Gromit theme.
Lukas Daniel Klausner said,
April 4, 2025 @ 2:45 pm
@David: Speaking as a fellow Austrian – AFAIK, it's quite common in Germany.
Yves Rehbein said,
April 4, 2025 @ 3:13 pm
Given nom de plume, "pen name", plume "feather", I guess that the connotation of Pflaume is not "plum". A cognate would be Pflaum, Flaum "fluff, down", so-called peach fuzz.
I had a priori assumed that nom de plume was a bloomy name, because those names are creative: durch die Blume, verblümt, verhüllend, "indirectly, oblique, allusive" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/durch_die_Blume just as Blei corresponds to plumbum "lead" (lead as in Bleiletter "black letter" with black as in blacksmith). If you want to go the whole hog to bulba, you have to put in more work.
Meanwhile, plum cannot possibly come from Latin prunum (contra Wiktionary).
Philip Taylor said,
April 4, 2025 @ 3:35 pm
The OED has a great deal of interest to say on the etymology of "plum", but rather more than I would feel justified in quoting in full. See, if you are able, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/plum_n?tab=etymology
Julian said,
April 4, 2025 @ 6:49 pm
@Benjamin E Orsatti
"Somebody ate someone else's plums; I mean, it's not Rilke or anything…"
No offence meant; each to their own; there's a lot of admired art and literature that I don't get either (maybe different from your list)….
But …
You remind me of the famous, possibly apocryphal review of Moby Dick: "It's a story about whaling."
HS said,
April 4, 2025 @ 7:31 pm
I have always loved Williams's* poem and I have never considered it to have Freudian overtones. In fact, the possibility had never occurred to me – this is not a double entendre Blues or anything like that. I have always just considered it to be a kind of slice of life (or imagist), good-humouredly teasing, casually intimate love poem, where the final line perhaps throws a slightly ambiguous air on the nature of the relationship.
Regarding Heard Island, for anybody interested in the history of exploration and mountaineering there is a superb documentary film called The Great White Whale about the first expedition to climb Big Ben, the huge volcano on the island (and the highest peak in Australia, if you interpret "Australia" broadly enough). It's told by some of the survivors of the expedition in old age, has nice quirky humour, and even has some poetry (well, some humorous sea shanties anyway). Thoroughly recommended.
New Zealand also has some sub-Antarctic islands but I have not heard anything about Trump slapping tariffs on them yet. But I would have thought that Bounty Island in particular might catch his eye – with a name like that, why it's just got to have lots of exports….!
* As a linguistic aside, why do Americans write things like "Williams' " rather than "Williams's"? Do they pronounce it that way? And is this spelling universal in America? I know this has been covered by Language Log in the past but I can't be bothered searching for it!
C Baker said,
April 4, 2025 @ 7:42 pm
* As a linguistic aside, why do Americans write things like "Williams' " rather than "Williams's"? Do they pronounce it that way? And is this spelling universal in America? I know this has been covered by Language Log in the past but I can't be bothered searching for it!
Some of us – but by no means all of us – are explicitly taught in school that when the word ends in an s, the possessive is spelled that way.
Some of us are told that only applies to certain words.
I would say that we pronounce it the same no matter how we spell it, but on Dora the Explorer they keep referring to Boots' things as Boots instead of Bootses, so who even knows?
Daniel Deutsch said,
April 5, 2025 @ 3:17 am
WCW’s wife Flossie wrote a reply:
Reply
(crumped on her desk)
Dear Bill: I’ve made a
couple of sandwiches for you.
In the icebox you’ll find
blueberries-a cup of grapefruit
a glass of cold coffee.
On the stove is the teapot
with enough tea leaves
for you to make tea if you
prefer-Just light the gas-
boil the water and put in the tea
Plenty of bread in the bread-box
and butter and eggs-
I didn’t know just what to
make for you. Several people
called up about office hours-
See you later. Love. Floss.
Please switch off the telephone.
Yves Rehbein said,
April 5, 2025 @ 3:53 am
That's an interesting aside. From what I find in the Wiktionary, thematic s-stems genetive was not highly marked in Proto Germanic, *arsaz ~ *arsa/iz, but it was marked in Old English, ears ~ earsas. German tends to agree with the Saxon genitive, e.g. the fox's cunning (des Fuches List), but Dutch does not (de sluwheid van de vos) and vernacular German is also like that. Old Norse inflected definite forms differently arsinn ~ arsinum, indefinite ars ~ arsi; fox is chiefly West-Germanic in contrast to ON refr ~ refi. Fish is a grating corner case in my ears, and since the plural was inflected fisċes ~ fisca (fish, *fishe's?) I am ultimately not sure what went on between vowel changes and analogical inflection. As for personal names, note *Haimarīks ~ *Haimarīkiz: Harry, patronymic Harris(son), for example matches the pattern
David Marjanović said,
April 5, 2025 @ 8:05 am
That makes sense. (Especially, of course, if the form with p instead of pf isn't just a typo!) It also fits Höschen as opposed to Unterhose.
*lightbulb moment* That could be a pun, especially in an area where /pf/ isn't native and is replaced with /f/ in Standard accents and mesolects, i.e. Germany north of the Main.
(The "fluff" word is Flaum, no p orthographically or etymologically or in southern pronunciation.)
An entirely unnecessary assumption.
Oh, that depends on the exact path. Portuguese branco "white" comes to mind. The feminine gender in German could be from the Latin neuter plural or even from Zwetschke < Slavic.
If these have a common source, quite convoluted paths must be assumed.
If they don't have their own URL top-level domains, as Heard & McDonald do, they're invisible to Elon and the Muskovites and therefore don't get separate tariffs.
Both pronunciations exist, and their relations to both spellings seem to be total chaos.
For extra fun, add Jesus' and various fixed phrases it occurs in.
That's archaic-poetic, BTW; usual nowadays is die List des Fuchses.
I thought that's an ordinary *a-stem, *haimarīkaz? (Part of how you can tell the second half is a Celtic pre-Grimm loan.)
cbk said,
April 5, 2025 @ 1:57 pm
HS and C Baker: I grew up (in the US) preferring usage such as Pythagoras’s. (Sidenote: A search on the book title “Pythagoras’s Trousers” also yields “Pythagoras’ Trousers.”)
Different publications have different styles.
The Chicago Manual of Style Q & A says "Chicago adds an apostrophe and an s to form the possessive of most singular nouns, including singular nouns that end in s—a rule that extends to proper names. Plural nouns, including plural names, add an apostrophe only.”: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/PossessivesandAttributives/faq0059.html
Page 354 of the 16th edition of the CMOS says: "Chicago no longer mentions the exception or proper classical names of two or more syllables that end in an eez sound. Such names form the possessive in the usual way (though when these forms are spoken, the additional s is generally not pronounced).”
In contrast, the New York Times changes the written form: "Ordinarily form a possessive by adding ’s to a singular noun (the boy’s boots; the girl’s coat), even if the noun already ends in an s (The Times’s article). If the word ends in two sibilant sounds (ch, j, s, sh, x or z) separated only by a vowel sound, drop the s after the apostrophe (Kansas’ climate; Texas’ population)." Source: Scroll down to “in a word”: https://archive.nytimes.com/afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/when-spell-check-cant-help-30/
Related questions:
How to refer to hamburgers served at McDonald’s: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/PossessivesandAttributives/faq0060.html
The possessive form of something like Sotheby’s: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/PossessivesandAttributives/faq0017.html
The possessive form of something like Los Angeles: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/PossessivesandAttributives/faq0053.html
Julian said,
April 5, 2025 @ 6:19 pm
I like simple rules.
In my view the simplest rule is:
1. Add apostrophe+s
2. Suppress the "s" if *and only if* the word already has a plural-forming "s" .
Thus "my cats' toys … Professor Katz's diploma"
I'm cool with "Aristophanes's plays" (when I did a little unprimed oral cloze test on my teenage son, that's the way he said it).
Seeing in writing locutions like "Pythagoras' theorem", or, even worse, hearing people try to say it like that, is for me like running fingernails down a blackboard.
Julian said,
April 5, 2025 @ 8:40 pm
The Heard Island penguins were sore.
"These tariffs will make us all poor.
In the US there are no
More markets for guano.
They want all their shit back onshore!"
Barbara Phillips Long said,
April 6, 2025 @ 1:49 pm
I was surprised by the way Williams read this work. Only the fourth example has any of the pauses I would have expected. The work sounds less poetic to me when read as though it was ordinary prose, leaving the listener with few clues about why the writer arranged the lines the way they are printed.
In college in the 1970s and afterward, while I still lived in the city where I went to college, I went to as many poetry readings as I could. Writers who were reading out loud used various approaches to help the listener sense the line breaks that were intended to have a reader focus differently on particular words or patterns of sound that reading lines as prose would not. I don’t think the way Williams reads his work adds to any understanding of the poem, and in fact, I think it diminishes it.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
April 6, 2025 @ 2:01 pm
In the Williams poem in the post, could the blank lines between the stanzas be restored? There should be separations after “icebox” and “breakfast” so the poem appears as three sets of four lines each. The parody from Bluesky has the correct structure.
HS said,
April 6, 2025 @ 8:08 pm
As a non-American it's perhaps not my place to comment, but I couldn't resist:
so much depends
upon
a New York
con-man
crazed with insane
power
inside the White
House
Ross Presser said,
April 7, 2025 @ 9:09 am
Undoubtedly due to my having rewatched the musical recently, as I started to read the first poem it fell into the rhythms of "No Place Like London" from the musical Sweeney Todd. Works pretty well for the first two lines, but not the third.