I’m honestly impressed that so many people were able to figure so much of this out! Here’s the backstory on all this:
The book these come from is “Ready, Set, Remember” by Jerry Lucas. It is indeed a book of visual puns and rebuses, but it’s intended to be educational, mnemonic devices to help you memorize things like the fifty state capitals and the presidents up to Carter. The puns shown in the original post are:
Des Moines, Iowa (”D” Moans, Eye Weighs)
Lansing, Michigan (Land Sing Miss A Gun)
Salt Lake City, Utah (Salt Lick City, You Tall)
The ‘bread’ one (see below for a full explanation...)
Frankfort, Kentucky (Frank-Fort, Can Tuck)
Santa Fe, New Mexico (Santa Fay, New Mixer Cow)
Presidents Coolidge through Carter (@frigfridge got them right!)
Here are some more examples, which some people guessed for the other ones:
“Toe Peek A, Can Sews” (Topeka, Kansas)
“Saint Pole, Many Sodas” (St. Paul, Minnesota)
And the first ten Presidents; “Washing-a-Ton”, “Adam’s (Apple)”, “Chef-Her-Son”, “Mad At Sun”, “Man-Row”, “Adam’s apple (again)”, “Jack-Sun” “Van Bureau”, “Hairy Sun”, and “Tiler”
This leaves the damn bread. What the hell was he getting at with the bread? You seriously won’t believe this, even though I’m about to tell you right now:
It’s for the multiplication table.
The second half of this book is dedicated to teaching you this jaw-droppingly complex system of associating consonant phonemes with numbers. It is so much harder than just learning to multiply by rote!
Jerry Lucas must have been furious that while he was putting so much effort into this book, Schoolhouse Rock came out at the same time and did it all so much better and faster.
The idea here is that once you associate each number with a sound, you can make up a funny picture from the images of the two numbers and their product. Now I do actually have quite a few friends with real dyscalculia issues-- maybe this would help them? Maybe. But it honestly seems a whole lot easier to remember “4 x 10 = 40″ than:
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
vaporwave
areudirty
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
kianamaiart
titsay
