A friend of mine had a professor that told the class that “Cutty Sark is a Freudian slip” was a four-way pun, but he wouldn’t explain how. That professor just dies a few months ago, and it got my friend thinking about that statement again. Now I can’t think of even one way it’s punny. Any ideas?
Slip can be defined as “The difference between a vessel’s actual speed through water and the speed at which the vessel would move if the screw were propelling against a solid” which connects nautically with cutty sark. That’s all we can come up with. Help!
I think I got the last one. Slip, as in an article of women’s clothing. Cutty Sark was named after a witch in a poem that was wearing a short shirt or chemise, which can be loosely interpreted as a slip.
A slip is also a boat’s regular parking spot at the dock. A Freudian slip is when you make a verbal mistake that reveals what’s in the back of your mind. For example, while fumbling with your money, “I’m just trying to calculate 20% for the waitress’s tit.”
Brainstorming in that direction, and remembering the bank of jokes about sailors using a sock for masturbation, you might come up with “cunty sock” from Cutty Sark. The sock would then be a Freudian (sexual) slip (a place to dock his ship of love.)
If he would not elaborate given it is Freud it is probably a dirty joke. That would fit in with the Cutty Sark being just a short slip, as in vest, which would result in the witch showing off her fanny to the world.
Now, substituting words, is there anything in a cutty slip being a short ships slipway (for lauching?).
Other possibilities might include rhyming slang or maybe there is a dirty spoonerism in there somewhere? There’s only one F in Freud after all (which is almost a pun in itself! )
Just ideas…and here is a link to the poem for which she takes her name, not that I can see anything obvious in the text to help us here.
So I assume it would be much easier to make all these slips if you’d been drinking, say, whiskey all night.
(Hmm, according to this site, a slip can mean “the price of a cab or bus fare home given to a person who has lost all their money.” Perhaps I’m going too far afield now…)
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