mondegreens
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LaDeDa, I think I heard it as calm and eggs, though I never really thought about it. Is Calminex a real brand name or did he make it up for the song? Google gives mostly Spanish pages.
Have I mentioned I thought crudit
I think I originally thought “suet” was “sewage” in Under the Pines, because I wasn’t familiar with the former term.
There’s a soporific marketed in the US and the UK as Sominex; I assume Calminex is supposed to be suggestive of that name.
(Actually, Sominex in the US has the same active ingredient — diphenhydramine — as Benadryl, a widely-used antihistamine that’s best taken before bed. I understand from Wikipedia that there’s a different formulation in the UK.)
Suet’s the kind of beef fat that you can find in supermarket meat cases if you search for it. Like a slab of white …stuff. It’s something you can put out for birds to eat in the dead of winter, either plain in a mesh bag or mixed with birdseed. And at some point in the past, it used to be used by ordinary chefs in ordinary cooking.
I knew what it was and recognized the lyric, but I’d only ever really heard of it in the context of feeding birds, as jinx notes. Think of it as the beefy answer to lard.
For some reason, feeding birds on fat seems bizarre to me. I recognised the word ‘suet’ in a kind of vague way with associations to sago and/or tapioca. I guess I’d heard the word before, and in the context of the song I thought of something meaty and sagoey, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was until I looked it up. Rendered suet does rather resemble tapioca pudding.
Normally it’s used as winter feed, and it typically has seed mixed into it, like a high-calorie edible concrete.
I’ve always assumed that in a bird’s diet, it takes the place of insects. Most seed-eating birds also eat a fair amount of insects, so they get their fat calories and nutrients from fat from a well-mixed diet. And insects in general are harder to find and eat in the winter, especially in non-wild habitats. So it makes sense. Does it make the same kind of sense for a sasquatch or yeti? Who knows? But it seems like an arguable point, and the concept is funny.
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