Prodigious macrophallicity, contemptuous noblesse

April 21, 2026

(all about man-on-man sex, described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest)

My latest gay porn DVD, ordered on sale and on spec, on the basis of Malik Delgaty’s brief appearance in a different MEN.com compendium, The Men’s Room. The DVD Malik Delgaty: The Ultimate Ride (2026), with 4 scenes: “Ass Blaster” (2020), “(The) Bootyguard” (2022), “Bussy Control” (2023), and “Hook Up Trade” (2023).

About MD, from Wikipedia:

Justin Lesage (born 29 September 2000), known professionally as Malik Delgaty, is a Canadian actor in gay pornographic films. He began working as a stripper at 18 years old in his hometown of Montreal before signing an exclusive contract with Men.com in 2020. He was the most searched-for gay pornographic actor online from 2022 to 2024 and has won three GayVN Awards.

… Delgaty identifies as straight and has stated that he “had never been attracted to men before being on camera”. He has been described as “gay-for-pay”

Justin Lesage makes his living by acting in gay porn movies as Malik Delgaty, an identity that allows him to take advantage of (1) the gifts of nature (he is a tall man — 6′ 3″ — with a big frame and a matching long — 8.5″ — and thick (cut) penis), as improved by gym workouts to achieve (2) an impressive bodybuilder’s heavy musculature, these physical advantages allied with (3) the ability to maintain a hard-on unflaggingly through extended reverential blow jobs and ass-fucking.

Two themes emerge. One is the celebration of penis size, what I’ve called macrophallicism; the other is a version of contemptuous noblesse oblige, coming for MD along with his attitude to being gay for pay (g4p).

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Posted in Figurative language, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics | Leave a Comment »

phantasia

April 21, 2026

A brief notice.

A recent issue of the New Yorker recommends an earlier piece in the magazine, on an aspect of our mental lives, on  mental imagery (experienced in the phenomenon of phantasia) — with which we can compare mental sounds (experienced in the phenomenon of auralia) — and how it works (or not) in different people:

Annals of Inquiry: “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound: Research has linked the ability to visualize to a bewildering variety of human traits — how we experience trauma, hold grudges, and, above all, remember our lives”  by Larissa MacFarquhar on 10/27/25 on-line; published in the print edition of the 11/3/25 issue, with the headline “Phantasia” — on aphantasia (lacking these mental perceptions) and hyperphantasia (having extraordinarily vivid mental perceptions), with considerable reporting on the lived experiences of aphantastics and hyperphantastics

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But what do you call it?

April 19, 2026

(man-on-man sexual encounters. described in street language, so totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

Gay porn videos bring us depictions of a variety of sexual acts that few of us have actually encountered; one service of the performers in the business is to bring us moving experiences from the fantasy land of mansex, taking us places we’re unlikely to go in real life, places we might not have known existed, where men do things that we don’t even know how to talk about. Hot action — but what do you call it?

And so from MEN. com’s 2026 collection Malik Delgaty: The Ultimate Ride, scene 2, “(The) Bootyguard” (from 2022), in which (according to the Internet Adult Film Database):

Malik [Delgaty] neglects his [bodyguard] duties to pick … bottom [Joey Mills] up for an upside-down bj, then fingers his hole and fucks him doggystyle.

Fucking doggystyle we all know about (whether it’s something we engage in or not), but what’s an upside down bj?

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The sno cone

April 18, 2026

Yesterday’s (4./17) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon shows two snowmen conferring:


Left Snowman reassures Right Snowman that the frozen confection that they are eating in a cone (“fruit-flavored crushed ice” (NOAD)) is not in fact snow — that would smack of, ick, cannibalism — but instead sno, a substance that merely resembles snow (Wayno’s title for the cartoon is Faux Cone); it’s just a sno cone / sno-cone (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »

Over-sensitive ambiguity alarms

April 17, 2026

As I regularly point out on this blog: if you look for it, ambiguity is everywhere; almost any expression can be understood in multiple ways, especially if you’re willing to entertain preposterous or unlikely ideas. So if you had a device that detects every possible ambiguity, it would be ringing forever and driving everyone crazy.

People typically fail to notice most of the possibilities, and then disregard the unlikely ones they do entertain (there’s evidence that most people hearing the word straw entertain, for a fleeting moment, both the interpretations ‘dried stalk of grain’ and ‘hollow tube for sucking a drink’ — even in The straw was mixed with hay and The straw was fabricated from plastic). So most ambiguity lies beneath the level of consciousness.

But some people have become accustomed to listening to and looking for details of language use — it’s one of the things they do — and so are inclined to have over-sensitive ambiguity alarms. Their ambiguity alarms are as a kind of occupational hazard. I am such a person, by profession. I have had to learn to suppress commentary on much of what I notice, because the details aren’t important for most people, though occasionally I’ll cite something that entertains me.

My friend Tim Evanson is also such a person, and since he’s a prodigious writer on Facebook, we get to see his ambiguity alarm in action. On 4/13, he citex a headline from Crain’s Cleveland Business:

CFO [is] named for Akron’s Trailhead Foundation (call this CCB)

And then quipped:

So, I have an etiquette question: Do we refer to her as “Ms. Trailhead”? Or as “Ms. Akron Trailhead”?

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Posted in Ambiguity, Extraction, Lexical semantics, Modification, Pragmatics, Syntax | 3 Comments »

Intellectual history

April 16, 2026

In two parts. First, an appreciation of a piece of intellectual history written by Geoff Pullum:

Geoffrey K. Pullum, The prehistory of generative grammar and Chomsky’s debt to Emil Post, Historiographia Linguistica, October 2025

And then a puzzle about the source of the central idea in my very first academic publication (appearing in an extraordinarily obscure place):

Arnold M. Zwicky, Grammars of number theory: some examples, Working Paper W-6671, MITRE Corporation (Bedford MA), 20 November 1963 (available on-line here) — hereafter, GmNuTh

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Posted in History, Mathematics, My life | 2 Comments »

USPS penguin day of the past

April 15, 2026

On 4/10/26 my USPS mail included a postcard showing penguins at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, with brief messages from three different people, each signed with a first name. So as not to get these people embroiled in this discussion, I’ll use their initials: E (common male name), I (uncommon female name), M (common male name). E’s message provided some crucial contextual information:

Ahoy, Arnold! Saw these really cute guys at the aquarium and thought of you.

I’s and M’s messages were about the penguins’ behavior they observed at the Shedd. E and M I couldn’t identify, but I’s name usefully picked out the only person I have ever known with this name, so I was able to send her e-mail about the card, which turned out to be deeply baffling.

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Posted in Mistakes, Penguins, Weirdness | 2 Comments »

After the rain, around the block

April 15, 2026

Yesterday (4/14), my helper Isaac and I took a walk around the block (Ramona to Forest to Emerson to Homer and back to Ramona), taking advantage of the end of days of rain. Officially we were visiting the oregano plant on Emerson St. (see my 4/14 posting “Things I didn’t know”, in the section on “a labiate plant with fleshy leaves”), but we traversed a largely changed scene: the cat’s-claw creeper on the arbor over my entry was coming to the end of its 4 or so days of bloom; the calla lilies on Ramona St. had finished their days of blooming and dropped their flowers; the rose bushes in Forest Ave. that were all buds before the rain were now a solid mass of beautiful single white roses; there were big passion-flowers on Emerson St.; and the Chinese elms on Homer Ave., totally bare on our last walk, had fully leafed out in green, turning a whole block into a pleasantly shaded path.

And on the street strip on Forest, a bunch of bare 4-foot sticks had been transformed into a dense display of bright-white dogwood blossoms. Much like these:

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and plants, Language and politics, My life, Palo Alto, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

Focusing on form rather than content

April 15, 2026

In today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro, a bank teller focuses on how quaint it is that a bank robber has written his demand on paper (the way they did it in old movies), while disregarding the pressing threat of the robber’s gun:


(1) A quibbling triumph of details of form over the real threat of content (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

Faced with dreadful, uncontrollable situations, people sometimes take to fretting about some minor issue that is more easily remedied.

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Posted in Form and function, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Mistakes, Movies and tv, Peeving | Leave a Comment »

More questions for anauralics

April 15, 2026

Following up on my 4/13 posting “A host of voices”, on

an enormous amount of variability in the way mental imagery and mental sounds work, in different people and for different purposes

focusing on auralia, on hearing sounds in the mind, and on anauralia, its lack (in a small percentage of people), in various contexts:

in silent reading, in the voice of an internal adviser, in recollected speech or music, in auditory hallucinations, in speech or other sounds in dreams

I had my University of Arizona colleague Heidi Harley as an exemplary anauralic (while recognizing that each person has their own profile of mental-percept abilities); what she can tell us is important, beause it appeared then, and still does, that there’s not much research on mental sound (or mental imagery), in perceptually deficient subjects (anauralics, aphantastics) or even in perceiving (“normal”) subjects (auralics, phantastics), though it looks like there’s an enormous amount of variability.

Now: two further contexts to consider.

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Posted in Dreams, Memory, Music, My life, Perception, Variation | Leave a Comment »

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