November 28, 2023
And now for something completely different. On 10/31 it was densely nerdy marveling at the words calceology, telamon, and hallux — I should probably have issued a technical-linguistics warning on that one — but today it’s underwear models (in a Daily Jocks e-mail ad from 9/26) wearing minimal tighty-whities that display the carnal attractions of their bodies, fore and aft, in intimate detail, hot stuff definitely calling for a male-sex-content warning. And then there are racy bonuses: the male couple in the ad is interracial, and the one presenting as a receptive / bottom is celebrated as an equal partner to the one presenting as an insertive / top.
Just to remind you: these are photos of male models playing characters in a sexual story (loosely playing with the image of a wolf pack) for a receptive audience, a story that’s intended to be at least sexually pleasing — or, better, actually arousing — to this audience and thereby to sell more of the company’s wares (DJ is an Australian company, here selling items from The Pack underwear company, distributed by Dragon Label Limited in Hong Kong). I’ve given these characters Italian names: Nero ‘black’ (note: in Italian, Nero is pronounced roughly like English neigh-roe) for the black receptive partner (who brings his tight muscular buttocks and its anal prize to the encounter, plus a focused and open facial expression) and Lupo ‘wolf’ for the white insertive partner (who brings his crotch and its genital prizes to the encounter, plus a decidedly feral facial expression, at least in the first of three photos).
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Effeminacy, Fashion, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, It's Just Stuff, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, Phallicity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
November 27, 2023
A One Big Happy strip, recently in my comics feed:
(#1) James (mis-)takes Ruthie’s meta-commentary — her talk about what’s going on in her interaction with James — to be part of that interaction, to be her next move in the routine of the knock-knock joke, and shows that he understands that routine, by producing the appropriate next move in the routine
James might be a dirty-faced urchin, but he knows his joke routines. And, in the last panel, is probably wondering how on earth Ruthie’s going to make a pun out of jeezy-peezy-I-forgot-the-joke.
So: mastering the routine of the knock-knock-joke is one thing, but then the routine incorporates another type of joke, the pun joke, which has its own requirements. In addition, the knock-knock joke requires not just any pun, but a (phonologically) imperfect pun, the more distant the better, so that its punch line will have genuine surprise value.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Jokes, Language acquisition, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Routines and rituals, Variation | 2 Comments »
November 26, 2023
(Note this posting’s title — it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
It’s all about fucking in fur: two scenes from the MEN.com gay porn flick Norse Fuckers in which men mate wildly and promiscuously, like the proverbial fur-bearing carnivores, while wearing fluffy fur stoles (which they discard as impediments when they dig into their pronging) and delightful furry boots (which stay on, even while the men, otherwise stark naked, are fucking their mates).
There will be pictures.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Accents, Clothing, Costumes, Gay porn, Idioms, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Myths, Shoes, Slang | 1 Comment »
November 26, 2023
(About man-on-man sex in printed gay porn, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Caught on Pinterest a little while back, this gay pulp novel from 1983:
(#1) Apparently, the young man — the piece of chicken — is offering to service the trucker’s erection; though the boy’s buttocks are prominently displayed on the cover, fellatio (rather than anal intercourse) is the conventional service in truck-stop sexual encounters (I know nothing about the actual story, or about its no doubt pseudonymous author Michael Scott)
So: three things here: chickens (and the men who seek them out); truck-stop sex; and the gay pulps, in particular the Adam’s Gay Readers of the 1980s (the series to which Trucker’s Chicken belongs).
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Books, Figurative language, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Masculinity, Metaphor, Pornography, Spanish, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
November 25, 2023
The title of a Sara Lautman cartoon in the New Yorker issue of 10/27/23:
(#1) The instrument emerges from the primordial ooze, climbs onto land, and ascends, eventually to stand upright at the pinnacle of evolution
Two things here: the musical instrument; and the cartoonist.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Cartoonists, Evolution, Linguistics in the comics, Music | 2 Comments »
November 25, 2023
An old One Big Happy strip, one in a long series in which Ruthie or her brother Joe is confronted with some type of test question (rather than an information-seeking question):
Ruthie is laboring at a workbook — a culture object that subjects a student to test questions, in this case a question requiring the student to demonstrate their understanding of the culturally appropriate grounds for publicly assessing the characteristics of other people: industriousness is an appropriate ground for assessing a farmer (because it’s relevant to his doing his job), while a conventionally attractive appearance is not
Even though she’s filling in questions in a workbook, Ruthie falls back on treating busy-or-pretty? as a question about her opinions, rather than her knowledge of cultural appropriateness. In fact, for all we can tell from the workbook picture, Farmer Brown might not be at all busy; he might be sitting upright in a stationary tractor, daydreaming about what’s for supper. But he could perfectly well be busy, while even if was drawn to look like a handsome film star, his looks would be culturally irrelevant to his job. (Subtle point: they would, however, be culturally relevant in general, since men judged to be conventionally good-looking have a social edge over other men in various contexts.)
Here, Ruthie personalizes her response by giving her opinions. In other OBH test-question strips she looks situations from her point of view or takes her own experiences as background for answering questions. But test questions demand a depersonalized stance — and then regularly plumb very fine points of sociocultural awareness. Fine points that for the most part aren’t treated in the workbooks, aren’t explicitly taught in schools. I’ll give one further example from an earlier posting of mine below.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Childhood, Culture, Linguistics in the comics, Questions, Speech acts, Teaching | 2 Comments »
November 24, 2023
(You can tell from the title that this posting will clearly not be to everyone’s taste, even if technically it doesn’t have to be shielded from kids.)
This striking composition of bodies (advertising flagrantly gay men’s underwear from Andrew Christian) in a HUNT Magazine e-mail offer today, 11/24:
The two men are posed as strongly differentiated in their roles, the black guy on the left as dominant, in charge, symbolically (and probably sexually) on top; the white guy on the right as submissive, subordinate, symbolically (and probably sexually) on the bottom — but evidently quite comfortable with his place, maybe even proud. If The Advocate magazine (“LGBTQ+ since 1967”) had an avant-garde wedding announcements section, this photo could be published there.
“Biggest Black Friday Ever” no doubt is a raunchy allusion to the fabled attractions of the BBC (Big Black Cock) — white guy sez, hey, I’ve got mine. (AC is often entertaining, but never subtle.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Male art, Photography, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
November 24, 2023
(About a gay porn flick, with naked hunky models displaying their bodies, but no actual genitals on display or descriptions of man-on-man sex, just some vulgar slang and reference to ejaculation. Still, not to everyone’s taste.)
In my e-mail on 11/22, a Falcon | Naked Sword mailing for its 2023 Christmas gay porn movie, whose title is a cheap raunchy pun:
The guys with the Xmas goodies (I’ve fuzzed out their pornstar dicks for WordPress modesty): Beau Butler (who’s been featured a number of times on this blog; here displaying his pornstar butt), Damian Night (new here), and Reign (from my 2/20/22 posting “Men’s Briefs: the locked gaze”)
My interest at the moment is not really in the flick or in the actors, but in the pun in the title. (“How like a linguist”, you are saying, “to disregard the hot stuff and focus on the wording”. As it happens, I’m entirely capable of getting off on the hot stuff while making mental notes on the wording.) But I will post Falcon’s publicity for the flick for you, because it actually describes the background plot, without the sex-act by sex-act retelling of the individual scenes:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Conversion, Gay porn, Metaphor, Music, Nouning, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
November 23, 2023
Two special meals today, call them brunch (I had my usual breakfast at 5 am, then this brunch around 9) and dinner (at 1).
Brunch. I was aiming for roasted chicken pieces (a distant bow to Thanksgiving turkey), but Safeway was already out of the roasted chickens by the time I ordered, so they gave me fried chicken tenders instead (to be served with a mayonnaise-based sauce: tartar sauce, blue cheese dressing, or the ever-present ranch dressing; I invented one of my own, with ingredients on hand).
Safeway’s tenders were neither greasy nor dry, actually quite satisfactory.
Dinner. Achieving a satisfactory posole was going to be out of the question (way too much complex advance planning), so I reverted to Singapore-style rice noodles (“angel-hair rice noodles tossed with BBQ pork, shrimp, onion in a light hint of curry sauce”, as Green Elephant Gourmet describes it), with “Chinese green” (baby bok choy) with black mushrooms (instead of the usual Sichuan dry-fried green beans, with an aromatic ground-pork sauce) — chopped into small bits, so easily eaten with a fork by disabled hands; served on brown rice.
Dessert. I am now contemplating a mid-afternoon dessert: cinnamon ice cream with blueberries. A hell of a lot of blueberries. Safeway didn’t have any for quite a while, and then they scored a lot of blueberries from Chile. So I ordered the usual four containers, not noticing that these containers were 18 oz rather than 8. The mantra now is:
Everything is Better With Blueberries
Posted in Holidays, Language and food, My life | 2 Comments »
November 22, 2023
The pursuit of plurals for the English noun octopus — most recently, in yesterday’s posting “Obscure plurals of octopus (and rhinoceros)” — has now lurched into the zone of the dorky, the raunchy, and the portmanteaued with Kyle Wohlmut’s posting today on Facebook of Jon Wilkins’s webcomic Darwin Eats Cake‘s smartass Guide to Pluralizing “Octopus”:
(#1)
The cartoon seems determined to take us to the raunchy portmanteau octopussy (= octopus + pussy) and to Octopussy, the 1983 James Bond spy film, titled from its principal female character, the wicked seductress Octopussy. I’ll be following it there.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
