Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Syntactic phrase, compound word, portmanteau

May 24, 2018

(Gay sex talk in street language: use your judgment.)

Encountered today in reports of the slang of young gay men, three words for ‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ, male sexcavity, (figurative) vagina of a man’:

munt /mʌnt/; mussy /’mUsi/, bussy /’bUsi/ (bunt /bʌnt/ is not recorded, but has probably been coined on occasion)

These are portmanteaus derived from the compound nouns man / boy + cunt / pussy, as examined in my 7/26/13 posting on expressions for the male anus viewed as a sexual organ.

Three steps in the tightness of connection between the elements participating in an expression:

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Posted in Compounds, Connotation, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Metaphor, Morphology and syntax, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Today’s misreading: life behind piano bars

May 24, 2018

The header on the e-mail appeared to promise:

Prison Gay Nite Every Friday in San Mateo – Piano Bar this week

A piano bar behind bars, gayfolk mingle with the incarcerated at the San Mateo Jail. Not really my thing, but I know people it might appeal to. And San Mateo is about 16 miles from where I live, so it would take some effort.

The message appeared in really tiny type on my computer screen, and its actual first word was entirely unpredictable in context, so it’s not entirely a surprise that I misread it. An announcement for the actual event [called Prism]:

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Misreadings | 1 Comment »

Crude japery

May 24, 2018

(If the image and text in #1 make you uneasy, pass on to something else. Otherwise there’s only coarse humor here, of the sort that delights middle-schoolers.)

From Aric Olnes on Facebook yesterday, this bit of crude foolishness, to which Aric added the title “Get Lei’d!”:

(#1) Marilyn Monroe + oink (of a pig) = Marilyn Monroink (the hula-dancing pig)

Dancing on what appears to be a slab of Spam (the canned meat product made mostly from ham), from a roll of the stuff. Spam from pig meat, boned and processed.

Providing an opening for coarse sexual word play on bone and roll (in a context where sexual pig and pork lurk).

Of course, I wondered where the image and text came from, who composed them. Searching took me to a larger and much more complex page of crude japery (an ad for “Dickman’s Boned Rolled Pig: Institutional Meat Food”, from Dickman Rendering & Creaming Inc.), on Reddit, where it came from Imgur (without attribution, of course). I then found some of the components of the joke ad, and eventually the identity of its creator, the cheerfully crude graphic artist Cris Shapan.

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Posted in Humor, Language of sex, Metaphor, Parody, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

The art class

May 23, 2018

Edward Steed cartoon in the May 21st New Yorker:

It’s about point of view (pov), especially as this reflects selective attention, an inclination to focus on certain things in the context over others.

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Posted in Classification and labeling, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Narrative, Perception, Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics | Leave a Comment »

brotastic

May 22, 2018

Jon Lighter to ADS-L on the 19th:

CNN describes Anthony Bourdain’s recent hearty, he-man adventure in Newfoundland as “brotastic.”

Jon seems to have found the word notable, but then he probably doesn’t hang out with people who use it. I don’t either, but then I have a side interest in brocabulary, enough so that there’s a brocabulary Page on this blog, with links to earlier postings. In any case, I haven’t posted about it before, so a few notes.

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Posted in Libfixes, Morphology, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

(I just) can’t stop (it)

May 22, 2018

From the May 21st New Yorker, this Harry Bliss cartoon:

(#1) “Get those things away from me–I can’t stop eating them.”

A translation of a scene (of snack-food addiction, in the universe of tv commercials) to a parallel metaphorical world (of rampaging Godzillas, in the universe of monster movies).

Some notes about such translations between worlds; about snack-food addiction in tv commercials; about people-eating in Japanese monster movies; and about some “can’t stop” music.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Music | Leave a Comment »

The cumless cake

May 22, 2018

(Semen is a theme, and, eventually, sexual practices involving semen, so some readers might want to exercise caution.)

Today’s taboo avoidance story, brought to my attention by Ben Zimmer, who provided a link to [UNN] (an unnamed national newspaper that lies behind a paywall for me, so I now lie behind a citewall for them; in this case, it seems to have broken the story), here as reported in today’s Daily Beast story “Publix Censors ‘Summa Cum Laude’ on Graduation Cake Order”:

(#1) The cumless cake
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language play, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »

Crowing

May 22, 2018

The One Big Happy from April 25th:

(Tick-Tocket’s Chicken Crew seems to be a children’s book invented for this cartoon. But the title is plausible.)

Library Lady asks abut the noun crew, Ruthie (who often marches to the beat of her own drummer) responds with crew, a PST form of the verb crow — and then goes on to conjugate