Arnold Zwicky's Blog

I take my linguistic examples wherever I come across them. In this case, the data comes mostly from porn. (Warning: a lot of sexual acts will be alluded to in very plain language in this posting.)

The story begins with a young man crying out

(1) Oh yeah, shoot my ass!

at the climactic moment of a segment in the gay porn compilation video A Bronco Named Brad (on the video, see here). The speaker is asking his partner to

(2) ‘shoot [your cum] on my ass, ejaculate on my buttocks’ [ONTO reading]

(It’s a convention of porn films, gay and straight, that the money shot must be visible to the viewer, so that guys come on someone else’s body or on their own, or occasionally on the furniture or whatever — see me on mess here. In gay porn, a fuck scene often ends with the fucker pulling out and coming on his partner’s buttocks, staying in situ but displaying his ejaculation.)

In other contexts, (1) could convey

(3) ‘shoot [your cum] in(to) my ass, ejaculate in(to) my anus’ [INTO reading]

Note the two different senses of ass here — ‘buttocks’ or ‘anus’, with the anus being the centerpiece of the buttocks, so to speak — related metonymically.

((1) on the INTO reading describes the culmination of bareback fucking, without the pull-out, so its natural home is porn writing, not porn films.)

But now for the main linguistic point, shoot ‘ejaculate’ used, exceptionally, as a transitive verb.

There are two ways — not necessarily incompatible with one another — that this verb shoot can come to be used transitively: via transitivizing P-drop (as in agree ‘agree on/about’) or by analogy with verbs like spray and cream and cum used with reference to ejaculation.

1. Transitivizing P-drop, abbreviating a VP a bit, yields an alternation between intransitive originals (having an argument structure with a PP complement to the verb) and transitive innovations (having an argument structure with a direct object to the verb). Two examples from my 2009 SemFest paper on P~Ø alternations in English:

Variety-speak (“Hollywoodism”) ankle ‘depart, leave (by quitting or being fired)’: Alan Smithee has ankled his post as production prexy [i.e. ‘ankled from, walked from’]; Ben Zimmer, Rankled by “ankle” (here) [cf. depart, flee, escape, etc. “verbs of inherently directed motion” (B. Levin), with from or Ø]

(primarily) British transitive agree ‘agree on/to’ [but not ‘agree with’](esp. in journalistic, administrative, business contexts, as in the Economist) (link to discussion on this blog)

2. Or the innovation could have been made on analogy with spray or with the denominal verbs cream or cum, all conveying ‘ejaculate on or in’, with ass as direct object. The models would be things like:

I can be an innocent little virgin or a dirty cum loving whore – cum and spray my ass, tits and face with your hot load. (link) [ONTO reading; this is a depiction of bukkake; you can find examples of cream/cum s.o.’s face as well as spray s.o.’s face in descriptions of the practice]

Back and forth he worked my cock all the way in and then pulled back leaving only an inch or so in the warmth and tightness he provided. He kept up these perfect strokes for a few minutes and then spoke again.

”I’m going to cum dude, fuck me hard, spray my ass,” he moaned. [INTO reading] (link)

Apparently Pete was very excited by the action too because he began to spray my ass with his hot cum. He was really ramming me deep and his cum had to be buried deep in my hole. (link) [INTO reading]

Right after that David shoved his cock in to the hilt and held it there before yelling out that he was about to cream my ass.  I thought he was gonna cum forever as he held on tight to my hips pumping endlessly into my boy pussy. (link) [INTO reading]

When he was ready to cream my ass he pulled it out and held onto his cock as if he were choking the life 
out of it. “Get him to his knees Randy, I’m cumming dude, I’m ready to shoot. Get him on his knees and let 
me shoot it in his face!” (link) [INTO reading, though the fucker pulls out and shoots ONTO]

He just kept fucking harder and harder and faster until I heard him mumble the words I had been waiting all week for. “Ooh I am Cuming. I want to cum your ass bad” … the moment arrived and he shot every last drop into my ass and it was fucking great. (link) [INTO reading]

(The INTO readings predominate very heavily in material on the net, no doubt because this is sexual fantasy, and barebacking is a very potent sexual fantasy for many gay men.)

Searching for shoot s.o.’s ass in the appropriate senses is difficult. There are lots of examples in these senses, but with further complements, as in He shot my ass full of cream/cum/jism/spunk. Otherwise, there’s a whole forest of examples with shoot in other senses: shooting involving guns (shooting someone in the ass with a firearm seems to be a moderately common occurrence, to judge from the web), shooting involving cameras (David Duchovny saying that he didn’t want photographers shooting his ass, for example), shoot s.o.’s ass ‘inject s.o. in the buttocks’, and an enormous number of cases with the vernacular pronominal X’s ass ‘X’ (giving He shot my ass meaning ‘he shot me’). (On this last one, see John Beavers & Andrew Koontz-Garboden, “A universal pronoun in English?” (Linguistic Inquiry 37.503-13, 2006). Then there’s the exclamatory idiom my ass!, to muddle searches still further.

It was just my good fortune to come across (1) during a moment of video appreciation.

[Bonus material, on two vernacular verb uses related to shoot s.o.’s ass on the INTO reading: seed s.o.’s ass and (heteronormativity alert!) breed s.o.’s ass, both confined, so far as I know, to descriptions of barebacking male-male anal intercourse.

Huge number of ghits, for example:

Breed My Ass
Description: Dominik Rider gets his ass loaded in “Breed My Ass”. No foreplay, no oral, no kissing, just all bareback ass fucking!! (link) [note also: get one’s ass loaded]

do u ever top? would u want to seed my ass? i rarely bottom, but it would feel so good to have one of your hot loads inside me. (link)

From the same source as this last one, another transitive use of seed, this time with a direct object referring to a man, but conveying seeding his ass in the sense above:

ohvboy: I would love to take a load from you man, but I am a poz bottom. Do you seed poz boys?

sdsk8rboi: I seed poz boys all the time. I’d love to give you a load.

(Poz , a clipping of positive, means ‘HIV+’.)

Similar uses for barebacking transitive breed.]

[Additional bonus, on the inflectional morphology of barebacking transitive breed. This verb is often treated, in print at least, as having a zero-marked PST/PSP breed (parallel to a common treatment of the verb text; discussion here):

[PST] He fucked like an angry beast. Kissed me everywhere. Touched me. Oh my god he rocked my world. It went on so long before he breed me with his seed. (link to Cock Chaser site, for a guy with a barebacking obsession)

[PSP] And I found a hot muscular guy who was 31 and had a nice hole that needed fucking earlier this morning. He came over and when I started fingering his hole I could feel a load (or two) already up there. He said he had been partying all night and had been breed by a few guys already and needed more. (link to Bareback Frat Boy site)

Interestingly, Bareback Frat Boy mixes the non-standard PST/PSP breed with the standard bred on his site:

[PST] Skipped Class Today and Bred Some Ass Instead

[PSP] Now I’m home and wanting to get bred like that again. I’m online cruising BarebackRT and Adam4Adam right now! LOL

I have no verifiable examples of seed used for the PST/PSP. They might be out there, but there are so many occurrences of non-standard PST seed instead of standard saw that it’s hard to find them.]

This entry was posted on April 26, 2011 at 10:36 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Argument structure, Gender and sexuality, Inflection, Lexical semantics, Morphology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.