Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Only a little bit about language.)

It starts with this image, provided on Facebook by Cliff Johnson:

  (#1)

A photo of a shirtless hot guy, with a caption challenging the viewer’s heterosexuality, using a familiar pun on straight — as in “I can’t even think straight” on this t-shirt (from CafePress):

  (#2)

But wait, there’s more!

On Facebook, Chris Ambidge noted that getting spaghetti hot isn’t enough to make it unstraight; you have to make it wet. That broadens the suggestive humor in the caption; somewhere in there, there’s a play on strands of dry spaghetti as phallic symbols, and Chris has added sexual wetness to the story.

Turns out that the hunk in the gay spaghetti photo is John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness on Torchwood and much much else), seen here shirtless and wet:

  (#3)

The plot thickens. Barrowman is proudly, openly gay. From Wikipedia, his love story:

Barrowman met his partner Scott Gill during a production of Rope at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1993, after Gill came to see Barrowman in the play. The couple have houses in London and Cardiff. In late 2005, Barrowman said he had had no plans to marry. However, a year later, Barrowman and Gill became civil partners on 27 December 2006. Barrowman and Gill do not want to call their relationship a marriage: “We’re just going to sign the civil register. We’re not going to have any ceremony because I’m not a supporter of the word marriage for a gay partnership.” Barrowman explains: “Why would I want a ‘marriage’ from a belief system that hates me?” A small ceremony was held in Cardiff with friends and family, with the cast of Torchwood and executive producer Russell T Davies as guests.

John and Scott kissing:

  (#4)

This adds a heavier mocking tone to the caption.

And then Ned Deily replied to Chris Ambidge, deepening the sexual innuendo: “If it’s hot enough, it just need a little assistance to self-wet and then it turns into that – how you say? – screw pasta.”

That would be rotini or fusilli:

Rotini is a type of helix- or corkscrew-shaped pasta. The name derives from the Italian for twists. It is related to fusilli, but has a tighter helix, i.e. with a smaller pitch. [Wikipedia]

(I’m very fond of rotini.) Tricolor rotini:

  (#5)

Fusilli are long, thick, corkscrew shaped pasta. The word fusilli presumably comes from fusile, archaic or dialectal word for “rifle” (fucile in modern Italian), referring to the spiral-grooved barrel of the latter. [Wikipedia]

  (#6)

The portmanteau screwghetti doesn’t seem to be attested. So someone could market Screwghetti: The Gay Spaghetti.

This entry was posted on July 6, 2011 at 8:31 am and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language play, Portmanteaus, Puns, Shirtlessness. 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.