Following on my twink posting, a bear comic:
This is a take-off on Bill Keane’s The Family Circus cartoon, adapted for gay men by reference to bears. (Plus a use of the X magnet snowclonelet.)
A gesture towards bear-twink equity.
(Hat tip to Chris Ambidge.)
In the world of male photography, there have been several specialists in young (especially boyish-looking) males, viewed homoerotically: Mel Roberts (here) and Bob Mizer, with posed but artless-seeming shots, and most especially Howard Roffman, who’s still flourishing at his craft. I think of Roffman as the twinkmeister, for his focus on the type of young man known in gay slang as twinks.
From Max Vasilatos on Facebook, this sentence from the Wikipedia entry on laterality:
Some types of mastodon indicate laterality through the fossil remains having differing tusk lengths.
Max sent this to me not for its tortured syntax (though that’s interesting in itself) or for the technical term laterality ‘sidedness’ (a bit on that below), but because of my interest in mammuthiana (though that’s not the point of this posting).
Two items this morning in which lexical items are understood in new ways: look down reanalyzed as V + Prt rather than V + P; and circadian in circadian rhythm understood as an ethnonym, denoting some group of people, the Circadians.
From yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, in the “One-Page Magazine”, Lizzie Skurnick’s regular “That Should Be a Word” feature, appropriate for National Grammar Day:
GRAMMANDO
(Gruh-MAN-doh), n., adj.
1. One who constantly corrects others’ linguistic mistakes. “Cowed by his grammando wife, Arthur finally ceased saying ‘irregardless.’ ” See also: Dictaplinarian (enforces correct pronunciation); Spellot (takes a red pen to all documents).
(For National Grammar Day, and also Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky’s 8th birthday.)
Mae Sander wrote a little while ago with a piece from the L.A. Times on snake charmers in India, which included this bit (with the crucial coordination boldfaced):
India had about 800,000 unlicensed snake charmers in 2007, according to a recent survey by the Snake Charmers Federation of India. Those now caught without a license face up to seven years in jail under Indian laws that aim to safeguard biodiversity by banning the possession, sale or trading of wild animals. Among the most affected, other than smugglers, have been traditional showmen: charmers, monkey grinders and trick-bear keepers.
Sander balked at monkey grinder instead of organ grinder ‘operator of a street organ (a.k.a. barrel organ or hurdy-gurdy)’. She suspected that the variant was an error induced by the fact that an organ grinders is often accompanied by a monkey. In any case, monkey grinder makes for an imperfect parallelism in the coordination in one sense (while improving parallelism in another).
From Chris Ambidge, this vintage ad for a Vaillant geyser — in German, as it happens, though the company was and is international:
An addendum to my posting on Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love, about her husband Paul’s aphasia:
Paul’s tortured search for words reminded me of work by Samuel Beckett, the wild and woolly Irish playwright, novelist, member of the French Resistance during WWII, and literary assistant to James Joyce. In his best-known play, Waiting for Godot, Beckett describes God’s inscrutability as “divine aphasia,” and God utters such aphasic gibberist as “Quaquaquaqua.” [compare Paul’s mem mem mem mem] I had a new appreciation for Beckett’s character Watt, who speaks with aphasic peculiarity, jumbling word order, letters, and sense until they’re cockeyed and no one can understand him. (p. 175)
Things get worse.
