A stock image of Bugs Bunny:
Like cartoon creatures in general, Bugs lacks genitalia or any hint of them — but he wields that carrot as a symbolic substitute (“What’s up, doc?” My carrot, of course.)
Earlier phallic carrots on this blog: the comic-book superhero, the (highly phallic) Flaming Carrot, here; and a phallic banana and carrot dancing together, along with the Holtville CA carrot mascot, here.
Keep your carrot up, dude.
A late entry in the gay Santa category, Dean Allemang at the Santa Skivvies run for charity:
(Dean is wearing only his Santa cap, sunglasses, his watch, the armband for the run, his nipple ring, his ring, his excellent striped briefs, and (not pictured here) socks and running shoes.)
On Santa runs, see my posting on gay Santas; in general, there’s no requirement that participants in these events be gay, but if you get Dean, you get gay (and a profound, and endearing, lack of modesty; unsurprisingly, Dean did the No Pants! BART Ride on Sunday).
Meanwhile, Dean commented on my “Do Californians have an accent?” posting, asking about a sentence-final rise in pitch that he’s been hearing here in California, referring to the feature as an “accent”. This will take some sorting out.
(Another posting in a long series on men’s underwear and the terminology for it. The topic and the illustrations, while technically not X-rated, might not be to the taste of some readers.)
In my mail today, an ad from the 10 Percent firm, offering all manner of wares of potential interest to gay people, especially gay men, and featuring the Jack Adams Jock Brief:
As a follow up to the incredibly popular Jack Adams Jock Brief, the Jack Adams Army Fly Jock Brief takes the open-rear brief design and adds an all-new front pouch created specifically to contour while providing a functional fly. You’ll love the pouch design as it gives support. (link)
(The regular Jock Brief has no functional fly.)
The innovation here — how long it’s been around, I don’t know — is the *horizontal* fly, a non-standard feature for fishing out your dick to pee. (For a long discourse on functional and vestigial flies in men’s underwear, look here.)
Two recent contributions to my files on restrictive relativizer choice (other than the classic which/that business and the use of that for human referents, both of which are objects of unmerited prescriptivist scorn): a who for human-institution referents and a who for (non-human) animal referents. In both cases, which or that is the prescribed relativizer, and the use of who is an extension granting symbolic human-like status to non-human entities.
On Thomas Thurman’s Facebook page, passed on by Bert Vaux this morning, a linguistics cartoon:
The cartoon alludes to the Wug Test in psycholinguistics.
For some years, I have been getting scans made of articles of mine, starting with often-requested pieces that appeared in out-of-the-way places. Typically, I would have a set of things scanned in and put on my website, and then almost immediately I’d get inquiries (usually from people in places with little access to good libraries) about further items. Ultimately, I put over a hundred things on my website, but leaving out some that I felt to be inconsequential or only of historical interest. And then in the past few days I’ve gotten requests for *two* of these items, from long ago:
Phonological constraints in syntactic descriptions. Papers in Linguistics 1.3.411-63 (1969)
On reported speech. Studies in Linguistic Semantics, ed. by D. Terence Langendoen & C. J. Fillmore. Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1971) 73-77.
It’s hard for me to imagine why anyone could have a pressing need for either of these, but I’ll do what I can. Some parts of the academic life are odd indeed.
A display of new crayon colors, from the Miss. Fits Facebook site, passed along by Ruth Lawrence:
Think of it as a complex exercise in sociocultural knowledge. My favorites are yellow and purple, for their grotesque specificity, but the more cerebral among you might favor gray or black.
Then there’s the Eagle Shirtmakers contest of 1961 for naming shirt colors.
On the heels of my posting on Ken Ryker and penis size comes a sale offer from Falcon / Raging Stallion Studios — apparently not tied to a holiday, as so many porn sales are, however inappropriately — on big dick videos:
Nice playful pile-up of synonyms for (very) big. Some of these items recur in the names of porn films featuring big dicks.
In the news this morning, an NPR Morning Edition piece by Louisa Lim, “Beijing’s ‘Airpocalypse’ Spurs Pollution Controls, Public Pressure”. Again, the disastrous libfix –pocalypse, just a few weeks after the libfixes -(po)calypse and -(ma)geddon (“hyperbolic combining forms for various catastrophes”) together won in the Most Useful category in the American Dialect Society’s 2012 Word of the Year competition, where hashtag was the overall WOTY winner and the portmanteau phablet (phone + tablet, “mid-sized electronic device between a smart phone and a tablet”) garnered the Least Likely to Succeed award.
Today’s Zits reanalyzes the word manicure:
Girls get their nails done at a salon, guys bite theirs.