Arnold Zwicky's Blog

I recently bought a new hairbrush, which came labeled

BOAR BRISTLE

A wonderful compound, bristling with /b/s and growling with /r/s. I might be a linguist, but like everybody, I have my moments of sheer word appreciation, and I savor boar bristle.

I’ve posted a number of times about word attraction/appreciation in Zippyland, that is, Dingburg. From 2010, for instance, “Zippylicious geographical names”, where I wrote:

Zippy is in love with words — beautiful words, somewhat ridiculous words, peculiar words, they’re all delicious to Zippy (a manifestation of word attraction). Names especially so. Here he is savoring two geographical names from Montana: Grundy Gulch and Zortman

and “Savoring words”:

It’s not just Zippy; Dingburgers in general savor words. They like to use their favorite words and will dwell on them [Vaseline and Lithuanian, in this case]

I’m partial to some words with initial /b/, so boar bristle is a natural for me. A longer /b/-heavy phrase came up in this blog also in 2010, in a short posting “/b/ing there”:

Recently I mentioned San Francisco Blow Buddies in passing. It’s a place for safe sex for gay and bisexual men, a No Fuck zone in nice surroundings.

A few years ago, a gay friend of mine was visiting in San Francisco and several of the locals gathered to spend some time with him. He’s an incredibly enthusiastic guy. On this occasion he was bubbling over with a report of going to the “Beer Bust at Blow Buddies”. He said it over and over, just to enjoy the sounds. All those /b/’s, all those bilabial stops in happy alliteration! You’ve got to work both lips just to say it!

Beer Bust at Blow Buddies! Be there!

The phrase has some further resonances, in the words bust and buddies, both of which have /Ʌ/ as their accented vowel — what you might think of as the “suck-fuck vowel”. Blow Buddies on its own is delicious phonologically and clever semiotically, using the milder blow rather than the coarser suck and using the warm and affiliative buddies (while echoing the idiomatic compound fuck buddy).

This entry was posted on February 2, 2013 at 11:19 am and is filed under Phonology, Usage attitudes. 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.