Five strips from the webcomic Cyanide and Happiness, with various points of linguistic interest (some incidental to the humor of the strip).
Archive for March, 2013
Snowboard Zippy
March 23, 2013In Today’s Zippy, our pinhead reverts to adolescence on a snowboard:
The slang in the body of the strip — airdog, boned out, shred, shred the gnar, pop, nollie, pow-wow — is all genuine snowboarder slang, listed in the enormous collection of snowboarding terms here. The title, “Shagnasty”, is slang, but apparently not slang specific to snowboarding.
Dance belts
March 22, 2013In a comment on my “dress left/right” posting on Facebook, Mike McKinley asks for a posting on dance belts. (We seem to be in the Crotch Zone at the moment, what with that posting, the one on Jon Hamm’s moose knuckle / freeballing, and the one on the NuttyBuddy protective cup — and now this one. Well, these things come in waves; one leads to another.).
Surrealists
March 22, 2013(Mostly about art.)
In the current New York Review of Books (4/4/13), a piece by Sanford Schwartz, “Surrealism Made Fresh”, on the exhibition “Drawing Surrealism” (organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it showed 10/21/12 through 1/6/13), now at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York (1/25/13 through 4/21/13). It sounds fabulous.
dress left/right
March 21, 2013Tailor’s terminology for which side of his trousers a man normally stashes his junk on; “Do you dress left or right, sir?” (The crotch dimensions will then be adjusted some to accomodate the man’s hanging on the left or the right.) It came up this morning in connection with my Jon Hamm moose knuckle / freeballing posting; Mike McKinley noted that from the photos, Hamm dresses right.
The idiom isn’t exactly a euphemism, but it is a delicate way of referring to personal information.
Maximum availability
March 21, 2013On AZBlogX, a piece on maximum availability of the body in sex in Gayland (the fantasy land depicted in gay porn), contrasting two men. Another installment in a series about taking things to the max, taking off from Linda Williams’s notes on maximum visibility in gay porn:
8/22/10: Collages Over the Max: piling on of sexual images (link)
10/17/10: To the max: top to the max; two cocks are better than one; many cocks in one scene (link)
Plus postings on dick size and on group sex. There will be more.
The Hamm knuckle
March 21, 2013Passed on by Karen Erickson on Facebook (with general agreement from the readers that I would appreciate it), this photo on the HappyPlace site from 9/10/12:
HappyPlace commentary:
Jon Hamm’s penis photographed shopping on Madison Avenue
It was a pretty muggy in New York this past week, and like most penises suffering through the humidity, Jon Hamm’s apparently tried its best to get a little fresh air. Either those are some very thin pants, or the ridges of his member are as well-defined as his jawline. We can practically count the veins. Never has junk sagged with such gravitas. (Also, his dick looks fat.)
NuttyBuddies and Nutty Buddies
March 21, 2013While looking up the botanical term nut, I was taken to the page for the NuttyBuddy, a piece of protective athletic gear for men, combining a cup with compression shorts. That’s nut as in nuts ‘testicles’, with nutty a near or full rhyme (depending on your dialect) to buddy. News to me, though I did know about the ice cream cones called Nutty Buddies.
sea cucumbers
March 20, 2013In the NYT today, a fascinating story from Dzilam de Bravo, Mexico (“Quest for Illegal Gain at the Sea Bottom Divides Fishing Communities” by Karla Zabludovsky), beginning:
Whispers of high-speed boat chases, harpoon battles on the open sea and divers who dived deep and never re-emerged come and go around here like an afternoon gale.
The fishermen eye strangers — and one another — with deep suspicion. “We’ll tear them apart,” said one, Jorge Luis Palma, squinting into the horizon at a boat he did not recognize.
What has wrapped this village in such hostility?
Sea cucumbers.
Greart variation in sea cucumbers. One example:
Stone fruits, nuts, and berries
March 20, 2013Posting about flowering pear trees reminded me of some complexities in the classification of fruits. Putting aside the well-known divergence between the use of the word fruit in botany and its use in cooking and dining contexts, I’ll look at some more specific cases, in particular stone fruit(s). Again, there’s a divergence between the technical terminology of botany and ordinary language — a result of botanists having taken over ordinary vocabulary and employed it as technical vocabulary in specialized senses.