Archive for May, 2013

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The liquor-poker joke

May 24, 2013

Bravo has been doing re-runs of Inside the Actors Studio shows, several each morning. A few days ago, Mike Myers (actor, comedian, singer, screenwriter, and film producer) was up, so the hour was packed with plenty of good-natured bad taste. A fair amount of time was devoted to Myers’s 2008 comedy The Love Guru, which aroused much critical venom when it came out (I haven’t seen it). Myers was especially pleased with an elaborate double entendre in the movie — the information, or advice:

Liquor up front, poker in back.

(That is, either there is liquor up front — in the front of this place — and poker in (the) back; or you should lick her up front and poke her in back.) Yes, tasteless.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Humor, Language of sex, Names, Silliness, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »

News on the edible penis front

May 24, 2013

Following on yesterday’s edible-penguin posting (focused mostly on cookies and chocolates), I return today to phallic foodstuffs, a topic last discussed here in connection with penis-shaped breadstuffs: baguettes, brioches, and tartes. Now to cookies and chocolates, with the nice portmanteau find cockie ‘cock cookie’, plus some other deliberately phallic food.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Metaphor, Portmanteaus, Signs and symbols | 3 Comments »

News on the edible penguin front

May 23, 2013

From Chris Ambidge, another package of penguin cookies, this time in chocolate chip:

  (#1)

The previous installment had penguin brownies.

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Posted in Language and food, Penguins | 1 Comment »

Annals of phallic animation

May 23, 2013

Phallic creatures abound, in the real world and in the fantasy worlds of artists; see, for example various renditions of the penisaurus (here). Now Rob Partington draws my attention to this charming representation from the 14th century, the flying penis monster:

With ears and a tail. And a nicely placed smile. And saddlebag testicles.

The image comes from the discarded image / discarding images site, devoted to medieval book painting. The identifying text for this one:

Decretum Gratiani with the commentary of Bartolomeo da Brescia, Italy 1340-1345.
Lyon, BM, Ms 5128, fol. 100r

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

The Bare Boys

May 23, 2013

On AZBlogX, a set of images from pornographer Sean Cody, from the video Bareback Fuckfest, with a quartet of cute guys displaying their bodies as a group and then stills from the video, which is focused on one of the four getting fucked by the other three (with the usual assortment of other gay sex acts involving all four of the men). Here, a few words about Sean Cody and a reminder about the verb bareback.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Verbing | 1 Comment »

Not your typical pornstar

May 22, 2013

Over on AZBlogX there’s a piece on gay pornstar Dale Cooper (who took this name from agent Dale Cooper in the tv series Twin Peaks). A man of many talents. He writes for the Huffington Post on (mostly) gay matters, Here’s HuffPo’s blurb on him:

Dale Cooper is a sexual health educator, a social worker for HIV/AIDS clients, a porn performer, and a fundraiser for sexual health causes and affordable housing. He continues to study how gay sexuality has been affected by the Internet, and maintains a web presence at www.daledoesporn.com.

There’s plenty of shots of Cooper genitally nude and engaging in hard-core gay sex acts on AZBlogX. For this blog, here’s a nice head, armpit, and torso shot of him, with his engaging smile:

 (#1)

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and sexuality, Language of sex, Language play, Words | Leave a Comment »

Verbing garbage

May 21, 2013

A message from Ken Callicott:

In the 1986 film “Never Too Young To Die”, the hermaphroditic rock star villain, Velvet Von Ragnar (played by Gene Simmons) killed a henchman, then said something like “Garbage that” or “Garbage him”.  I don’t recall ever having heard ‘garbage’ used as a verb.

At first I thought garbage here was a euphemistic replacement for fuck (based on semantics rather than phonology), but now that I look at the actual quote, I see that we’re dealing with a simple verbing here.

(And the movie looks like a hoot.)

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Posted in Euphemism, Gender and sexuality, Movies, Silliness, Taboo language and slurs, Verbing | 1 Comment »

This week’s best title in an academic journal

May 21, 2013

In a mailing from the Association for Psychological Science, an abstract for this fascinating-sounding article (by Yigal Attali) in Psychological Science (April 29, 2013):

Perceived Hotness Affects Behavior of Basketball Players and Coaches

Ah, you ask, whose perceived hotness? And perceived by whom? Many people think that basketball players are hot hot hot, and I assume the players know this, so it might well affect their behavior.

Oh, not that kind of hot. [Emily Litella mode] Never mind.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Gender and sexuality, Headlines | Leave a Comment »

hairy Harry and the asparagus

May 21, 2013

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a portmanteau:

  (#1)

That’s despair + asparagus. This is a stretch as a portmanteau for me, because the accented vowels in the two contributing words are distinct for me: [e] in despair, [æ] in asparagus. For me and some other American speakers — and for virtually all English speakers outside of North America. But for other Americans, the vowels are quite close (with [ɛ] in asparagus) or identical (with [e] in asparagus). This is merry–Mary–marry territory.

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Posted in Dialects, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Portmanteaus, Variation | 1 Comment »

Three penultimate comments

May 20, 2013

Comments on my posting on penultimate (in penultimate Frisbee) took three directions: a comic association with antepenultimate; complaints about a relatively recent non-standard use of penultimate (to mean ‘absolutely final, absolutely the best’); and complaints about using ultimate and unique and other so-called “non-gradable” adjectives as gradables (modifiable by degree adverbials).

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Posted in Innovations, Modification, Semantics, Style and register, Syntax, Technical and ordinary language, Zeugma | 7 Comments »

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