… was yesterday. From John Lawler on Facebook, this comment about the Pied Piper of Hamelin and an illustration, originally from Richard Galgano:
July 22 is Ratcatcher’s Day (celebrated on June 26 in Hamelin, Germany)
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Archive for July, 2013
Pied-Piping Day
July 23, 2013
Odds and ends: portmanteaus to penises
July 22, 2013An accumulation of miscellanea: portmanteaus, porn flick and pornstar names, (in the continuing Remarkable Underwear series) black lace skivvies, and (in the continuing News for Penises series), the smallest penis in Brooklyn.
More Magritte
July 21, 2013(About art rather than language.)
Today’s Zippy:
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Zippy comes back to Magritte every so often. Surrealists stick together.
take it as a given
July 21, 2013In today’s Pearls Before Swine, Pig misunderstands yet another English expression:
Ok, it’s take it as a given ‘assume that it is true’, a partly transparent idiom. Which Pig apparently hadn’t heard before, so he understands the noun given, eggcornishly, as gibbon. Swing on, Pig.
(Yes, tremendously silly. But I am entertained.)
As the car drives
July 21, 2013Yesterday’s Bizarro, with a play on as the crow flies:
As the car drives — on roads that follow complex and twisted routes.
Baseball days
July 21, 2013(Not much language in this one.)
The San Francisco Giants have been playing a series against the Arizona Diamondbacks; I watched the beginnings of the games Friday night and last night — both Giants wins, 2-0 and 4-3 — at Three Seasons (while consuming sushi). These games moved me to add Hunter Pence to my list of favorite Giants players — favorite as players and as wonderful men to look at. (Buster Posey and Tim Lincecum were already on the list.) After my adventures with shirtless actors and tennis players, I thought to check for shirtless Hunter Pence, and bingo.
It also occurred to me that Hunter Pence wouldn’t be a bad name for a pornstar. It doesn’t seem to have been taken, but a search did pull up a rich vein of steamy RPF (real people fiction) involving Giants players, in particular Hunter Pence and Brandon Belt (another good potential porn name) as lovers and Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner as lovers. Oh my.
Respecting each other
July 20, 2013The short version of an ad for a gay dating/cruising app:
MISTER is an online community for men who value themselves and other men. Unlike other gay social networking apps, MISTER encourages users to show their faces, show respect, spend less time searching and more time meeting men in the real world. The users of our app are proud to say, “I am MISTER.”
(There will eventually be a linguistic point.)
pizzle
July 19, 2013In looking at the simile piss like a horse (here), I came across references to the pizzles of male horses (from which copious piss streams, famously). Pizzle — ‘the penis of an animal, esp. a bull’ (NOAD2) — was a word familiar to me from childhood (close to the farm), but not one I see often these days, except in overheated porn writing (in gems like “gets the pizzle drizzlin’ “).
Etymological point: pizzle has nothing to do with piss, which is onomatopoetic. Cultural point: pizzles have a variety of uses, notably as chew sticks for dogs. I’m not making this up.
More sexual slang
July 19, 2013(Warning: high sexual content.)
Continuing my series of postings on sexual practices and slang terms for them, I turn today to cum play of various kinds, in particular snowballing and gokkun (illustrated in #1 and #2, respectively, in this posting on AZBlogX). The first practice was familiar to me, though I didn’t know it had a slang name, other than the transparent name cum sharing; and the second I vaguely recalled having heard about, but under the transparent name cum drinking.
Taking idioms seriously
July 18, 2013Cartoon Thursday continues with today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
Mother Goose wants Grimm not to reveal a secret, not to let the cat out of the bag. Grimm agrees that he won’t let the cat, Attila, out of the bag he has him in. A play on an ambiguity between literal and idiomatic (and figurative) readings.