A book cover found by Chris Ambidge and posted on Facebook:
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Let’s dance!
Clearly from a time when gay predominantly meant ‘lighthearted, carefree, cheery’ and had not yet come into widespread use meaning ‘homosexual’.
Archive for July, 2013
The gay old days
July 16, 2013Remarkable names
July 15, 2013(Warning: Some plain talk about man-man sex.)
In a comment on my “Name notes” posting (on royal names, unisex names, and fashionable names), javava2012 wrote:
Then there’s that whole (surprisingly large) class of inappropriate names — so, most often, because of what their diminutives are. I’ve personally known two Candice (ne Candy) Kanes and one Mary Christmas. I’ve also known one Michael (NEVER Mike) Hunt. (The latter’s brother was nicknamed York.) (Their sister, fortunately for her, was named Lynette.)
Another category of notable names: names that are remarkable because they’re ambiguous, with an interpretation other than as a simple name — in particular, as a fixed expression of some kind (Mary Christmas, Candy Kane), or as risqué or even obscene phrase (Mike Hunt, York Hunt).
I’m suspicious of the brothers Mike and York Hunt; the ghits suggest an urban legend. But Mike Hunt I can vouch for; this is the name that Scottish pornstar Michael Hunt usually works under.
Piratical Pope
July 15, 2013Talk Like a Pirate Day isn’t until September 19th, but George Takei posted this entertaining piratical moment (passed on to me by Victor Steinbok) recently, and I don’t want to wait two months to post it here:
That would be Alexander Pope (“To err is human; to forgive, divine”, from An Essay on Criticism) crossed with stereotypical pirate talk (“Arr, me hearties!”).
Three sex workers
July 14, 2013(Warning: very plain talk about man-man sex; no X-rated images, but several right on the line.)
The immediate impulse for this posting is the death of three very popular, hunky pornstars in the last year (each with his own sad story), which has led me to think about the term sex worker (as applied to men) and its penumbra of reference to men who make a living from their bodies. And about the challenges of a life in porn.
Revolution at school
July 14, 2013Today’s Bizarro, for Bastille Day (today):
Bring the revolution to school! As it happens, Doug Wyman wrote me a little while ago about a piece of revolutionary childlore, the rhyme:
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No more pencils,
No more books,
No more teachers’/teacher’s/teachers dirty looks.
(This is a rhyming couplet, in trochaic tetrameter, written here with the first line split in two.) Doug wondered about variations in the rhyme. It looks like the couplet above is invariant (in pronunciation; there are orthographic variants given above), but there are numerous extensions to it around, and some of them are aggressive taunts against teachers and schools.)
Another gay back-formed verb
July 14, 2013First came to gay-marry (or gay marry), back-formed from gay marriage — here — and now we get to gay-flirt (or gay flirt) ‘flirt with gays’ (said of straight men), back-formed from the synthetic compound gay-flirting ‘flirting with gays’ — this in a Steam Room Stories video “Straight Guys Who Gay Flirt”:
Sex on the magazine cover
July 14, 2013The notably phallic cover on the current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek (formerly BusinessWeek and before that Business Week):
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twerking
July 13, 2013The latest dance rage. From Wikipedia:
Twerking is a “dance move that involves a person shaking their upper hips and lower hips in an up and down bouncing motion, causing them to shake, ‘wobble’ and ‘jiggle.'” To “twerk” means to “dance in a sexually suggestive fashion by twisting the hips”.
Word divisions
July 12, 2013Today’s Pearls Before Swine, in which Pig continues to have language problems:
So Pig gets the word division wrong. But the sign-maker isn’t blameless here: the sign is printed solid, rather than divided — and (like so many sign-makers these days) eschews apostrophes, so that the sign as printed is ambiguous. Goat gets it right: MEN’S WEAR.
Arguing on the internet
July 12, 2013Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
Call them A (on the left) and B (on the right). B’s leaps in conversational reasoning are totally baffling to A (and pretty baffling to me), though they resemble forms of invalid reasoning you can find on the net, most involving aggressive wild overgeneralization (all cats are French, you’ll be forcing everyone to get gay-married, the lack of dogs means unfairness).