(Yes, a pun, but a lot of (homo)sexual content as well.)
In my e-mail this morning, an ad for this gay porn flick:
A cheap pun — grease/Greece, allusion to greek (anal) sex, which is prominently featured in the flick — but still entertaining to me; maybe it’s just a cheap Monday thrill.
In the NYT on the 19th, “Learn to Talk in Beggars’ Cant” by Daniel Heller-Roazen, beginning:
Rulers have long kept certain powers hidden from their subjects. But this summer’s disclosures concerning the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency have made it clear that today’s freedom of expression comes at the price of a new power: the state’s ability to burrow ever deeper, by technological means, into the private language of ordinary citizens.
… In a time when speech is subjected to unprecedented scrutiny, it is worth recalling that the safest way to express a subversive thought is to clothe it in unfamiliar garb. We can learn how from another motley cast of characters, including children, rebels, beggars and scribes. Long ago, such outsiders and outlaws twisted the languages that they shared with others, making of them new and unheard things: obscure jargons, which allowed them to communicate safely among themselves.
Today’s Pearls Before Swine, with a word avalanche:
Pearls toilet-talk, which manages to avoid pissy while strongly suggesting it.
[Oh yes, and the reference to pity party.]
Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine:
Rat is characteristically insulting; never hire Rat for a delicate task.
Then there’s the agentive noun breaker upper (or breaker-upper), with double marking: -er on both the verb, break, and the particle, up.
Just posted on “Men and their pickles”, which brings me to (actual) pickles and (figurative, sexual) pickles. It’s well in advance of National Pickle Day (November 14th), but here’s a pile of (cucumber) pickles to tide you over:
(#1)
From a re-run of the Law & Order episode “Shangri-La” (2002), Assistant D.A. Jack McCoy (played by Sam Waterston) to Associate D.A. Serena Southerlyn (played by Elisabeth Röhm):
Never get Freudian with a man with a pickle.
(McCoy is of course eating a pickle during their office conversation.)
This is what I took down as the scene went by, and what many others report. But some have it as the weightier:
Never get Freudian with a man holding a pickle.
Either way, an entertaining and memorable quotation.
Heard on KQED just moments ago, an NPR piece on puffin restoration on the Maine coast. Puffins have a special place in my household, because they were my man Jacques’s totem animals (as penguins and woolly mammoths are mine) — from his many summers Down East, where the puffins roam.
My recent postings on slash fiction and imagery, and fan fiction and art, pulled up a series of truncations and clippings, the most notable being manip, a count noun referring to a digital or photo manipulation of an image or video. From “Spike / Marsters” on the 20th:
Angel can be viewed in my previous posting (image #2, and with the Winchester brothers and Spike in a fourgy in #9). Doug Wyman supplied a Spangel [Spike/Angel] manip in a comment to that posting, and here’s another that I like: [#2 in “Spike / Marsters”]
That’s digital or photo manipulation truncated to manipulation, then clipped to manip. Well, it’s short and snappy.
(Technically not visually X-rated, but very heavy in sexual content.)
In writing about facial expressions during gay sex (especially, during man-on-man intercourse), I’ve remarked on an ecstatic expression often shown by one partner (usually, the bottom) or both of them. From a posting on “Captioned croppings”, this example of mutual ecstasy (mouths open, eyes narrowed or fully shut):
The expressions are an outward manifestation of an inner state of mind (and body), an intense giving over of one’s self to, or losing one’s conscious self in, the sexual experience — an ecstasy or rapture. Gay men sometimes speak of a bottom in this transcendant state as being in heat; the counterpart for a top would be, I suppose, being in rut or rutting, though I’ve never heard the expression. These ways of talking adopt the vocabulary of sexual behavior in certain animals for an only very roughly analogous human phenomenon.
In today’s Pearls Before Swine, Pig once again fails to recognize idiomaticity, but this time he does it in steps:
Pig first treats expect as taking an infinitival complement, as in They’re expecting to leave soon. But then Goat provides an NP direct object (as in They’re expecting a baby, still with an idiomatic use of expect), so Pig shifts to treating expect as taking a direct object plus an infinitival complement, as in They’re expecting the kid to leave soon. Pig asks for the infinitival complement — for him, the sentence is still incomplete — and Goat abandons the whole thing in exasperation.