Archive for April, 2015

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Cluster Fucked

April 24, 2015

(Obviously heavy on taboo language, some of it about man-man sex, but no images. Use with caution.)

In mail today from TitanMen (the gay porn studio), an ad for the new video Cluster Fucked, about orgy scenes (and gangbangs). Samples on the TitanMen site for three group sex scenes, involving (for those of you who follow these things) pornstars:

Francois Sagat, Dean Flynn, Diesel Washington, CJ Madison, Brody Newport

Jason Branch, Jon Galt, Lance Gear, Nick Nicaste

Jessy Ares, Marco Wilson, Junior Stellano, Wilfried Knight

There are two senses for the noun clusterfuck or cluster fuck. From Urban Dictionary, in addition to the ‘orgy’ sense:

Military term for an operation in which multiple things have gone wrong. Related to “SNAFU” (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”) and “FUBAR” (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair).

In radio communication or polite conversation ([e.g.,] with a very senior officer with whom you have no prior experience) the term “clusterfuck” will often be replaced by the NATO phonetic acronym “Charlie Foxtrot.”

And from the scholarly Jesse Sheidlower (3rd ed. of The F-Word), who doesn’t have Charlie Foxtrot:

  1. an orgy [from 1965 on]
  2. Military. a bungled or confused undertaking or situation; mess; (also) a disorganized group of individuals. [from 1969 on]

Both senses have the occasional variant Mongolian clusterfuck / cluster fuck.

The connection between the two senses? One clue is that a similar ambiguity arises for circle jerk ‘group masturbation scene’, ‘mess’ and some other items. From a posting of mine on 1/3/11:

Having just posted, on my X blog, on group sex in gay porn, I’ve returned to some material on circle jerk that I started collecting in 2004

… Tom Dalzell pointed out on ADS-L that HDAS (the Historical Dictionary of American Slang) has circle jerk ‘mess’ since 1973, and the compound seemed to him to be fairly common in that sense. And Doug Wilson noted a possible parallel to cluster fuck, goat fuck, pooch screw, etc. (especially in military contexts), in which “Instead of getting their job done, the participants are engaged in undisciplined,  undignified, useless activity: e.g., metaphorically, group sex or sex with animals.

Posted in Ambiguity, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Metaphor, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Youthful enthusiasms

April 24, 2015

(About music rather than language.)

In the May Harper’s, an entertaining piece on “New Music” by Terry Castle — a literary scholar (specializing in the history of the novel) at Stanford, and sometime writer on popular culture. The Harper’s piece is about old music become new, focusing on Robin Williamson, once of the Incredible String Band.

Terry begins with a confession:

Is there anything more shaming than doting on the electrified English folk-rock of the late Sixties and early Seventies? It’s taken me, I confess, a dreadfully long time to come to terms with it — to acknowledge that I adore, nay, have always adored, the whole tambourinetapping, raggle-taggle mob of them: Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, John Renbourn, Shirley Collins, Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy, Steeleye Span, Maddy Prior, Richard and Linda Thompson, Lindisfarne. I still venerate Jethro Tull and its leader, the psychedelic flutist Ian Anderson, unforgettable for his dandified overcoat, harelike skittishness, and giant comic aureole of red beard and frizzy hair. It’s like admitting you’d rather go to the local Renaissance Faire than hear Mahler’s Lieder at Wigmore Hall.

One is cruelly dated by one’s doting. The British fad for switched-on folk reached its apogee somewhere between 1968, when the Incredible String Band released its sitar-laced masterwork, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, and 1978, the year that the lissome but likely inebriated Sandy Denny, former lead singer of Fairport Convention, died of blunt head trauma after falling down a flight of stairs. Yes, one capered and twirled through it all. Alas, one is now fairly eldritch oneself — positively rime-covered.

I shared Terry’s enthusiasms then — and now as well. And I’m a dozen years older than she is. Rime-covered, indeed.

(more…)

Posted in Music, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

“Cosseted like rare orchids”

April 24, 2015

Very briefly noted: in a book review by Christine Smallwood in the May Harper’s,

Reality wasn’t directly relevant,” one character thinks, all too relevantly, in Nell Zink’s manic new novel MISLAID … The fun begins in the hazy 1960s at the all-female Stillwater College, a former plantation decked out with Virginia creeper: “A mecca for lesbians, with girls in shorts standing in the reeds to smoke, popping little black leeches with their fingers, risking expulsion for cigarettes and going in the lake.” One of these lesbians is a would-be playwright named Peggy, and before you can say “freshman orientation,” she’s shacked up with the resident campus queen, a gay male poet and professor named Lee Fleming who lives down the lake and paddles to class in a canoe. Their eventual marriage isn’t exactly a sham — “vestiges of heterosexuality . . . cosseted like rare orchids” produce two children — but neither does it provide what you might term fulfillment.

A wonderful turn of phrase.

Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Writing | Leave a Comment »

The mammoth genome

April 24, 2015

From Sim Aberson on Facebook, from BBC Science, “Mammoth genome sequence completed” by Pallab Ghosh, beginning:

An international team of scientists has sequenced the complete genome of the woolly mammoth.

A US team is already attempting to study the animals’ characteristics by inserting mammoth genes into elephant stem cells.

They want to find out what made the mammoths different from their modern relatives and how their adaptations helped them survive the ice ages.

The new genome study has been published in the journal Current Biology.

(more…)

Posted in Mammoths, Science | Leave a Comment »

Conversation with the Muffman

April 23, 2015

Today’s Zippy, with another roadside fiberglass icon:

(#1)

There’s a Wikipedia article on Muffler Men, roadside fiberglass figures originally serving as commercial icons, usually holding a sample of whatever is advertised — a muffler in the case of the canonical Muffler Man. Muffler Men take many forms: images of Paul Bunyan, for instance, and the very popular cowboy figure, as above. Zippy fairly often engages Muffler Men (and other fiberglass figures) in conversation.

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Names, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Dinosaur connoisseur

April 23, 2015

Today’s Bizarro, with a portmanteau:

Dinosaur + Connoisseur. With some entertaining play on the style of wine writing.

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Style and register | 2 Comments »

Poem for hot February day

April 22, 2015

The illustration: today’s offering from the Daily Jocks people, with a poem.

The doomed hustler

Mid-February eruption of heat,
Delirious.
Everyone on the street, stripped
For the weather.
A near-naked vision, no
Shirt, no shoes, no
Underwear, just low-slung
Blue shorts: lounging expectantly
Under an awning, offering
Himself.
A hustler’s name, no name,
Changed for each john. But
No johns come: he’s
Hombre sin hombre.

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Alternatives

April 22, 2015

Two recent items about alternative expressions: an occurrence of whimsiness (where you might have expected whimsicality), and one of the count noun mistruth (where you might have expected untruth).

Both are in the OED and both are in the Collins online (and count as legitimate words in Scrabble), but neither is in NOAD2 or most other one-volume dictionaries.

(more…)

Posted in Derivation, Morphology, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Mind the Gap

April 22, 2015

The title of a piece on “mindfulness” by Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times Magazine on the 19th. Well, that was the title in the print version, using a conventionalized expression for warning about a (specific) danger; in the on-line version, the title is the more straightforward (but alliterative) “The Muddied Meaning of ‘Mindfulness’”.

(more…)

Posted in Idioms, Lexical semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Verbatim letter

April 21, 2015

A while back, in a comment on my word entertainment posting, I referred to a note I posted in Verbatim magazine — a letter in #1.4.6 (1975) — with (among other things) observations on –oon words in English. Now I have unearthed it:

Posted in Language play | 2 Comments »

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