February | 2017 | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for February, 2017

ON in the comics

February 20, 2017

A Zippy I’ve been saving since it came out on 11/25:

Another piece of what’s turning into a very large project on the English words normal (Adj), normality (N), and normalize (V) — plus related vocabulary — and the conceptual (and sociocultural) categories associated with them. The Zippy involves only long-standing senses of normal and normality — what I’ll call O (for old (senses of)) N (for the three normal-related words) — plus the Adjs abnormal and deviant. (The contrast is between ON and what I’ve called IN, for innovative senses of the words.)

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Double your pleasure

February 20, 2017

(This posting has no redeeming social value whatsoever, and hardly any linguistic interest, but it can afford some laughs. It is, however, about gay porn ads, describing hard-core mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The hard-core evidence is on AZBlogX, in a posting titled “Sleazy Presidents Day with Michael Lucas” (Michael Lucas the gay porn honcho), with a holiday ad (#1) plus a still from a video the company has on sale (#2).

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex | Leave a Comment »

New on my blog

February 20, 2017

Three new Pages on my blog this morning:

Penis art, under the parent Page “Xblog essays”, building on the inventory of postings in my recent “Art of the penis” posting: about artworks in which penises figure prominently.

Categorization & labeling, under the parent Page “Linguistics notes”: conceptual categorizations vs. linguistic expressions, an inventory assembled by Kim Darnell on my behalf

Clothing: general, under the parent Page “Clothing postings” (which it shares with pages on shirtlessness and underwear — reflecting some of the preoccupations of this blog): another inventory assembled by Kim Darnell on my behalf

Posted in Links, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Blossoms from the south

February 20, 2017

Two visits to the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, one a few weeks ago, one last week, netting wonderful plants from the Southern Hemisphere (South Africa to Australia and New Zealand): Westringia fruticosa ‘Smokey’ and Tulbaghia simmleri ‘Cheryl Renshaw’ on the first visit, a species of Bulbinella (possibly Bulbinella nutans) on the second. All winter-blooming here in Palo Alto (though their blooming times are variable, in both hemispheres).

Meanwhile, we’re having a continuation of winter, with all its plants (including various magnolias, camellias, citrus fruits, cymbidium orchids, leafy greens and brassicas of all kinds, cyclamens, hellebores, pansies and violets, and so on). Meanwhile, the onset of spring comes in January, with narcissus / daffodils (now in great spreads of bloom), the first leafing out of deciduous trees, and then the flowering fruit trees in the genus Prunus (now blooming gorgeously and dropping their petals everywhere). There are seasons, but they overlap. Very soon: the first roses.

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Posted in Language and plants, Names | 2 Comments »

horsetails

February 19, 2017

… the plant, viewable locally in planters outside two office buildings, one a block north and one a block west of where I live. They thrive there; they are tough plants, aggressive even — they are invasive pest plants in South Africa and Australia — though they suffer some from vandals who manage to break their stems off. The local species, Equisetum hyemale, in a big stand:

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Posted in Language and plants, Mathematics, Names | 2 Comments »

Playlinguist

February 19, 2017

Playlinguist, “The Magazine of Full-Frontal Grammar”, has now been revamped as Parts of Speech, a lifestyle magazine for trendy metrolinguals, as you can see in today’s Bizarro:

(#1)

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Posted in Double entendres, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Art of the penis

February 19, 2017

(Obviously, there will be a lot of dick talk here, but of the art-historical and art-critical variety, rather than the sexual-arousal variety.)

On Facebook, art historian Reuben Cordova writes:

I’m giving a lecture: “The Penis in Art. A Short History, From the Greeks to Today.” Any suggestions?

and offers as an example this ancient Greek vase with the image of a naked woman carrying a gigantic penis on it:

(#1)

(Such images appear to fall under the Fine Art Exemption for body display on Facebook, and presumably Google+ and WordPress as well. The point presumably being that the penis images on display are not of actual human bodyparts, but are fantasy creations.)

Naked men are all over ancient Greek art, and ancient Roman art as well. A few more examples, then a pile of links on this blog and AZBlogX to phallic art, and a sampling of modern penis art not already covered in my blogs.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language play, Phallicity | 3 Comments »

Stud Finder

February 18, 2017

(Discussion of men’s bodies and male-on-male sex in mostly very plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Today’s playtime viewing began with a compilation video of scenes from porn flicks featuring Trenton Ducati, beginning with an especially nicely crafted scene from the 2012 TitanMen Stud Finder, involving Jed Athens, Ford Andrews, and Ducati. Well, yes, a bit of titular word play, combining carpentry / construction work and hot men.

(#1)

The DVD cover, with Ducati in the middle

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Posted in Compounds, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Metaphor, Names, Puns | Leave a Comment »

They don’t get it

February 18, 2017

Short, very common words tend to have a great many senses — more exactly, in such cases there tend to be a great many homophonous lexical items from the same historical source (thanks to semantic shifts and syntactic changes). So, in its main entry for the verb get, NOAD2 has 32 subentries (and then there are lots of idiomatic phrases with get and phrasal verbs with get). And we, um, get things like this scene in a recent One Big Happy:

(#1)