Archive for January, 2018

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News from the Mormon territories

January 7, 2018

Two pieces of news, from wildly disparate parts of my life, but both with Mormon connections.

First, a gay porn sale from the Lucas studios, from their MormonBoyz.com specialty site: tons of deeply transgressive LDS mansex, framed as daddy-son sex to boot; also with lots of images of men kissing, which I happen to find very satisfying.

Second, the news from Salt Lake City, where the 92nd annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America is drawing to a close today — an event that brings with it meetings of sister societies, among them the American Dialect Society, sponsor of an annual Word of the Year competition, a kind of public lexicographic circus with voting from the floor. The overall WOTY winner this year, announced on the 5th: fake news, in two different senses. Details on this and the other winners below.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Word attraction, Words | Leave a Comment »

Epiphany morning with Joey Tribbiani

January 7, 2018

Since my middle name is Melchior, I was hoping for gold on Epiphany morning, but what I got was a primo sex dream — my attempts at programming sex dreams never work, they always turn into convoluted dreams about linguistic analyses, so yesterday’s dream was a great gift — featuring Joey Tribbiani as a fabulously slutty (also sweet and goofy) gay pornstar. Not Matt LeBlanc, but his character Joey Tribbiani. So I woke with a hunky funny Joey on my, um, mind.


(#1) Joey practices making love with a pineapple (video here)

That’s Matt LeBlanc playing Joey. My dream had Joey playing a stud named Rocco. In a threesome with me and my boyfriend, whose dream name I don’t remember, but he was played by my guy Jacques. Together, between nearly non-stop bouts of noisy public sex, we saved all the gay pornstars of the world from annihilation by an evil army. With the help of a lot of undercover agents, most of them women. But the three of us studs had the big weapons.

It was all deeply satisfying, with victories in battle and ragingly hot sex. Also a lot of fun, with horseplay and banter, and (thankfully) without the Friends laugh track. Also without the Epiphany gold befitting the white-bearded King of Persia, but then you can’t have everything.

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Morning names, Movies and tv, My life, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »

This week’s terrible literary food pun

January 6, 2018

It starts with the piece by Calvin Baker on the life of poet Derek Walcott in the recent NYT Magazine “The Lives They Lived” issue (12/28 on-line, 12/31 in print), with this photo of the Nobel laureate:


(#1) Walcott in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, in 1993; photo credit: David Hurn/Magnum Photos

The village of Hay, on the river Wye, on the border between England and Wales, is famously picturesque, and I’ll get to that. But I was then struck by a recollection that there was in fact a village in England called Ham (also picturesque, and I’ll get to that too), which is not on the river Wye (though it’s close to the river Avon, as in Stratford-on-Avon, cue Shakespeare, so you could reasonably think of it as Ham-on-Avon) — but if it were, it would be (insert massive groan here) Ham-on-Wye. Well, it gets worse.

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Posted in Books, Death notices, Language and food, Names, Poetry, Puns | 1 Comment »

But that’s not I nor you

January 6, 2018

My most recent adventure in pronoun case — the posting “Usage note: NomPred”, about nominative predicative pronouns — ended with a screen capture with the bit of dialogue

No, that’s more you. That’s not me.

which I converted to a piss-elegant pronoun version with That’s not I.

I haven’t found recent examples of this pronoun usage, not That’s not I, That’s not she/he, That’s not they, or (worse) That’s not we — NomPred we is extraordinarily unnatural — but I did find an example from the late 19th century, in a bit of didactic verse for schoolchildren:

Some folks long to die
But that’s not I nor you.

(where it’s repeated as the fourth line of morally instructive quatrains; this is the end of the first verse) — here conveying ‘but that’s not the way you and I are, but you and I aren’t like that’, and so indirectly conveying both ‘but that’s not the way I am, but I’m not like that’ and also ‘nor should that be the way you are, nor should you be like that’.

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Posted in Language and food, Poetry, Pronoun case, Usage advice | 2 Comments »

Usage note: NomPred

January 5, 2018

Every so often, I’m brought up short by an example, in edited prose in a serious publication, of a nominative predicative pronoun that strikes me as deeply strange and unnatural. So it was yesterday as I read through the New York Times. In a piece by Alan Feuer (relevant sentence boldfaced):

[on-line 1/3] “One Brooklyn Man’s Lonely Journey to Jihad”, [in print 1/4] “Court Papers Detail a Drift Toward Jihad”
For years in Brooklyn, it was just he and mother, his alcoholic father having long ago abandoned them in Kazakhstan. She worked cleaning houses and was gone much of the day. He went to a large public high school, but spoke little English and had few, if any, friends.

Presumably, either Feuer or an editor was bewitched by the theory that predicative pronouns must necessarily be nominative (on the model of the hyperformal identifying formulas It is I and This is he), but in the specifying-it construction above, the pronoun case choice of native speakers would be accusative him, not nominative he.

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Posted in Pronoun case | Leave a Comment »

Spathy in maturity

January 4, 2018

I call my spathiphyllum Spathy /spǽθi/ for short. Its most recent bloom, which started out all white and calla-like, has now matured to a handsome green:

The mature bloom on the left, a younger bloom (seen from behind) on the right. The plant in its native habitat, on my worktable. (Warwick Rowers engaged in naked horseplay in the background, among other things.)

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Posted in Language and plants | Leave a Comment »

A news bulletin for scrotums

January 4, 2018

Passed on by Mary Ballard on Facebook:

A somewhat uncomfortable combination of nut bag, suggesting nut sac ‘scrotum’, and (nut) milk ‘semen’, both involving nut ‘testicle’.

But plastic?

Posted in Language and food, Language and the body | 1 Comment »

A zeugmoid in high office

January 4, 2018

Elizabeth Joh on Twitter today, reporting this statement from [REDACTED]:

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.

which she identified as zeugma, though that’s not quite right.

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Posted in Zeugma | 2 Comments »

Two puns for Thursday

January 4, 2018

A caption in yesterday’s New York Times (front page); and a Bizarro + Wayno cartoon:

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns | Leave a Comment »

tooken by the senses taker

January 4, 2018

The 12/5/17 One Big Happy, which came by in my comics feed a few days ago:

(#1)

Three things here: Ruthie’s eggcornish reshaping of the unfamiliar word census (ending in /s/) as the familiar senses (ending in /z/); her tooken as the PSP of the verb take; and (in the last panel) her use of take ‘tolerate, stand, endure’ (here with the modal can of ability and also negation; and with the pronominal object this).

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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Idioms, Inflection, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Negation | Leave a Comment »

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