Archive for June, 2018

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Muscle daddies for Fathers Day

June 17, 2018

(About the social and sexual worlds of gay men as represented in gay porn. About men’s bodies, especially the muscle hunk body type. And about mansex. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The intro to today’s posting “Muscle Daddies Day” on AZBlogX, about a TitanMen sale for Fathers Day, featuring Liam Knox and Luke Adams in Muscle Daddies:

The TitanMen sales for US holidays contnue. Recently, Mothers Day skillfully turned into a gay porn occasion by focusing on muscle hunks who are muthuhs, using material from the gay porn DVD New Rules. Then mansex for Memorial Day featuring the DVD Beef. Now for Fathers Day — which in the gay porn world is always going to be about Daddy / Boy relationships — we get, of course, material from Muscle Daddies, a DVD I posted about back in March.

(more…)

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

An old mishearing

June 17, 2018

For almost 33 years now, I’ve been mishearing the lyrics to the theme song “Thank You For Being a Friend” for the American sitcom The Golden Girls (which debuted in September 1985 and continued through 1992). Just one line:

And the card attached would say

which I hear, every time (including just now, as I watch re-runs of the show), as

And the heart attack would say

The phonological relationships are close, but of course heart attack makes no sense at all in the context. Yet the illusion perseveres. Even when I know it’s about to come up again, I have to struggle not to hear heart attack.

(more…)

Posted in Mishearings, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »

Why? Why?

June 17, 2018

Because we can. And we think it’s clever. And cute.

But why try to read the minds of people who do these things? Just sit back and admire their artisanal pigs in blankets. On a Pinterest board:

(more…)

Posted in Language and food, Logos, Names, Phallicity, Portmanteaus, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

DJ is chaired at Stanford!

June 16, 2018

Yesteday’s hot news from my little corner of academia, a message from my Stanford linguistics colleague Beth Levin announcing that

Dan Jurafsky … has just been appointed to an endowed chair, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professorship in the Humanities.

Margaret Jacks Hall was thronged with well-endowed celebrants bearing chairs and singing paeans to the law and the American banking system, bringing to conclusion not only the month of Ramadan but also an extraordinarily crowded season of doctoral debuts (some of which I will report on in other postings).

In the midst of this, excited buzz — like the murmuring of innumerable bees — over the verbing of chair in the sense (roughly) ‘to award a named professorship to’.

(more…)

Posted in Academic life, Awards, Linguists, Stanford, Verbing | Leave a Comment »

Proper nouns

June 16, 2018

In the One Big Happy of May 30th, Ruthie falls into the pit of use and mention:

There’s an adjective proper as defined by Ruthie’s mother. Then there’s the adjective proper in the idiomatic nominals proper noun / name. And that’s just the beginning of the problem.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Common vs. proper, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Technical and ordinary language, Use and mention | 2 Comments »

Background foods and food discoveries

June 15, 2018

The spur: this brief moment from the NYT obit for chef, author, tv personality, and social critic Anthony Bourdain, by Kim Severson, Matthew Haag, and Julia Moskin, on-line on the 8th as “Anthony Bourdain, Renegade Chef Who Reported From the World’s Tables, Is Dead at 61”, in print on the 9th as “Anthony Bourdain, Renegade Chef, Dies at 61; Showed the World How to ‘Eat Without Fear'”:

  (#1)

He first became conscious of food in fourth grade, he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.” Aboard the Queen Mary on one of the family’s frequent trips to France, he sat in the cabin-class dining room and ate a bowl of vichyssoise, a basic potato-leek soup that held the delightful surprise of being cold. “It was the first food I enjoyed and, more important, remembered enjoying,” he wrote.

(more…)

Posted in Language and food, Language of sex, Memory, Movies and tv, My life, Names, Phallicity, Slang, Vaginality | 5 Comments »

Midnight in Cuba

June 14, 2018

From Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown: “Miami” (S5 E2, 5/3/15), as quoted in the Eater.com site‘s “19 best quotes” from the episode:

4. [Bourdain] On the medianoche sandwich: “Many of you watching who are dimly aware of Miami and this sandwich thing they call a Cubano that you may or may not have had before, you’re thinking, ‘Yes, a Cubano sandwich.’ But you’d be wrong. This, is not a Cubano sandwich, strictly speaking. This, my friends, is a medianoche. Close. A cousin. Like a Cubano, it’s got roast pork, ham, Swiss cheese, pickles, and a little mustard. And like a Cubano it’s pressed until hot and runny inside. But:”

5. [Miami chef Michelle] Bernstein, interrupting, on the medianoche sandwich: “You see the bread? It’s darker and it’s sweeter, so you have a real contrast with the salty pickles and the pork, and the bread.”

Una medianoche, uno Cubano. Not the same, because the bread is different (and maybe the kind of pork or the kind of ham or the pickles or the mustard). I can get uno Cubano at my local Whole Foods (and often do) — “slow roasted pork, Black Forest ham, Swiss cheese, pickles, mustard” — and it seems to be pretty authentic, except that it’s on a French roll. Best not to argue names and ingredients and authenticity.

(more…)

Posted in Language and food, Names | Leave a Comment »

Drunk Cartoons

June 14, 2018

(#1)

A new series by cartoonist Bob Eckstein (who’s been around on this blog for three years now; see his Page). From the 6th, on the Weekly Humorist site, “Drunk Cartoon: Pants”:

(more…)

Posted in Compounds, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Pride space flags

June 13, 2018

More Pride flags, all transformed versions of existing X Pride flags, for various values of X having to do with gender or sexuality. Transformed by Laurie Raye by superimposing images of the starry sky on them. So the now-standard six-stripe Pride flag becomes:

(#1)

(more…)

Posted in Flags, Gender and sexuality, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

24 Hours, 24 Kisses and 24 Magazine Covers

June 13, 2018

(Not much about language in this one.)

The title of the cover story in the NYT Magazine on the 10th, with this illustration:

(#1)

Las Vegas claims the title “Sin City”; this is New York’s bid to  be “Love City” — challenging Paris, Rome, and (in the U.S.) San Francisco, where Tony Bennett famously left his heart:

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and the body, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »