Archive for August, 2020

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Are you 79½ or 80?

August 15, 2020

I’m a few weeks away from my 80th birthday, which turns out to be a cultural watershed of sorts — the dividing line between being “in your 70s” and “in your 80s’, which is definitely old age. But that doesn’t actually make a lot of sense: the decades according to the calendar correspond to no natural physiological milestones, especially not ones so very sharply delineated. One period of life shades into another, with relatively long transitions.

The matter isn’t just theoretical, but of great practical significance, as detailed at some length in the New York Times on-line on 2/20/20, in “The Upshot: How Common Mental Shortcuts Can Cause Major Physician Errors: Tendencies like left-digit bias can have life-altering consequences for patients” by Anupam B. Jena & Andrew R.Olenski (in the print edition on 2/21, under the title “Are you 79½ or 80? Your Doctor’s View May be Life-Altering”):

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Posted in Psychology | 3 Comments »

Let them eat cake

August 15, 2020

(Totally unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

From the Raging Stallion gay porn studio, the 2020 flick Cake Shop, focused on cake ‘buttock’ and especially on cum as a culinary ingredient. The cover of the video, with the naughty bits fuzzed out:


(#1) At the top: Devin Trez, Jake Nicola, Wade Wolfgar — Trez and Wolfgar with long pendulous half-hard cocks you can view in an AZBlogX posting “Cake Shop” — and  below them, Beaux Banks and Donnie Argento, cupcakes in their mouths, their cakes (‘buttocks’) offered for fucking

There is much play on cakes ‘buttocks’ and on eating cum (that’s a queer thing).

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

empathetic

August 14, 2020

Standardly, ‘exhibiting or expressing empathy’, but now also, in some contexts, ‘eliciting empathy’. A semantic development now prominent in the U.S. because of (former vice-president, now presidential candidate) Joe Biden, who is famously empathetic in the first sense (he appreciates our feelings) — subject-oriented EXHIBIT — but because of his life history is also empathetic in the second sense (we appreciate his feelings) — object-oriented ELICIT.


EXHIBIT empathetic (sense one), from cartoonist Baloo’s site

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Posted in Argument structure, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Spontaneous erections

August 13, 2020

(About penises and nipples, in plain talk. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The original spur for this posting was a magazine piece (which I can no longer locate) by a woman complaining about guys getting visible hard-ons in everyday contexts. Why, the writer wondered, can’t men control their hormones in public? Are they just uncivilized beasts?

The fact is that almost all men experience spontaneous, or random, erections, often to their great embarrassment. The triggers are many and complex. When I was a horny teenager (and masturbating, mostly swiftly, around six times a day, to sexual fantasies of my own devising), riding on a bus produced a motion that provoked gigantic unwelcome hard-ons that were very hard to conceal. Other young men get intractable hard-ons in situations of great social anxiety — such as, alas, speaking in public in front of an audience. (There’s more; see below.)

What’s more, an enormous number of people, female as well as male, get spontaneous nipple erections in all sorts of non-sexual situations. Our bodies do a lot of this on their own, without any input from our thoughts. Yes, sexual thoughts and images can trigger these stiffenings, but a lot of it happens out of our consciousness.

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Posted in Language and the body, Phallicity, Shirtlessness | 2 Comments »

Christopher Robin Hood

August 12, 2020

Yet another Bizarro POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) — Dan Piraro is very fond of them — from 12/22/19:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 8 in this strip — see this Page.)

So: Christopher Robin + Robin Hood — plus, of course, the outrageous Robin Hood pun: he steals from the rich and gives to the Pooh.

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Posted in Books, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | 2 Comments »

One more book

August 12, 2020

A Frank Cotham cartoon from the New Yorker on 3/2/20:

(#1)

In my unfortunately frail old age, I’m not exactly doing research, and I’m certainly not going to get it in a book. But I collect stuff — ideas, images, experiences — and turn them into daily essays on my blog, much quirkier even than the stuff I used to publish. It’s a new kind of life.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, My life | 1 Comment »

Two whimsical Bizarros

August 12, 2020

In a time of great distress (the sadness of so many deaths, punctuated by flashes of extraordinary hope), two delightful Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strips to divert my attention: from yesterday (8/11), a sweet strip in which the Pied Piper takes his son into the family business; and from today (8/12), an outrageous pun on the geographical name the Greater Antilles:

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Placenames, Trade names | 1 Comment »

Mansex positions: spitroasting

August 11, 2020

(Obviously not for kids or the sexually modest. In fact, it’s deeply, unimaginably, not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Another chapter in the big book of positions for mansex, about a type of three-man encounter. From my AZBlogX posting of 3/31/13, “Threesomes and more”:

A gay spitroast, or spitroasting — or taking it at both ends — involves a man being fucked by one man while sucking another man’s cock. The metaphor is to the spitroasting of meat (pork, lamb. chicken)

… Spitroasting is not particularly hard to pull off, and if you’re the fortunate pig on the spit, the thrusting of the guy fucking you can push your mouth onto the cock of the guy you’re sucking, making the three of you a single sexual engine. In my wild younger days, I was the pig a number of times; it’s a total cockpig experience.

This assumes the canonical gay spitroast, in which the pig’s body is horizontal, and facing downward (so that his ass is easily available for fucking). Yes, there’s also an upward pig variant, and a vertical pig variant too. Illustrations on AZBlogX (in the 8/11/20 posting “Spitroast chronicles”), since hardly any of them could be cropped for this blog; after all, the practice is all about dicks, so its representation in gay porn abounds in penises.

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

Double scoop in the heat of summer

August 10, 2020

The cover of the 8/17 New Yorker (not yet on the stands), “Double Scoop” by Wayne Thiebaud. Ice cream for the hot summer days.

Not about language, but another tribute to the pleasures of Thiebaud’s art.

(#1)

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Posted in Art, Language and food | 1 Comment »

The pleasures of role reversal

August 10, 2020

A tour of contrasting, also complementary, ideals of male beauty, and hence of male desirability, as they are played out in the fantasy world of gay male pornography. Apollo (or Adonis) vs. Dionysus (or Bacchus or Priapus), Ganymede (the prototypical catamite) vs. Zeus (the prototypical inseminator), beautiful boy vs. powerful man, worked into conventional forms of porn for men, and then complexly subverted by role reversals in which Apollo penetrates Priapus.

Yes, there’s a site (Twink Top) for that — there’s specialist porn for pretty much every fantasy — as well as at least one site (Fun Size Boys) intensifying and celebrating the boy/man dichotomy (featuring little guys taken sexually by really big guys).

This posting is drenched in mansex discussed in street language and so is utterly inappropriate for kids or the sexually modest.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Masculinity | 2 Comments »

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