Archive for May, 2021

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Speaking in tongues

May 6, 2021

Specifically, cod tongues. In a brief piece in the Economist‘s April 17th 2021 issue (behind a paywall,alas), p. 46, with the following assortment of headers:

[superheadline] Lip service [on-line] / Norwegian cuisine [in print]

[headine] Fish tongues, a Norwegian delicacy harvested by children [on-line] / Fish tongues, harvested by children [in print]

[subheadline] The piece of cod that passeth all understanding

My focus is that subhead, which is a play — very close to a perfect pun — on the beginning of a verse from the Christian Bible, Philippians 4:7. In the KJV:

7 And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

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Posted in Allusion, Language and food, Language and religion, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Musical numerology: two days in May

May 5, 2021

5/4 (yesterday; yes, I’m late, but I was without internet access for about six hours and couldn’t finish assembling the materials for this posting); and 5/9 (Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky)’s birthday, and, this year, Mother’s Day). About the occasions, but also about the dates as 54 Day and 59 Day — in the pages of the Sacred Harp.

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With knitted brows

May 3, 2021

(Significantly about sex between men, often in street language, so thoroughly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

On 5/1, e-mail from HUNT magazine (which hawks gay video porn) featuring a new bareback release, Show Hard, all about t-room / tearoom sexual encounters — a recurrent theme on this blog (there’s a Page on postings about sex in public, especially focused on t-room sex). I’ll take up the flick (and its name) later in this posting.

But on viewing the still from the first scene of Show Hard in the mailing — muscle hunk Beau Butler getting pronged on a mensroom sink by equally hunky Sean Maygers — what really caught my eye wasn’t the sexual action, arousing though that is, but the expression on Butler’s face. One that is so common that we have a name for it in English: knitted / knit (eye)brows. It turns out that there’s more than one physical gesture that is so called; and also, unsurprisingly, that this family of gestures can convey a variety of affects. Also that there are a number of other closely related gestures, with a collection of vocabulary that refers to them; it’s a rich domain of meaning.

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Posted in Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy, Slang | 3 Comments »

Rollin’ on the roadway

May 2, 2021

The mobility equipment piles up. I now have a cool cane (with four feet); an indoor walker (fairly recently equipped with a tray for carrying things around the house); and now a big fancy outdoor walker — a Rollator! — that can, in seconds, be turned into a comfortable seat to rest in on the street.

And now a tour of my assistive devices, as they’re called in the trade.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

5/1

May 1, 2021

It’s a new month, so: 🐇🐇🐇

In a moment I’ll reprise “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” and other 5/1 associations in a posting from last year, but before that I’m going to suggest a new association: in the tradition of 3/14 as Pi(e) Day (from 3.14 as the value of pi / π) and 4/20 as Marijuana Day (from 420 as slang for smoking pot, or otherwise consuming cannabis), I suggest that 5/1 should be celebrated as Alien Encounter Day, in honor of Area 51 in Nevada. (There already is a World UFO Day, celebrated by some on 6/24, by others on 7/2.)

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