(It’s all about penises, with mildly raunchy playfulness in content and language, so not to everyone’s taste, but requiring (I think) no more warning than that.)
A Dog Named Trouser. It begins with jocular exchanges on Facebook on 8/6:
MV: If they’d just told me there was a job where you can meet a dog named Trouser, I’d have picked that sooner. [MV has been selling her drawings of dogs and cats]
RW: Does he pant? [Imagine everyone groaning at the pun on pants ‘short, quick breaths’ vs. pants ‘trousers’.]
CC: Is there also a snake named Trouser? [first playful slang: trouser snake ‘penis’]
AO: That’s a trout, I think. [shifting right to our topic: trouser trout ‘penis’]
AZ > AO : Snake, trout, eel, they’re all adorable trouser-dwellers… [trouser eel is also possible] Entertaining, easily available, and delicious. And the Trout is lyrical [allusion to Schubert’s music].
AO: Alliterative, even! [trouser trout, tripping on TRs]
AZ [shifting from the common noun trouser trout to a proper name, and slipping into journalist register] > AO: Breaking news: Trouser Trout, acknowledged master of moose-knuckle modeling, and oldest recorded practitioner of this niche craft, died in a freak runway accident yesterday at the age of 87, according to his management agency. Mr. Trout, born Regenbogen Forelle [Gm. ‘rainbow trout’] on the Gallatin River in Yellowstone Park [the Gallatin provides excellent trout fishing], assumed his professional name at the age of 17, when a photographer, coming across him on the street, recognized the man’s potential and featured him in a spread jointly published by Look and Physique. After a private memorial service, he will be returned to the Gallatin River for interment.
Resemblance in two places. Background: my 8/5/12 posting “Snakes, worms, fish, clams, slugs”, illustrating various actual creatures that resemble penises (the fish in question include a number of species) and so get metaphorical names: a penis fish (subsective compound) is a type of fish that is like a penis; a penis snake (resembloid compound) is a snake-like creature that is like a penis. The relationship between the head, N2, in the compound and the modifier, N1, in the compound is one of likeness.
Penis snake expresses resemblance in two places: in N2, which is resembloid (the creature so named isn’t actually a snake, but resembles one) and in the (likeness) relationship between N2 and N1 (the creature is like a penis). Penis snake, denoting a type of snake, expresses resemblance only via the relationship between N2 and N1.
(#1) Trouser snake, on the other hand, is resembloid (what the pirate is flaunting isn’t a snake, but merely resembles one); but the relationship between N2 and N1 is one of location, not likeness (the snaky penis is located in the pirate’s trousers)
Trouser snake can then serve as a representative of the similar compounds trouser trout and trouser eel (which seems not to have been attested, but is certainly a possible coining; eel ‘penis’ has been around since Shakespeare’s time). From the cites in GDoS, both trouser trout and trouser snake seem to be recent coinings — with first cites in 1989 and 2001, respectively. (Their monocular variants one-eyed trouser trout and one-eyed trouser snake are even more recent.)
The gay porn flick. The especially satisfying name trouser trout then shows up in lots of places. Unsurprisingly, it’s been used as the name of a gay porn flick, from a major studio (the Monster Bang section of Raging Stallion). The cover of the DVD is relatively decorous (for such things):
(#2) Entertainingly, the pornstar on the cover, Dominic Sol, is doing a jock cock tease, opening his jeans fly to reveal a jockstrap that holds the desired cock
(More on the flick and one of its stars, Antonio Biaggi, in my 8/7/21 posting “Melecio / Biaggi”.)
The jokey dating advice book. A gay porn flick was pretty much inevitable, but advice on looking for a husband, framed as a perky guide to man-trout fishing with flies (flies as in #1)? Yet, there is A Girl’s Pocket Guide to Trouser Trout: Reflections on Dating and Fly-Fishing, by Gail Rubin (from the self-publishing company AuthorHouse, 2004). The cover:
(#3)
The synopsis from the publisher (which is to say, from Rubin herself):
Synopsis: Are you angling for trout but hooking only Other Fish in the Sea? Ladies, we’re not talking about seafood. If men were fish and women the anglers, trout would be the good guys women want to land, Other Fish in the Sea the fellows who make women’s lives miserable. How do you differentiate between the keepers and the losers? A Girl’s Pocket Guide to Trouser Trout illuminates the often-murky waters of the dating pool with insights inspired by fly-fishing techniques and advice. A Girl’s Pocket Guide to Trouser Trout helps a woman define her own angling style in the hunt for her trophy trout. This witty, sometimes spicy book dishes information on Other Fish in the Sea to avoid, quality streams to fish (good places to meet good men), leader lines to cast (conversation openers), and natural, artificial, and exotic lures to utilize. What to do when the fishing hole runs dry, prospects for angling in the later years, trouser trout tips, and tall tales of trout landed or lost round out the book…
(In my 8/9/21 posting “Gail Rubin”, I investigate who this author Gail Rubin is, an absorbing question that has nothing to do with the sexual slang trouser trout.)
Trout here, trout there, trout everywhere. In a similar vein, in an earlier posting today, “Trout, the name”, I looked at things and people named Trout (besides the actual fish), ending up with Kilgore — again, by free association to the slang trouser trout without bearing on its use.
Bonus: an occurrence of trouser trout. In my 5/2/16 posting “Where is he now?”, I looked at cartoonist Brad Parker, in particular at three strips from his gay sex comics “Bigdicked Cocksucking Surfers” (raw stuff on AZBlogX), with extravagant synonyms for the penis in the second strip:
big bullhero, trouser trout, spurtin’ sex salmon
Elaborate giggle-inducing synonyms from literary raunch, like nothing what men actually cry out in the throes of same-sexual passion (if they utter words at all, rather than grunts or moans) — which is simple, time-worn, repetitive, and ritualistic (as it should be, to accompany powerful, intense animal acts).
Parker’s absurd terms for the penis moved me to compose a gay personals ad for Marine Parkerland:
Trouser Trout seeks Sex Salmon to shoot the torpedo juice together
(with another giggly Parkerism, for semen). Actually, the ad just makes me hungry for nicely grilled fish, with a lemon sauce.
Parker also led me to compose captions for imaginary cartoons:
Randolph thoughtlessly stroked his trouser trout while waiting for the amuse-bouche to be served.
Herbert showed the class how his sex salmon turned a fabulous deep orange as he neared ejaculation.
Franklyn’s big bullhero made climbing narrow stairways vexatious for him.
The lacrosse team lined up, by size, for the day’s chalk talk on the aesthetics of torpedo juice.
Probably not Parker’s thing — anyway, he’s doing tiki art now — but perhaps Glen Baxter could be induced to try his hand at the task.
August 10, 2021 at 7:49 am |
I was somewhat surprised to find that the earliest citation for trouser trout precedes that for trouser snake by a dozen years; my subjective impression (and we all know what that’s worth) is that I’d seen, or at least heard, trouser snake earlier than 2001, but I can’t really ever having heard trouser trout until this series on your blog.
August 11, 2021 at 6:04 pm |
Three things.
First, the dictionary cites can be only for material that somehow reaches publication, so for slang they’re almost always significantly later than their presumable first occurrences in speech; as a result,12 years or so isn’t much at all — given the probabilities, they’re essentially contemporaneous with one another.
Second, the dictionaries aim to give a panoptic view of usage, something that no individual speaker comes close to possessing more than a tiny sliver of. Any one person can know only a little more than what they have themselves experienced, and that’s infinitesimal in comparison to the big picture. The fact that (as far as you can recall) *you* never heard of trouser trout until a few days ago counts for nothing. That’s one of the things wrong with subjective impressions.
Third, and much worse, our memories for what we have experienced in the way of language and when we experienced it in what context are appallingly piss-poor, and subject to many sources of grave distortion. (Worse still, we are often absolutely dead sure about these memories, while being provably dead wrong.)
I give this lecture again and again, mostly to people like you, who I think are both smart and flexible in their thinking. You find reporting on your subjective impressions entertaining, but you might as well be amusing us with tales of the gremlins and elves in your cellar, as opposed to the werewolves and fairies in your neighbor’s. (There are dozens of sites on the net where people are welcome to entertain their peeves, enthusiasms, beliefs, attitudes, reminiscences, and subjective impressions with respect to language; why gum up my blog with this stuff?)
Having given versions of my rant for, oh, 30 or 40 years now, without any visible effect whatsoever, I have reached some point of terminal despair. (Life has been hard on me recently.) There’s nothing wrong with your telling your recollections, and they might be useful in suggesting places to do research, but dwelling on your subjective impressions as the only commentary on current dictionary entries just gets in the way of doing even rudimentary science.
As it happens, my own very strong subjective impression was that trouser trout was at least 40 or 50 years older than GDoS has it, but I didn’t report that because it’s quite likely that I was full of shit (as we sociolinguists like to say, in our quaint technical way).