Archive for 2021

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Bert and Ernie’s 51st anniversary

January 30, 2021

Artist Tom Taylor’s portrait of B&E on the occasion:

(#1)

As puppets on the tv show Sesame Street, B&E haven’t aged at all in 51 years; but the characters B&E are human, so of course they have changed and developed over time. They were kids in 1969 (when Sesame Street started, 51 years before 2020, when Taylor drew this portrait); became a (closeted) gay couple about 15 years later (when writer Mark Saltzman, a partnered gay man, joined the show’s staff); and then came out and explored a new life as macho queers  — there are many varieties of homomasculinity — with Ernie taking a more dominant role in the relationship (the t role, in my writing on role differentiation in couples; see the Page on b/t roles on my blog); note Ernie’s proprietary hand on Bert’s shoulder when they pose as a couple.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Movies and tv | 2 Comments »

The sexual essence of a jockstrap

January 29, 2021

(Very much about men’s bodies as sexual objects, so clearly not for everyone.)

Today’s Daily Jocks sale ad, carefully posed and quite steamily direct, also with an anatomical feature I don’t recall having seen in real life: a blood vessel running down the outside of the model’s leg, quite prominently visible on the surface of his leg (presumably because the model has so little bodyfat to conceal it):

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Underwear | 4 Comments »

True or false in Mushroomland

January 29, 2021

Yesterday on Gina Zwicky’s Twitter account (@GinaGoesOutside):


(#1) Gina Z: I thought this was a death cap and excitedly sent pictures to my friends. it is a false death cap. I have been juked by a mushroom and now I must go

Three things: Gina Z; true and false death caps; the informal, slangy verb juke‘deceive, outmaneuver’.

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Posted in Language and plants, Slang, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

Learning culture

January 28, 2021

The One Big Happy cartoon from 1/6, recently up in my comics feed:

Ruthie and Joe are engaged in picking up elements of culture — American commercial culture, to be specific — beginning this particular bit of learning by reproducing material they’ve heard on tv, without much appreciation for what it means.

This is in line with kids’ learning of other bits of culture — song lyrics, joke routines, patterns of swearing and insulting, greeting and leave-taking routines, and much much more. At the same time that kids are picking up new words at a great rate, they are also incorporating those words into ways of performing the verbal bits of social life. (Meanwhile, they’re learning gestures, facial expressions, the physical elements of dances, games, and sports, and the rest of a vast universe of nonverbal behavior, which then has to be coordinated with verbal behavior.)

And much of this has to be picked up “on the fly”, from observing what people around you do, without being explicitly instructed — a fact that guarantees that their first efforts at performing these bits of culture will be decidedly imperfect and will have to be honed by practice.

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Posted in Child language, Childhood, Linguistics in the comics, Sociocultural conventions | 2 Comments »

The Acting Corps: Cloris Leachman

January 28, 2021

Leachman, who died on the 26th at the age of 94, pretty much defined what it means to be a member of what I’ve called the Acting Corps, a bank of reliable actors with large numbers of acting credits (there’s a Page of links, on this blog here): her professional debut was in 1948 — I was 8 at the time — and she has nearly 300 credited roles on IMDb (a list that doesn’t cover all of her acting work).


Leachman in three of her roles: as Frau Blucher in Young Frankenstein; as Barbara June “Maw Maw” Thompson in Raising Hope; as the title character in the sitcom Phyllis (a spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show)

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Posted in Actors, Movies and tv | 3 Comments »

Honey, egg white, toasted nuts — and chocolate

January 27, 2021

Some of the principal ingredients for chocolate torrone — for some years when Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky was a child, the standard dessert for her birthday, which is coming up next month. Then yesterday, under the header “Chocolate Torrone”, this innocent question from EDZ:

I don’t suppose you remember what cookbook the torrone I used to have for my birthday was in?

I didn’t, and it took me many hours of searching to discover the answer and find the actual, enormously detailed, recipe (which I will reproduce below); as a bonus, I unearthed an account of the very first time EDZ’s mother Ann made a chocolate torrone, back in 1970. (So: a moment of sweet nostalgia to go along with memories of delicious food.)

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

Fleurs des males

January 27, 2021

Penises as literally the flowers of manhood, which can be collected into bouquets and other floral arrangements — an occasional theme in artworks that are light-hearted and charming rather than pornographic, intended to amuse rather than to arouse.

The occasion for this posting was a Facebook posting by Greg Parkinson yesterday about a 1982 exhibition “Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art” (an early exploration — almost 50 years ago — of the topic), which included one of these artworks:

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Names, Phallicity, Poetry, Titles, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

euphemism ‘replacement expression’

January 26, 2021

In preparing yesterday’s posting “Garment vocabulary”, on the purported Victorian tabooing of the word trousers, I looked at the actual tabooing of the word breast (because of sociocultural anxiety over the female bodypart), even in reference to a type of chicken meat (from the breast of the bird), and found a small number of euphemisms for the female bodypart: bosom, bust (and for some people, also chest). Not a big haul, so I thought to do a search on “euphemism for breast” — and found long lists of vulgarities (mostly used by men), nothing like my idea of a euphemism, and nothing like the definition of euphemism in standard dictionaries.

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Posted in Euphemism, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

Garment vocabulary

January 25, 2021

What do you call an outer garment covering the body from the waist to the ankles, with a separate part for each leg? The referentially and socioculturally least restricted lexical item for this purpose, in both AmE and BrE, is the plural noun trousers. (The gloss in my first sentence is in fact the definition of trousers given, without restriction, in NOAD.)

It’s then remarkable that the Quite Interesting Twitter account maintained on 8/14/18 that

The Victorians thought the word ‘trousers’ so vulgar and rude that they used euphemisms such as ‘sit-upons’, ‘inexpressibles’, ‘unutterables’ and ‘unwhisperables’ instead.

The result of such an attitude would have been that there was literally no everyday expression to refer to such a garment — even one originating as a euphemism but naturalized as ordinary vocabulary — as has been the case for white meat as a replacement for (chicken) breast, for some speakers, and in many other cases.

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Posted in Clothing, Euphemism, Lexical semantics, Semantics, Taboo language and slurs, Word aversion and attraction | 1 Comment »

It started with a kiss

January 24, 2021

(Six male-male kisses, of different sorts and with different sociocultural meanings, plus a general suffusion of homoerotic content and undercurrents throughout, so this posting is not to everyone’s taste — but there’s nothing raunchy enough to make it plainly unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

It started with a kiss in a poster (from Hana Filip on Facebook, long ago — 2/23/19) apparently signifying the union of the Soviet Army and Navy, but it turns out to be sheer invention, the work of the artist Igor Baskakov, whose specialties include a very uneasy blend of official Communism and high-commercial capitalism:


(#1) The caption: ‘Support/Strengthen the union of the Army and Navy’

Three things about this poster. First, it alludes to (as Hana put it) the fraternal socialist kiss trope, the most (in)famous of which is the kiss between Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker (1979):

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Posted in Art, Flags, Gender and sexuality, Linguists, Movies and tv, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

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