Archive for February, 2022
February 28, 2022
(hunky men modeling underwear or underwear-adjacent garments, classical male nude statuary, references to the male body in sometimes intimate detail, so some might want to exercise their judgment about this posting)
Today’s Daily Jock’s e-mail ad offers an eye-catching vision of an ideal male body, an athlete posed at rest, his gigantic sculpted musculature held powerfully in reserve as he strikes an attitude of Greco-Roman male beauty, his unfocused gaze directed down and to the side. A decidedly modern and calculatedly homoerotic presentation reproducing the pose of the Westmacott Athlete, from a very different aesthetic and cultural context, in which the beauty of a boy athlete conveys the moral ideals of goodness and truth embodied in balanced strength, nothing in excess.
The DJ ad for the Cellblock13 Kennel Club Bandit collection of harnesses and jockstraps (available in four intense colors), marketed as fetishwear — that is, as homowear, for display, rather than as gymwear, in actual athletic gear:
(#1) Bandits in intense blue (they also come in intense red, pink, and gray), worn by a superhumanly muscled model; try to imagine him as sculpted in warm brownish marble
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Posted in Art, Gaze, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
February 27, 2022
A Vicki Sawyer greeting card (on Sawyer’s animal art, see my 2/5/22 posting “The groundhog and the scallion”) from Ann Burlingham, Troublemaker (that’s what it says on her business card) — written on the 20th, postmarked in Pittsburgh on the 22nd, arrived in Palo Alto on the 26th — with a reproduction of Sawyer’s composition “Garden Prince”:
(#1) The Garden Prince wears a crown of carrots and a royal neckchain of peapods, which together serve both as symbols of his authority and as indicators of his tastes in food (also note the conventional simile like peas and carrots ‘getting along well together, being compatible’)
In #1, Ann “saw something akin to a Renaissance portrait. Crossed with Watership Down?” YES!
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Posted in Art, Books, History, Language and animals, Language and food, Movies, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Poetic form, Poetry, Simile | Leave a Comment »
February 26, 2022
Another too-cold day, no going outside, because it hurts too much for me to breathe (that’s been a problem for 40-50 years, it’s why I moved from Ohio to California, but now it’s much worse because I have some chronic respiratory thing, all sinus and bronchial distress, that might be long Covid, or just my body giving up), so I bundled up at 4 a.m. — breakfast time — in my excellent blue velour bathrobe, sweetly worn, smelling a bit like me, warming to my body, pleasing to the touch, bearing the satisfying luxurious name velour. A delicious word. Velvety amour.
I mused on the word. And its fabric family: velour, velvet, velveteen, plush.
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Posted in Books, Clothing, Etymology, Fashion, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, My life, Variation, Word attraction | 3 Comments »
February 25, 2022
(Somewhat astonishingly, this is going to end up in over-the-line raunchy territory — not for kids or the sexually modest — with a celebration of a character who’s both a feminist and a dirty slut, who deserves the right to fellate men “in the bathroom at Acme on a Wednesday” (from Rolling Stone). I’ll issue a warning when it comes up.)
It starts with today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with yet another cartoon riff on Magritte’s painting The Son of Man:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.) That’s a green M&M candy where Magritte’s painting has a green apple (so the doctor’s message is that the Magritte character has been consuming too many sweets, like that piece of candy, and needs to substitute fresh fruit, like an apple)
Two things here. Thing one, this is (by my reckoning) the 9th cartoon riff on Magritte’s painting that I’ve posted about. Thing two, about M&Ms, and the green one in particular, which has its own life as a character in ads: a life as a sexy, seductive woman. So M Magritte (the cartoon character) might well desire to take her body into his mouth and, figuratively, eat her.
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »
February 24, 2022
(References in plain language to men’s bodies viewed as sexual objects, with a photo, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
On Facebook yesterday, information from train-watcher Ned Deily about FREDs. That’s FRED, an acronym for flashing rear-end device — an alternative name for end of train device, no doubt devised to provide a pronounceable acronym (FRED) rather than a mere initialism (like ETD). But then we get then nominal rear end, referring not only generally to the back part of something, but also specifically to a person’s buttocks. Which takes us into racy or frankly raunchy territory.
FRED 1, the flashing rear-end device. In brief, from Wikipedia (a) on the end of train device; and then from the Trains & Locomotives Wiki (b) on “End of Train Device” (edited for readability):
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Posted in Abbreviation, Acronyms, Initialisms, Language and the body, Metonymy | Leave a Comment »
February 23, 2022
Sunday’s (2/20) Bizarro strip, rich in symbols, references, and allusions (“semiotically dense”, as I’ve started to say):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 9 in this strip — see this Page.) One of Piraro’s secret symbols is a miniature space alien, which you can find in the upper righthand corner of the cartoon
First things first. What the strip is primarily about is an encounter between two space aliens and a gumball machine (a 25¢ machine, which means it’s a modern one), which the aliens recognize, because of its physical resemblance to them, as one of their kind. Eliminating everything except the encounter:
(#2) The encounter as a free-standing gag cartoon
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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Poetic form, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
February 22, 2022
The Zippy strip for 2/20, in which Bill Griffith gets to goof on surf vs. serf:
(#1) Zippy’s title: “Serf City!!”, playing on the song title “Surf City”
panel 1: the serf wakes up in his cell and gets up — the idiomatic phrase surf’s up, roughly ‘the waves are good for surfing; let’s do it’, so figuratively ‘conditions are good for action; let’s get on with it’
panel 2: the serf surfing the net — the (metaphorical) verb surf ‘move from page to page or site to site on’
panel 3: the serf channel-surfing — the (similarly metaphorical) synthetic-compound verb channel-surf ‘change frequently from one television channel to another’
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Posted in Art, Conversion, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Music, Puns, Slang, Understanding comics, Verbing | 3 Comments »
February 21, 2022
On the Language Typology mailing list this morning, a note from Grev Corbett:
A sobering question is “In ten years time, how many people in this linguistics class are going to care about the definition of phoneme, clitic or right node raising?” If the proportion is small, then a linguistics class can be invaluable in getting over messages which will matter in ten years time, such as:
– beware of arguments from authority
– respect the data
– don’t guess when you can measure
– beyond what we think we know there’s a seething mass of uncertainly and ignorance out there
– when we hit the ‘in-between’ cases, we don’t throw our toys out of the pram, but we try to understand the apparently clear cases better
– “… the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.” (Peter Medawar: Advice to a Young Scientist 1979 p. 39)
(You will note that these pieces of advice have a wider applicability than to linguistics.)
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Posted in Linguistic theory | 3 Comments »
February 21, 2022
It starts with my 2/19/22 posting “A regular genius”, on quintessential regular (NOAD example: this place is a regular fisherman’s paradise), vs. run-of-the-mill regular (NOAD example: it’s richer than regular pasta).
Which elicited this Facebook comment from Joel Levin:
I get a sarcastic note from he’s a regular genius, in that one might so describe a person who had done something particularly doltish. I thought I might see a mention of that sense in the column.
And then AZ > JL:
In some contexts I get that note too, but I think that’s just an example of the generalization that any compliment can be used sarcastically, not a fact specifically about regular.
And then a comment from Ben Yagoda, making the Jewish connection: it’s probably relevant that JL’s Jewish and I’m, so to speak, Jewish-adjacent; we’re more inclined than a random person to detect a sarcastic or ironic tone in he’s a regular genius. The tone is available for anyone to pick up, but some of us are predisposed to detect it (and to convey it in our own speech).
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Posted in Language and religion, Lexical semantics, Pragmatics, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »
