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Archive for May, 2022
Three responsibilities
May 12, 2022Now serving at the Raven Cafe
May 11, 2022Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Edgar Allan Po’ Boy = Edgar Allan Poe (the American writer and poet) + po’ boy (the superb New Orleans submarine sandwich):
(#1) Edgar Allan Po’ Boy is a N1 + N2 compound N, understood as having the head, N2, semantically associated with the modifier, N1, by (the referent of) N2’s being named after (the referent of) N1 — parallel to the Woody Allen Sandwich (a tower of corned beef and pastrami) at NYC’s Carnegie Deli
(Plus the allusion to Poe’s poem The Raven — Quoth the raven, “Nevermore” — in Grimm’s, “I had it once, but… nevermore”.)
If you were a betting person, you would surely put some money on this MGG strip as not being the first to use this particular POP — of course, that would be fine, it’s all in how you develop the joke — and you would win.
Just on this blog, in Zippy postings from 2016 and a Rhymes With Orange posting in 2017.
Plus bonuses: a texty with a pun turning on the ambiguity of /póbòj/ as either po’ boy or Poe boy; and two cartoons turning on Edgar Allan Poe / Po’ Boy understood as a Source or Ingredient compound (parallel to shrimp po’ boy) — yes, Edgar Allan Poe in a po’ boy, in it, good enough to eat.
Three occasions
May 10, 2022Three occasions, the first deprecable in intent, though with some charms in the local execution of it; the second earnest in aim, but distressing in its commercialization and its substitution of a day’s dose of sentimentality for any lasting celebration of mothers (plus, it interferes with Ann Daingerfield’s birthday):
May 7-9: Palo Alto’s celebration of Cinco de Mayo on 5/7 (it has to be on a Saturday)
Mother’s Day on 5/8 (the punctuation of the name is merely the one I fancy; don’t get all riled up about it)
Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s 85th birthday — she died in 1985 — on 5/9 (this is Arnold Zwicky’s Blog, so you get my occasions)
And then three sub-occasions:
family breakfast (a weekly event, this week a three-generation affair for me, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, and Opal Armstrong Zwicky) on 5/7
Masturbation Day on 5/7 (a major celebration in my one-person household) (I put the responsibility for the choice of date on Good Vibrations in San Francisco, and specifically on Susie Bright, though she will probably demur)
AMZ’s return to Sacred Harp singing on 5/8 (only via Zoom, but still)
Cool [ʍɪp]
May 9, 2022Voiceless /hw/ (phonetically [ʍ]) in a surprising place (the name of the artificial whipped cream Cool Whip), a place where even W-WH contrasters like me never have it. Made into a standing joke on The Family Guy. Which will cause me to tell you more about voiceless /hw/ in English than you might have wanted to know.
The chirosexual moment
May 8, 2022(Men’s bodies, masturbation, not suitable for kids (according to the — inexcusably, harmfully puritanical — sexual mores of current American culture) or the sexually modest.)
The image from a 5/6 TitanMen ad for the 2022 Masturbation Month sale of their gay porn:
(#1) A pants-pulled-down cock tease, plus an eyes-narrowed slant-eye cruise face (the expression is hard to pull off: it’s supposed to be invitingly sexy, but to my eye here it verges on silly)
Celebratory days, and the whole merry celebmasturbatory month of May.
The discovery of smoke
May 8, 2022A Mick Stevens cartoon from the New Yorker of 4/18:
(#1) The giant black cloud of smoke, largely obscuring its discoverer, made me laugh out loud when this issue arrived last month
But I didn’t post about the cartoon because it seemed to have neither a linguistics point nor a gender & sexuality point (nor to engage with other of my passions — music, art, food, plants, animals, mathematics, men’s bodies, shapenote singing, Switzerland, my medical conditions, and so on).
Ah, man of little faith. There is almost always a linguistics point to be found; and, if I’m willing to exercise some ingenuity, a gay point too. And so it is here.
Flagging your identity
May 7, 2022Friday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro (Wayno’s title: “Logo Design”):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
There’s a relatively straightforward implicature from what Superman says, that there was a time when he didn’t wear an identifying logo — “the big red emblem” — but used only his spit curl (BrE kiss curl) to identify himself.
(Well, there is the rest of the costume, including the cape, but I suppose the idea is that those items would merely identify him as some superhero or another, speeding through the streets and airspace of Metropolis, but would fail to distinguish him from all the others. While the spit curl would have been something unique; it could have been, oh, a goatee, red eye shadow, pixy ears, a big butch metal neck chain, red knee pads with S on them, brass knuckles, high-heeled boots, any manner of things, but a spit curl ought to work.)
As it happens, in his early appearances, starting with Action Comics #1 in June 1938, Superman had the S shape on his chest, but not on his forehead. What to make of that? — Has he forgotten? Is he confabulating? Or does his use of “is too subtle” not implicate a spit-curl-only period?
Perhaps it merely conveys that when he started his career he, or maybe Martha Kent, realized that spit curls alone apparently are, as a general matter, insufficient to distinguish exceptional individuals from the herd, so added the logo from the beginning; in that case, he might have said “an S-shaped spit curl apparently would have been too subtle [for our purposes]”, so they axed the spit curl completely in favor of the much less subtle logo.
Getting him on the mat
May 6, 2022Today’s e-mail ad for a Daily Jocks sale features an ornamental (rather than strictly functional) wrestling singlet — a striking piece of homowear — worn in a sexual (rather than strictly athletic) stance by a model I’ll call Joe:
(#1) Joe has pulled the top half of his singlet down to fully expose his lean, nicely muscled upper body; meanwhile he’s in a stance no wrestler has ever used in an athletic competition: resting on his elbows, back arched, ass humped up in the lordosis position (see my 4/7/21 posting “Assuming the position”, about the lordosis, tail-in-the-air, or FMP (Fuck Me Please) body position, with links to other postings)
If Joe’s coach taught him that stance, then the coach had something in mind other than preparing Joe for an athletic match on the mat — men can be matched on a mat in other ways (videos with hot wrestlers grappling sexually are a subgenre of gay porn) — and that would be sexual imposition, not coaching. (But #1 is an underwear ad that is merely fantasy-framed as depicting a wrestler — a homowrestler in homowear.)
Music of joy
May 5, 2022A sort of appendix to my 4/20 posting “Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!”, which was centrally about the expression of joy in music (and also a very many other things). As I noted there, joy is a big thing in my life; I seek out occasions where I can experience joy (like conversation, dancing, and, of course, sex) and things that display joy (as in joyful smiles; I collect images of pleasurable smiles, mostly by men) or embody joy (as in hymns of joy) or evoke joy (as in kissing; I have another collection of same-sex kisses, mostly men). Since music is also very important to me — has been woven into my daily life since I was a child — some years back I started assembling (on my computer) albums of the music of joy.
Eventually, there were two little albums, Joy 1.1 and Joy 1.2, of what was categorized (on iTunes, now Apple Music) as classical music (which includes, among other things, hymns, especially those in the shapenote music tradition of the Sacred Harp). Pieces of music that struck me as joyful when they came by in more or less randomized play from my huge collection. Strongly tilted towards chamber music, because chamber music is conversational; and towards piano music, because I was once a pianist. Selected with some care to sample the different tonalities of musical joy: bright, celebratory; intense, even ecstatic; playful, delightful (scherzos!). And then ordered in an attempt to offer shifting and contrasting pleasures to the listener.
Just the beginning. I’ve avoided some of the obvious items — people ask, Where’s Beethoven’s Ode to Joy? Where’s “Joy to the World”? Well, they’re so familiar and loom so large that they’re likely to overshadow the rest, so I haven’t figured out how to work them into another album. But I’ll talk about them here. And I continue to collect candidates for Joy 1.3. (Separately, and with difficulty, I’ve been working on Joy 2, with popular music of many kinds, but it turns out that unmingled joy — joy without darker emotions mixed in — is not all that common in pop music. But I’ll show you what I’ve got.)