Archive for June, 2024

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It’s that day again

June 30, 2024

June 30th, specifically. It also happens that there are Pride celebrations lots of places, including San Francisco,  but such events have long been out of my grasp, and being trapped in my house on an unmanageably hot day, facing a pile of vexing mail, has sent me into an emotional tailspin. I know from experience that if I ride this out, things will seem better tomorrow, but for the moment, I can’t cope. So I’ll just re-post the core of my June 30th posting from two years ago — “Ultimate Queen Day”, from 6/30/22:

🐆 🐆 🐆. (That’s a ritual tiger-tiger-tiger for the last day of the month …) Today is Ultimate June, the final day of a month packed with occasions of considerable emotional content, also (etymologically) a month dedicated to the Roman goddess Juno: queen of the gods (in fact, also called in Latin Regina ‘queen’), counterpart to Greek Hera; protector of women and motherhood; also embracing warlike features of Greek Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war (the deities of classic times were marvels of intersectionality, as we would now put it), and oh yes, wife of Jupiter, the counterpart to Greek Zeus.

So I am suggesting that 6/30 be recognized as Ultimate Queen Day, especially celebrating men who are flamboyant (in any way) and those who are effeminate (in their presentation of themselves). Stereotypically, these two bundles of characteristics are manifested together, in the cultural type the queen (not to be confused with royalty, with the drag queen, with X queen used to label tastes or preferences of many kinds — imagine a white-cross queen, a man who prefers Swiss men as sexual partners, or a fan of Swiss things — or with various other uses of /kwin/).

You could think of UQD as F-Gay Day, with F for fem / femmy / femboy, flaming / flamer, flagrant, faggy / fag / faggot / fag-ass, fairy / fairy-boy, fuckboy / fucktoy / fuckhole, and all that good stuff.

 

 

Posted in Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Myths | Leave a Comment »

Pleasantly gay and deeply serious

June 29, 2024

Noticed for the first time yesterday, on Alex Wagner Tonight on MSNBC, 6/28, in “‘Republicans in robes’: Supreme Court critics see politics behind action on [the Grabpussy] immunity case”, on-line here: commenter Mark Joseph Stern (a senior writer covering courts and the law for Slate Magazine), in his pleasantly gay persona — an engaging fem (vs. butch) presentation of himself — while, with deep seriousness and evident passion, picking apart the Supreme Court’s behavior in the immunity case.

What came to my consciousness for the first time was the gayness of his persona, a collection of his specific variants of fem characteristics, including his particular gay voice and his particular gay eye gestures (eye widening, some flirtation with eye roll and slant-eye). Wonderful that he doesn’t edit out these behaviors, even if many people take them to be indicators of a superficial mentality (just like a dumb broad”, they think to themselves).

I had somehow not attended to any of this the day before, 6/27, when MJS was again on Alex Wagner Tonight, in “‘A seismic shift’: Supreme Court Chevron ruling radically alters U.S. government with power grab”, on-line here; or in his earlier appearances on her show, explaining the intricacies of various US courts to the MSNBC audience. But now I’m a fan, of his brand of a fem persona, combined with visible playfulness and enjoyment in his own performance, and of his elegant explanations of complex legal and political matters, in which his expertise is combined with visible, urgent, commitment to a system of moral values.

I see lot of this in my gay world: pleasantly gay and deeply serious, in tandem. In a while I’ll pull up, from my earlier postings, another example of this pairing, with all the details wildly different from MJS’s case.

But first, more about MJS.

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Posted in Effeminacy, Facial expression and gesture, Gay porn, Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language and the law, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

The Putin-on-Ritz pun

June 28, 2024

Passed on by Susan Fischer yesterday, this item from the We Love PUNS site:


(#1) Three things you need to know about or recognize to understand the pun joke here: Vladimir Putin (depicted here without a label); Ritz crackers (this is easy, because the name Ritz is on the package, as are images of the crackers); and, crucially, the model for the pun: the song title “Puttin’ on the Ritz”

Which gives us, oh groan, the pun Putin on the Ritz. Phonologically imperfect in the Putin part: pun /pútǝn/ for model puttin’ /pÚtǝn/. You can imagine other possibilities: poutine on / in the Ritz, pootin’ on / in the Ritz, button on the Ritz, and more with Ritz; still others involving tits, fritz, Rit (the commercial dye), and no doubt others.

It turns out that this is not the first appearance, on this blog, of Vlad the Invader with Ritz crackers. Nor the first pun involving Ritz. But first a lexical note on ritz, from NOAD:

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Posted in Idioms, Jokes, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Portmanteaus, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Moose attachment

June 27, 2024

A follow-up to my 6/25 posting “Dogs on wheels”, about the ambiguity between low attachment (LA) and high attachment (HA) of modifiers, as exemplified in a memic joke about a dog chasing people on a bicycle (in the LA reading, people on a bicycle are chased by the dog; in the HA reading, the dog chasing people is on a bicycle):


(#1) One version of the dogs-on-wheels joke

In that posting, I complained:

I was … sure that I’d seen a version of [the “dog chasing people on a bicycle” meme] and had posted about it; but then I couldn’t find it on any of my blogs or in the “to blog”  files on my computer or in the “to blog” images on my desktop or in my stored albums of images. Much annoyed growling.

I surmised that I had indeed saved it for later posting, but then deleted the image and my notes on it in one of the necessary periodic purges of my “to blog” material.

Then, yesterday, I noticed an oddly named image on my desktop display of images (which, even pared down, is still sizable): MooseAttachment.jpg. This turned out to be a different memic joke exploiting a LA / HA ambiguity:

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Posted in Ambiguity, Jokes, Memes, Modifier attachment | 7 Comments »

Formal dress in the American Southwest

June 26, 2024

And those weren’t the oddest features of an absolutely splendid dream I had last night, call it Formal Dress in the American Southwest (FDAS for short). The formal dress was for two simultaneous culminating events of the dream: a formal ball in celebration of a (female) student of mine’s successful defense of an ace PhD dissertation on the texts of German lieder (with special attention to Mozart’s songs); and my marriage to a fabulous Latino named Tony — who strongly resembled the Nick Torres (Wilmer Valderrama), charming and smell-the-testosterone hunky, of recent episodes of the tv show NCIS. (My current imagined dream lover is always named Tony, whatever his race and ethnicity; he used to be called Joe; and before that, he had other names. But the FDAS Tony isn’t just one of my dream lovers, he’s amped all the way up, just as the landscape of the American Southwest is in FDAS, and just as a dissertation celebration and a wedding are in FDAS.)

FDAS was about the lead-up to these dual occasions, set in a stunning hyper-real endless-vista version of the American Southwest, where folks got around in small planes and battered trucks, as well as on horseback, lots of horseback. I’m now pretty hazy about how we all ended up in the red canyons of the Four Corners, and various details have vanished: what was my student’s name? what university were she and I at? how did Tony and I hook up in the first place?

Well, some details in dreams are intensely vivid in ways beyond real life — the locale of FDAS and my FDAS husband, for example — while other crucial details are elided from the dream world, so that a lot of it is just baffling (see the “Nightmare Song” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe). There’s not much point in trying to figure out why some things go one way, some the other. But it could be revealing to puzzle out where some of this material might have come from, and it can provide some personal satisfaction to see how a particular dream fits into the larger picture of your current life.

So I’ll tell the story of my last night, which will account for some details of FDAS (like the Mozart songs), as well as showing how FDAS created an enormously satisfying resolution to a difficult, exhausting night. Let’s hear it for the restorative subconscious!

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Movies and tv, My life | Leave a Comment »

Dogs on wheels

June 25, 2024

Well, it’s about attachment ambiguity, in a family of memes about dogs chasing people on two-wheeled vehicles (mostly bicycles). Along the way, I’ll use this opportunity to expose some of the complexities of my blogging life.

The story begins on 6/23, with a message from Ellen Kaisse — a regular on this blog — offering me this memic wheel-dog joke that turns on an ambiguity between low and high attachment of the modifying PP on a bicycle:


(#1) Did the neighbo(u)r report that some people on a bicycle were being chased by the dog, or that the dog was on a bicycle in pursuit of some people? The human in the photo cartoon supposes the former, the dog the latter

In the human’s report, the PP is intended as a modifier of the head N people within the direct object NP of the verb chasing (low attachment (LA), which you could also think of as narrow attachment); but the dog’s response makes it clear that it understands the PP as modifying the VP are chasing people (high attachment (HA), which you could also think of as wide attachment). (There is a Page on this blog about my postings on modifier attachment, including lots of cases of potential LA vs. HA ambiguity; there’s some overall preference for LA, but how things are understood in actual usage depends very much on the plausibility in context of the two understanding.)

The text in #1 has the BrE spelling neighbour, but there are otherwise identical versions out there with the AmE spelling neighbor, plus otherwise identical versions in which the cycle in the text is a motorcycle rather than a bicycle. And then there are further variations, lots of them, on both image and text (a couple of them reproduced below).

In any case, EK cautiously added the note, “You’ve probably seen this before” — her caution the product of previous occasions on which she sent me some cool example and I told her that I’d posted an analysis of it in 2008 or 2015 or whenever. This time, I was in fact sure that I’d seen a version of #1 and had posted about it; but then I couldn’t find it on any of my blogs or in the “to blog”  files on my computer or in the “to blog” images on my desktop or in my stored albums of images. Much annoyed growling.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Modifier attachment, Style and register, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Perfecto Fancy-Boy

June 24, 2024

Perfecto Fancy-Boy, the Dingburg psychoanalyst, analyzes the appeal of Helmet Grabpussy in today’s Zippy the Pinhead strip:


(#1) Grabpussy’s real name is suppressed above, as too indecent to mention, even on this blog; but what grabbed me first in this strip was the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy for the psychoanalyst — a name that is most unlikely to have ever been given to any actual person, but is instead a pure creation of Zippy‘s cartoonist Bill Griffith

Zippy is a savorer of words and phrases. (He is also the playful lord of nonsensicality, call him Absurdo.) He has favorite names — Ashtabula, Estonia, Valvoline, Ding-Dongs, taco sauce, and more, treasured just for the way they sound, not for what they refer to; the Talking Heads album Stop Making Sense could have been named in his honor.

And he’s forever latching onto random expressions whose sound enchants him, so that he repeats them for pleasure, like mantras — what Griffy, the cartoon avatar of Bill Griffith, calls onomatomania. (There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania.)

Then there’s Griffith’s choice of names for his characters — like Perfecto Fancy-Boy. No doubt intentionally crafted to some degree, but also to some degree pulled out of thin air, from Griffith’s subconscious, picked because they “sounded good”. I’m in no position to say which part is which, so here I’ll just unearth some possible ingredients in the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy, specifically in this name referring to a psychoanalyst.

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Posted in Art, French, German, Language play, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Nonsense, Psychology, Puns, Writers, Writing | 1 Comment »

What I’ve been writing: the cartoon

June 23, 2024

From Bob Eckstein’s substack The Bob yesterday, this cartoon (from Writer’s Digest), which struck a metaphorical chord with me:


(#1) Abandoning the farm to write romance fantasy

You’ll see the connection in my 11/9/22 posting “What I’ve been writing”:

over the past two decades I’ve abandoned traditional publication for postings on my blog that I now think of as intellectual entertainments, aimed at a general audience, mixing writing about language with writing about g&s (gender & sexuality), plus all sorts of other stuff that happens to come within my view. The pro here is that this isn’t like anything else you’ll find on the net; it is, as people have said about my work since the 1960s, idiosyncratic. And that’s pretty much the con too; what you get is me, in all my playful and highly personal rambling over all sorts of stuff, which many people will find weird or distasteful or both.

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Posted in Art, Books, Linguistics in the comics, Museums, My life, Writing | Leave a Comment »

Rengarenga flourishes on Ramona

June 22, 2024

Antipodal reduplicative flowering just down the street from me in Palo Alto, discovered on Thursday on a little neighborhood exploration with León Hernández Alvarez (hereafter, LH). A gorgeous display of an exotic plant in the otherwise featureless recessed back entrance of a company that’s sandwiched between my condo complex and the one to the south.

Here’s the building:


(#1) 744 Ramona St. (from Google maps), with nothing inside or outside of the building

And the plant in bloom (quite a surprise in the context of #1):


(#2) A mass planting along paths in the Sydney, Australia, Botanic Gardens (from the GardensOnline site); at 744 Ramona, it’s a somewhat smaller planting in a big pot, but still quite stunning

So, four things: the plant, Arthropodium cirratum, native to New Zealand; the location in my neighborhood, 744 Ramona St. (the backdoor to 745 Emerson St., which runs all the way through the block); my little venture around the block, the first in many months; and LH, in a return engagement as my all–around homecare person (well, for 4 hours a week).

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Posted in Language and plants, Morphology, My life, Palo Alto | Leave a Comment »

The mantra ray

June 21, 2024

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro brings us a gigantic terrifying fish that flies underwater and, in their telling, repeats a meditative formula while doing so:


(#1) With mantra ‘a word or sound [in this case, the classic syllable om] repeated to aid concentration in meditation’ (NOAD) punning on manta (ray), the name of the fish (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

mantra ray is one of those puns that are just lying around waiting, begging, to be exploited for a cartoon, so it’s no surprise that others have taken advantage of this comic resource before Wayno got to it; I’ll look at three of them below (one from a famous print cartoonist, two from webcomics).

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras, Puns, Quotations | Leave a Comment »

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