Archive for August, 2025

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Gay banter: great big green beans

August 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) 🔧 Labor Sunday 🔨 (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B

Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:


graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty

A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:

— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!

This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.

And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff  further on green beans / string beans / snap beans. (more…)

Posted in Alliteration, Events and occasions, Formulaic expressions, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Insults, Intention, It's Just Stuff, Language and plants, Language play, Masculinity, Metaphor, My life, Phallicity, Pragmatics, Routines and rituals, Speech acts | 1 Comment »

Events of the day

August 30, 2025

🪛🔧🔨 penultimate August and (US) Labor Saturday; looking ahead, I see that Labor Day in 1940 was 9/2, but I wasn’t born until 9/6, so that was a long labor; meanwhile, from Benita Bendon Campbell today, an early birthday greeting to me:


The mammoth, the orchid, and the penguin, the emblems of my land, a BBC confection celebrating (as Bonnie observed) a friendship going back about 66 years

Meanwhile, these are birthday days for survivors from those days: Ellen Sulkis James (also going back ca. 66 years, to the Reading Eagle newspaper), who is 85 today; BBC (from Princeton), who is 89 tomorrow; and then, eventually, me.

 

Posted in Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and plants, Mammoths, Mascots, My life, Penguins | Leave a Comment »

The craft of writing

August 29, 2025

The backdrop: yesterday’s posting “Days of grief and anger”. Lise Menn’s comment on it:

— LM: Wonderful writing; may the message reach some new ears.

And my response:

— AZ >LM: Thank you; I hope so. As for the writing, that took hours, of revisions ranging from the minute to the global, with a lot of weeping, but stoked by rage that had to be crafted to present itself as an passionate outpouring of spontaneous feeling, complete with an urgent comma splice. So it pleases me to have it my craft recognized and appreciated; I’ve been working on it for almost 75 years now, but here it’s crucial that I not come off like a splenetic geezer.

Yes, I was a kid 75 years ago, and I was already honing my craft as a professional writer and editor, going on to edit my high school newspaper (and write a humor column for it), finally getting paid for my writing at the age of 17, when I began four years of work at the Reading (PA) Eagle newspaper (one of the jobs that got me through Princeton). All those years later I’m writing, every day of the year, essays — academic entertainments, as I think of them — for this blog.

I am a facile writer — first drafts are a lot of fun — and I have plenty of material to work with, but most of the work of writing is revising, rewriting, reframing, polishing, and editing. It can take stunning amounts of time.

So now I bring you two writing stories, the first about Geoff Pullum and me, writing a one-page abstract on Auxiliary Reduction in English for a 1997 Linguistic Society of America conference paper, an abstract offered to the program committee at the time; the second about E. B. White, writing a single paragraph for William Shawn (the New Yorker editor from 1952 through 1987) on the 1969 moon landing. Pullum & Zwicky had 25 versions labeled as drafts, with of course an enormous amount of churn during each of those revisions (and still at least one typo survived in the published version); White’s piece had 6 versions labeled as drafts, with, again, lots of churn during each revision (but at least the magazine’s staff ensured that the published version was flawless).

(more…)

Posted in My life, Syntax, Writers, Writing | Leave a Comment »

Days of grief and anger

August 28, 2025

About death and life.

Out of yesterday’s gun death news, from Minneapolis, one detail sticks in my mind: older kids lying on top of younger ones to shield and shelter them. A moment of both bravery and loving care, a reminder of the good that people are capable of, in the face of immense evil — the evil, not of the shooter, who was dreadfully deranged (and apparently crammed with conspiratorial fantasies), but of the machine of death constructed over decades by political leaders in collaboration with gun manufacturers and the NRA. So that for times so numerous that they blend together into one bloody tapestry of slaughtered children, college students, churchgoers, shoppers, and party-goers, we cry out in agony (as the mayor of Minneapolis did yesterday) NEVER AGAIN, while those mechanics of death offer only pious thoughts and prayers against an event they triggered themselves but fervently disavow, telling us that no one could have predicted this, it’s a mental health problem, and the only protection would be to arm teachers, professors, leaders of religious congregations, grocery store clerks, and doormen at dance clubs — it takes a gun to stop a gun — and to lock up every place where people gather (so that guardians can protect them from those unpredictable crazies).

Meanwhile, ONLY IN AMERICA are so many so bloodily deranged.

Their stance is thoroughly disingenuous, consciously evil. But they are the people with serious money and political power, entirely capable of putting down the resistance of millions. So that what we face is FOREVER AGAIN, fresh slaughters every few months or so, as we’ve become inured to.

It is possible for endless patient resistance on a large scale to counter this evil, but that can take a century or more; consider civil rights for Black people in my country, finally more or less achieved in about a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation (but now being undone by rich and powerful white people), while the larger program of true racial equality is still a dream in Martin Luther King Jr.’s eye, requiring maybe another century. The alternative is a genuine bloody revolution, whose consequences are notoriously unpredictable and often unpleasant.

But I fear that we’re on the Gun Death Train, with lots of stops, on a line whose final destination is constantly receding and might well never be within reach. What we’ve got for solace along the way is small acts of bravery and loving care. We need more of them, many more of them, and we need to act in concert whenever we can, to do these things together, because we are stronger together and it’s going to be a long hard road, one none of us will see the end of, so we’ll need that strength to get from day to day.

Meanwhile, keep your power dry.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Eggcorns, innocent and deliberate

August 26, 2025

From a reader on 8/24:

Are you involved in collecting eggcorns?  In case you are, I thought you might be interested in a potential one that I’ve encountered “in the wild” (i.e., a Reddit post).  This person wrote jig solve puzzles instead of jigsaw puzzles:

I should have been diagnosed [with ADHD] as a child but it was the early 90s in a poor rural area. Special ed at my school didn’t diagnose me with anything specific … they just told my mom I needed to spend time doing jig solve puzzles. So, I forced my way through. (Reddit posting)

My response:

I certainly have been involved in collecting eggcorns. But there are only so many balls you can juggle at one time, and I am now a old man with not a lot of time left, so I’ve been pretty much out of the eggcorn business. But you will be pleased to hear that jigsaw > jig solve isn’t in the eggcorn database and hasn’t come up in the eggcorn forum, so I might post on it.

And now I am.

(more…)

Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Formulaic language, Intention, Language play, Names, Play, Puns, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »

The rainbow made us gay, the penguins say

August 26, 2025

From Steven Levine on 8/19, this image from a Facebook group on thrift store finds, about a rectangle of needlepoint (probably intended to be a wall hanging) depicting penguins marching from left to right, through a rainbow, each emerging from the other side with its body, inside and out, in one of the colors of the gay pride flag; the rainbow makes them gay:


(#1) Steven of course thought of me, but appreciated that this would not be the time to be giving me penguiniana, so contented himself with letting me enjoy the strange spectacle

I’d never seen anything quite like it. Marching penguins, yes, of course. Penguins in the colors of the gay pride flag, of course. I’ve posted both. But the preposterous fantasy of penguins getting gay-transmuted by passing through a rainbow, absolutely not. And then to realize it not in drawing, painting, or trick photography, but in the unpretentious craft medium of needlepoint, where we expect earnest images (stylized birds) and slogans (BLESS THIS HOME), well, that’s wonderfully goofy.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Color, Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Penguins, Rainbow, Rainbows | Leave a Comment »

I’m happy that you quilted me

August 25, 2025

(Towards the end, some coarse sexual slang referring to fellatio, which some readers will want to avoid)

After years of service on my bed, the delightful images quilt was sent off on Saturday for dry-cleaning and some stitching repair, and I got to contemplate the other three t-shirt quilts, which had been quietly stored away on a closet shelf that was inaccessible to me, but had been brought down to my level as part of the great project of dispossession. I decided that all four (made by friends as a gift to me) would have to move with me — a triumph of sentiment over practicality — and picked the queer quilt, the really in-your-face one, as its replacement on my bed.

Now, more of the story, with pictures.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Clothing, Furnishings and tools, Language of sex, Language play, Music, My life, Parody, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping

August 24, 2025

I’m barely getting through my days, but now suddenly there are five new things on my plate (and dozens of other postings I’ve failed to follow up on). I’ve picked the thing of most immediate interest, since it follows up on my posting yesterday “Yo soy Johnny Peso”, where I wrote about this cartoon:

(#1)

In the 8/22 Bizarro strip, Wayno presents us with Johnny Peso, an intricately constructed Mexican-Spanish and Mexican-culture counterpart  to Johnny Paycheck as a performer on the Grand Ole Opry stage. If you don’t know about Johnny Paycheck and the Grand Ole Opry, you’re doomed; the cartoon will be incomprehensible. If you know who they are, you’ll get the joke; and the more you know about them, the more you’ll see in Wayno’s cartoon (I suspect there are still more things that I’ve missed). And then there’s a lot to say about the way Johnny Peso introduces himself [with the stiff and Englishy yo soy Johnny Peso].

Then came the objections. In a Facebook comment from David Preston and this blog comment from Geoff Nathan:

— GN: Are you sure it isn’t a reference to Johnny Cash?

— AZ > GN: A point also made on Facebook by David Preston. Yes, surely peso is a rough (metonymic) translation of cash, so Johnny Peso would be a Mexican Johnny Cash. But I made a case in this posting that Johnny Peso is a Mexican Johnny Paycheck. The answer is that in the world of cultural allusion, both things can be true. I’ll expand on this idea in a separate posting [the one you’re reading right now].

Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Identities, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Spanish, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Yo soy Johnny Peso

August 23, 2025

In the 8/22 Bizarro strip, Wayno presents us with Johnny Peso, an intricately constructed Mexican-Spanish and Mexican-culture counterpart  to Johnny Paycheck as a performer on the Grand Ole Opry stage. If you don’t know about Johnny Paycheck and the Grand Ole Opry, you’re doomed; the cartoon will be incomprehensible. If you know who they are, you’ll get the joke; and the more you know about them, the more you’ll see in Wayno’s cartoon (I suspect there are still more things that I’ve missed). And then there’s a lot to say about the way Johnny Peso introduces himself. The cartoon:


(#1) The joke in the cartoon comes the two bilingual puns: Spanish peso punning on English paycheck, Spanish olĂŠ punning on English vernacular ole; the puns are, in addition, what I’ve called (semiotically) satisfying puns (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

And then there’s a lot more.

(more…)

Posted in Bilingualism, Clothing, Hats, Interjections, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Puns, Spanish, Understanding comics | 7 Comments »

Words and things in the dining room

August 23, 2025

An object unearthed in my household investigations for dispossession: a woven wool rectangle, two-sided, showing a stylized blooming plant, and relatively small (10×19″, not counting its fringes) —


(#1) What I think of as the recto side

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Design, Fabrics, Furnishings and tools | 1 Comment »

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