Today’s adventure in analyzing the jokey allusions in my postings. The target allusion is the one boldfaced in this passage from my posting yesterday (5/13), “The pocket bulge”:
[The DJX bulge booster] provides a soft but protective pocket in which a man’s package (of whatever size) can be unconstrained (hang free or peter out, as the slogan goes)
I explained half of the joke in a comment about my raw materials for this posting:
“Live Free or Die”, the official state motto of New Hampshire
But then there’s peter out, a verb of fading (before coming to an end), so ‘fade to death’ here, framed with a pun on peter, with a covert allusion to the penis hanging unconstrained within the bulge booster.
The lexical resources. From NOAD:
verb peter:: [no object] decrease or fade gradually before coming to an end: the storm had petered out | the economic recovery is in danger of petering out | the sense of optimism fast petered away. ORIGIN mid 19th century: of unknown origin.
noun peter: informal a man’s penis. ORIGIN late Middle English: from the given name Peter, applied in many transferred uses. Current senses date from the 19th century. [AZ: note that dick ‘a man’s penis’ has a similar origin, but counts as, whoa, vulgar slang, while the tom and harry of Tom, Dick, and Harry have no widespread phallic use at all; these thing aren’t arranged according to some larger plan, but just develop helter-skelter, one by one, each in its own social context]
Telicity. The current OED entry for the verb peter says originally US (in mining slang) and has cites
with plain peter (1844 … prospects have ‘petered’)
and with peter out (1850 … he may, as they say in the lead mines, ‘Peter out’)
and with senses
‘to run out, decrease, or fade’ (especially for plain peter) — neutral with respect to whether or not the event reaches a terminal point (is telic) —
and this fading plus ‘gradually to come to an end or cease to exist’ (especially for peter out) — a telic understanding
Merriam-Webster online glosses V + Prt (particle) peter out as telic:
verb peter out: informal to gradually become smaller, weaker, or less before stopping or ending.
My own judgment on two further V + Prt combinations, peter off and peter away, is that they tend towards the merely fading (telicity-neutral) use, with peter off less drastic or slower than peter away. Others might have different judgments.
Annoyingly, my attempts to find dictionary entries for peter off get peter out instead. My attempts to find entries for peter away get nothing.
May 14, 2026 at 11:21 am |
On the other hand, I _was_ able to find the dictionary entry for “telic” — I don’t often run across small simple words to add to my vocabulary, and this one has been around for more than 180 years; so thanks for that.
May 14, 2026 at 11:29 am |
I do what I can to be informative, not just entertaining.