(a note on taboo avoidance and euphemism, but with enough explication of the raw reference of various expressions to make this posting unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
A poster wrote:
I am a male corn actor.
— adding that he had worked in adult entertainment before getting into corn. Just enough background information for me to exclude, oh so reluctantly, a wide range of colorful but unlikely understandings of corn, in favor of its just being an intentional replacement for porn to avoid filters on-line. So: a subtler and harder to detect variant of the well-established filter-avoidance pr0n ‘pornography, porn’: an intentional misspelling of porn (with the middle letters transposed, and the letter o replaced by numeral 0). (The thing is, pr0n stands out as odd, so clever filtering could fairly easily pick it out; the beauty of corn is its utter ordinariness.)
(Now, of course, being the person I am, I am seized with carnal, raunchy, grossly sexual readings of corn on the cob, corn chowder, Children of the Corn, cornucopia, corny jokes, cornflakes, cornfields, popcorn, Cornwall, corner store, cornrow, Jimmy Crack Corn, cornet, acorn, …)
And then two other recent adventures in bro-talk / dudespeak on sexual topics, on this blog:
— on 6/4/26, in “to collab”, on the verb to collab ‘to hook up (sexually)’ and noun collab ‘(sexual) hookup’ as recent coinings for sexual vocabulary, with a note on the euphemistic slang to toss someone’s salad ‘to rim someone’
— on 6/8/26, in “I’m a big gooner”, on the sexual verb goon, agent noun gooner, and activity noun gooning (all recently coined), with a range of uses, all having to do with (male) masturbation (jacking off / jerking off / wanking), but with fresh expressions
June 19, 2026 at 3:13 pm |
I’m surprised that cornhole wasn’t on your list.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23488/what-is-the-etymology-of-cornhole
June 19, 2026 at 3:26 pm |
I left that one out deliberately, because it’s packed with overtly sexual uses (plus some innocent ones, but still …).
June 20, 2026 at 9:07 am |
For some reason I was totally ignorant until maybe ten years ago of the cornhole tournaments that they regularly hold out here, and the presence of cornhole competitions at things like local outdoor festivals and other such activities. I don’t know how long that term has been in use, but I was more than a little surprised the first time I saw ads in family friendly locations for these things.
June 20, 2026 at 9:41 am
The older sense of cornhole — the anal sense — is the one people of a certain age (like you and me) will know, so they are always taken aback on encountering the more recent ludic sense for the first time. See my 12/18/17 posting on this blog “Adventures in buggery and beanbags”:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2017/12/18/adventures-in-buggery-and-beanbags/