Archive for August, 2026

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Hot Pants Homo

August 18, 2026

(Crude, but not actually X-rated; but the title is HOT PANTS HOMO, so it won’t be to everyone’s taste)

From Chris Ambidge on the Facebook group soc-motss  on 8/10:


[CA:] I must have done something wrong — I’ve never seen a book like this on a bookstore shelf. Maybe I didn’t have enough Ovaltine™?

CA alludes to vintage ads for Ovaltine, notable (these days) for their use of the adjective gay ‘light-hearted, carefree’, e.g. “To Wake Up GAY in the Morning! Just Try this at Bedtime Tonight!” (see my 7/20/17 posting “Ovaltine mornings”).

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Language of advertising, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Pornography | Leave a Comment »

Gooner music videos

August 18, 2026

(Raunchy content, which some will prefer to avoid)

From WIRED on-line, “The Gooner Music Video Boom Is Here”, by Jason Parham on 6/26/26, in summary:

Porn music videos have circulated on the fringes of the internet for years. Featuring everything from narrative-driven stories to hypnosis, they are proliferating across X as “bate fuel” for gooners.

(more…)

Posted in Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, Pornography, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

A fragrance note

August 18, 2026

A note on my 7/14/26 posting “Raunch dressing”, on a Facebook pitch for Creed Fragrance that came by me on 7/12:

Aventus by Creed. Bright fruits and smoky woods, crafted into an unmistakable signature

Which led to some notes on smoky tones in fragrances. And then took me to this bit of fancy writing from the Creed Boutique site:

Aventus is bold, confident and timeless. Uniting fresh Calabrian bergamot, smoky birch and an iconic pineapple accord, this is a fragrance that leaves its mark.

BBP, for short, I guess.

(more…)

Posted in Language and plants, Language in advertising, Smell | Leave a Comment »

Sniff

August 18, 2026

About the moment. From my 8/17 posting “Cool nights”, on my greatly increased prednisone dosage:

it seems to me that my already unusually keen senses of smell and taste have heightened; all my food is fabulous, especially if jazzed up to be even more bitter, more sour, more aggressively fermented, or more spicy than before, and I’m now getting stronger sniff bulletins from my environment

(more…)

Posted in Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Smell, Social class, Taste | Leave a Comment »

Los Futbolitos

August 18, 2026

Encountered a while back via Facebook, this YouTube video:


[text:] Los Futbolitos, es un dúo de youtubers dominicanos, compuesto por Ángelo Valdés, alias “Will” y Vincent Peréz, en el que se dedican a hacer videos sobre fútbol y debatiendo sobre esto ultimo. [Valdés and Peréz make videos about soccer / football and debate about it]

So: we’ve got the noun (el) futbolito ‘football / soccer guy’, a derivative of (el) fútbol ‘football, soccer’, with the diminutive suffix –it-; immediately, there’s the question of how this noun gets this sense.

And I note that Spanish has another noun (el) futbolito ‘foosball’ — which, startlingly, is also alluded to in the photo: that’s a foosball game just under the title. How does this noun get its sense?

And then that Spanish has another derived noun denoting foosball: (el) futbolín, with another diminutive suffix, -ín (for the musically inclined reader, it’s the Spanish counterpart of Italian –ín-: from Marriage of Figaro, Se vuol ballare, signor Contino ‘if you want to dance, my little count, …’)

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Italian, Language and sports, Lexical semantics, Metonymy, Spanish, Variation | 2 Comments »

Cool nights

August 17, 2026

It’s mid-August, and still hot summer in Palo Alto, but the nights are now cool (quilt time is upon me) and it’s cool when I get up (around 3 am), moving me to put on a thick flannel shirt and gelling the coconut oil I use to treat my body (it becomes a thin clear liquid in the heat of the day, but the gel is what you want if you’re using it for skin and hair).

(more…)

Posted in Chemistry, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life, Smell, Taste | 1 Comment »

Reading the face

August 17, 2026

From the New Yorker issue of July 6 & 3, 2026, under the heading “A critic at large” (on-line, 6/29/26, “What happened to your face: How the human countenance become something to study, edit, optimize, and scan”; in print, 7/6/26, “Regression to the mien: How mirrors, selfies, and surveillance have changed what we make of our faces”)  by Cal Revely-Calder (with some subheads added by me):

(more…)

Posted in Facial expressions, It's Just Stuff, Language and the body, Psycholinguistics, Signs and symbols, Sociolinguistics, Switzerland and Swiss things, Symbols | Leave a Comment »

Experiencing it again for the first time

August 16, 2026

It starts with the movies, dwells on a paradox of dementia — that it can allow someone to experience something again for the first time — and picks up another paradox — that it’s possible for someone to forget everything and still successfully follow enormously complex routines. I will illustrate the first from my guy (my husband-equivalent) Jacques Transue in the early stages of his life-ending dementia and the second from myself under the sway of a powerful steroid drug. This will be a lot less grim than it sounds.

Then some professorial reflections on what it’s all about. I’m sorry; the professor comes along with the story-teller, it’s a package deal.

(more…)

Posted in Language and medicine, Memory, Metaphor, Movies and tv, My life, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

frags

August 16, 2026

No, not hand grenades, but (portmanteaued) fag frats, sexually specialized college fraternities. A topic that sprung out of my Sundance interview posting, in a comment by Gijs Doorenbos:

F.A.G. fraternity -> ΦAΓ ? (Should be available as a T shirt somewhere)

And then we strolled down fraternity row.

(more…)

Posted in Greek, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Social life | 2 Comments »

The first step

August 15, 2026

Now, a piece of my life story you have heard about from my side of the event — the first meeting of Ann Walcutt Daingerfield and Arnold Melchior Zwicky (which happened in the bowels of the Firestone Library at Princeton University) — from Ann’s viewpoint, as rehearsed in e-mail yesterday from our old friend Benita Bendon Campbell:

In September of 1959, I called Ann, who was languishing in Lexington [KY] and said something like, “I have a job and a nice apartment in Princeton. Would you like to join me?” She replied, “Bonnie, I am so miserable that if someone said ‘I have a job and an apartment in Hell. Would you like to join me?’ I would say, ‘Yes!'”

So she did. A week or so thereafter, she started a job in the Language Lab. Mr. Keefer [AZ: possibly Kiefer] was her boss and she reported in pleased tones about a pair of Student Assistants called “Franklyn and his partner Arnold.” [AZ: partner as in teammates / buddies; Frank Carr and I were roommates for three years]

That is how the milk got into the coconut.

I Did It. By Jove, I Did It.

And deserves credit.

(more…)

Posted in Earworms, Music, My life, Princeton | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »