… with showers, gusty winds, and some concomitant masculine property damage, between 2 and 3 p.m., likely tapering off within an hour or two. Then this Karl Stevens cartoon from the 10/25 New Yorker:
(#1) “It’s raining men, every specimen / Tall, blonde, dark and lean / Rough and tough and strong and mean”
Well, the Latin alphabet as used for writing English. Its Ω is Z, my letter: [zɛd] most Anglophone places, [zi:] in Anglophone America (meanwhile, it’s [tsɛt] in the language of my grandparents). Suddenly relevant once again when I stumbled on the Z-named disc jockey Zedd, who led me to other Z-names: the singer / songwriter Zee Ali, the transgressive filmmaker Nick Zedd, and the robotic entertainer David Zed.
There are more; these four share the characteristic that their Z-names are professional names they’ve adopted. Their birth names, in order: Anton Zaslavski, Izyan Alirahman, James Harding, David Kirk Traylor.
Two very different occurrences from my experience.
The Fillmore plea. From the late 1960s, Chuck (Charles J.) Fillmore, tapped (as senior member of the linguistics department at Ohio State) to serve as acting chair of the department while Ilse Lehiste was on leave, hesitantly addressing the first faculty meeting of the year (I was one of those faculty):
(CJF) I can do this job if you all tell me, often, that you love me.
The Transue plea. From ca. 1990, my guy — my husband-equivalent — Jacques Transue, with some visible anxiety, pulling me aside for a moment of serious couple-talk, holding my hand, gazing into my eyes:
(JHT) I need you to tell me more often that you love me.
Two clearly different senses of the verb love (but both, of course, capable of different shadings in different contexts).
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip (Wayno’s title: “Dietary Restrictions”), with a culinary misstep:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
There’s a lot to talk about here: the gendering of the two characters in #1; the Bizarro theme of anteaters and food; fire ants; hot and spicy food; the art of anteaters (it’s not just Bizarro).
That’s the personal name /émǝn/, in a fully anglicized rendition of either of two very different names: the (Egyptian) Arabic name of MSNBC commentator Ayman Mohyeldin; or the Irish name of Google software engineer Éamonn McManus (who’s also a friend of mine). Time for a multicultural, multilingual moment.
(men’s bodies, references to sex between men, so inadvisable for kids and the sexually modest)
From ads in my e-mail recently, these two male faces, with (lots of) context removed:
(#1)
(#2)
The question is how we read these faces, what we see in them, and that turns out to be an enormous question, in part because our responses are a compound of many different kinds of judgments, all of which are complex and variable in themselves.
The faces are not without context. They are, to start with, faces in poses (these faces are in static photos; if we had them in motion, there would be even more information to cope with).
Suppose we got them in a neutral pose, facing the camera. What we’d be looking at then would be a compound of a basic face overlaid by a facial expression, and we’re accustomed to assigning an interpretation to both of these things. And these interpretations are essentially never unique.
Now graduating from boys and normative masculinity to men and normative masculinity, but still in the comics. Via Verdant on Twitter, the Lieutenant and Sarge in an old Beetle Bailey (apparently from 3/30/65):
At issue is the status of illegible vs. neat handwriting with respect to normative masculinity.
Sarge, offering himself as an authority on the matter, identifies his own illegible writing as rough, and is about to brand the Lieutenant’s neat writing as, well, at least soft.
It’s that time of the year again, you can smell it in the air: Pumpkin Spice Season. For some, a keenly arousing moment, as in this e-card (#1 in my 10/26/17 posting “Three more pumpkin-spicy bits”):
(#1) A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau): verb pumpkin spice up = noun pumpkin spice + verb spice up ‘make more interesting or exciting’
A fresh installment in this series on boys and (normative) masculinity, in this case illustrating Michael Kimmel’s first rule of the Boy Code and the Guy Code: that “[normative] masculinity is the relentless repudiation of the feminine” — in the One Big Happy comic of 9/19:
(#1) The ignominy of having to use the women’s room
Public restrooms in the U.S., especially large ones (in shopping malls, airports, and the like) can be daunting places for children, so it falls to caregivers to help them use the facilities, until they are large enough and experienced enough to cope on their own. Since caregivers for small children in our society are very predominantly women, it falls to women to do this work in most circumstances (family outings being one notable exception).
The consequence is that female caregivers will take a boy into women’s restrooms until the boy objects (as Joe does above) or she decides that he can go it alone (while, typically, she hovers fretfully outside the mensroom). Sites for mothers are packed with agonizing about the situation, and sites for parents in general are packed with complaints about how drastically unaccommodating public toilets are for children.
In The Guardian of 2/20/21: “Tom Gauld suggests some literary collective nouns – cartoon”:
(#1) The last collective noun — gruop — excited a certain amount of appalled attention from some readers, who seem not to have gotten the joke
Not just collectives, but terms of venery.
