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The pengring

September 16, 2021

In the mail yesterday (in transit for a month from Italy), this neon purple penguin key ring — a pengring, portmanteau of penguin + ring — a little gift of friendship in difficult times, from Anna Thornton — morphologist Anna M. Thornton, Professor of Linguistics at Università Degli Studi Dell’Aquila,  the University of L’Aquila, Italy:


(#1) A hollow key ring, with the hollow good for holding the pendant penguin and so finding and wielding the keys on the ring, though this particular design is usually intended to make the pendant usable as a bottle opener; I don’t, however, think I’d want to risk scratching that handsome purple surface on a bottle cap (but then twist caps have widely replaced pry-off caps, so we all have less call for bottle openers)

And from this, excursions in many directions.

I note at the outset that the penguin is one of my totem animals; my house is a riot of penguiniana (and mammuthiana as well). Anna’s choice of penguin as gift creature was no accident.

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Posted in Language and food, Music, Penguins, Poetic form, Portmanteaus | 4 Comments »

Items of gay decor

September 15, 2021

(References to penises but no depictions of them , even (alas) on plastic action figures. On the other hand, there’s a neon pink dildo, so readers might want to exercise their judgment.)

My neon pink DJX Trough jockstrap (in size L) has arrived from the antipodes (the company is in Australia, but the jock was shipped from New Zealand) and been installed in its place as an item of decor in my living room. Meanwhile, my new Lollicock neon pink dildo has come to rest on the desk in my bedroom; it has become a Desk Dildo. And I am finally releasing a portrait of three gay action figures and their three companion mammoths, engaged in a ritual celebration under the blazing bedroom sun (on what I still think of as Jacques’s dresser, even though it’s the one I use in daily life — the dresser on which J once erected a small shrine to Mark Wahlberg in his (Marky Mark’s, not J’s) Calvins).

Anyway, it’s all dick-heavy (on the scene and even in reminiscence), though there are no discernible actual dicks.

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Posted in Clothing, Mammoths, Phallicity, Toys, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

May I use you?

September 14, 2021

Well, really, May I use your blog?

More adventures in blogging, this time in dealing with correspondents who want to use my blog for some purpose of their own, in exchange for something; the nature of these proposed deals is usually unclear to me, though I’ve been slowly learning. Here, two cases, of somewhat different sort, to which I’ve assigned the names: the Strong Family Circus; and Matt Thomas, Content Supplier.

With a cartoon for the occasion:


Cartoon from Gaping Void Culture Design Group (more on them below)

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Posted in Language and business, Linguistics in the comics, Music, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Stick to your own kind

September 13, 2021

(There are passages in the middle of this of extraordinarily crude obscenity, which should be exposed and reviled, not hidden away. I offer this warning, but no apology.)

Over rice pudding (that characteristic, iconic dish of American roadside eateries), a confrontation between Zippy the Pinhead and a Roundhead enforcer of law and order, a mysterious Masked Man attired all in white (someone much resembling the Lone Ranger, defender of American goodness, power, and purity), over Zippy’s citizenship status and his freedom of action — a confrontation set in the Village Diner in a mythical Wild West (an establishment much resembling a diner of that name in Millerton NY):


(#1) The standoff at the Village Diner

Claim A

ZP: Pinheads are Wild West citizens, free to move about the territory as they wish.

MM: Not at all. Pinheads are alien interlopers, who must be interned in camps we call circuses, with their own kind, in locations reserved for them, away from real citizens.

Claim B

ZP: Some Pinheads are clever and wise, some are silly, ornamental, and entertaining, but they are all harmless. In any case, Pinheads are entitled to dress and act as they wish (within reasonable limits set by fair and just laws).

MM: Not on the street in front of respectable citizens, they aren’t. They’re deranged, dirty, and dangerous — scarcely distinguishable from wild animals. My duty as the protector of American values is to rope them up and drag them to the camps. In fact, I would prefer to shoot the hell out of the sonsofbitches, but current bleeding-heart laws tie my hands and prevent me from giving them the punishment they deserve.

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Taboo language and slurs | 8 Comments »

Read the message in my face

September 12, 2021

(Warning: there will eventually be a naked male pornstar, but without his naughty bits visible, plus some mention of feminism and same-sex attraction.)

Two faces that recently caught my eye. I saw them first in a rich context, including the rest of the pose they were in; a background behind the pose; information about the place where the larger photo appeared; and some knowledge about that place and the function of the photo there. Here they are, as bleached of context as I could manage: just the faces:


(#1) Call this person A


(#2) Call this person B

What personas are these two people projecting? What are they like, and what are they doing in the photos?

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Posted in Clothing, Faces, Facial expression, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Photography, Slogans | 5 Comments »

Growing boldly where no flowers had grown before

September 11, 2021

Thanks to Randy McDonald, yet another pop-up garden wrested from cracks in the concrete jungles of Ontario:


(#1) [RMcD:] “I saw this [intentional accidental garden] back on 22 September 2017, walking north on quiet residential Palmer Avenue in Niagara Falls ON towards the train station”

Randy chronicles the street scenes of Toronto in great detail — gets the buildings and the streets and the sky above them to talk to us — and also the everyday scenes wherever he happens to go on his travels. So, here, in Niagara Falls ON in 2017.  (This week in 2021: Charlottetown PEI.)

This is a pop-up garden, composed of fast-growing annuals, mostly marigolds (and a white flower, maybe snow-on-the-mountain), that will shrivel, go brown, and die when frost comes. For the moment, it flourishes in brave defiance in this amazingly inhospitable place, the crack between curb and sidewalk. Where it clearly could not have sprung up unbidden, but had to be nurtured by human hands and carefully fashioned to look wild and spontaneous.

Take tough seeds and give them human care, and showy garden flowers can grow boldly where none had grown before.

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Posted in Language and plants | 1 Comment »

My address, a rant

September 10, 2021

LISTEN UP!

A friend writes to ask me for my address — in this case, my snail mail address, since he has my e-mail address (and has just used it), but I get requests all the time (sent to me by various indirect means) for my e-mail addresses too. I get hundreds of appeals, of both types.

I find this baffling, and annoying. These are intelligent people, who should understand that in this wonderful world of digital tech, enormous resources are easily available for everyone to access. In particular, you can do a search.

Remember: GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND.

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Posted in Resources, This blogging life | 4 Comments »

9/9: not a non-event

September 9, 2021

(Astonishingly, this silly posting will devolve into references to male pubes (NOAD entertains both /pjúbìz/ and /pjubz/ as pronunciations, by the way, so do as thou wilt) and photos of hunky young men stripped down to them, so it’s not to everyone’s taste.)

It is once again Negation Day, a festival for semanticists, also customarily the day for the annual convention of No Joke, aka the Society for Language Play.

This year, the semanticists will gather en masse at the Square of Opposition, where a statue of Larry Horn, caught in mid-smile, will be unveiled; and in collaboration with the No Joke meeting, there will be staged performances of Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic” sketch. Then, as usual: a clinic for those suffering from overnegation and undernegation; and a bazaar where shoppers can rummage for negative polarity items and reinforcements for their everyday negatives. (Just Don’t Do It: because of ugly incidents in the past, metalinguistic negatives have been banned from the festival site.)

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Posted in Art, French, Idioms, Italian, Metonymy, Music, Puns | 3 Comments »

My Lollicock has come home!

September 8, 2021

Lollicock, lollicock / Oh lolli lolli lolli

(Look, this is going to be about startling pink dildos — but adorable! — and phallofellatial lollipop playfulness, in art and song, so it’s clearly not to everyone’s taste, but it’s mostly goofy rather than raunchy; and it might actually be useful for kids to learn to suck with pleasure on a rainbow lollipop with adult self-awareness rather than adolescent snickering: yes, we understand exactly what it stands for, and we’re down with that.)

My pink Lollicock dildo arrived yesterday and has been integrated into my très-gay bedroom decor. I’m past using dildos for their intended function, but am now exploring their potential as elements in artful compositions of sexually charged objects.

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Posted in Language and food, Language play, Music, Phallicity, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Lupine Sapir-Whorf allusions

September 8, 2021

(That’s the adjective /lúpàjn/; the noun referring to a flower in the pea family is /lúpǝn/ — but this is not the Lupine Express.)


Francis Barlow’s illustration of the fable, 1687

Today’s morning name: the phrase the boy who cried Whorf. A paranomasic play — wolf vs. Whorf — on the boy who cried wolf, as in the Aesop fable, alluding to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the relationship between language and thought.

Oh, I thought on coming to full consciousness, surely someone has messed Whorfianly with the formulaic phrase.

And so they had; here I’ve just picked the first one that came up in googling: the heading The boy who cried Whorf, in Anthropology for Dummies by Cameron M. Smith, p. 48.

Then I tried some other formulaic expressions (again picking just one occurrence, the first one to come before my eyes):

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Posted in Formulaic language, Language and thought, Language play, Morning names, Puns | Leave a Comment »

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