arnold zwicky

Author Archive

The pleasures of role reversal

August 10, 2020

A tour of contrasting, also complementary, ideals of male beauty, and hence of male desirability, as they are played out in the fantasy world of gay male pornography. Apollo (or Adonis) vs. Dionysus (or Bacchus or Priapus), Ganymede (the prototypical catamite) vs. Zeus (the prototypical inseminator), beautiful boy vs. powerful man, worked into conventional forms of porn for men, and then complexly subverted by role reversals in which Apollo penetrates Priapus.

Yes, there’s a site (Twink Top) for that — there’s specialist porn for pretty much every fantasy — as well as at least one site (Fun Size Boys) intensifying and celebrating the boy/man dichotomy (featuring little guys taken sexually by really big guys).

This posting is drenched in mansex discussed in street language and so is utterly inappropriate for kids or the sexually modest.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Masculinity | 2 Comments »

Zippy philaconfusion

August 9, 2020

(There will be a brief dip into a mansex-steamy Tom of Finland drawing, which might offend some readers.)

Today’s Zippy, in which philandering and philately are confounded:

(#1)

Word confusions are very common; sometimes they are momentary failures to retrieve the intended word; sometimes they are misapprehensions about the target. Zerbina’s error is apparently of the first type, but she nevertheless has a complaint about Zippy’s attentions to her, though the cause isn’t philandering but philately.

The two words share an etymological component, the phil(a)- (originally ‘love’) part, seen also in philosophy, philodendron, pedophilia, Philadelphia, and much more. But this is scarcely obvious to modern speakers of English.

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Posted in Errors, Etymology, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

August flora and fauna

August 9, 2020

… mostly fauna, the birds and creatures, squirrels especially. From the little world that I see in my long confinement (now into its sixth month), on the narrow patio outside the big window by my work table. The view from that window on 6/27:

(#1) From the inside of the house: the bird feeder, attached to the outside of the window; in the foreground, succulents (notably a silver Echevaria); a planter with tall-standing calla plants; and an assortment of cymbidium orchid plants; with an ivy-covered wall in the background

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Posted in Inflection, Language and animals, My life | 2 Comments »

Flies met cute

August 9, 2020

The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 8/7 features a housefly couple telling the story of how they met:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

Where to begin? Well, it’s a decidedly meta cartoon, in which the characters know they are cartoon characters and comment on that fact. And it’s a cartoon in which parallel worlds are aligned and translated from one to the other: a world of conventional American domesticity (in which couples meet and form relationships, and entertain friends in their home); and a world of fly jokes, turning on the appearance of houseflies in soup at restaurants.

All this held together by a story type in film-making: the meet cute form, in which unlikely accidents of meeting lead to romantic involvements.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »

Thighland

August 8, 2020

(Racy talk and joking about men’s bodies, so probably not to everyone’s taste.)

The background story is an error committed by the Imperator Grabpussy in reading from his text recently, with /θaj/ for /taj/ ‘Thai’, thereby introducing us all to the wonders of Thighland. (Details below.) Wags seized on the error for jokes, and on Facebook Tim Evanson offered photos of the King of Thighland, showing his massive muscular thighs and focusing our attention on the crotch they surround:

(#1) Thigh Guy: Kevin Cesar Portillo, who is all-around massive (he’s 6′5″), a former college basketball player at Miami-Dade CC, Mississippi Valley State, and Ave Maria Univ., now working as a male model (projecting smouldering sexiness) and fitness consultamt

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Posted in Errors, Language and the body, Language play, Movies and tv, Music, Parodies, Puns | Leave a Comment »

More cucumber soups

August 8, 2020

Yesterday, in my posting “Cucumber soup”, it was cucumber and yog(h)urt soups, a topic that led Kathryn Burlingham to post a recipe from the August 2016 issue of bon appétit magazine, for a cucumber-tomatillo gazpacho — “A cool green zingy soup; pack it in a thermos on ice and take it picnicking or to the beach” — that sounds absolutely delicious (with the tomatillos supplyng crucial acidity), and comes with a fabulous piece of food photography (ba regularly produces masterpieces of the genre):

(#1) Cucumber-tomatillo gazpacho

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Posted in Language and food | Leave a Comment »

Cucumber soup

August 6, 2020

Starting yesterday on Facebook:

Kristin Bergen: Summertime, my breakfast is salty lassi with a cucumber tossed in it. Also cold cucumber yogurt soup with dill and toasted walnuts

Arnold Zwicky: Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky) made a wonderful cucumber-yogurt soup with dill (and toasted walnuts). I’ll try to find her recipe, but life is difficult and searching is hard.

Kristin Bergen > Arnold Zwicky: the base recipe I made it from was in I think the NYT cookbook circa 1970s, but I omitted the chicken broth. Use a sweet Indian style whole milk yogurt, not Greek, Brown Cow works. And the toasted walnuts get very finely chopped, and don’t over-do it. Tiny tiny amount of garlic. and some EVOO drizzled on top.

Well, it’s taken me six hours, but I think I’ve found the recipe that Kristin and I have in mind.

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Posted in Language and food, My life | 5 Comments »

Caterpillars spinning platters

August 5, 2020

Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with songs you just can’t get out of your head:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

A wonderful collision of worlds, set off by the idiomatic (and colorfully metaphorical) N + N compound earworm: the world of DJs — the ear world (disc jockeys providing sonic pleasures for the ear) — and the world of caterpillars — the worm world (caterpillars being one type of worm in colloquial English).

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Posted in Abbreviation, Categorization and Labeling, Idioms, Initialisms, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Music, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »

Towards the high end of the hardness scale

August 4, 2020

(All I need to tell you is that this posting takes off from a line of Cumdump jockstraps offered by the Breedwell company in deliberately provocative ads, and you should see that it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest.)

A Daily Jocks ad from 11/4/19 shows us the jock in red, with a model presented faux-naturalistically as a tough working-class guy in a blue-collar setting (a railyard, shipyard, or truckyard). Ad copy for the jock:

The new Breedwell Cumdump Jock [available in white, black, red, yellow, and blue] is a take on the classic, old-school woven jock.

Features a black centre patch with the Breedwell logo and signature “Dirty By Choice” motto. The back of the jock features ‘Breedwell’ across the entire back.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Masculinity, Metaphor, Porn, Pornography, Portmanteaus, Scalarity, Semantics, Underwear | Leave a Comment »