The One Big Happy from 4/10:
Ruthie runs aground on two facts that are sad but true: lexical ambiguity is everywhere, especially for short, common words; and though Ns and Vs frequently come in related pairs, there are a great many gaps in the pairings: not all Ns have been verbed or Vs nouned.
… and pornlinguistics.
Recently on Facebook, from Dan Everett and then Rob Pensalfini, calls for research in what I’ll call the profane domain of linguistics:
Dan: How about a pop-up book on the interaction of pornography and linguistic relativity?
Rob: It’s about time for a revival of McCawley’s field of pornolinguistics (and scatolinguistics, while we’re at it).
Dan is a frequent presence on this blog; Rob is new (and I’ll introduce him below). Rob asks about the profane domain, under the name “pornolinguistics and scatolinguistics” (a label I seem to have been responsible for, in 1967, in a moment of careless playfulness). Dan asks about linguistic aspects of pornography (I’ll put pop-up books — they already exist — and linguistic relativity aside in this posting), a topic several commenters thought must be barren, though I’ve found quite a lot to say about it on this blog.
So: on the profane domain, other names for it, and resources on this blog about it. And then on pornography in a similar vein.
(from the annals of remarkable company names and the Index Paranomasiarum)
For Naked Gardening Day (today and every May 6th), this shot of a landscaping company in the Miami area:
If Christian Gray is out on call, Marquis De Sod will discipline you — work you over in raunchy verdure under the fierce Florida sun. They will bind you, edge you, train you, hold you back until tomorrow, when they will allow you the release of Masturbation Day.
The morning name for today, lurking no doubt in my subsconscious after days of looking at, thinking about, and posting about desert plants. The green plant:
(#1)
Trying to recover the name of a deodorant I’d once used, I went on a Google search and immediately pulled up the Balding Beards site — they offer to put you on a mailing list for manly products — with its piece “The Top 10 Best Deodorants and Antiperspirants for Men” by Domen Hrovatin on 4/13/18. Three of the choices — all new to me — have memorable names: Primal Pit Paste Natural Deodorant (/p/-alliteration, and of course, rough, hairy, manly pits — women have underarms, men have armpits, or just pits); Forest by Herban Cowboy (major pun groan, at least for AmE speakers, for whom urban and herban are homophonous; plus those stone-butch cowboys and the masculine scent of the woods); and Jack Black Pit Boss (rhyming Jack Black, all tough monosyllables, plus the image of a tough casino pit boss, and, once again, pit).
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a fine POP (of a nonstandard variety):
(#1) M.C. Hammer-Escher = MC Hammer + M.C. Escher
An M.C. Escher-style tessellation of images of the rapper MC Hammer — visually combining the elements that are combined linguistically in the portmanteau.
On the blog of http://www.linguisten.de (“the free and open forums on linguistics, language, and languages and the study thereof … operated by and for people interested in linguistics”), for Star Wars Day, 5/4 (May the Force), the playful “Syntax Wars: The Saga Continues”:
(Sexual plain talk, in street language. Later, some gay porn described in plain terms. Mostly not for kids or the sexually modest.)
John Baker, in a comment on my posting yesterday “Then, if ever, come lusty days” (about the month of May), catches the reference to the musical Camelot’s song “Lusty Month of May”:
(#1) The scene from the 1967 movie; you can listen to Julie Andrews sing the song here
This is about lusty.
