On Law & Order: Criminal Intent on cable this morning, an episode with a very familiar face that I couldn’t put a name to. The man turned out to be named Geoffrey Nauffts, but I still couldn’t place him. He’s a veteran actor on tv, in the movies, and on stage, as well as an award-winning playwright. And he’s openly gay. Here’s the playwright at his desk:
(#1)
A particularly nice error I committed in writing up “Late summer porn sales” (here):
now that Independence Day and gay pride days are past and Memorial Day is about six weeks in the future
Memorial Day instead of Labor Day.
This is, first of all, a semantics-based word retrieval error, rather than a phonologically-based one; Labor and Memorial are not at all phonologically similar, but they are semantically similar — both names of US holidays. Even better, they are semantically opposed: in a convention of US culture, Memorial Day is the beginning of the summer season, Labor Day the end of it.
On cable, episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (the original CSI, set in Las Vegas) go by, including recent ones with Ted Danson as a crime scene investigator. Danson made his mark in the memorable sitcom Cheers, an ensemble comedy that addressed many serious themes during its 11 years.
Two similar brand names, both kinds of portmanteaus, but otherwise very different: acoustic insulation, sturdy soles for shoes.
Yesterday’s Calvin and Hobbes:
Calvin continues his art criticism, now providing an artist’s statement in defense of his sidewalk art. (I have an aversion to artist’s statements, especially if they use the word Weltanschauung.)
A David Sipress cartoon in the July 20th New Yorker:
Looking at text in a mirror is one way to reverse the image. But so is looking at it from the back side of a glass window, as here. The bar’s customer is just going along with the reversal.
You do wonder about the pronunciation of the reversed text. (There are people who’ve gotten pretty good at “talking backwards” — reversing the acoustic signal. The linguist Yuen Ren Chao used to do this as a kind of parlor trick.)
(Mostly about gay porn and advertising for it, but there’s some language stuff in there.)
We’re into the latter part of the summer season, and there aren’t many occasions to celebrate in the US, now that Independence Day and gay pride days are past and Labor Day is about six weeks in the future. That presents a challenge for gay porn studios, who like to have holidays to hang sales on. Two of them — C1R (Channel 1 Releasing) and TitanMen — have taken the challenge, with rather different approaches.
C1R wasn’t inventive; they just declared a “summer splash sale” and offered up chunks of their inventory, plus a new flick, It All Cums Down to Cock (cramming cum, the down of go down on, and cock into a six-word title). The material in their ad, reproduced in an AZBlogX posting (note: visually and verbally X-rated), is undistinguished except for a steamy shot from the new flick (with slim twink Devin Dixon admiring hunk Jason Phoenix’s penis).
But TitanMen went for playful cleverness, with a “Christmas in July” ad campaign (details on AZBlogX).
At first glance this looks like word salad, and things aren’t helped much if I tell you that it’s a VP, that it’s attested, and that it wasn’t an inadvertent error. Context, we need context.
In today’s Dilbert, Alice complains about a sexual double standard on language use, with women held to a stricter standard than men:
Alice refers to, and rejects, two expectations of women: that they be supportive and cooperative (while men are expected to be competitive and challenging), and that they be the guardians of deceny (while men have licence to break the social rules of niceness). Both fair objections.
Of course, men with these expectations might be affronted and pained by women who flagrantly fail to respect them.
