Archive for the ‘Clothing’ Category

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Stylish? Or in costume?

April 25, 2026

(lots of discussion of men’s bodies in street language and similar references to sex between men, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

Stylish? Or in costume? There can be a fine line here, often crossed flagrantly  — in my opinion, at any rate — in high-fashion shows. And then also in the far reaches of premium underwear for men, especially from the raunchily named Breedwell company — whose name includes the sexual verb breed ‘pedicate a man bareback (without a condom) to orgasm’.

(Translation in plain, but seriously vulgar, language: pedicate is a Latinate verb for engaging in insertive anal intercourse — fucking someone up the ass — and breed is the related slang achievement verb for bareback man-on-man sex — conveying that the fucker comes (shoots his load) in the other man’s ass.)]

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Names, Portmanteaus, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

human urinal

April 8, 2026

(a brief note about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

The hybrid. From “The Human Urinal” episode of MEN.com’s The Men’s Room DVD (the first scene (of 5) on my recently arrived copy of the 2/26 DVD:

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Form and function, Gay porn, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

Annals of derogation: homo

March 19, 2026

An example on the hoof, complete with the libelous myth of gay recruitment:

“These homos are interested in recruiting new members,” Rev. Benjamin Bubar, leader of the fundamentalist Christian Civic League of Maine, told the Bangor Daily News. (“Remembering the Maine Gay Symposium”, link here)

with homo, an abbreviation of the medical-technical term homosexual, the short form derogating gay men — along with such terms as fairy, pansy, fruit, BrE poof(ter), and before some of us homos engaged in reclaiming it, fag(got). I’m comfortable, even proud and defiant, with faggot, but because fairy-boy was the primary verbal abuse directed (inexplicably) at me in childhood, along with (equally inexplicable) accusations that I wanted to be a girl, I’ll never get on good terms with fairy.

Your mileage probably varies. Most people recognize fairy — and homo — as usually intended to be insulting, but open for ironic and playful uses, even full reclamation, as in the Radical Faery movement (for queer liberation, community, and ecological awareness). So, on the homo front, we get a queer-studies colleague of mine, parting from a lunch together with the announcement that he had to get his homo ass back to work. How queer is that?

More to come in this vein.

(more…)

Posted in Abbreviation, Clothing, Etymology, Formulaic language, Homosexuality, Insults, Language play, Lexicography, Movies and tv, Proverbs, Puns | 3 Comments »

Stripes

March 6, 2026

The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of 3/5, in which the effusive Cat in the Hat of Dr. Seuss / Theodor Geisel meets the elusive Waldo of Martin Handford’s Where’s Waldo? Under the sign of red stripes, in two styles (Wayno’s title: “Stylistic Differences”):


The Cat stands out, Waldo blends in (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Costumes, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Tell us their story!

February 25, 2026

(Underwear models displaying their bodies, with allusions to various forms of intense man-on-man sex, so not to everyone’s taste)

A Daily Jocks sale ad in my email today (2/25):


[ad text:] Cellblock13 at Daily Jocks — buy 2 & save 30%

What sort of dramatic relationship from the world of the butch faggy — Red Guy and Blue Guy, resplendent in their gorgeous intense colors — is illustrated here? Tell us their story!

(more…)

Posted in Identities, Language and the body, Language of sex, Stories, Underwear | 2 Comments »

Nairobi, gorillas. and gorilla suits

December 9, 2025

Musings on three things — Nairobi, gorillas, and gorilla suts — en soi (as “just stuff:”) vs. those things serving as symbols, with various values / evoked associations, which are typically conventional: cultural meanings. With specific reference to these three things in the 1950s Ernie Kovacs comedy sketch The Nairobi Trio.

(more…)

Posted in Costumes, It's Just Stuff, Language and animals, Language and culture, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

It’s the polar bears

December 6, 2025

A Glen Baxter cartoon in the latest — 12/8/25 — issue of the New Yorker:


The scheduled event will go on, complete with umbrella to shelter the picnickers from the blazing sun, even in the snow; even when polar bears arrive (attracted by the smell of food) to steal bites of avocado toast, the way jays and gulls do in the summer

It’s a feature of local life (on the SF peninsula) that temperatures drop about this time of year to chilly nights and daytime highs hovering around 60, while some guys — I am one — persist in going about in short pants (low today 47, high 59, I am in rainbow flag gym shorts), but with a warm shirt (fleece-lined flannel if necessary); I do not, however, picnic in this weather.

And we are unafflicted by polar bears. Chipmunks, roof rats, squirrels, ground squirrels, jays, crows, gulls, hawks, owls, raccoons, skunks, the occasional lynx, every once in a while a mountain lion, but even the tantalizing scent of Safeway’s jambalaya heated up in my microwave has failed to lure polar bears south from Alaska to Palo Alto. But then we are woefully lacking in ice floes and meaty seals.

 

Posted in Clothing, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Seasons | Leave a Comment »

Je suis Monsieur Pantoufles

November 19, 2025

Today’s morning name (pure playfulness after a long night of uneasy sleep fragmented by joint pain): from the Cambridge French-English dictionary, the noun

pantoufle (fem.): slipper;  a loose, soft kind of shoe for wearing indoors


(#1) An array of pantoufles (from the Cambridge dictionary)

Considered as a nonsense word, it’s silly-sounding in French, or when borrowed into English as /pæntúfǝl/, which sounds like a cousin of kerfuffle.

But then the things it denotes are often indulgences — playfully pleasurable in design, material, or color (as in #1), so that the word comes with an air of the ridiculous, both in sound and in meaning.

An air that carries over to uses of pantoufle as a name. Two of which I now explore: an imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, from the world of fiction; and me as Monsieur Pantoufles, the woolly moccasins guy. (more…)

Posted in Books, Clothing, French, Morning names, Movies and tv, Names, Shoes, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

The dark lord of death

October 28, 2025

From Ed Battistella on Facebook on 10/25, this remarkable Halloween display in a corner lot in Ashland OR not far from EB’s house:


(#1) A solid-dark figure of dread — not jolly fun, not even edgy fun — and mortal decay (remnants of its clothes  are falling away from the black skeleton), with none of the conventional features of skeletal Halloween memento mori (no white skull or face, but charcoal black; no stylized scythe, but a peasant’s scythe in black, with a rough wooden handle and a crudely hand-tempered blade), posing unsteadily amongst the detritus of material destruction, even the skull of a baby

The dark lord of death, the Grim Reaper, in autumnal haze, mid-day, on an ordinary suburban street, stalking the home of Southern Oregon University (where EB hangs out), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Lithia Park, and strikingly liberal politics.

(more…)

Posted in Costumes, Holidays, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

The passing domestic scene: waterfalls

October 18, 2025

The second installment on recent events in my life (yesterday’s posting “The passing domestic scene: biopsies”, covering 10/2 to the present, was the first).

Today’s story begins on the morning of 10/7. I was intently focused on a cute posting about a Bizarro cartoon — “The flannel frontier”, finally posted on 10/9 — when I became peripherally conscious of the sound of running water. Really loud running water. Had I left a faucet running?

I looked up from my keyboard, to witness waterfalls streaming from the ceiling in four places, drenching everything below them, pooling on the carpeting in the living room and surging in a wave into the little hallway to the bathroom.

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Family life, Furnishings and tools, Language and the body, My life | 1 Comment »

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