Archive for the ‘Clothing’ Category
November 28, 2023
And now for something completely different. On 10/31 it was densely nerdy marveling at the words calceology, telamon, and hallux — I should probably have issued a technical-linguistics warning on that one — but today it’s underwear models (in a Daily Jocks e-mail ad from 9/26) wearing minimal tighty-whities that display the carnal attractions of their bodies, fore and aft, in intimate detail, hot stuff definitely calling for a male-sex-content warning. And then there are racy bonuses: the male couple in the ad is interracial, and the one presenting as a receptive / bottom is celebrated as an equal partner to the one presenting as an insertive / top.
Just to remind you: these are photos of male models playing characters in a sexual story (loosely playing with the image of a wolf pack) for a receptive audience, a story that’s intended to be at least sexually pleasing — or, better, actually arousing — to this audience and thereby to sell more of the company’s wares (DJ is an Australian company, here selling items from The Pack underwear company, distributed by Dragon Label Limited in Hong Kong). I’ve given these characters Italian names: Nero ‘black’ (note: in Italian, Nero is pronounced roughly like English neigh-roe) for the black receptive partner (who brings his tight muscular buttocks and its anal prize to the encounter, plus a focused and open facial expression) and Lupo ‘wolf’ for the white insertive partner (who brings his crotch and its genital prizes to the encounter, plus a decidedly feral facial expression, at least in the first of three photos).
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Posted in Effeminacy, Fashion, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, It's Just Stuff, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, Phallicity, Underwear | 2 Comments »
November 26, 2023
(Note this posting’s title — it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
It’s all about fucking in fur: two scenes from the MEN.com gay porn flick Norse Fuckers in which men mate wildly and promiscuously, like the proverbial fur-bearing carnivores, while wearing fluffy fur stoles (which they discard as impediments when they dig into their pronging) and delightful furry boots (which stay on, even while the men, otherwise stark naked, are fucking their mates).
There will be pictures.
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Posted in Accents, Clothing, Costumes, Gay porn, Idioms, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Myths, Shoes, Slang | 1 Comment »
November 24, 2023
(You can tell from the title that this posting will clearly not be to everyone’s taste, even if technically it doesn’t have to be shielded from kids.)
This striking composition of bodies (advertising flagrantly gay men’s underwear from Andrew Christian) in a HUNT Magazine e-mail offer today, 11/24:
The two men are posed as strongly differentiated in their roles, the black guy on the left as dominant, in charge, symbolically (and probably sexually) on top; the white guy on the right as submissive, subordinate, symbolically (and probably sexually) on the bottom — but evidently quite comfortable with his place, maybe even proud. If The Advocate magazine (“LGBTQ+ since 1967”) had an avant-garde wedding announcements section, this photo could be published there.
“Biggest Black Friday Ever” no doubt is a raunchy allusion to the fabled attractions of the BBC (Big Black Cock) — white guy sez, hey, I’ve got mine. (AC is often entertaining, but never subtle.)
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Male art, Photography, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
November 15, 2023
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro hinges on a bit of language play that cuts across two categories of play: it’s a pun based on a portmanteau, a punmanteau:
(#1) A cummerbund in the shape of a Bundt cake (Bundt punning on bund), with a name that’s a portmanteau of the names for those two things: cummerbund + Bundt (cake) = cummerbundt (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
(Note: The Cumberbatch is something else entirely.)
(Further note: Wayno’s title for this one is “Frosted Formalism”, alluding to the icing (aka frosting) on the cummerbundt in the cartoon — though Bundt cakes are not necessarily frosted.)
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Language and culture, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | 2 Comments »
November 11, 2023
It’s suddenly wintry-cold here: night-time lows in the low 40s F, day-time highs only flirting with 70 F, and then just briefly for a moment in the afternoon. It’s time to sleep warm — break out the quilts — and dress warm — it’s flannel-shirt weather — and abandon going barefoot, in favor of (if you are me) savoring the warmth of shearling-lined moccasins (which are also kind to my huge and painful bunions). Yes, there will be pictures.
But I will be brief. Like my previous two postings, this is a Posting Through Pain; the middle finger on my right hand is no longer visibly inflamed, but the first joint is still hugely swollen and painful — and, now, so are almost all of the joints on both of my hands, so typing is harrowing, and I can manage only brief bursts of writing at the keyboard.
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Posted in Academic life, Clothing, Shoes, Weather | 4 Comments »
November 1, 2023
🐇 🐇 🐇 trois lapins to inaugurate November, the final month of autumn or spring (depending on which hemisphere you’re in), and celebrate the Day of the Dead. A day on which we’ll enjoy three English words that have entertained posters on Facebook (from now on, FB) recently: calceology ‘the study of footwear’; telamon ‘male figure used as an architectural pillar’; and hallux ‘the first and largest toe (on a human foot)’.
At this point, you might admit that these terms are English words but, quite rightly, object that it would be bizarre to talk about expressions that almost no speakers of English know or use as words of English. Certainly, if I asked you whether English has a word for the study of footwear, you’re almost surely going to say no, because part of our everyday understanding of word of English is that such an expression has some currency, and hardly any speakers of English know or use the expression calceology.
On discovering the technical term calceology, then, you might be willing to say that the term is an English word, or maybe even a word in English, but still balk at saying it’s a word of English. It should by now be clear that we’re dealing with distinct concepts here, and grappling, awkwardly, with putting labels on them. At least one fresh label is called for. I’ll hold off on choosing a label to cover the territory that includes words of English until after I’ve looked at three other characteristics of CTH — calceology, telamon, and hallux — separate from their lacking currency.
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Posted in Architecture, Art, Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Holidays, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Names, Shoes, Words, Words and things | Leave a Comment »
October 18, 2023
Male underwear models minimally covered by garments designed for the sweaty dance floor of a raunchy fantasy gay club, so certainly not to everyone’s taste. And then (in somewhat distant homage to Barbie the movie), the garments in a full range of shades of butch-faggy pink: huge jutting packages wrapped in deep pink (the Brutus jockstrap); muscular buttocks, yearning for a depth pronging, framed by dark pink camo (the Combat jockstrap); and much more.
All this in the 10/17 e-mail ad from Daily Jocks, displaying some of its pink homowear for, surprise, Halloween. This year, the gaybros are tricking in pink.
The full ad, broken into three sections for this posting (label the whole thing as image #1):
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Posted in Color, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Masculinity, Underwear | 1 Comment »
October 13, 2023
This remarkable photo left me dumbstruck yesterday when Monica Macaulay passed it along on Facebook, having gotten it from the Art Deco FB group on 10/10:
The Pickle Sisters, a vaudeville group from the 1920s (photo: eBay.com)
[Here I repeat a note from the last posting I was able to manage, the 10/7 posting “THE shirts”, six days ago:
Note: this is massively a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting, indeed something of a celebration of my being able to post anything at all, not to mention through enormous pain in my swollen fingers. But no details about any of that here; at the moment, I truly am pleased to be still alive and want to show that I can manage a posting.
This caution applies fully to this Pickle Sisters posting.]
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Posted in Clothing, Costumes, Folklore, Language and food, Language and gender, Language play, Music, Phallicity, Pop culture, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
October 7, 2023
… for THE Ohio State University. A posting inspired by this Facebook posting by Scott Schwenter (who is, among other things, Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio), on 9/16:
(#1) SS — with Tammy Anderson, to whom he is married — before an Ohio State football game they were going to
SS is wearing a scarlet THE shirt for the occasion, TA a scarlet and gray shirt of her own, scarlet and gray being the school colors. For what is about to come, you also need to know that the school mascot is the buckeye, the nut of the Ohio buckeye tree Aesculus glabra, and that school teams are known as the Buckeyes; Ohio State fans like TA and SS are also known as Buckeyes, as indeed are natives of the state of Ohio. (I am not making any of this up.)
Note: this is massively a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting, indeed something of a celebration of my being able to post anything at all, not to mention through enormous pain in my swollen fingers. But no details about any of that here; at the moment, I truly am pleased to be still alive and want to show that I can manage a posting.
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Posted in Articles, Clothing, German | 12 Comments »
October 5, 2023
(There will be a barely clad male model showing off his hot hairy body in Daily Jocks homowear ads; you have been warned. But otherwise this is, remarkably, a posting about art, in particular extraordinary public art)
The backdrop is yesterday’s posting “A remarkable table lamp” — about a “sculpture in bronze by George Sellers — one of his insect sculptures, in particular a magnificent staghorn beetle cast in solid bronze, on a walnut base, which Sellers has made into a lamp base”. Which I used as a proof of concept / principle, showing that it was now possible for me to post something, even with my swollen (but somewhat ameliorated) left hand, if I used my fingers on that hand gingerly. That posting was pretty bare-bones — no further illustrations of some of Sellers’s remarkable works — but it served its purpose, which was to demonstrate that I can once again post stuff, at least relatively short, uncomplicated stuff.
The current posting was intended as another relatively brief, easy affair, about a gesture, or pose, in a men’s underwear ad that happened by accident to surface on my desktop. But it led to that public art, in Fort Lauderdale FL. The two are unlikely to be connected, so there’s still a bit of a puzzle.
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Posted in Art, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Underwear | 1 Comment »
