Archive for the ‘Figurative language’ Category
August 18, 2026
Encountered a while back via Facebook, this YouTube video:
[text:] Los Futbolitos, es un dúo de youtubers dominicanos, compuesto por Ángelo Valdés, alias “Will” y Vincent Peréz, en el que se dedican a hacer videos sobre fútbol y debatiendo sobre esto ultimo. [Valdés and Peréz make videos about soccer / football and debate about it]
So: we’ve got the noun (el) futbolito ‘football / soccer guy’, a derivative of (el) fútbol ‘football, soccer’, with the diminutive suffix –it-; immediately, there’s the question of how this noun gets this sense.
And I note that Spanish has another noun (el) futbolito ‘foosball’ — which, startlingly, is also alluded to in the photo: that’s a foosball game just under the title. How does this noun get its sense?
And then that Spanish has another derived noun denoting foosball: (el) futbolín, with another diminutive suffix, -ín (for the musically inclined reader, it’s the Spanish counterpart of Italian –ín-: from Marriage of Figaro, Se vuol ballare, signor Contino ‘if you want to dance, my little count, …’)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Italian, Language and sports, Lexical semantics, Metonymy, Spanish, Variation | 2 Comments »
August 16, 2026
It starts with the movies, dwells on a paradox of dementia — that it can allow someone to experience something again for the first time — and picks up another paradox — that it’s possible for someone to forget everything and still successfully follow enormously complex routines. I will illustrate the first from my guy (my husband-equivalent) Jacques Transue in the early stages of his life-ending dementia and the second from myself under the sway of a powerful steroid drug. This will be a lot less grim than it sounds.
Then some professorial reflections on what it’s all about. I’m sorry; the professor comes along with the story-teller, it’s a package deal.
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Posted in Language and medicine, Memory, Metaphor, Movies and tv, My life, Terminology | Leave a Comment »
June 26, 2026
(fellatial fun — and disrespectful of religion as well — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday on the Facebook group soc-motss (for same-sex-inclined folk and their friends), Ellen Evans forwarded a 6/24 FB posting from Derekh Baruch Von Geiger on Facebook:
The ultimate source for this image is not identified; it could just be an invention, but it looks like a Christian church service borrowing from Jewish practices, in particular what’s customarily translated into English as the blowing of the shofar
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Posted in Jokes, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Metaphor, Puns, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »
June 5, 2026
(dripping with raunchy sexual content, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Not what TSE had in mind, but peach-eating was the topic for some bros in a Facebook reel that came by me this morning. Another chapter in the great book of schemes for talking about analingus without sounding really gross. (And the topic comes up because a great many people find the act deeply pleasant to receive, and a fair number of us find it satisfying to perform, for the sense of bodily intimacy it affords, as a display of insertive dominance (for its own sake or as foreplay to fucking someone), as a offering of submissive service (for its own sake or as foreplay to getting fucked), or for some amorphous swirl of such feelings.
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Posted in Argument structure, Emoji, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Poetry, Puns, Signs and symbols, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
June 3, 2026
On Facebook on 5/28, Bert Vaux reported on responses to a query of his on curtains vs. drapes. On that posting, an incidental comment by Heidi Harley:
Did anyone [among BV’s respondents] mention that you can’t threaten anyone with the utterance, It’s drapes for you! But you can with curtains!
Eliciting a series of responses from me:
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Posted in Argument structure, Complementation, Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Language and the body, Metaphor, Plays, Sociolinguistics, Style and register, Syntax | 2 Comments »
May 25, 2026
(a dip into the rhetorical organization of texts and into figurative language, but getting its raw material from gay porn and so it’s going to be entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
In the opening of Raging Stallion’s 2024 porn flick Tourist Attractions (scenes from the stream of visitors to Beau Butler’s (fantasy) rental house in Barcelona), BB explains the pleasures of the city:
I like to take in everything Barcelona has to offer: art, culture, food, cock — you know, the basics.
Thus launching this seaside D&A S&F circus with a stroke of comic bathos. From the high level of art and culture, dropping to the artful and cultivated satisfaction of an animal need and then plunging to what we think of as raw vulgar pleasure.
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Posted in Allusion, Bathos, Figurative language, Gay porn, Jokes, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Poetry, Pop culture, Porn actors | Leave a Comment »
May 23, 2026
(genitals and sex acts discussed in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
From the Monty Python fandom wiki:
Biggus Dickus is a fictional character in the Monty Python film Life of Brian, portrayed by Graham Chapman. He is a Roman nobleman and officer. He is married, according to his friend Pontius Pilate, to Incontinentia Buttocks.
BD’s sexual-onomastic legions have advanced throughout modern media, where they have a particularly powerful role in gay male pornography; some productions are staffed almost entirely by raunchily named performers, their names travesties on those of masculine icons; louche plays on vivid everyday words; and vocabulary smeared with the X, XX, and XXX of obscenity.
Two striking examples that have come by me recently: a man who does business as Feral Fux or Feral Fuxxx; and another who performs as Fabio Stallion or Stallion Fabio.
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Posted in Figurative language, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Identities, Implicature, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Names, Professional names | 2 Comments »
May 19, 2026
Whoa: toxic, resilience, Rizzler — all cry out to Zippy as he makes his critical way along a forest path, deprecating — despite their (respective) colorfulness, exactness, and freshness — the way these expressions are overused:
In the Zippy strip of 5/17, the forest is alive with the sound of lexical lamentation — with 14 such sounds, to be specific
For each of them, you might feel that you’re legitimately complaining that you’ve been hearing the expression often in recent times, though this impression is obviously going to depend a lot on who you hang out with (Rizzler has a minuscule role in my life. and my bad not much of one; consequently, I find them notable, but not because they seem to be used too much).
Now, people choose — mostly tacitly, not through conscious planning — to use certain expressions for reasons; people choose them because they have some function in the speakers’ and writers’ lives. The usual critique of overuse amounts to the claim that people are making their choices entirely on the basis of stylishness, choosing certain expressions merely because they are fashionable, stylish, with-it, what (they believe to be) the cool people are saying; and that this is reprehensible, because people are making choices just to show off that they’re in whatever counts as the in crowd for them and not on the basis of some more abstract goodness of fit of expressions for conveying particular meanings.
But talking this way just puts things back onto the question of where these styles come from. There’s room there for a certain amount of historical accident, but there are also reasons why certain expressions might get some social traction, through their values or virtues. Specifically, the values of colorfulness, exactness, and freshness. I will ilustrate all three from Zippy’s 14.
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Posted in Figurative language, Hyperbole, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Usage advice, Usage attitudes, Variation | 4 Comments »
May 8, 2026
Spurred by Max Vasilatos’s show-n-tell at the most recent (5/3) soc.motss get-together on Zoom, some material on the S&M graphic artist REX, assembled from material in his Wikipedia entry; the summary paragraph:
REX (1943 – March 2024) was an American visual artist and illustrator closely associated with gay fetish art of 1970s and 1980s New York and San Francisco. He avoided photographs and did not discuss his personal life. His drawings influenced gay culture through graphics made for nightclubs including the Mineshaft and his influence on artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Much censored, he remained a shadowy figure, saying that his drawings “defined who I became” and that there are “no other ‘truths’ out there”. REX died in Amsterdam in late March 2024.
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life | Leave a Comment »
May 8, 2026
(much talk of men’s bodyparts and some of man-on-man sex, much of it in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Background: from Benjamin Dreyer on Facebook yesterday (5/7), about assless:
— BD: My gosh, I’m in the dictionary.
(#1) From Merriam-Webster online
And my comment:
— AZ: why do I find no citations (anywhere I can see) of hyperbolic bodypart assless ‘having minimal buttocks’, esp. in assless Irishman (used ruefully by some Irish American men I know)?
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Posted in Clothing, Figurative language, Homosexuality, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics | 1 Comment »
