Archive for the ‘Metaphor’ Category
September 6, 2026
The big scheme is Pleasure as Therapy: something I do for pleasure (or play or engaged curiosity) turns out to be excellent therapy, alleviating some affliction of mine or extending my life. These are unintended, but gratifying, consequences. Gravy.
Previously on this blog, the story of my singing Sacred Harp hymns in communities of shapenote singers, a practice that moves me deeply, sometimes taking me into an ecstatic state. That’s the pleasure. Then my pulmonologist — who had me using breathing apparatus to strengthen my lungs — discovered this and said that my singing full-out was much better therapy than his, and I should do it as much as possible, ideally some every day. I see this as getting a prescription to eat cake. Or, to pick a different metaphor, go for the gravy.
(more…)
Posted in Age, Language and medicine, Lexical semantics, Linguists, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Play, Social interactions, Social life | 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.
(more…)
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
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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:
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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 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.
(more…)
Posted in Figurative language, Hyperbole, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Usage advice, Usage attitudes, Variation | 4 Comments »
April 30, 2026
(plenty of references to a wide rage of sexual practices, mostly between men (though not in street language), so dubious for kids and not for the sexually modest)
A e-mail ad today for a new t-shirt from the Peachy Kings shop: the SIR mesh football jersey ($40), with this pitch:
Yes SIR… we’ve got the top for you! Our new SIR mesh jersey will let everyone know who’s the boss! This top will get you all the attention this summer with its slinky sleeves, peek-a-boo mesh and slight-crop.
SIR now joins PK’s existing t-shirt labels GOOD BOY, PORN STAR, STUD, and TRASH, but with a sociolinguistic twist: sir is primarily an address term; unlike the count nouns boy, star, and stud, and the mass noun trash, it has virtually no uses as a referential common noun. In man-on-man sex, it’s used by a subordinate addressing a superordinate: a bottom to his top, a Boy to his Daddy, a sub(missive) to a dom(inant), a (sexual) slave to his master. I am Sir is used in bdsm contexts, but I am a sir ‘I am a top / Daddy / dom / master’ is decidedly odd.
(more…)
Posted in Address terms, Clothing, Context, Emoji, Figurative language, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Signs and symbols, Slang | Leave a Comment »
April 28, 2026
(about a family of vulgar slang expressions, so streams of raunchy talk about sex: totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
With apologies to the Rodgers and Hammerstein of Carousel, notes on to bust a nut ‘to ejaculate, orgasm’ and its kin, among them the verbs bust, nut, dick, and ball (plus all those bodypart nouns).
(more…)
Posted in AAVE / Black English, Conversion, Dialects, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Nouning, Variation, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
April 23, 2026
This is a complicated background to a mishearing posting that has itself turned out to be more complex than I first imagined — a mishearing of the title word in the song “Cardinal” as recorded in 2024 by Kacey Musgraves. This posting is about the song; the titular bird, the northern cardinal; KM the singer-songwriter; KM’s wonderful performance of the song; and the song’s moving background story, inspired by the late country / folk singer John Prine. (more…)
Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Figurative language, Folk beliefs, Language and animals, Language and music, Metaphor, Music, Pop culture, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
