Archive for the ‘Metaphor’ Category
January 31, 2025
🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate January, and a day continuing the theme of late-January early-death birthdays: Robert Burns, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Edward Sapir in an earlier posting of mine (“Luminous birthdays” from 1/26); now, Anton Chekhov two days ago and Franz Schubert today
Meanwhile, tigers savage rabbits, but the rabbits of February are clamoring at the door, growing in size and ferocity, and are now prepared to chew up the tigers like mere blades of grass. A monument in bread to the coming triumph of these adorable but gigantic bunnies:
(#1) Today: from Benita Bendon Campbell, who got it from Jacqueline Martinez Wells
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Posted in Clothing, Events and occasions, Hats, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Variation | 2 Comments »
January 29, 2025
elegantized insult: a replacement for an insulting word or phrase that’s notably more elegant than the replaced item, by using material from either the specialized or technical Greco-Latin stratum of English vocabulary or its very formal registers, for the purpose of humor, either pointed mockery (amplifying the insult) or droll playfulness (entertaining the audience).
Two examples conveying ‘without courage’. An example of the first type (and conveying mockery) came to me a few days ago in e-mail: anorchídic as a replacement for the insult ball-less. Then an example of the second type (and conveying jocularity): lacking intestinal fortitude for the insult gutless. I’ll go through the examples in some detail, and then riff some on sophisticated insults, in various senses of sophisticated.
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Posted in Euphemism, Figurative language, Humor, Insults, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Slang, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »
December 16, 2024
An invitation on Facebook on 12/13 from linguist Jennifer Arnold, performing her musical role (crucial phrase underlined):
If you like to sing, come to the Chapel Hill Messiah open sing tomorrow evening! I’ll be in the viola section.
My response:
I had a confused moment when I thought you’d be singing the praises of the Messiah of Chapel Hill (whoever he is; I’m woefully out of touch with things, and thought I must have missed the rise of a Prince of Peace in the New South).
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Constituency, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Music, Semantics of compounds | 4 Comments »
November 22, 2024
(Well, consider the title if this posting, which tells you that it’s going to get into some vivid descriptions of sexual parts and sexual acts — plus a photo that’s just barely WordPressable — and you’ll see that it’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; and from here on, you’re going to get the C-word raw and unconcealed, but your enthusiasm for this dirty talk will probably be diminished when it turns out that this posting is mostly about lexical semantics)
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Posted in Address terms, Context, Dialects, Gay porn, Insults, Language and the body, Language change, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Personification, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs, Variation | 6 Comments »
November 10, 2024
(Vividly of sex among men, well pictured, and so no meat for the young or those whose eyes are modest; you must now leave — forgive me, gentles, for I am this third day immersed in Shakespeare (see this of yesterday) and speak as he would have me)
Glazed twinks: not Hostess Twinkies coated with sugar icing, but queerboys glistening with the jizz of many men. Hang on, friends, I’m still in transit from WillTalk, but fast recovering — a good thing, because it’s about to get raunchy, messy, and sticky (on the other hand, I will be offering some actual food as well as the sex). With its centerpiece a moment of carnal vulgarity, both verbal and visual, this 2002 gay porn dvd from the Kinky Twink studio, now, according to the ad in my e-mail this morning, on a November sale from Gay Empire (“Gay Porn Videos DVDs & Sex Toys”):
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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor | 3 Comments »
November 9, 2024
… and, instead of taking the Zzyzx exit, catches a ride with a guy in a SYZYGY car to the end of the road, where one-point perspective takes you (so we are both out in the desert in San Bernardino County CA; and also in the artist’s meta-world, where perspective lines converge in a vanishing point, and that is truly the end of the road). All this in yesterday’s Zippy strip, which is rich in Z, Y, ZY / ZI, and ZYG. plus the occasional antic X:
(#1) Three things: Zzyzx Road; one-point perspective; and the word SYZYGY (the ZYG of which took my mind to the word ZYGOTE; while the concept of syzygy took me to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a wedding-feast of syzygy — of counterparts, contrasts, conflicts, and oppositions)
And then there’s zig; from NOAD:
noun zig: a sharp change of direction in a zigzag course: he went round and round in zigs and zags.
(which can then be verbed to yield to zig ‘to take a zig’, as in my title)
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Posted in Art, Assonance, Comic conventions, Etymology, Language of sex, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Names, Opposition, Placenames, Semantics, Spelling | 1 Comment »
November 7, 2024
In an on-line notice of a journal article, a language name that I don’t recall having come across before, but one I understood after a moment’s thought: Hexagonal French, the French spoken in the hexagon of France — that is, Metropolitan French, or more plainly, the French of France, France French, French French (occasionally referred to as European French or Continental French, but those terms would take in Belgian French and Swiss French, which are outside the hexagon). Meaning, of course, the standard, Paris-based, varieties of this language; there are plenty of provincial varieties in the country, plus other Romance languages related to French, and, even further afield, non-Romance languages within the hexagon, like the Celtic language Breton in Brittany.
From Wikipedia:
French of France is the predominant variety of the French language in France, Andorra and Monaco, in its formal and informal registers. It has, for a long time, been associated with Standard French. It is now seen as a variety of French alongside Acadian French [in the Maritimes], Belgian French, Quebec French, Swiss French, etc.
Lots to unpack here, starting with the hexagon. Which will lead immediately to names of regions, including those that constitute the land masses of political entities. including countries like France.
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Posted in Geography, Language and politics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Names | 5 Comments »
October 30, 2024
(Publicity for a gay porn video, entertaining in its way but absolutely off-limits for kids and the sexually modest)
🎃 🎃 🎃 three jack-o’-lanterns for penultimate October, Halloween Eve (that is, the day before the day before the day of the dead) — in my house, the day when the pussyboys go out to seek their phallic prey
Into this scene comes this morning’s e-mail from the Falcon | NakedSword Store, offering:
Hot House movie download discounts — full movies $11.95 each
With, right at the top, the crudely pun-titled video Swim Meat and its cover illustration, offering four fine pieces of swim meat, one (Johnny V’s) just barely concealed by his swimwear; plus three proudly jutting tubesteaks that I’ve had to suppress for WordPress modesty (but here you can view the uncensored cover, along with the publicity text):
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Posted in Compounds, Discourse organization, Gay porn, Holidays, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
September 2, 2024
In today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange, the clams are tenting tonight on the old campground, but find today’s experience to be unaccountably joyless; for some reason, the formulas just aren’t working:
To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize two similarity-based formulaic expressions of English: the metaphor happy camper and the simile happy as a clam; yet neither is overt in the cartoon, though both are alluded to indirectly (we’re campers and we’re clams)
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Posted in Figures of speech, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Simile, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
August 30, 2024
It appeared a few weeks ago, and then was often repeated on tv stations I get. At first, I heard it out of the corner of my ear, got the brassy women’s voices singing what was not quite “We Built This City”, but was instead, “We Quilt This City”. So a commercial for something. Quilted puffy jackets for the coming fall weather? Beautiful bedquilts, pieces of folk art? Well, something quilted as in this NOAD entry:
adj. quilted: (of a garment, bed covering, etc.) made of two layers of cloth filled with padding held in place by lines of stitching: a blue quilted jacket.
Then I listened a bit more closely and pieced out:
We quilt this city on a comfy roll.
Whoa, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. What kind of rolls are quilted? Oh… So the song goes on:
Say it doesn’t matter, say it’s all the same,
But we are here to change your toilet paper game.
Ah, quilted toilet paper. It’s 3-ply — so, though it doesn’t fit the NOAD definition of quilted, it’s analogous to quilted stuff as in the NOAD definition. It’s a natural metaphorical extension.
What we have here is a sales-pitch parody of Starship’s “We Built This City”, in fact a whole production number built around that parody. In a one-minute music video (first used on 7/29/24) that opens with the three Quilted Queens — three women of varied age and racioethnicity (most toilet paper is bought by women) — taking over a grocery store in “Keep It Quilted” puffer jackets; the store then turns into a neon-colored set, while the three sing their sales pitch. (As it happens, I find the Starship original really annoying — probably a minority taste, but there it is — so I find its being hijacked for a paean to toilet paper refreshing.) You can experience the whole thing on a YouTube video here.
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Posted in Compounds, Furnishings and tools, Language in advertising, Metaphor, Music, Parody, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »
