Archive for the ‘Metonymy’ Category

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More news not for penises

July 5, 2017

Start with this little poem, “Spurring him on”, which seems to be heavily sexual:

Hotspur Cockspur:
Thorny, horny, over-
Heated prick.
Spiky, showy dandy,
Sharply tipped.

Actually, this is a continuation of my 2/4/16 posting “Some news not for penises”, which was about senses of cock that aren’t about penises, and it’s mostly about plants, a whole hell of a lot of plants, some of them with sharp thorns (like spurs) that will prick you, some of them with showy spikes (like a rooster’s comb), all of them with cock in one of their common names. So, what with the noun cock, the phallic spurs, and the phallic combs, the topic fairly drips with male sexuality — but this posting is not about men’s bodies or mansex. It’s mostly about birds and plants, plus some vintage dandies and Sir Henry Percy.

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and plants, Metaphor, Metonymy, Names, Nicknames, Phallicity, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Sparky, Jasper, and Bunky

April 3, 2017

Three morning names a few days ago: used as nicknames, address terms, common nouns. Each with its own story.

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Posted in Address terms, Metaphor, Metonymy, Morning names, Names, Pragmatics | 3 Comments »

News for penises: a friend request

March 11, 2017

(Well, yes, men’s bodies, sex talk, and man-man sex. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)

A friend request on Facebook, from someone using the name Nick Petersucker (some time ago, FB obviously ceased to care a great deal about its policy of insisting that posters use their real names; now, all sorts of remarkable names come past me on FB). His profile picture, a selfie of someone, first posted in 2012:

(#1)

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Posted in Language of sex, Language play, Metonymy, Names, Synthetic compounds | 2 Comments »

fudge

January 31, 2017

(It starts with tasty stuff, but eventually there will be some distasteful stuff. Be prepared.)

Yesterday it was Betty Crocker Fudge Brownies, which drew a giggle from me (because I have a dirty mind), So let’s start with fudge and brownies, the foodstuffs.

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Posted in Euphemism, Language and food, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Poppin’ Fresh in a pink dress

January 22, 2017

(It starts with dough and cross-dressing and eventually touches on several sexy topics. So: definitely racy, but probably not enough to frighten the horses in the street.)

Today’s Rhymes With Orange portrays the kinky side of the Pillsbury Doughboy, Poppin’ Fresh (the advertising icon and mascot of the Pillsbury Company):

(#1)

The Doughboy cross-dressing in an adorable pink skirt — a fluted cupcake liner, from the set on the kitchen counter.

Now: some remarks on cupcakes; a note on sexual undercurrents in the Poppin’ Fresh ads; and extensive discussion of sentient, speaking figures (often anthropomorphic, as here) in advertising, cartoons, or fictions of other kinds, figures that are in fact foodstuffs.

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Posted in Address terms, Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Slang | Leave a Comment »

The Adventure of the Morning Napoleons

July 6, 2016

Today’s morning name (welling up during my sleep from who knows where) was mille-feuille, the pastry.

(#1)

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Posted in Language and food, Metaphor, Metonymy, Morning names, Names | Leave a Comment »

The masturbation sleeve

April 30, 2016

(The subject line should warn readers about the content to follow. There will be linguistics, and also music, but there’s no denying the sexual content, which might make some readers uncomfortable.)

Yesterday, in talking about a comic in the first issue of the publication Meatmen, I noted that in this strip,

blow jobs (by mouth or Accu-Jac) and hand jobs abound

referring to an electrically-operated male masturbation device, via a trade name variously spelled (here, I used the spelling most familiar to me, but it seems that the trade name is, or at least was, Accujac). Much to talk about here — male masturbation devices, spellings, the name Accujac, the expression jack off, the noun orifice, and more. But, in recognition of recent events, I’ll start with Prince.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language in advertising, Metaphor, Metonymy, Music, Names | Leave a Comment »

nookie

April 13, 2016

(On sexual vocabulary and its uses, but not in street language.)

Back a few days, in my sexy-playful posting “Magnitude boys” (underwear with captions), the Rocky character calls out (to two other men), “Move over boys, Daddy needs nookie!” What he wants is sexual intercourse, but he’s saying this playfully. He could have used much earthier and more direct phrasing (and he could also have been more specific about what role he wanted to take in intercourse), but he chose instead to use the lighthearted, even sweet, word nookie (variant spellings nooky, nookey, nookee).

Three things about the word: its range of meanings (narrowly focused on sexual matters); its etymology (disputed and unclear, but culturally fascinating); and its penumbra of associations, which makes it sound “cute”, so much so that it can be used (albeit still with sexual overtones) in the name of an Australian brand of clothing for hip young women, Nookie Nation (with its cheeky mascot, the Nookie Girl).

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Posted in Derivation, Expressive language, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of advertising, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy, Slang | 2 Comments »

Substance massification on the golf course

September 15, 2015

In another watching of the GEICO “Kraken” commercial (posting here), I caught a nice everyday example of the sort of conventionalized metonymy that I called in a 2008 LLog posting substance massification, a particular type of conversion of a C (count) noun to a M (mass) use.

In their in-play commentary on a golf game in progress, one reporter says to another, about a golfer attempting to cope with a sea-monster:

(X) Looks like he’s going to go with the 9 iron. That may not be enough club.

(Golf) club is C, but here is used with M syntax, according to this generalization (from the LLog posting):

C>M: substance massification. A C noun denoting an individual has a M use to denote a generic substance or totality, usually in construction with a quantity determiner (“That’s a lot of horse”, “That’s more elephant than we can handle”). [So: horse / elephant (roughly) ‘amount of horse / elephant material or substance’ (considered as a whole)]

Or in the case of (X), enough club, with club (roughly) ‘amount of club substance or material’.

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Posted in Conversion, Count & Mass, Metonymy | Leave a Comment »

Go for the nuts!

September 8, 2015

From Ned Deily on Facebook, a photo of the Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game for small children, which invited jokey comments playing on nuts ‘testicles’. And from there to other expressions for the testicles: play ball!

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Posted in Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy, Slang | Leave a Comment »

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