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…)
Archive for the ‘Figurative language’ Category
Amiable g4p
April 22, 2026(lots of man-on-man sex, described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
In yesterday’s (4/21) “Prodigious macrophallicity, contemptuous noblesse” on the g4p porn actor who performs under the name Malik Delgaty: a very big man with a really big dick and a frequently disdainful attitude towards the men who service that dick. In his first videos, his line readings were wooden, and he showed little interest in his partners as people. Over the years 2020 to 2023 he got better at his craft, but he continued to treat his sexual partners primarily as devoted receptacles for his monumental organ — with what I called contemptuous noblesse.
Such an attitude is a hazard for g4p men, but not an inevitable one. I bring you, for contrast, the g4p porn actor Chris Rockway. Seen in this thumbnail photo:
(#1) CR. with a characteristic (somewhat knowing) smile; compare the photos of MD in yesterday’s posting: either neutral or intense, bordering on the disdainful
Prodigious macrophallicity, contemptuous noblesse
April 21, 2026(all about man-on-man sex, described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest)
My latest gay porn DVD, ordered on sale and on spec, on the basis of Malik Delgaty’s brief appearance in a different MEN.com compendium, The Men’s Room. The DVD Malik Delgaty: The Ultimate Ride (2026), with 4 scenes: “Ass Blaster” (2020), “(The) Bootyguard” (2022), “Bussy Control” (2023), and “Hook Up Trade” (2023).
About MD, from Wikipedia:
Justin Lesage (born 29 September 2000), known professionally as Malik Delgaty, is a Canadian actor in gay pornographic films. He began working as a stripper at 18 years old in his hometown of Montreal before signing an exclusive contract with Men.com in 2020. He was the most searched-for gay pornographic actor online from 2022 to 2024 and has won three GayVN Awards.
… Delgaty identifies as straight and has stated that he “had never been attracted to men before being on camera”. He has been described as “gay-for-pay”
Justin Lesage makes his living by acting in gay porn movies as Malik Delgaty, an identity that allows him to take advantage of (1) the gifts of nature (he is a tall man — 6′ 3″ — with a big frame and a matching long — 8.5″ — and thick (cut) penis), as improved by gym workouts to achieve (2) an impressive bodybuilder’s heavy musculature, these physical advantages allied with (3) the ability to maintain a hard-on unflaggingly through extended reverential blow jobs and ass-fucking.
Two themes emerge. One is the celebration of penis size, what I’ve called macrophallicism; the other is a version of contemptuous noblesse oblige, coming for MD along with his attitude to being gay for pay (g4p).
Surfing like bunnies
December 4, 2025(deeply not for kids or the sexually modest: it’s all about man-on-man sexual acts, though the really hard-core stuff will come in a later posting; this one is mostly about lexicography, but even so, there’s a lot of guys pronging guys going on)
In this morning’s crop of gay porn ads, in a TitanMen store mailer, the charmingly titled (and apparently single-entendre) Joey’s Surf Vacation, with a dvd cover featuring a porn actor new to me, the boyish twink Joey Mills (paired with a familiar muscle twink, Dean Young, in a scene I’ll write about in a later posting). The cover of the 2024 dvd from MEN.com:
Troy Daniels and Joey Mills (from a different scene in the dvd)
On to the lexicography, starting with various attested verbs, while working towards what would seem to be a fresh metaphorical verb surf.
At the zeugmoid laundry
December 3, 2025A tv commercial for the laundry detergent Tide, heard this morning:
If it’s got to be clean, then it’s got to be Tide [1]
(with the deontic modal of obligation have got to, roughly ‘must’). At this point, I’ll simplify the example somewhat by using the one-word variant have to rather than have got to:
If it has to be clean, then it has to be Tide [2]
[1] and [2] catch your attention because they’re somehow jokey, some kind of play on words. The two parallel underlined stretches are word-for-word identical, but they’re not parallel in meaning, and we expect them to be. This semantic disparity makes [1] and [2] examples of what I’ve called zeugmoids. More on all that to come, but first I want to make the phenomenon clearer.
A monster sale at Bath and Body World
October 26, 2025In today’s Rhymes With Orange strip, a sale at Bath and Body World:
A sale of body parts from and/or for monsters — not what comes to mind when you come across the N + N compound monster sale, which is a dauntingly large sale, one that’s (metaphorically) a monster
Now the details.
From the annals of remarkable commercial names
September 27, 2025Briefly noted. From Randy McDonald on Facebook yesterday, a nighttime-atmospheric photo of the Chew Chew Grill / Chew Chew’s Diner, 186 Carlton St., Toronto ON (open 8 am to 4 pm):
All-day breakfast, hot sandwiches, and burgers in a space with booth seating and train-inspired decor
You get the remarkable name, a kind of ludic trifecta — punning (choo punning on chew), imitative (choo-choo ‘train’), and metonymical (chew in the name of an eating place) — plus the wonderful train mural, especially vivid at night.
Gay banter: great big green beans
August 31, 2025🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) 🔧 Labor Sunday 🔨 (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B
Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:
graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty
A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:
— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!
This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.
And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff further on green beans / string beans / snap beans. (more…)