Archive for the ‘Figurative language’ Category

Baby foods

February 29, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅  three tigers for ultimate February; for Leap Day, the US is having wild weather (four days of cold rain predicted here on the SF peninsula, where the first flowering fruit trees are already in bloom)

An old One Big Happy strip that turned up in my comics feed recently. The linguistic point is a familiar one on this blog, the enormous potential for ambiguity in N + N compounds in English:


(#1) baby back ribs, baby snow peas, baby green beans, with N1 baby ‘young, immature; small, insignificant (in comparison with others of its type)’ (the sense on the menu) versus baby food, baby carriage, baby book, with N1 baby ‘intended for (use by) a baby’ (the sense Ruthie understands)

The contrast is between two semantic interpretations of the relationship between the modifier N1 and the head N2 in these N1 + N2 compounds.

On the one hand, baby food ‘food for a baby’ is what I’ve called a Use compound; Use compounds (‘N2 for (use by/on/in) N1’) are very common, and sometimes present a pesky ambiguity with also very common Source compounds (‘N2 made from N1’) — some contrasts: Use compound saddle oil ‘oil for (use on) saddles’ vs. Source compound mink oil ‘oil made from minks’ (ugh, but true); Use compound snow tire ‘tire for (use in) snow’ vs. Source compound snowman ‘(simulacrum of a) man made of snow’. The snow examples come from my 1/25/23 posting “Snow tires” on Use vs. Source compounds, taking off from

a classic Don Martin Mad magazine cartoon for the winter season, illustrating the utility and flexibility of N + N compounds in English — and also their enormous potential for ambiguity, which has to be resolved in context

… [with] four examples of N1 + N2 compounds in English, all four highly conventionalized  to very culture-specific referents. In these conventionalized uses, two (snow tiresnowshoe) are use compounds …, two (snowmansnowball) are source compounds … But N + N combinations are potentially ambiguous in  multiple ways; this lack of clarity is the price you pay for the great brevity of these combinations (which lack any indications of the semantic relationship between the two elements).

So: [in the cartoon] we get snow tire and snowshoe understood as source compounds …: ‘(simulacrum of a) tire made of snow’, ‘(simulacrum of a) shoe made of snow’.

On the other hand, baby back ribs ‘back ribs (of pork) that are smaller than the usual (spareribs)’ is what I will now label an Attributive compound, in which some characteristic that’s metaphorically associated with N1 is attributed to N2. Only a few Ns have been conventionalized for use in Attributive compounds: baby for attributing relative smallness (in baby back ribs) or immaturity (in baby peas); giant and monster ‘gigantic, huge’ for attributing (relative) great size (in giant marigold and monster truck); killer ‘exceptional, impressive’ for attributing excellence (in killer abs and killer idea). Since only a few Ns have been conventionalized in this way, Attributive compounds are not very common. But there’s another compound type that’s fairly common and superficially resembles Attributives: what I’ll call the Predicative type, conveying ‘N2 that’s a N1’: baby prodigy ‘baby who’s a prodigy’, killer clown ‘clown that’s a killer’, cowboy poet ‘poet who’s a cowboy’. (The compound killer clown is then ambiguous as between Attributive and Predicative: someone who’s really good as a clown vs. a clown that kills.)

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UNVOICING

February 26, 2024

From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday, coping with the day’s Spelling Bee game on the web, in which she was told that her candidate UNVOICING was not a word — well, not a word acceptable in the game. Her hedged response:

UNVOICING is a word. (Well, maybe.)

(CW is, among other things, a linguist, and linguists often have complaints about what Spelling Bee is willing to accept as a word of English.)

I’ll expand on CW’s comment, and that will take us to a surprising place (AI chatbots and their discontents). But first, some background on the NYT Spelling Bee.

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Palilogia, we adore ya

February 3, 2024

Yesterday’s Zippy strip shows our Pinhead submitting to (in his words) ‘the desire to repeat a word or phrase’, a condition that (borrowing from literature on rhetoric) he calls palilogia:


Here the palilogic impulse is to repeat the word palilogia itself — even by trees

Earlier Zippy strips referred to the clinical affliction phrase repetition disorder and the mantric or chanting practice onomatomania (there’s a Page on this blog about my postings on “Chants, cheers, mantras, onomatomania”). The rhetorical term — with Greek initial element pali(n) ‘again’ plus the ‘word’ stem log — merely refers to repetition; what Zippy’s usage adds is a note of impulse or compulsion that ties the term to phrase repetition disorder and onomatomania.

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Hot Days of Christmas: geese and swans

January 11, 2024

(A certain amount of penis-talk, so not to everyone’s taste.)

My digital-artist friend continues their tour through the 12 days of Christmas in the carol, with the daily gifts embellished by hot hunks chosen to give me a moment of delighted arousal; the artist knows my ways.

They mail out greeting-card prints of their compositions to me on the day depicted in them, and when USPS manages the task of getting the cards from one American coast to the other with dispatch, they arrive in my mail 4 days later. (The performance of USPS is, to put it very kindly, erratic; yesterday was 1/10, and the cards from days 8-10, for 1/1-3, had not yet arrived.)

In any case, the cards from days 6 (geese a-laying, 12/31) and 7 (swans a-swimming, 1/1), which did arrive in 4 days, represent a shift in the artist’s approach to their subjects: instead of showing a hot hunk together with the gifts of the day (as in the first 5 days), the gift birds are treated as manifested in Hot Hunks: 6 feathered hunks who are clearly hot lays; and a putative 7-man swim team, wearing tight long johns to accentuate their figurative swan necks (their down-curved penises). Exponential explosion of hotness ensues.

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Kissing the proverbial you know what

December 20, 2023

From the Raw Story site, “‘The stain is on you’: Ex-RNC chair slams GOP for silence on [GP]’s call for blood purity” by Matthew Chapman on 12/18/23 (in this story [GP] refers to (Helmet) Grabpussy), beginning:

The Republican Party at large owns former President [GP]’s increasing descent into fascistic and racist rhetoric, former GOP chair Michael Steele told MSNBC’s Katie Phang [sitting in for the host of “The Beat With Ari Melber”] on Monday.

This comes as [GP] stated at a rally that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” language that has clear roots in Nazi Germany — and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) defended it furiously when cornered by reporters.

“Michael, it is not just [GP] that’s doing the bad thing, it’s the enablers that are doing the bad thing,” said Phang. “We all know why they are kissing the proverbial you know what. And, when you have somebody like Marc Short [Republican operative, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence] saying ‘I doubt that [GP] has read Mein Kampf,’ I don’t disagree with him, I don’t think he has the capacity to read, but it is not the point. These people enable [GP] to be able to say this with zero consequence.”

In the crucial quote, boldfaced above, Phang was choosing between two idioms, both of the form kiss + object, both expressing submission to someone: the elevated idiom (with the C[ount] Sg object noun ring):

kiss someone’s ring or: kiss the ring

and the vulgar slang idiom (with the M[ass] Sg object noun ass):

kiss someone’s ass or: kiss ass

In any case, Phang chose to indicate that she was using a formulaic expression, via the formula-signaling adjective proverbial modifying the head noun of the object. She said kiss the proverbial X and not kiss proverbial X, and that would seem to indicate that she was using the elevated idiom (with ring), which comes with a definite article, and not the vulgar idiom (with ass), which is anarthrous: kiss the ringkiss the proverbial ring; kiss asskiss proverbial ass.

But we can feel pretty sure that she was aiming for the vulgar idiom, because she also used a scheme for avoiding taboo words (like ass ‘buttocks’ or ‘anus’): the filler you know what replacing the taboo item (I’m not going to kiss (his) you know what, He told me to stick it up my you know what).

The result is that at first glance she just looks confused, mixing features of the two competitors for a submission idiom. But it turns out that the syntax of formula-signaling proverbial is more complex than I had thought, and she was saying exactly what she intended.

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Packing Extreme Meat

December 18, 2023

(A lot of this posting is about the title of a Lucas gay porn movie, slated for full release in March 2024, but with its scenes being released one by one before then — the first, baldly titled “Dom King pounds Leonardo Bravo”, out last Friday (12/15), is described in one section of my 12/16 posting “Christmas days at the gay porn factories”. Before going on to an analysis of the movie’s title, I’ll unload some of the Lucas p.r. for the flick, and provide a sweet shot of the young Argentinean bottom LB in its first scene; this stuff is all about men’s sexual parts and man-on-man sex, in crude street language, so it’s entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. After that, you’ll get some sexual slang, though treated analytically; mostly there will be a lot of technical linguistics, but I’m trusting you to handle this material like adults. Relax, you can do it (as Frankie Goes to Hollywood didn’t quite say).)

Part the First: four guys with big dicks. The Lucas Entertainment press release for the whole film, in gayporntalk:

Release Date: Mar 01, 2024

Performers [alphabetically ordered by first name]: Austin Ponce, Craig Marks, Dom King, Jacob Lord, Jeffrey Lloyd, Kosta Viking, Leandro Bravo, Sean Xavier

Some guys have such huge dicks that they can barely keep them under control… that’s when you know they’re PACKING EXTREME MEAT! Dom King unleashes his huge cock on Leandro Bravo and pounds him bareback. Kosta Viking and Jacob Lord suck and fuck until they nut. Sean Xavier slams Craig Marks with his enormous piece of man meat. And Jeffrey Lloyd funds Austin Ponce with his fat uncut dick!

[Linguistic note. Most of this is familiar ornamental gayporntalk: pound and slam ‘fuck’, nut ‘ejaculate, come, shoot’. But fund (with) used like award or bestow (with) as yet another way to convey ‘fuck’ (fucking as figuratively giving your dick to another man, bestowing it on him, bestowing him with it) is new to me. Promoted no doubt by the orthographic / phonological similarity between FUND and FUCK.]

From the first-released segment, I give you, not the big-dicked muscle-stud topman DK, contemptuously pounding Argentinean ass, but his lean, hairy, and very hot, novice pussyboy LB (as a receptive / bottom, long retired from active service, I note that I view the label pussyboy as playful and celebratory):


On the beach: Leandro Bravo in basic black

Part the Second: based on a hot-cock POP. This section is about the title Packing Extreme Meat, which is a pun on Packing Extreme Heat, so I turn now to the VP pack extreme heat. Which is an unusual (but attested) type of POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau). Whose contributing phrases are figurative expressions, one conveying ‘having a big penis’, the other ‘being sexually arousing’. And whose shared (overlapping) material — heat — has different senses in the two contributors, so that the portmanteau is also a pun, a punmanteau, if you will.

Yes, it’s complicated. It just has to be unpacked bit by bit. Stay with me.

I’ll start with two general observations about POPs, one about their form (about where the shared material comes in the two contributors — in the middle, at the beginning, or at the end), the other about their interpretation (about whether the shared material has the same meaning or different meanings in the two contributors — in what I’ll call vanilla POPs vs. pun POPs). There will be generous collections of examples from real life; don’t be alarmed by all this abstract description.

— Where does the shared material come? In your everyday POP, the shared material comes in the middle, but the beginning and the end are other possibilities:

medial sharing: A B C = (A B) + (B C) — sweet tooth fairy = sweet tooth + tooth fairy; Chia pet cemetery = Chia pet + pet cemetery; Home Birth of Venus = home birth + Birth of Venus; Billy Zane Grey = Billy Zane + Zane Grey (almost all POPs are of this form)

initial sharing: A (B + C) = A B + A C — paranormoralegal = paranormal + paralegal (a minority option)

final sharing: (A + B) C = A C + B C — L. Ron Mother Hubbard = L. Ron Hubbard + Mother Hubbard (another minority option)

— Is the meaning of the shared material constant or divergent in the two contributors? There are many vanilla POPs, like sweet tooth fairy, Chia pet cemetery, and Home Birth of Venus above. But there are also a ton of pun POPs, along the lines of:

snow border collie = snowboarder + border collie; Edgar Allan po’boy = Edgar Allan Poe + po’boy

similarly: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young Frankenstein, Fleetwood Macchiato, Half a Key Largo, Pacific Rim job, iPad Thai

Yes, the really memorable pun POPs tend to be pretty outrageous; they figure in elaborate pun jokes.

Now: pack extreme heat. This is a final-sharing pun POP:

pack extreme heat = pack heat + extreme heat, with contributors:

— pack heat, a verb + object idiom (meaning ‘carry a gun’), with the slang noun heat ‘weaponry; weapon, gun, pistol’ as object

— extreme heat ‘high temperature’

On its face, that would yield an expression meaning something like ‘carry a gun that’s hot to the touch’. But then both contributors are understood figuratively, and sexually; remember that we’re working our way up to the title of a vehicle to (in elevated language) aid gay men to achieve ejaculation through masturbating to the filmed performances. It’s a gay jack-off flick, people, so its title pretty much has to be a dirty play on words; that’s why both parts now acquire dirty figurative senses: the gun of pack heat can be taken as a sexual metaphor, for a (big) penis, so that the phrase can convey ‘have a big cock / dick’. Meanwhile, there are also sexual metaphorical uses of heat, referring to sexual receptivity, sexual arousal, or the quality of being sexually arousing. so that extreme heat can convey high sexual involvement (in mind and/or body).

Voilà! Packing Extreme Heat, an excellent title for a gay porn movie: easily understood as satisfyingly down and dirty (even if you don’t understand the linguistic mechanisms that make it work); admirably raunchy, without using any off-color vocabulary at all (unlike, say, the Treasure Island Media gay porn flick Ruin the Cunt — which, like the Lucas film, is largely focused on bareback anal sex between men.)

Hold that thought about admirable raunchiness. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

But first I’ll do my duty as a linguist to fill in some of the lexicographic details on pack heat from standard sources, rather that just spouting glosses off the top of my head. (Extreme heat is, I think, entirely straightforward.) From NOAD:

phrase pack heat: North American informal carry a gun: he was busted at JFK for packing heat.

And from GDoS:

noun heat: 4 (US) weapons, arms [AZ: this is the M[ass] use, which might be better glossed as ‘weaponry’; but the entry also has C[ount] uses, glossed as ‘pistol’]

One last turn of the sexual screw. Ok, in Packing Extreme Heat, the Lucas Entertainment people had a fine title available to them. But they then decided to gild this lily with a paint gun, pushing the big-dick image hard by punning on pack extreme heat with the off-color pun meat ‘penis’ for the more innocent-seeming slang noun heat. Bringing us Packing Extreme Meat, for the holiday jack-off season (and on until March 1st, when the whole work will be officially released).

I know, I know, subtlety is not their strong point.

 

 

Counting your bots

December 12, 2023

Barbara Partee on Facebook yesterday, on the English noun AI [èáj], historically an initialism for the nominal artificial intelligence, but with a lexical life of its own, writing about:

— the new use of AI as a count [C] noun, as in these examples I heard on the NPR program 1A this morning about the use of AI bots in psychotherapy: “Would you use an AI?”, “AIs don’t have hangups, they don’t…” etc. The same conversation had the familiar [mass [M]] noun use as well: “Is there a chance that AI would be better than a trained psychotherapist?”

[Chris Waigl noted that the C usage has been common for a while in some sci-fi subgenres.]

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Naked men in Santa caps

December 4, 2023

(Rampant nakedness, juicy description of man-on-man sex, definitely not for kids or the sexually modest)

A piece of sheer raunchy frivolity. Two naked lads, a hunky bottom and a twink top, both wearing Santa caps, meet in a 12/1 mailer ad for a scene from Falcon’s gay porn flick Cum All Ye Faithful. Bottom Beau Butler has a package, a box, to offer top Trevor Brooks, who has pulled his briefs down to show what he’s got available to put into Butler’s package:

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Slutty T-Rex

November 30, 2023

🐅 🐅 tiger tiger for ultimate November, also St. Andrew’s Day (Scotland’s national day); meanwhile, I bring you two dinosaurs trading ideas about popularity and sluttiness

A pair of Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics strips, coming in succession on 11/10 and 11/13, in which T-Rex rambles on to his buddy Utahraptor about a fairly well-known paradoxical-sounding phenomenon in social networks, the friendship paradox. Actually, it applies more generally, and I’ll talk you through the (apparent) paradox in the general case. Yes, I’ll get to the comics, and to the way T-Rex uses the adjective slutty, but first let’s talk about your lunch partners.

The symmetric-relation paradox. Brace yourself for some mathematician-talk, but don’t despair: I’ll work up a concrete example (about you and your lunch partners) along the way.

Consider a a set N (for example, the set of people in a social network) and a symmetric relation R between members of N; R might be being friends with, say, or having gone to grade school with or — my concrete example — having had lunch with. Then for any member m of N (like you, for definiteness), define m’s R:N-cohort to be the set of members of N that m bears R to (like, the set of all your lunch partners), and m’s R:N-index to be the size of m’s R:N-cohort (like, how many lunch partners you’d had). Then it can be shown that, on average, the R:N-indices of members of m’s R:N-cohort are greater than m’s R:N-index — like, on average, the number of lunch partners your lunch partners have had is greater than the number of lunch partners you have had. Yes, it sounds paradoxical. But it’s provably so.

Now, listen up: what the symmetric-relation paradox does not say is that (all) your lunch partners have more lunch partners than you do. That would be genuinely paradoxical. All it says is that the (arithmetic) mean of their lunch-partner figures is higher than yours, which is a great deal less thrilling (though it still has a whiff of the perverse about it). So let’s look at the special case, the friendship paradox, where N is a social network and R is the being friends with relation (which is where T-Rex starts in his Dinosaur Comics ramble, before he goes on to the having had sex with relation (parallel to the having had lunch with relation) and to sluttiness, having had many sexual (rather than lunch) partners.

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Cruising the trucks

November 26, 2023

(About man-on-man sex in printed gay porn, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

Caught on Pinterest a little while back, this gay pulp novel from 1983:


(#1) Apparently, the young man — the piece of chicken — is offering to service the trucker’s erection; though the boy’s buttocks are prominently displayed on the cover, fellatio (rather than anal intercourse) is the conventional service in truck-stop sexual encounters (I know nothing about the actual story, or about its no doubt pseudonymous author Michael Scott)

So: three things here: chickens (and the men who seek them out); truck-stop sex; and the gay pulps, in particular the Adam’s Gay Readers of the 1980s (the series to which Trucker’s Chicken belongs).

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