Archive for the ‘Figurative language’ Category

Give your boys the love they deserve

April 11, 2024

(About naughty bits — men’s testicles and women’s breasts — so not to everyone’s taste.)

From the ads of brands site, “Ad of the Day | Manscaped Gives Men’s “Boys” the Love They Deserve”, from 3/8/24:

There’s a lot of data out there about men but only one truth… 100% of men think their “groin” is the most important part of their body. [AZ: I’d like to dispute that, since I’m deeply attached to my heart and my brain; and since if I had to choose between losing my testicles and losing my arms or my legs, I’d happily give up my balls; but that’s a topic for another day] But the problem is almost all of them feel uncomfortable talking about it. Especially when it comes to grooming. [AZ: looking ahead and clarifying this murky text, what Manscaped is deprecating here is hairy testicles, not pubic hair in general or testicles in general]

The goal for “The Boys” campaign was to stop treating male groin grooming like it’s some kind of taboo. It’s 2024 afterall, we need to normalize groin grooming for the benefit of men (and their partners) everywhere.

The challenge? How to talk about men’s nether regions in a TV-safe way. Enter the visual metaphor. The spot depicts the…you know what… as a pair of miniatures identical to every full-size male character, always attached to him at hip height. The visual allowed us to showcase exactly what the product was designed to do by changing the miniatures’ hairstyles throughout the spot.


(#1) His boys before manscaping


(#2) His boys after manscaping

This visual metaphor opened up a whole world – one where every male would have two identical groomed boys. The jokes unfolded naturally as the boys behaved like men’s body parts — bobbing around whilst jogging or floating to the top of a hot tub. And the ungroomed boys, well, they had a rough time of it [AZ: they were sweaty and uncomfortable and nowhere near as cool as other men’s boys] until they finally got a little love via The Lawn Mower® 5.0 Ultra, MANSCAPED’s newest groin and body hair trimmer.

You can watch the Manscaped “Give your boys the love they deserve” 2024 Super Bowl commercial here. A shorter version has gotten lots of play on tv.

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Love what Scrivan did with the rabbit pun!

April 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, 🃏 🃏 🃏 three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and 🌼 🌼 🌼 three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:


(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”

Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.

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Hold the mayo

March 29, 2024

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, a Psychiatrist cartoon in which a ketchup squeeze-bottle treats a mayonnaise jar:


with a surprising pun on the verb hold, a pun that’s possible only because of the nature of this particular analysand (a sentient jar of mayonnaise)

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Manual monuments

March 12, 2024

Today’s Zippy strip offers us a talkative piece of public sculpture in the shape of a hand — actually, a closed fist, upraised — that riffs together with Zippy on the manual, hand-based, lexicon of English:


The hand exclaims, Zippy questions, but their exchanges are absurd

The big topic here is the manual lexicon: lexical items that involve the noun or verb hand. The manual lexicon is enormous. embracing some fixed expressions referring to the bodypart, but mostly composed of figurative expressions etymologically traceable to the bodypart but now semantically distant from it.

The other topic is also sizable, but it’s artistic rather than linguistic: statues of hands, especially fists, especially in works of public art. I’ll start with that.

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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.