Archive for the ‘Formulaic language’ Category

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Mononga Hela!

July 1, 2026

šŸ‡ šŸ‡ šŸ‡ rabbit rabbit rabbit, the sultry bunnies of July! But they are no match for Mononga Hela, the monstrous snake that swallows fat Carnegie melons, prodigious feral boars, and of course entire railway trains whole — the fearsome creature that in popular lore is said to have consumed all of western Pennsylvania in a fit of pique. Mononga Monga Ooga Gila Hellmouth!

But first, the Zippy strip from 6/27:


Beyond spelling: Zippy appreciates the power of the name Monongahela; and of courseĀ potrzebie, but the word for the day is Monongahela

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Posted in Events and occasions, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras, Names, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »

Variations on a theme

May 17, 2026

(by the time I’m just a bit of the way into revealing the themes of this posting, certainly once Jake Mathews appears, it should become entirely clear why this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest)

A follow-up to my posting “Taking Pleasure” yesterday (5/16), with scenes from two gay porn videos:

The two scenes have Mr Deep Voice (the screen persona of actor Thomas Johnson (TJ) ) and Andy Toro (AT) in a random hookup of complete strangers in a scene fromĀ Right Place, Right TimeĀ (Falcon Studios, 2026); and Tayte Hanson (TH) and Eli Bennet (EB) as step-brothers in (romantic) love inĀ Big Bro Little Bro Raw (CockyBoys, 2021)

Right Place is a compilation video, of 5 Falcon Studios scenes in which chance encounters end in wild raw man-on-man sex: 5 variations on this theme, with different pairings of men, different tones, different stories. Some details below, because one of the pairings has the cute Mancunian muscle bottom Jake Matthews filled with Barcelonian dick and great pleasure, serving as a kind of sweet hero of bottoming, a model for men who love to get fucked (he also stars in gangbang videos, where he takes dick with intense enthusiasm; yes, it’s a performance, but he has fully mastered the Catamite genre, and I want to tip my hat to the maestro).

Big Bro Raw also has a series of variations on a theme, “big bros give it hard to their little bros’ tight holes”, as the Cocky Boys publicity has it. And then this video is the third in a series of “big-dicked tops showing their lil’ dudes how to take dick” (again from their publicity). That is, the last of three compilations of “a cast of men pounding young butts”, with different men and different young butts in each compilation. Yielding a sort of visual encyclopedia of this domain of sexual connection.

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Slogans, Stories | Leave a Comment »

Hang free or peter out

May 14, 2026

Today’s adventure in analyzing the jokey allusions in my postings. The target allusion is the one boldfaced in this passage from my posting yesterday (5/13), “The pocket bulge”:

[The DJX bulge booster] provides a soft but protective pocket in which a manā€™s package (of whatever size) can be unconstrained (hang free or peter out, as the slogan goes)

I explained half of the joke in a comment about my raw materials for this posting:

ā€œLive Free or Dieā€, the official state motto of New Hampshire

But then there’s peter out, a verb of fading (before coming to an end), so ‘fade to death’ here, framed with a pun on peter, with a covert allusion to the penis hanging unconstrained within the bulge booster.

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Posted in Aktionsart, Allusion, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Puns, Slogans, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

The contrary opinion

April 2, 2026

In the spirit of the Passover season, a Frank Cotham cartoon in the 4/6/26 issue of the New Yorker:


A gentle jab at the stereotypical Jewish inclination to public disputation, alluding to the saying two Jews, three opinions or three Jews, four opinions

Even Moses, parting the waters of the sea (to enable the Israelites to escape the Egyptians pursuing them) was not immune from second guessing, at least in Cotham’s telling (though the event somehow escaped recording in the Pentateuch).

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Posted in Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans | Leave a Comment »

Annals of derogation: homo

March 19, 2026

An example on the hoof, complete with the libelous myth of gay recruitment:

ā€œThese homos are interested in recruiting new members,ā€ Rev. Benjamin Bubar, leader of the fundamentalist Christian Civic League of Maine, told theĀ Bangor Daily News. (“Remembering the Maine Gay Symposium”, link here)

with homo, an abbreviation of the medical-technical term homosexual, the short form derogating gay men — along with such terms as fairy, pansy, fruit, BrE poof(ter), and before some of us homos engaged in reclaiming it, fag(got). I’m comfortable, even proud and defiant, with faggot, but because fairy-boy was the primary verbal abuse directed (inexplicably) at me in childhood, along with (equally inexplicable) accusations that I wanted to be a girl, I’ll never get on good terms with fairy.

Your mileage probably varies. Most people recognize fairy — and homo — as usually intended to be insulting, but open for ironic and playful uses, even full reclamation, as in the Radical Faery movement (for queer liberation, community, and ecological awareness). So, on the homo front, we get a queer-studies colleague of mine, parting from a lunch together with the announcement that he had to get his homo ass back to work. How queer is that?

More to come in this vein.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Clothing, Etymology, Formulaic language, Homosexuality, Insults, Language play, Lexicography, Movies and tv, Proverbs, Puns | 3 Comments »

The fabulously successful idiot plot

March 5, 2026

I recently stumbled on the notion of an idiot plot on Facebook — a cultural category I had surely encountered before but must have forgotten about. In any case, I now had Wikipedia’s explanation, along with a notable example, the plot of the Astaire / Rogers musical comedy film Top Hat.

But … despite some evident absurdity, I find the film enormously enjoyable, and in fact it’s by far the most successful of the Astaire / Rogers movies. Musical films are clearly not bound by constraints of rationality or fidelity to fact — indeed, the narrative objects of culture are in general unconstrained by such considerations: consider the plots of most operas and American Western movies, both set in times and places that never existed and often don’t make sense: consider, specifically, Manon Lescaut and The Magic Flute; or Red River and Stagecoach. Masterpieces of their genres, truly wonderful, but preposterous and inaccurate in many ways. We don’t care. All this stuff happens in fictive worlds that are imaginative creations with their own conventions (not unlike the fictive worlds of science fantasy).

Now: background about idiot plots. And then an appreciation of Top Hat.

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Posted in Culture, Dance, Dancers, Formulaic language, Movies and tv, Music, Pop culture | 1 Comment »

You know it’s good, because it’s free

February 13, 2026

A step into greater complexity in my blog posting, after re-entry in two brief postings yesterday: “Zichichi” (here) and “Calvin Tompkins (here): two separate subjects, united by being cleverly stitched together in The Bob newsletters (from writer and cartoonist Bob Eckstein), about the 2026 Winter Olympics on television, with this cartoon from 2/7:


(Toon) The Bob at the Winter Olympics; BE says “The bob is here”, with this tag about the Olympics on tv:

You know it’s good, because it’s free

This is subject 1, the excellent tag, which I would like to apply to this very blog of mine: you know it’s good because it’s free (and I have gone to some trouble to make it so; applaud here for me)

Meanwhile, Toon is BE’s wiener dog race version of the Olympics, in which the racing dogs are in hotdog buns, observed by an array of condiment bottles. On Facebook on 2/8:

BE: “I’m Iā€™m watching the Puppy Bowl. Itā€™s not the same. Gambling has ruined it, even though Iā€™m admittedly part of the problem.

BE’s eccentric Puppy Bowl is subject 2, and it has nothing to do with the the tag.

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Posted in Formulaic language, Language and animals, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans | Leave a Comment »

Like a Spanish cow

November 11, 2025

Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French:

parler franƧais comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’

I heard this first from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and our good friend Benita Bendon Campbell, It’s vivid and silly, and then English like a Spanish cow can be adapted as a critique of someone’s linguistic abilities in French or English or, I assume, any language. Cows being linguistically quite limited, and Spaniards being one of the nationalities French people are inclined to mock (though I would have expected the cow to be Italian, Dutch, or German; or of some exotic despised nationality, like Turkish or Chinese).

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Posted in Etymology, Formulaic language, French, Idioms, Insults, Morning names, Pragmatics, Stock expressions | 2 Comments »

School days, Golden Rule days

October 29, 2025

The background, from FactCheck.org (a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center), “Meme Doctors Quote From Well-Known Satirist” by Angelo Fichera on 12/12/19:

[satirical columnist Andy] Borowitz … in a post to his verified Facebook page in 2016:

Stopping T**mp is a short-term solution. The long-term solution, and it will be more difficult, is fixing the educational system that has created so many people ignorant enough to vote for T**mp.

This wasĀ quoted (in a punctuational variant) on Facebook today, with ensuing commentary (edited some here):

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Posted in Education, Language and politics, Metaphor, Morality, Slogans | Leave a Comment »

Quiche, Henri, les flics!

October 21, 2025

Gretel Cunningham Young (of Columbus OH, where she grew up, with my daughter Elizabeth, many years ago) on Facebook yesterday:


— GY: My goal was to make a half-vegetarian, half-carnivorous quiche, so I ordered this divided pan

Noting her reference to carnivorous quiche, plus an odd quirk in way English vegetarian is used, I reacted to her statement with some alarm (my response in an expanded and improved form here):

— AZ: But I don’t think I want to get near a carnivorous (‘meat-eating’) quiche, lest I be devoured by it. vegetarian quiche has the adjective vegetarian ‘(of food or diet), plant-based, excluding meat’, not the noun vegetarian ‘(of people) a vegevore, someone who eats only plant-based food; a non-carnivore, someone who does not eat meat’. A quiche that’s a vegetarian would not be a threat to me (as a being made of meat), but it would nevertheless be creepy, in a cannibalistic sort of way. The meaty correspondent to vegetarian quiche ‘quiche for vegetarians’ would be quiche for carnivores.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, French, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Slogans | 1 Comment »

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