(There will be some sex talk, and a photo of men being papillarily affectionate, but, I think, nothing seriously problematic. Use your judgment.)
Another item backed up in my posting queue: from the Gaily Grind on 5/14/15, “Did You Know It Was Illegal For Men To Show Their Nipples In Public In The 1930s” by Adrian Garcia.
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Nipples, then and now
Things have been quiet on the snowclone front on the net for a while. The Snowclones Database has been in abeyance (since 1/28/13), and little has been posted on Language Log or here. But then came my recent posting on the snowclone Think Of The Xs, and a bit before that, the introduction of a snowclone discussion on ADS-L. Dan Goncharoff on 4/12/16:
Discussion of Clinton e-mails led Obama to say, “there’s classified, and then there’s classified. Has anyone ever traced this formation back into history?
Tracing snowclones back in history turns out to involve all the complexities of tracing the history of some word or fixed expression, plus a lot more. More on this later.
But back to There’s X And Then There’s X. The major item here is a posting to ADS-L by Larry Horn on 10/8/12:
Today’s Zippy:
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From the annals of snowclones, commercial icons in contestation, commercial names, and advertising run amok.
The Saturday (February 6th) Rhymes With Orange:
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Ah, a noodle bar — one in which the customer picks a type of pasta and a type of sauce. There are in fact such places, though they seem not to be called noodle bars.
It started with a cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti (from 1/18/10) in my doctor’s examining room yesterday:
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Angry doctor upbraids a smugly smiling patient (hugely obese, cocktail in hand, cigar in mouth).
Barsotti is a great favorite of mine, and he has his own Page on this blog.
So: four more Barsottis that tickle me and haven’t been blogged on here before.
Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm, in which Mother Goose deploys a snowclone strategically and Grimm gives her a SNAP for her performance:
One of the great (and most frequent) snowclones of all time, The New Y (in full: X Is The New Y).
(There’s some gay sex stuff in the last section, not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Four items that have come my way recently, all with some language play in them. Two are Christmas-related: a Green Eggs and Ham tie and a Rhymes With Orange cartoon. One has a jokey wine label. One has a wonderful invented name for a gay pornstar (and that leads to Arab characters in gay porn).
I’ll be posting mostly about a family of snowclonelet composites of the form X queen, in which the queen component is a word going back to Old English, with the meaning ‘woman, wife’, though a lot of history has intervened. Eventually we get to things like
the gay partner-preference snowclonelet X queen, denoting ‘gay man who prefers Y men as romantic or sexual partners’, where Y is a class of people and where X refers to something, typically a food, associated with Y
— for example, rice queen, denoting a man, typically white, with a preference for partners who are East Asians or of East Asian descent (given that rice is a characteristic food of East Asians).
Discovered while loooking for something else, a piece of brocabulary (involving portmanteaus or puns on the informal noun bro, roughly ‘buddy’ when first taken in from black street speech and then extended to a man of a certain type and then to any man) that I hadn’t encountered before: bro-job (or brojob or bro job), to refer to fellatio involving two men who identify as straight. A play on blow job. And it takes us, once again, into the world of sex between men who identify as straight.
