Archive for the ‘Holidays’ Category
May 24, 2017
(Not much about language. Warning: eventually there will be hunky young men wearing virtually nothing.)
As part of the run-in to Pride Month, the Out Magazine June-July issue has a page on clothes for the occasion:
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I’m not aesthetically moved by most of these, though I do like the Levi’s socks; and at $15 a pair they’re the closest thing there is to an affordable item in the set. Second on the economic front ($28 a pair) is the Mack Weldon underwear — but you’re probably wondering what black trunks are doing in a display of Pridewear. Seems they’re a stand-in for a line of underwear in hot rainbow colors, one color per skivvy. (There’s a Page on this blog on rainbow underwear, if you’d like to explore a more conventional approach.)
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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language in advertising, Rainbow clothing, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
May 19, 2017
As the run-up to the American holiday Memorial Day continues (only 9 days to picnic time), Pinterest has responded with a board of playful things you can do with hot dogs — sometimes moderating their potential as phallic symbols, sometimes accentuating it. Five examples follow.
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Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Phallicity, Silliness | Leave a Comment »
May 17, 2017
Anticipating Memorial Day (May 29th this year), Pinterest has provided a big Hot Dog board. Memorial Day is a US holiday honoring Americans who died while serving in the armed forces, but it has also come to be the unofficial beginning of the summer vacation season and so the occasion for patriotic picnics (like the Fourth of July, but usually without fireworks or marching bands): hot dogs, hamburgers, mayonnaise salads (especially potato salad), watermelon, and so on.
Now, hot dogs are natural phallic symbols, more potent in a bun, and even more potent with the tip of the hot dog protruding from the bun, simulating a glans penis.
As a bonus, one Memorial Day picnic site suggests fruit skewers for the holiday — just the thing for Queer Memorial Day, with rainbow fruit in Pride Flag order and bright strawberry dickheads.
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Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Phallicity, Rainbow | Leave a Comment »
May 14, 2017
A Zwicky family photo (from 1945 or ’46) showing Bertha and Melchior Zwicky (my Swiss grandparents), their five children, four of the five spouses (only my uncle Theodore Severin is missing from the photo shoot), and ten of their twelve grand-children (only my cousin Ted Severin is missing from the photo shoot; his sister Eleanor was yet to be born):
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Posted in Abbreviation, Clothing, Holidays, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »
May 13, 2017
Something I’m moderately sure of is that May is National, maybe International, Masturbation Month. All ny sources seem to agree on that. From the current version of Wikipedia:
The first National Masturbation Day was observed May 14, 1995, after sex-positive retailer Good Vibrations declared the day in honor of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who was fired in 1994 by President Bill Clinton for suggesting masturbation be part of the sex education curriculum for students.
International Masturbation Day has since been expanded to include the entire month of May as International Masturbation Month
(Note both vaginal and phallic symbols.)
Already there’s a question: why May 14th, back in 1995? Then things get quickly complex: an earlier version of the Wikipedia article, which I posted about here in 2013, identified Masturbation Day as May 7th (a date apparently selected by Good Vibrations in 1999) in the US, May 28th in some other countries. (Other US sources say May 28th is Masturbation Day.) Meanwhile, the current Wikipedia article says with great assurance that Masturbation Day is July 21st. The Wikipedia sources are in no way authoritative: they just assert dates. Thanks to the earlier Wikipedia article, I have May 7th on my calendar as National Masturbation Day, but now I’m all at sea. The 7th, the 14th, the 28th, or July 21st? And why? Why, in fact, May for the Month?
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language of sex, Phallicity, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
May 9, 2017
I’ll start with Roz Chast’s cover art for the May 15th New Yorker, “Motherboard”, a droll celebration of Mothers Day in embroidery. With notes on uses of mother. From there to a sepia-toned mother and baby photo (more baby than mother) from 1965: mother Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, baby Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky. On the occasion of Ann’s birthday, today, May 9th; Ann would have been 80 today (but she died at 57). And then something celebratory: a lot of gorgeous foxgloves, a plant that Ann much liked; locally, they’re at their peak around the time of Ann’s birthday (and Mothers Day, which she detested; and Derby Day, which she loved).
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Posted in Holidays, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Vaginality, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »
May 5, 2017
(There will, eventually, be some references to mansex for Cinco de Mayo, so use your judgment.)
Four occasions that come around every year on the same date: yesterday, the silly Star Wars Day and the sad Kent State Day; today, the pleasantly celebratory National Cartoonists Day and the wildly celebratory Cinco de Mayo (which I’ll focus on in this posting).
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Posted in Classification and labeling, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and food, Movies and tv, Race and ethnicity, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
May 1, 2017
It’s May Day, an ancient spring festival — think maypoles and all that — so, the beginning of the cycle of the seasons. (Everybody knows the Vivaldi. Try listening instead to the Haydn, here.) And it’s the first of the month, an occasion for still other rituals, including one that calls for everyone to greet the new month, upon awakening, by saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” (or some variant thereof). There’s even a Rabbit Rabbit Day Facebook community, with this page art (not attributed to an artist):
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The three-rabbit variant is the one I’m familiar with. (I got it as an adult from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky. Since she was from the South, I thought it was a specifically Southern thing. But today I learned, from an astonishingly detailed Wikipedia page, that that is very much not so.)
Today also brought a Facebook posting from my friend Mary Ballard, to whom the whole inaugural-rabbit thing was news, and, by good fortune, three cartoons from various sources: a Bizarro I’ve already posted about; a Mother Goose and Grimm with an outrageous bit of language play; and a Calvin and Hobbes reflection on the meaning of the verb read.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Euphemism, Folklore, Holidays, Idioms, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Reading, Spoonerisms, Superstitions, Word confusion | Leave a Comment »
April 19, 2017
An Easter gift from Kim Darnell on Sunday: a handsome purple calla lily, looking dark bluish-purple in yellow interior light, but in fact bright pinkish-purple in sunlight. Purple is the liturgical color for the Lenten season, white for the Easter season, so both white and purple flowers are appropriate for this time of year. I’ll start here with the gift calla, in two photos; move on to callas in general and their sexual symbolism, with a digression on George O’Keeffe.
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and plants, Language play, Music, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
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