Archive for the ‘Language and sports’ Category

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Happy Birthday, Mr. President

June 17, 2026

(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest)

Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26:


(#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our overlord Grabpussy now), through two different renditions of the song “Happy Birthday”: in 1962, in a potent haze of female sexual desire and sexual desirability (by Marilyn Monroe, in as close to naked as she should get while being in principle fully and elaborately clothed), but in this week’s cartoon, by a muscular machine of male aggression (who doesn’t look at all ready to deliver an adoring serenade to this particular President)

And now: backstory, tons of backstory.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Understanding comics, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »

Two laughs-out-loud and a shiver of self-recognition

June 13, 2026

Cartoons that especially moved me in the latest — 6/1/26 — issue of the New Yorker: two by artists who are old acquaintances on this blog (Drew Dernavich and Frank Cotham), trafficking here in their brands of absurdity (their gags made me laugh out loud); plus one by British cartoonist, illustrator, and writer Sara Akinterinwa (whose work, all recent, explores dating, relationships, identity, politics, and navigating adult life as a young woman of color) that gave me not a great laugh but a shiver of self-recognition: that’s not funny, that’s my life strategy!

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Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and medicine, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Race and ethnicity | Leave a 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 I’m watching the Puppy Bowl. It’s not the same. Gambling has ruined it, even though I’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 »

Kinky Beavers and their kin

December 22, 2025

Today’s Zits comic strip sets up a baffling list of ridiculous and raunchy-sounding things Jeremy’s father wants for Christmas — a Wiggly Pickle! Kinky Beavers! — and resolves the puzzle in the final panel.


(#1) Fishing lures, kids, fishing lures; apparently all from the Reaction Innovations fishing lure supply company, and so known to a substantial number of fishing enthusiasts

I suspected what was going on when spinners and crickets turned up in the second panel. But it’s still a sweet set-up.

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Posted in Jokes, Language and animals, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Names | Leave a Comment »

Tomorrow x 4

November 21, 2025

Tomorrow is 11/22; on my calendar this brings up a set of two deeply discordant anniversaries and the birthday of an admirable colleague and friend. And this year 11/22 is the date of Stanford’s preeminent sporting event, to add a note of passionate silliness to the whole business.

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Posted in Academic life, Events and occasions, Language and sports, Music, Ohio State, Poetry, Silliness, Stanford | 1 Comment »

Capades on ice

September 28, 2025

From Benjamin Dreyer on Facebook yesterday:

It’s once again been brought to my attention that many people seem not to grasp that Ice Capades is a play on words and that they are not in fact capades on ice.

(I myself learned this at a rather advanced age, but: earlier than today.)

Well, Ice Capades originated as a play on words, but that doesn’t mean it still is (only) a play on words. History is not destiny. BD tells us, in fact, that many people — I would say almost all of us — don’t appreciate that it originated as a play on words. Which is to say that for all these people it is not a play on words, but an odd compound of ice and capades. Just as, for almost everyone these days, the name of SRI International (a Silicon Valley R&D nonprofit institute) is just a string of letter names, not an abbreviation for anything, despite the fact that the organization began its life as the Stanford Research Institute (I know this, but I’m a very old man, 6 years older than the Stanford Research Institute); SRI is now an orphan initialism.

So now, a lot of facts.

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Posted in Initialisms, Language and sports, Language change, Libfixes, My life | Leave a Comment »

Cheating at golf

August 5, 2025

Recent news: Our Overlord Grabpussy (POTUS 45 + 47) is suspected of cheating at golf. For instance, in the Guardian, the story “‘Dodgy looking’ clip of Tr**p playing golf in Scotland sparks cheating debate: Video appears to show aide dropping ball in favourable position, as golf fans say it is a bad look for the sport” by Steven Morris on 8/1/25.

This is in not even slightly news.

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Posted in Language and politics, Language and sports, Language and thought, Lying | 1 Comment »

Two footballs, passing in the night

July 30, 2025

Very briefly (it’s been a hellish day). In my comics feed for today, penultimate July, Mark Parisi’s off the mark cartoon of 7/16/25, in which an AmE football and a BrE football fail to hook up with a sportsball of their own kind — next to one another in a bar.

In the RomCom version, of course, they go on to find satisfaction in hooking up with (aka dating) one another, in the thrill of the new and different.

Otherwise, you see the pitfalls of dating through text only; if they communicated by voice, they’d get nationality information. (Though in the real world, a British football would know that such a brown sportsball was called a football in the US. Whether an American football could be depended upon to know that a soccer ball was called a football in the UK is not so clear to me.)

 

 

Posted in Ambiguity, Dialects, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Leather jackets, jockstraps, boots, and d&a

May 30, 2025

(Entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. Starting with the painting that set this posting off when it appeared in today’s Pinterest mailing for me. Which has a leather jacket, a jockstrap, boots, and an a in it; we’ll get to the d in the fourth and last painting in today’s series)

The painting is Man Wearing Leather Jacket (n.d.) by Bruce Sargeant, a prolific wildly homoerotic artist who is also entirely fictional (but died in 1938 in his timeline). Sargeant is the creation of Mark Beard — who is even more prolific, queer as fuck, plus he’s a real person (still living, now aged 69).

Pinterest has been offering me this painting every so often for a long time, but without any identification; today, I was finally intrigued enough by the tough and direct offer of the model’s muscular ass for sex to use Google Images to dig out the source. Who turned out to be an artist we’ve seen on this blog before, in my 7/18/23 posting “A homerotic painting by Bruce Sargeant” (the painting is Locker Room Scene — Charlie in Three States of Undress).

I’ll look at that first, to establish an important characteristic of Sargeant’s work: it might drip homoeros, but it’s also intended as commentary on art-historical genres, styles, and themes (in Locker Room’s case, with a bow to Marcel Duchamp’s studies of bodies in motion). Then I’ll move to four closely related paintings, transportations of the classic male nude study to the subterranean world of man-on-man sex, in this case leathermen offering or soliciting dick or ass (in popular art, the standard sexual display of women for a male audience being t&a, tits and ass; of men for a male audience, d&a, dick and ass).

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Posted in Art, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports | Leave a Comment »

Instruments of death

May 23, 2025

Today’s Bizarro brings us the percussion section of a marching band, a section composed entirely of Grim Reapers — yes, Reaper percussion, portmanteaued to Reapercussion:


Wayno’s title: “Halftime Dirge” — since they’re marching on a (US) football field (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Accent, Comic conventions, Compounds, Derivation, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Music, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

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