Archive for the ‘Language and the body’ Category
November 29, 2018
(Hunky men in minimal swimsuits, but nothing actually X-rated. The posting is about the presentation of self in photographs, via clothing, stance, gait, facial expression, gaze, and the like. Not much about language here.)
11/9 Daily Jocks sale ad for Marcuse underwear and swimwear:
(#1) Come Wander With Me
He came from the sunset
He came from the sea
He came from my sorrow
And can love only me
He said, “Come wander with me, love
Come wander with me
Away from this sad world
Come wander with me”
(more…)
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Male art, Movies and tv, Music, Photography, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
November 25, 2018
The One Big Happy from October 12th, a dialogue between Joe and James in which we experience a tiny bit of the fabulous flexibility of the English verb have:
(#1)
James seems not to have registered the noun hobby (‘an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure’ (NOAD)) and so takes hobbies in have hobbies to be the name of a disease, infection, or medical condition, like (the) mumps. For him, chickenpox and the mumps, but not hobbies is just an ordinary coordination, but for the rest of us, it’s prime-grade zeugma, like (I had) asthma and artistic inclinations — with the extra wrinkle that though both chickenpox and mumps end in a plural-resembling /s/ (and so superficially resemble the PL hobbies), both are grammatically SG:
chickenpox / (the) mumps once was / *were a common childhood disease, but vaccines have nearly eliminated it / *them [SG for subject-verb agreement and also for anaphor selection]
Two notes: on the morphosyntax of disease names; and on the extraordinary versatility of have (which just invites zeugmas and zeugmoids).
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Posted in Count & mass, Errors, Grammatical categories, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Zeugma | Leave a Comment »
November 19, 2018
From Charlie Doyle on ADS-L on November 10th:
According to two different ESPN commentators, a University of Georgia football player has had surgery on “both groins.” Doesn’t that sound odd?
Others agreed that it did — the problem being that, in their reckoning, each person has only one groin.
Then still others quoted anatomists, and dictionaries, supplying evidence of a usage in which everyone has two groins, one on each side. This is apparently the older usage, though for a great many, metonymy has shifted the everyday meaning to cover the entire crotch region, with (for them) the older usage surviving only as a technical term in anatomy.
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Posted in Architecture, Language and the body, Metaphor, Metonymy | Leave a Comment »
November 18, 2018
(Warning: eventually this posting devolves to references to, though not illustrations of, gay porn; a video of a guy dancing in nothing but his Calvins; and the decidedly raunchy, though not actually X-rated, lyrics of Beyoncé’s song “Blow”. So: rated “unhealthy for sensitive groups”, in particular, kids and the sexually modest.)
Day 11 in the smoke — not nearly as bad here on the SF peninsula as in SF itself (or, of course, closer to the Camp Fire around Paradise) — and today the local AQI (the American Lung Association’s Air Quality Index) has dipped to 129, merely “unhealthy for sensitive groups”, but I’m in several of the compromised groups, and life has been hellish for a long time. [A few hours later: up to 158, “Unhealthy”, period.]
(#1)
Aid arrived Thursday night, in the form of a Blue Pure 121 air purifier, which now stands majestically in the middle of the main area of my Ramona St. house, humming softly as it offers me clean air to breathe. Puckishly, I have named the machine Randy Blue (after a big gay porn company, itself puckishly named), so this posting will segue from pure air to raunch.
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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Language play, Metaphor, Music, Names, Slang, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
November 7, 2018
In today’s comics feed, a One Big Happy that requires a double dose of pop-cultural moon knowledge to understand:
(#1)
A defiant gesture, a bit of lycanthropic folklore.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Categorization and Labeling, Gesture, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns, Slang, Understanding comics, Verbing, Words and things | 1 Comment »
November 6, 2018
A bit late for the train, a recent snack treat from mccormick.com — McCormick & Co., the spice, seasonings, and condiments firm — that appeared on a Pinterest board for Halloween:
(#1)
Combining two pop-cultural items: zombies and nasal mucus, especially in the form of green boogers. Plus popcorn, of course.
(more…)
Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Mascots, Pop culture, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
November 5, 2018
(Hunk in a swmsuit, oblique literate raciness. Plus religion, art, and plants.)
Today’s mailing from the Daily Jocks company takes us to the beaches of Oz, where an ad for the Aussie homowear firm 2eros’s Mandala swimsuit is framed as a postcard, complete with a 2018 Oz-floral stamp. Plus a caption of mine:
(#1) The flower of his manhood
Ramble down the
Rocks to revere his pink
Lotus flower, to
Lose yourself on the
Blue wheel of desire
(more…)
Posted in Art, Captions, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Signs and symbols, Slang, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
October 17, 2018
(Homowear: male models in underwear, displaying their bodies homoerotically, with archly queer ad copy. Not X-rated, but not to everyone’s taste.)
The Daily Jocks ad for PUMP! underwear from the 15th:
(#1)
Underwear model as sculptural form. Mahogany Man.
(more…)
Posted in Clothing, Facial expression and gesture, Idioms, Language and food, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Libfixes, Trade names, Underwear, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
September 24, 2018
Sunday night, on the way to the PAMF (Palo Alto Medical Foundation) Sleep Disorders Clinic in Sunnyvale CA (for a night sleeping in a forest of electrodes and other monitoring devices), an absolutely gigantic moon, slightly short of full, hanging low in the sky. Sunday (the 23rd) was the Autumn Equinox and tonight (the 24th) the moon is full, so we are now experiencing a harvest moon — which means today is the Mid-Autumn Festival in China and other East Asian countries (and elsewhere), so it’s the prime day for mooncakes / moon-cakes / moon cakes, paper lanterns, and family reunions. It’s also the beginning of the holiday of Sukkot in the Jewish calendar (this year, sunset on the 23rd through sunset on the 30th), so it’s a harvest festival there too, also a solemn religious holiday and a family festival.
Meanwhile, my days have been physically / medically dreadful and emotionally disastrous, so I haven’t been able to assemble all the text for a proper posting. But here’s a photo gallery for a posting to come.
(more…)
Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and plants, Language and the body, Music | 2 Comments »
September 23, 2018
(Extensive references to male genitals, with photos of phallic simulacra, so not to everyone’s taste.)
About a hitherto unstudied class of English N + N compounds that I will call Stormy compounds (in honor of Stormy Daniels, aka Stephanie Gregory Clifford), or Stormies for short. In a stormy, one N is mushroom and the other is a N referring to the penis (penis, phallus, dick, cock, in particular). For example, the subsective resemblance compounds mushroom penis ‘penis resembling a mushroom’ and penis mushroom ‘mushroom resembling a penis’.
Resemblance is one of a small set of canonical semantic relations between the head N2 and the modifier N1 in an N + N compound — relations that are in some sense always available for interpreting such compounds (within the bounds of real-world and contextual plausibility). Otherwise, there’s an essentially open-ended universe of interpretations specific to the context and the shared experiences of speaker and addressee. In my writing about semantic relations in compounds, I’ve referred to the first set of relations as O-type (to suggest ordinary-type) and the second as X-type (to suggest extraordinary-type); others have used other terminology.
But even for O-type relations, there’s some room for specificity in how particular compounds are understood, and this fact is signficant for stormies.
(more…)
Posted in Compounds, Language and the body, Morphology, Names, Phallicity, Semantics, Subsectivity | 3 Comments »
