Archive for the ‘Language in advertising’ Category
April 30, 2026
(plenty of references to a wide rage of sexual practices, mostly between men (though not in street language), so dubious for kids and not for the sexually modest)
A e-mail ad today for a new t-shirt from the Peachy Kings shop: the SIR mesh football jersey ($40), with this pitch:
Yes SIR… we’ve got the top for you! Our new SIR mesh jersey will let everyone know who’s the boss! This top will get you all the attention this summer with its slinky sleeves, peek-a-boo mesh and slight-crop.
SIR now joins PK’s existing t-shirt labels GOOD BOY, PORN STAR, STUD, and TRASH, but with a sociolinguistic twist: sir is primarily an address term; unlike the count nouns boy, star, and stud, and the mass noun trash, it has virtually no uses as a referential common noun. In man-on-man sex, it’s used by a subordinate addressing a superordinate: a bottom to his top, a Boy to his Daddy, a sub(missive) to a dom(inant), a (sexual) slave to his master. I am Sir is used in bdsm contexts, but I am a sir ‘I am a top / Daddy / dom / master’ is decidedly odd.
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Posted in Address terms, Clothing, Context, Emoji, Figurative language, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Signs and symbols, Slang | Leave a Comment »
December 5, 2025
(hard-core man-on-man sex action, so totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday, in my posting “Surfing like bunnies”:
In this morning’s crop of gay porn ads, in a TitanMen store mailer, the charmingly titled (and apparently single-entendre) Joey’s Surf Vacation, with a dvd cover featuring a porn actor new to me, the boyish twink Joey Mills (paired with a familiar muscle twink, Dean Young, in a scene I’ll write about in a later posting).
— with the cover of the 2024 dvd (released 9/24/24) from MEN.com, showing Joey Mills with a third actor from the video, Troy Daniels.
This is that later posting.
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Posted in Gay porn, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
April 20, 2025
[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]
Regularly playing on MSNBC, the tv commercial “No Time to Wait”, featuring an earnest and friendly Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (now 78 years old) telling us
I have AFib (/éfɪb/ atrial fibrillation, the irregular heart rhythm)
which I heard as
I have aphids /éfɪdz/
(You can watch the commercial here.)
A screen shot from the commercial; Kareem is holding a basketball just in case you’ve forgotten who he is
It’s immensely pleasing to me that he’s still alive and is doing good things.
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Posted in Language and medicine, Language and sports, Language in advertising, Mishearings, Movies and tv | 2 Comments »
February 16, 2025
From Joe Transue on Facebook on 2/12, as a comment on my 2/11 posting “On the faux-Hopper watch”, about Waiting for the train (an image that was merely inspired by Edward Hopper (1892-1967), not actually by him):
(#1) JT reported that this image came up on his feed out of nowhere, with the label: Edward Hopper. Locomotive 1944; there’s a lot to be said here, but one thing is absolutely clear: it is not a painting by Hopper; there are excellent catalogs of Hopper’s paintings, and neither this image (or anything like it) or this title (or anything like it) appears in the catalogs — but then it turns out that Hopper spent years (resentfully) churning out illustrations, for magazines and for advertisements, just to pay his bills, and these haven’t been catalogued, so who knows?
More things that are absolutely clear: that this image was in fact used in an ad (in Life magazine) in 1944, for ALCO (the American Locomotive Company); that the locomotive in the ad is an ALCO DL-109 diesel engine built between late 1939 and the spring of 1944; and that this ad appeared at a time when Hopper had been recognized as a major figure in American art and was in the midst of one of his most productive periods (in the 1930s and early 1940s, he painted New York Movie (1939), Girlie Show (1941), Nighthawks (1942), Hotel Lobby (1943), and Morning in a City (1944), among others), and cannot imaginably have been resorting to commercial illustration to pay his bills in 1944.
So where does #1 come from?
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Posted in Art, Design, Kinship, Language in advertising | Leave a Comment »
February 10, 2025
Bubbled up recently on Facebook and elsewhere, references to two chapters in the history of American advertising: Interwoven-brand stockings as icons of male sexiness, first in the 1920s and 30s, then for Interwoven Esquire socks in the 1970s.
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Stockings, Zeugma | 4 Comments »
December 23, 2024
🎄- 2: 12/23, so it’s Festivus; the last day of Saturnalia; and now, according to a front page story in today’s New York Times (“In Some Parts, It’s Christmas Adam Before Eve: Churches Are Adding Day to the Holiday, With a Side of Ribs”), it’s Christmas Adam, the day before Christmas Eve (it’s a joke, son)
Meanwhile, today’s found mantra is Zesty Pickle — repeat as needed until you reach the desired state of tangy pungency. It came to me in a commercial for Chick-Fil-A’s classic chicken sandwich:
Crispy chicken, zesty pickle, it’s tough to top the original
But then the piquant phallicity of zesty pickles pushed me onto another path, into the tale of a fickle fly:
zesty pickle
frisky pepper
pesky stuck zipper!
… no plucky pickles past this point
(#1) The pickle-pepper tale
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Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Language and plants, Language in advertising, Mantras, Music, Phallicity | 3 Comments »
November 26, 2024
From Chris Ambidge (one of the Wardens of the Spheniscid Zarchives) on Facebook this morning:
(#1) [CA > AZ:] Arnold! Have you considered … penguin slippers? Keeping Feathers McGraw underfoot might be the best way to make sure he doesn’t get into mischief
From the Coddies website:
Coddies® Wallace & Gromit Feathers McGraw slippers:
Silent but villainous, Feathers McGraw is the ultimate plush slipper icon!
Slip into the soft embrace of Wallace & Gromit’s Feathers McGraw himself with Coddies’ new plush slippers, designed to capture the essence of Aardman’s criminal mastermind. They fit like a glove – not unlike the red rubber glove perched atop Feathers’ head – a disguise so brilliant in its simplicity that it once outwitted Wallace and even the local law enforcement.
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Posted in Clothing, Compounds, Language and food, Language in advertising, Movies and tv, Names, Penguins, Shoes, Trade names | 1 Comment »
September 18, 2024
In recognition of Wednesday as Hump Day, I offer you (from today’s Pinterest mailing) a brief notice of some hump-worthy (verb hump: … 3 [with object] vulgar slang have sex with (NOAD)) young men in a vintage ad by J.C. Leyendecker (who appeared most recently on this blog in my 9/2 posting “Leyendecker Labor Day”):
A JCL ad for Ivory Soap, set in an athletic homosocial space, the locker room showers (note the male buttocks, a recurrent object of JCL’s artistic — and presumably also personal — engagement).
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of checking-out going on in that shower room. No doubt dwelling on those “muscles … in perfect trim” and the “sweating skin” that has been cleansed “under the rushing water”.
Posted in Art, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Male art, Masculinity, Slang | Leave a Comment »
