Archive for the ‘Language of children’ Category

Jock Robin

August 15, 2021

(Jockstraps and plays on cock ‘male bird’ vs. ‘penis’, but no more than that.)

A note from the annals of (homo)masculinity, inspired by this Cellblock 13 Tight End jockstrap in robin’s egg blue, offered relentlessly on my FB page recently:


(#1) In design and material, an entirely conventional jockstrap, calling up your standard locker room, but in a very pretty color (robin’s egg blue), which seems to make it homowear, rather than than gymwear

Sometimes a guy just wants to look pretty, but apparently a robin jock — especially from Cellblock 13, which specifically designs for and markets to gay men — marks you as a fag. A tough, muscular, athletic fag, perhaps, but a fag nonetheless; in that case, you’re a butch fag. (I post fairly often on butch fagginess; frankly, I enjoy the mixed signals, which many read as dissonance.)

(Of course, you could also be a straight guy who likes pretty clothes and doesn’t mind being taken for queer, so you might well turn to Cellblock 13 for your jockstraps (and more).)

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Rubber and glue

July 23, 2018

The June 26th One Big Happy, with an updated version of a bit of childlore:

(#1)

It starts out traditionally, with a retort to insult beginning “I’m rubber and you’re glue…”, but then it takes a modern-tech social-media turn (while preserving the glue … you rhyme).

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Ruthie copes: Moses and the doggie bag

July 9, 2017

Two recent One Big Happy strips, in which Ruthie wades into interpreting unfamiliar expressions (bulrush, Israelite) and interpreting one familiar expression (doggie bag) in a non-standard way.

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Popsicles for dinner

August 3, 2015

Strips from the One Big Happy cartoon often appear on this blog featuring the 6-year-old Ruthie wrestling with vocabulary she’s not familiar with — doing her best to accommodate what people say to what she knows. No doubt many, or even most, of these vignettes are drawn from real life. Now, from linguist John Beavers yesterday, this tale about his 2 1/2-year-old daughter Morrissey:

We had a bunch of Chinese leftovers, so I told Morrissey that she was going to eat potstickers for dinner. She was very excited. The excitement dissipated quickly when the plate landed in front of her and she discovered she was not in fact going to have Popsicles for dinner.

Popsicles familiar territory, potstickers not so much.

Some commenters applauded the idea of Popsicles for dinner, and I recommended potstickers for breakfast.