(a brief note about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
The hybrid. From “The Human Urinal” episode of MEN.com’s The Men’s Room DVD (the first scene (of 5) on my recently arrived copy of the 2/26 DVD:
A Jacquie Lawson digital greeting card from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell (who appears frequently on this blog) for Easter, featuring garden flowers, cresshead eggs (eggshells with human faces drawn on them and with green plants — cresses especially — sprouting from them, like hair), and, eventually, large amiable rabbits (not shown below). A penultimate shot of the developing scene:
(#1) A festival of spring flowers and cressheads
Going past me yesterday morning, a tv ad for some remedy for, as I heard it, teeth stained by poppies (and other foods).
Yes, coffee. With blueberries, black tea, and red wine, a classic offender against dental whiteness. Granting that I have /a/ (in addition to /ɔ/) as an alternative accented vowel in coffee, poppies is a complex but phonologically unsurprising mishearing; coffee and poppies are in fact excellent half-rhymes / imperfect rhymes:
My morning coffee
By a field of poppies
(with two feature rhymes, both well-attested — (initial) p for k and (medial) p for f — plus a subsequence rhyme, with the final z of poppies against the absence of a final consonant in coffee; for the terminology, see my 1976 Chicago Linguistic Society paper “Well, this rock and roll has got to stop. Junior’s head is hard as a rock.”, available on-line here)
As a Z-person, I was immediately pulled into Bert Vaux’s query to his “British and Antipodean friends” on Facebook this morning: Bert is collecting examples of -Z(ZA) nicknames (what I’ll call znicknames), like Baz for Barry and Hazza for Harry. The -Z(ZA) (phonetically -z / -zǝ) replaces an intervocalic r following what is, in the varieties in question, an accented short / lax / open vowel: ɪ ɛ æ a ʌ ɔ. Some more conversions of model names to znicknames from Bert’s collection:
Carrie, Carol → Caz
Darren, Darryl → Daz, Dazza
Jerry, Jeremy → Jez, Jezza
Karen → Kazza
Larry → Laz, Lazza
Mary → Maz, Mazza
An example on the hoof, complete with the libelous myth of gay recruitment:
“These homos are interested in recruiting new members,” Rev. Benjamin Bubar, leader of the fundamentalist Christian Civic League of Maine, told the Bangor Daily News. (“Remembering the Maine Gay Symposium”, link here)
with homo, an abbreviation of the medical-technical term homosexual, the short form derogating gay men — along with such terms as fairy, pansy, fruit, BrE poof(ter), and before some of us homos engaged in reclaiming it, fag(got). I’m comfortable, even proud and defiant, with faggot, but because fairy-boy was the primary verbal abuse directed (inexplicably) at me in childhood, along with (equally inexplicable) accusations that I wanted to be a girl, I’ll never get on good terms with fairy.
Your mileage probably varies. Most people recognize fairy — and homo — as usually intended to be insulting, but open for ironic and playful uses, even full reclamation, as in the Radical Faery movement (for queer liberation, community, and ecological awareness). So, on the homo front, we get a queer-studies colleague of mine, parting from a lunch together with the announcement that he had to get his homo ass back to work. How queer is that?
More to come in this vein.
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip for 2/25: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead with their Potatohead dog:
The toy: Mr. Potatohead and his detachable-bodypart family; the potato: the russet; the dog: the Jack Russell terrier (note russet as a potato-pun on the dog name Russell) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize it as an instance of the potatohead cartoon meme, based on the toy. Now, some details.
I come to celebrate two television performances by Jesse Jackson (who died a few days ago) that have made my day: one that totally broke me up in laughter and one that made me weep with his regard for and buoying up of the least among us, little children.
The thumbnail history. As background about Jackson as a political force, from Wikipedia:
Jesse Louis Jackson (né Burns; 10/8/1941 to 2/17/2026) was an American civil rights activist, LGBTQ rights activist, politician, and ordained Baptist minister. A protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel during the civil rights movement, he became one of the most prominent civil rights leaders of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and an ardent and early supporter of LGBTQ rights. From 1991 to 1997, he served as a shadow delegate and shadow senator for the District of Columbia.
Now: Jackson reading Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” on Saturday Night Live in 1991 as a passionate and devout reading from the pulpit; and Jackson in a 1972 appearance on the children’s tv program Sesame Street, exhorting a gaggle of Rainbow Coalition kids in the liberatory chant “I am somebody”. Laugh with me, weep with me.
I am reminded by Amanda Walker that today is DEC-20 Day — it’s the date, kids — causing me to recall times working at research labs that used DEC-20s as their shared workhorse machines. This DEC-20 brought me two cartoons, the first a Zippy glancingly related to Christmas, the second a Bizarro directly about Christmas in popular culture.
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the month of December and to begin a new work week
Another lesson from a visit a little while back from an old friend and colleague in linguistics in which three meals (deliveries from local restaurants) were a stand-out feature. I quietly insisted on doing the ordering, so as to offer my guest an array of pleasant surprises. I have since realized that what I was doing was displaying an ability of social value; in earlier years, I would have cooked the meals (I was genuinely good at that), but I’m long past being able to cook, and now (for complex reasons) I’m also unable to take guests out to dinner — but I can still play the role of host, by foraging takeout skillfully.
In a similar vein, though I can’t cook, I can produce new meals in my kitchen, using takeout, household staples, and a microwave [I realize this sounds like the description of a MacGyver episode, with our hero, oh, escaping from a prison using only leftover lasagna, plastic cutlery, and a thimble]; I can still play the role of cook, through my skill at assembling new dishes. As a boast: I Am the Great Assembler. (Totally over-the-top theme music here: Freddy Mercury singing “The Great Pretender”, in this YouTube video.)
Another chapter in foraging for food by restaurant delivery. I had a desire for some gyros, an old favorite in the wide world of demotic cuisines, in this case Greek: from Merriam-Webster online (considerably amended):
noun gyro (plural gyros): /jíro/ [North American] a sandwich especially of lamb and beef [roasted on a spit and sliced], tomato, onion, and yogurt sauce [tzatziki] on pita bread [AZ: the name comes originally from Greek, but has been thoroughly Anglicized, so that the phonology and morphology of the Greek name are no longer relevant to the American name]
