Archive for the ‘Language play’ Category

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A seminar on raunchy play

September 23, 2025

(entertaining, but totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

The seminar was called to order on 9/21 on Facebook by Michael Thomas, who introduced the key background element, the internet fridge. The participants were three gay men, long-time friends (our shared backgrounds and the relaxed, playful atmosphere are important here): speakers Michael Thomas and me, with Michael’s husband Aric Olnes in a non-speaking role. From the transcript (somewhat edited):

— MT: We [MT and AO] hooked our fridge up to the internet the other day. Here’s a question for the ages: do fridges watch porn while the doors are shut?

— AZ: But of course. And then they fall asleep and dream of abusing electric sheep. And you thought that was condensation on the fridge walls, didn’t you?

— MT > AZ: fridge spunk. just scrape it off for your coffee in the morning.

— AZ > MT: Absolutely. The best jizz there is.

There’s an enormous amount of stuff packed into this — some from the widespread sexual culture of modern America or from popular culture but also some from gay male sexual culture. I will now do some unpacking.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Porn, Rhyme, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »

Putain ouais!

September 9, 2025

(Swearing in French, and English, so not to everyone’s taste)

Today’s Bizarro strip, in which Wayno shows us what goes on in a lower education classroom:


MonkeyJack (as I’l call him) asks the question, expecting the answer, in chorus: Fuck, yeah! To which he will tell them all to shout it out the way he does, loud and clear: Putain ouais! (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

But then there’s Wayno’s title, a play on higher education (sometimes known as tertiary or post-secondary ed): this semi-technical term has higher ‘closer to the high end, the top of something’ (of formal education here, so referring to university education); and it’s opposed to K-12 education, referring to school education, that is, primary and secondary ed. Though lower ‘closer to the low end, the bottom of something’ is the opposite of spatial higher, lower education seems rarely if ever used to refer to K-12 ed.

Then lower education becomes available for play, using one of the other senses of low. And if we’re going down there, might as well go raunchy, so we get low as a rough synonym of louche ‘disreputable, sordid’, the opposite of high ‘morally or culturally superior’ — and lower education, an education in the seamier side of things, in vulgarity, like swear words. And swear words in French, ’cause everyone knows everything’s dirtier in French.

And that’s today’s quick linguistic joke. Meanwhile, life has been amazing in some ways (people said the most wonderful things about me on my 85th birthday) but almost unmanageably difficult in most ways. I am hanging on.

 

 

 

Posted in Education, French, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

I’m Chiquito Quesito …

September 2, 2025

I’m Chiquito Quesito, and I’m here to say,
Cheese dip has to be made the Arkansas way

The jingle to go along with native Arksansan Bill Halstead’s reproducing (on 8/31) this silly dip pun he found on Facebook (from who knows what source):


(#1) The signage is for a dip in NOAD‘s sense 3a, wilfully misunderstood as about sense 2:

noun dip: … 2 a thick sauce in which pieces of food are dunked before eating: tasty garlic dip. 3 [a] a brief downward slope followed by an upward one: the road’s precipitous dips and turns. [b] an act of sinking or dropping briefly before rising again: a dip in the share price.

And queso is short for chile con queso  (‘chili with cheese’), which Wikipedia identifies as:

an appetizer or side dish of melted cheese and chili peppers, typically served in Tex-Mex restaurants as a dip for tortilla chips.

Now three further explorations: about dip signage; about dipspreads and dips in general, and varieties of queso in particular; and then some Facebook exchanges with Bill Halstead about cheese dip as a significant item in Arkansas’s food culture.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Categorization and Labeling, Language and food, Language play, Logos, Puns, Signage | Leave a Comment »

Gay banter: great big green beans

August 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) 🔧 Labor Sunday 🔨 (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B

Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:


graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty

A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:

— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!

This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.

And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff  further on green beans / string beans / snap beans. (more…)

Posted in Alliteration, Events and occasions, Formulaic expressions, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Insults, Intention, It's Just Stuff, Language and plants, Language play, Masculinity, Metaphor, My life, Phallicity, Pragmatics, Routines and rituals, Speech acts | 1 Comment »

Eggcorns, innocent and deliberate

August 26, 2025

From a reader on 8/24:

Are you involved in collecting eggcorns?  In case you are, I thought you might be interested in a potential one that I’ve encountered “in the wild” (i.e., a Reddit post).  This person wrote jig solve puzzles instead of jigsaw puzzles:

I should have been diagnosed [with ADHD] as a child but it was the early 90s in a poor rural area. Special ed at my school didn’t diagnose me with anything specific … they just told my mom I needed to spend time doing jig solve puzzles. So, I forced my way through. (Reddit posting)

My response:

I certainly have been involved in collecting eggcorns. But there are only so many balls you can juggle at one time, and I am now a old man with not a lot of time left, so I’ve been pretty much out of the eggcorn business. But you will be pleased to hear that jigsaw > jig solve isn’t in the eggcorn database and hasn’t come up in the eggcorn forum, so I might post on it.

And now I am.

(more…)

Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Formulaic language, Intention, Language play, Names, Play, Puns, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »

I’m happy that you quilted me

August 25, 2025

(Towards the end, some coarse sexual slang referring to fellatio, which some readers will want to avoid)

After years of service on my bed, the delightful images quilt was sent off on Saturday for dry-cleaning and some stitching repair, and I got to contemplate the other three t-shirt quilts, which had been quietly stored away on a closet shelf that was inaccessible to me, but had been brought down to my level as part of the great project of dispossession. I decided that all four (made by friends as a gift to me) would have to move with me — a triumph of sentiment over practicality — and picked the queer quilt, the really in-your-face one, as its replacement on my bed.

Now, more of the story, with pictures.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Clothing, Furnishings and tools, Language of sex, Language play, Music, My life, Parody, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Yo soy Johnny Peso

August 23, 2025

In the 8/22 Bizarro strip, Wayno presents us with Johnny Peso, an intricately constructed Mexican-Spanish and Mexican-culture counterpart  to Johnny Paycheck as a performer on the Grand Ole Opry stage. If you don’t know about Johnny Paycheck and the Grand Ole Opry, you’re doomed; the cartoon will be incomprehensible. If you know who they are, you’ll get the joke; and the more you know about them, the more you’ll see in Wayno’s cartoon (I suspect there are still more things that I’ve missed). And then there’s a lot to say about the way Johnny Peso introduces himself. The cartoon:


(#1) The joke in the cartoon comes the two bilingual puns: Spanish peso punning on English paycheck, Spanish olé punning on English vernacular ole; the puns are, in addition, what I’ve called (semiotically) satisfying puns (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

And then there’s a lot more.

(more…)

Posted in Bilingualism, Clothing, Hats, Interjections, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Puns, Spanish, Understanding comics | 7 Comments »

Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas

August 17, 2025

On Facebook yesterday, Aric Olnes, with a floral message brought to us by the letter M (he does a daily alphabetic floral message):


(1) Aric: Matchlessly magniloquent Michaelmas modifies miserable moping motivating meliorative mindfulness

Tim Evanson then messed around with it in a minor way:

Miss Marple is always admiring the Michaelmas daisies just before a murder, it seems

(more…)

Posted in Alliteration, Language and plants, Language play, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Now Playing on A.I. Radio

July 26, 2025

A new intricately playful Bizarro series (by Wayno) began on 7/14, with two word boxes, a supertitle Now Playing on A.I. Radio and a regular title; the regular title is a play on the name of a musical group that you might hear on the radio, but with the name altered as if it had been retrieved by a somewhat loopy associative AI program; and with an image that illustrates the goofy name. And then Wayno supplies a further jokey title that’s a play on a further name or title connected in some way with the cartoon. The series, with all of these moving parts, was still going today, 7/26.

Here I bring you the second and third strips, from 7/15 (Wu-Tang Clam) and 7/16 (Bob Marley and a Whaler). Today it’s The Mamas and the Pupas, and I’m one happy cartumer (ok, ok, cartoon consumer).

(more…)

Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

A Monty Python formula pun

July 23, 2025

Benita Bendon Campbell wrote me yesterday to report a Monty Python (setup / payoff) formula pun joke that had come up on her Facebook feed, thus providing me with a moment of comic relief from my posting about  — here we cheer — being saved from death by the skill and caring of others and then — here we weep — finding that my previous life was entirely gone, to be replaced by one of isolation, disability, and pain, which I had to negotiate by reinventing myself as best I could. Meanwhile, I embrace joy, playful delight, and (I know of no better term) moral purpose, to steer me through the swamp of despair. I have recently celebrated moral purpose (in my 7/20 posting “Days of memory”, with a section on the Good Trouble National Day of Action); today, it’s playful delight.

The joke. As it came to Bonnie:

I was staying at a small family owned hotel in Madrid when I suddenly became ill, nauseous with a fever. My Spanish language skills are limited, so I called the front desk. The concierge told me that the inn had an English speaking doctor on call, and they would send him up to my room. Twenty minutes later the doctor had treated me and my fever and nausea were subsiding.  I mentioned to the doctor how lucky it was that the inn had an English speaking doctor on call. Without missing a beat, the doctor smiled and said:

No one expects the Spanish inn physician

Here you groan. You really are expected to groan; that’s the canonical response to a setup / payoff formula pun — the formula in this case being the tagline from a Monty Python routine (slightly misquoted in the version Bonnie came across):

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

(The joke is an imperfect pun, the pun having /f/ where the model has /kw/.)

(more…)

Posted in Formulaic expressions, Jokes, Movies and tv, Puns, Quotations | 2 Comments »

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