Archive for the ‘Rhyme’ Category
November 20, 2025
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]
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Posted in Chinese, Greek, Korean, Language and food, My life, Palo Alto, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »
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.
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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 »
July 19, 2025
In my 7/14 posting “Making a mango crazy in bed”, a surprising mishearing on my part. The speaker said:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy?
But what I heard was:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a mango crazy?
The (sex-infused) mangos just dropped in from the sky, bafflingly, with no justification I could see. (Intended [mæn.go] and perceived [mæŋgo] are very close acoustically, but mango makes no sense in the context. )
Then on the 17th it was kapok. Maybe it’s a plant thing.
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Posted in Korean, Language and plants, Language play, Misreadings, Movies and tv, Music, Phonetics, Poetic form, Pop culture, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »
April 30, 2025
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April; tomorrow the rabbit operatives of the revitalized Industrial Workers of the World will smash the tiger lackeys serving the corrupt octopus of big business and government; the Wobblies will, of course, dance onto the scene, tossing flowers to the audience (public service warning: do not eat the muguets; they are beautiful and sweet-selling, but toxic)
Previously on this blog. In yesterday’s “hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 1”, a Lynn Johnston For Better or For Worse strip, (re)published on 6/19/24:
(#1) There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented –illions words; and the thing [my correspondent Masayoshi Yamada] was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions
Yesterday, things 1 and 2; today, thing 3.
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Posted in Accent, Connotation, Events and occasions, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Nonsense, Poetic form, Pronunciation, Prosody, Rhyme, Semantics | 2 Comments »
April 6, 2025
On Easter egg quotations — the light hand — vs. ostentatious allusions — the hammer — in the Economist. From the issue of 3/15/25 in the Culture section, a review of Righting Wrongs, by lawyer Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, with main headline
How to shame a dictator
(vague echoes of titles whisper in your head) and just one section head (in bold face)
The gripes of Roth
(clang clang clang and you groan at the outrageous pun).
And now I’ll riff on these two allusions. But first, the background.
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Posted in Allusion, Books, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns, Quotations, Rhyme, Titles | 4 Comments »
March 15, 2025
π 🥧 π 🥧 π 🥧 for yesterday (mammoths lumber along majestically, and they are often regrettably late for appointments), 3/14, which was Pi Day in my country, and for some years now, also — delicious pun — Pie Day in many places (so inviting a cascade of formulaic word play: pie in the sky, a piece of the pie, easy as pie, even pie chart)
I’ll jump right into things with a charming and heartfelt Facebook message yesterday from my old friend Paula Stout, who many years ago lived in Palo Alto, but has since moved to the great American Southwest — on a ranch outside Greenville TX, east of Dallas-Fort Worth:
Happy Ecstatic Friday on Pi Day (3.14)
We were in town today, where every store treated the day as a celebration. They were giving away apple pies, chicken pot pies, [pizza pies,] and even eskimo pies. With big smiles, balloons and jubilation.
And it struck me that we are seeing history unfold.
1988 was the first “Pi Day” for a marketing campaign in SF, iirc. Before that, only we geeks and friends of the wonderful Kevin McHargue (who was born on this day) partied it up
And now, here we are. A national holiday of pies!
As David Mamet, renowned playwright, once noted, “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
There’s enough stress brewing in the world, y’all, let us pray he is right and there is pie enough to combat it.
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Posted in Allusion, Events and occasions, Language and food, Language play, Mathematics, Movies and tv, My life, Parody, Puns, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »
October 14, 2024
(About gay porn, with rapt attention to men’s bodies and sex between men, in street language, so entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest)
Dirty Words is a new release from NakedSword Originals (in the Falcon family of gay porn studios). Not about dirty words ‘taboo vocabulary, offensive or indecent words’, but about dirty writing ‘sex writing’ (erotic fiction, sexual memoirs, sexual advice). The synopsis from the studio (divided into paragraphs for easier reading):
New York City has long been the playground of sex writer Zachary Zane, author of Boyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto. Threesomes, anonymous hook-ups, and sex parties are all in a day’s research, not to mention questions from blog fans who happen to spot him out and about at his favorite Manhattan haunts.
Even power-bottom stud Michael Boston stops him on the street for some advice on his relationship with fuck buddy Alexander Müller before Zachary finally heads to Fire Island for a few days of rest and relaxation. Quickly, though, Zachary learns that the summer getaway hotspot is packed with inquisitive readers, all of whom want a piece of him – for counsel, of course. What started as an escape from writing deadlines quickly becomes a crash course in better sex for Oliver Hunt, Harold Lopez, Matty West, Beaux Banks, and Axel Rockham.
By the time Zachary returns to his NYC stomping grounds, he’s ready for a vacation from his vacation – but not before weighing in on a kinky threeway that new pal Michael Boston is planning to have with buddies Braxton Cruz and Travis Connor. Never one to say no to a friend, Zachary dispenses wisdom and encouragement in his signature no-nonsense style, proving that he’s always willing to provide more than just the tips.
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Posted in Books, Color, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Rhyme, Signs and symbols, Taboo language and slurs, Writers | Leave a Comment »
August 9, 2024
The New Yorker cover for the August 12th, 2024 issue is a great big Roz Chast cartoon. With the accompanying cover story, “Roz Chast’s “Flavor of the Week”: The artist’s enticing (and not so enticing) tweaks to one of summer’s enduring pleasures” by Françoise Muhly on 8/5/24:
(#1) Along with plain Vanilla, there are strangely modified real flavors, in it for the alliteration (Microchip Mint, First Avenue Fudge); actual food names not especially attractive in an ice cream (Lard Swirl, Hardtack, the potato variety Yukon Gold); and lots of totally non-food allusive names (Placebo, Bitcoin, Tumbleweed, Amnesia, Tsunami, and the noble gas Xenon)
For the cover of the August 12, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Roz Chast — who has delighted readers since 1978 with her opinionated and peculiar takes on life’s indignities — gives ice-cream makers some suggestions for new flavors. “There are a lot of things I like about ice-cream stores aside from the ice cream itself,” Chast said. “I like looking at the different colors and patterns of all the bins. I like comparing cones: wafer flat-bottom or pointy classic? And the names of the flavors: the more preposterous and baroque, the better.”
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about Roz Chast and her work)
Preposterous and baroque naming schemes run riot in several domains: famously, for colors, especially of paints and of fabrics; and then widely in the word of ice cream flavors, where many frozen-confection firms exult in their naming practices. I’ll comment on just three US companies, with three different approaches: Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, and Ben & Jerry’s.
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Posted in Alliteration, Allusion, Art, Color, Language and food, Naming, Portmanteaus, Puns, Quotation, Rhyme, Taste, Trade names | 3 Comments »
December 1, 2023
It’s December, and as the Christmas elves appear, there comes a startling elfshelfism joke (in abbreviated form), on Facebook today. I got it from Ryan Tamares, who got it from Britannic Xen Osiris Zane, who got it from someone else, and who knows where such memic material originated.
(#1) Yes, Spock on a cock: the science officer of the starship USS Enterprise, riding a monstrously large rooster (across a bleak alien landscape)
To get to the punchline Spock on a cock, you have to recognize the figure of Spock (from popular-culture tv and movie fiction) and also recall that cock — most commonly used for raunchy reference to the penis — is also a somewhat antique or specialist word for a rooster. (As a result, #1 is not only a joke, but also a slightly dirty joke.)
As described in my 12/22/22 posting “Elfshelfisms”, the elfshelfism is a riddle form presented visually, and depends on rhyme (perfect rhyme or half-rhyme), with example punchlines: lemur on a femur, Dolly [Parton] on a tamale, and sonorants on cormorants.
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Posted in Formulaic language, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Rhyme, Riddles, Taboo language and slurs, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »
