Archive for the ‘My life’ Category

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I’m a big gooner

June 8, 2026

(plenty of raunchy sex talk, not for kids or the sexually modest)


(#1) That’s gooner ‘someone who masturbates a lot, enthusiastically’ — one of a family of senses for this noun — and it’s a fair cop (on the song, see the footnote at the end of this posting)

But that’s not how I got wrapped up in goonerology (and what Mickey Dolenz sang in 1966 — back in pre-gooner days — was, of course, I’m a believer). That I blame on the Peachy Kings 30%-off Memorial Day sale on (100% polyester) mesh football jerseys with sexual or sexualized identity labels on them, among them:


(#2) At $40 a pop; the labels include GOOD BOY [Boy for Daddy], EVIL GAY, TRASH [‘slut’], STUD, HO HO HO [with ho(e) ‘slut’ (etymologically ‘whore’)], PORN STAR, DEMON TWINK, WOOF, SIR — and, as above, GOONER

Now, it turns out that a sexual verb goon, agent noun gooner, and activity noun gooning are all, according to Merriam-Webster online, recently coined (with goon‘s first known uses from about 2005). As is common with recent coinages, especially of markedly slangy or taboo nature, these items are highly variable in their reference (people play with them), taking in a range of uses — in this case, at least 5 distinguishable uses, all having to do, in some way or another, with masturbation. The result is that I have no idea of what a guy would intend to convey by wearing the shirt in #2. (I am a gooner-3 and gooner-4, definitely not a gooner-1 or gooner-5, and will disavow gooner-2.)

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Posted in Euphemism, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Music, My life, Taboo language and slurs, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »

The disastrous year 2003

June 5, 2026

Every year, for me this day (June 5th) is one of the most emotionally difficult days of the year; it’s my man Jacques Transue’s death day, in the bright early summer of what unfolded as the disastrous year 2003. Jacques died, after all those years of withering through dementia to death; I was crazed with grief (actually, I still am, it never went away, though the sharpest edges have worn down some, they would have had to); and then in November the flesh-eating bacteria came for me, and I just barely survived their onslaught, coming out disabled and disfigured, with almost all of my previous life gone.

Mozart’s disastrous year was 1791 — it’s chronicled in H. C. Robbins Landon’s 1791: Mozart’s Last Year (1988) — and ended with his death in the dark winter, but also embraced great triumphs, notably Die Zauberflöte. (More on Mozart’s last year below.)

I can’t tell you much about 2003 between J’s death in June and the appearance of a painful swelling in my right armpit in November. It’s almost all lost to me. I presumably spent this time in Palo Alto. I know that I was teaching a seminar at Stanford that fall, but I know that only because people have told me about it. My actual memory is blank.

I recall my response shortly after J’s  death, because I wrote some about it in postings on the net: I wept a lot, and raged. At him: how could he have abandoned me like this, how could he have left me, damn him, how could he have just gone and died on me like this? And I sat with the flannel shirts that were heavy with smell of his body and mourned. Now, I fully understood the irrationality of my response, but I also realized that I was, like, the millionth person in the world to react this way; I would endure. Meanwhile, I wept, bitterly.

But sometimes I fall back into that hole. And then I miss Jacques terribly — well, the Jacques who mostly melted away in the 1990s, over 3 decades ago. But still…

(more…)

Posted in Books, Death and dying, Language of medicine, Music, My life | 2 Comments »

Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience

May 21, 2026

The crucial moment of today’s (5/21) Zippy strip, in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It’s hard to know where to start with this — and then it turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme.


(#1) Today’s strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity


(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)

Just to get the two strips on display, for discussion to come. My l life has been overfull, but almost entirely in wonderful ways, and that’s something else for me to talk about.

 

Posted in Academic life, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, My life, Phallicity, Pop culture, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »

The gift of your body

May 12, 2026

(tales of man-man sex, some of it in very plain street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

A story from my times at the gay baths, this one not previously reported on. From 1980, at the Club Baths of Toronto, a night out during the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in Toronto, at which I gave a paper (“Internal” and “External” Evidence in Linguistics) in a symposium on “The Problem of Data in Linguistics”, now viewable on-line here.

The story has a poignant sequel in my current life as a solitary 85-year-old gay man with a lifelong high sex drive, which I’ll put off for a later posting because this one will be lengthy.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life | Leave a Comment »

Latino meat baskets

May 10, 2026

Yesterday’s dinner order (big enough for that meal and today’s lunch): the Meat Basket Salad from Tacos El Grullense #1, in Redwood City:


(#1) The meat basket at El Grullense #1 (the Tacos El Grullense Grill in Redwood City is the first in a Bay Area family-owned chain of taquerias): beans, choice of meat (grilled chicken for me), rice, onions, cilantro, salsa, lettuce, tomatoes, guacamole, cheese, and sour cream in a crispy tortilla basket

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Names, Race and ethnicity, Spanish | Leave a Comment »

African iris

May 9, 2026

(To the memory of Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, who was born Ann Walcutt Daingerfield on 5/9/1937. Her favorite flower was the Japanese iris and her least favorite holiday was (US) Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May.)

Found almost everywhere in today’s walk with my helper Isaac around a few blocks south of my house: a pretty plant growing in clumps, with narrow leaves, and at the tips of stalks, modest yellow (occasionally white) iris-like (but flat) flowers, with three petals and three sepals:


(#1) The flower of the month

Some digging around got it identified as the (yellow) African iris, Dietes bicolor. An excellent plant.

(more…)

Posted in Events and occasions, Language and plants, My life | Leave a Comment »

REX&M graphic art

May 8, 2026

Spurred by Max Vasilatos’s show-n-tell at the most recent (5/3) soc.motss get-together on Zoom, some material on the S&M graphic artist REX, assembled from material in his Wikipedia entry; the summary paragraph:

REX (1943 – March 2024) was an American visual artist and illustrator closely associated with gay fetish art of 1970s and 1980s New York and San Francisco. He avoided photographs and did not discuss his personal life. His drawings influenced gay culture through graphics made for nightclubs including the Mineshaft and his influence on artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Much censored, he remained a shadowy figure, saying that his drawings “defined who I became” and that there are “no other ‘truths’ out there”. REX died in Amsterdam in late March 2024.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Clothing, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life | Leave a Comment »

Not knowing

May 8, 2026

Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin in the Point / Counterpoint segment on Saturday Night Live: Jane would make some serious point, only to be dismissed by Dan with a response beginning “Jane, you ignorant slut”

This posting is about not knowing, about ignorance — but not about the ignorance of “Jane, you ignorant slut” (call this ignorant, sense a), instead the ignorance of my helper Isaac, who turned out to be ignorant of the Great Depression (call this ignorant, sense b); well, he’s Fijian and more than a generation younger than me. On the two senses, see NOAD:

adj. ignorant: [a] lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated: he was told constantly that he was ignorant and stupid. [b] [predicative] lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about a particular thing: they were ignorant of astronomy. …

Unfortunately, the odium of sense a tends to overwhelm the simple not knowing of sense b (negative associations tend to crowd out positive ones). Meanwhile, I am famously ignorant of almost everything having to do with sports, while also being famously knowledgable about a few things having to do with language.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Lexical semantics, My life | Leave a Comment »

Three plants

May 6, 2026

Three plants — all old favorites of mine — that have recently caught my helper Isaac’s attention on our walks around downtown Palo Alto: two because of their striking foliage and flowers, one because its multitude of yellow flowers seem to thrive everywhere, even in the most unlikely wastelands. Then the first two have remarkable — and, alas, similar — names: acanthus, agapanthus. While all three have odd common names: bear’s breeches / britches, lily of the Nile (not a lily, and from South Africa, far from the Nile), daylily (again, not a lily —  and why day?).

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Posted in Clothing, Language and plants, Language and religion, My life, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | 2 Comments »

Turkish hand towels

May 5, 2026

Awaiting the delivery of 4 Turkish hand towels (for use in bathroom and bedroom), to supplement my old 15 x 27″ stock, in white and yellow, as they gradually fray and shred and get retired as rags or trash. My helper Isaac asked how old they were, and was astounded to be told that Jacques and I bought them 40 years ago. The new ones:

Slightly larger (16 x 28″), in a color labeled silver grey

(more…)

Posted in Furnishings and tools, My life | Leave a Comment »

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