Archive for the ‘Names’ Category
October 15, 2019
Now seen on tv, commercials for Gold Bond creams. In particular, this remarkable item:
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Radiance Renewal Whipped Shea Butter. Body Cream: 8 oz. Buttery smooth, ultra-rich hydration moisturizes skin for 24 hours.
Have you ever wished you could have all the benefits of a raw Shea Butter, but with a smooth, easy application? Meet GOLD BOND® Radiance Renewal Whipped Shea Butter.
Oh, honey, I have yearned for raw Shea Butter, but always hoped it could somehow be whipped into smoothness, for I am a sensitive fellow. And I’ve long mused about the fabulous Irishman Shea who gave his name to this remarkable ultra-rich hydrating substance.
Imagine my astonishment when I discovered that Shea was not Irish at all but West African, and that he was a nut-bearing tree. Also that Shea Butter, like Coconut Oil, provides not only moisturization, but also nourishment. Shea is, in a word, eminently edible.
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Posted in Language and food, Language and plants, Language in advertising, Language play, Names, Tongue twisters, Trade names | Leave a Comment »
October 9, 2019
In the Swiss German-language daily Blick, a 10/6 story by Marc Iseli, “Neues Gastro-Konzept kommt nach Zürich: Migros bringt den Metzger zum Anfassen” (‘A new gastronomic concept comes to Zürich: Migros makes the butcher accessible’), about a new program — some combination of Retail, Gastronomie und Event — that is somehow supposed to bring the consumer closer to the producers of food (the butcher, the baker, the fisherman, the farmer), at least in the giant supermarket by the main railway station in Zürich:
(#1) From the butcher’s hands to yours, in the new “Meet Food” (yes, with a name borrowed from English) program (note: I didn’t choose this photo; Blick did; I will, however, inventory it in my files under “Phallicity: The Wurst”, where it deserves some sort of vividness trophy)
The story is about this still not fully defined program, but its primary interest for me is that it comes from der Migros-Sprecher (‘the Migros spokesperson’) Gabriel Zwicky, who gets his name in the news quite a lot, Migros being a very big thing in Switzerland. Zwickys, we are everywhere.
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Posted in German, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Names, Phallicity, Switzerland and Swiss things, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »
September 30, 2019
Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine (in print) was “The Voyages Issue: Photographic dispatches from the extremities of the earth”, with one report from remote parts of Norway: “Majesty on the Wing: Enormous and indefatigable, sea eagles turn their daily hunt into a thrilling display of aerial dominance”. The introductory photo:
(#1) (photographs by Paolo Pellgrin, text by Helen Macdonald)
Notable to me because the sea eagle, or ern(e), is my onomastic totem animal, Arnold being etymologically the ‘eagle’ stem arn-/ern- + a variant of the ‘adult, strong’ stem alt-/ald-. I am eagle-strong (you may snicker at this; most people do). (In defense of my parents, Arnold is a common Swiss-German name; probably no one in the family had any idea of its etymology.)
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Posted in Language and animals, Mascots, My life, Names, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »
September 22, 2019
noun address: 1 the particulars of the place where someone lives or an organization is situated: they exchanged addresses and agreed to keep in touch. … (NOAD, with some degree of vagueness)
No, not for me, for my department, and in fact for the whole university. From the Stanford Report on 9/18/19:
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Serra Mall will be renamed Jane Stanford Way and become the university’s official address on Oct. 7, honoring the university’s co-founder and implementing a proposal that came out of a review of campus historical names.
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Posted in Lexical semantics, My life, Names, Prototype semantics, Semantics, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
September 21, 2019
Today’s Zippy takes us to the shore of Lake Erie, in the roadside realm of Dolly Dimples (but, startlingly, it will end with the minstrel-show character Rastus and the Cream of Wheat box; you never know where things will go these days):
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DD is actually selling chocolates, statuary, and tchotchkes, not hamburgers. Her head is indeed unrealistically gigantic, but even with this selling point she’s probably not going to leave Silver Lake NY to pursue a failed movie career in L.A. (note the whimsical tense-aspect-mood semantics of intending to pursue a failed career).
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Posted in AAVE / Black English, Books, Language and food, Language and race, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Names, Race and ethnicity, Semantics, Taboo language and slurs, Tense-aspect-mood, This blogging life | 1 Comment »
September 18, 2019
In a comment on my 9/14/19 posting “Clavicular knobs” (aka Ricardo’s acromia), Robert Coren writes about “the hollow space above the inner end of the collar-bone”, and I confess to not knowing a name for it. Roger Phillips (in England) fills in:
It’s not in Merriam-Webster, but all my British dictionaries have “saltcellar” for the collarbone pit. The first OED citation is:
[1870 O. Logan Before Footlights 26] I was a child of the most uninteresting age..a tall scraggy girl, with red elbows, and salt cellars at my collar-bones, which were always exposed, for fashion at that time made girls of this age uncover neck and arms.
The item has a complex social and cultural distribution, but knowing this much eventually led me to the technical term from anatomy: the suprasternal, or jugular, notch. Sometimes referred to in ordinary language as the hollow of the neck or the neck hollow.
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Posted in Dialects, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Names, Shirtlessness, Technical and ordinary language, Variation | 3 Comments »
September 14, 2019
A friend recently was approached on Scruff (the hookup site for men) by this young man — way too young for my friend and a continent away, but nevertheless worth a few moments of contemplation:
(#1) (some hair means ‘some torso hair, lightly furred chest’, no reference to his head hair)
No doubt others will have dwelt first on other of Richardo’s features, but I was immediately struck by the protruding knobs at the ends of his clavicles. Because my first male lover, from 50 years ago (the pseudonymous Danny of my writings about my sexual life), had them, and so did my man Jacques, and that means I look at them with great affection.
The clavicles are quite visible in lean men, but only a few of those men have the sweet bony handles.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, My life, Names | 3 Comments »
September 7, 2019
(References to gay male life, men’s bodies, and mansex, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday was my birthday, my 79th, 79 being, as I noted in a 8/29 posting for the day, a sexy prime. 8/29 is also, every year, National Coffee Ice Cream Day, and coffee is my favorite ice cream flavor. Put all this together and you get this birthday present, delivered by Kim Darnell yesterday:
(#1) Coffee ice cream, plus a selection of Big Gay Ice Cream flavors for Big Gay Arnold
This will take us to the pornstars of the end of summer, to Greenwich Village, and to South Park, with a final side trip to visit with the Marquis de Lafayette.
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Posted in Figurative language, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, History, Holidays, Homosexuality, Hyperbole, Language and art, Language of sex, Movies and tv, My life, Names, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
August 20, 2019
From Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook on the 18th:
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We were a little surprised to notice that the logo for the Hotel Amadeus is a portrait of George Washington. Rome, Italy. 20171028
I replied:
Ah, that’s George Amadeus Washington, an Italian con man who made a career of passing himself off as the Father of the U.S.A. and, incidentally, the composer of The Magic Flute.
Jeff:
That’s good to know! My knowledge of history is so spotty.
And then Rod Williams in high mischief mode:
Didn’t he write that opera, Il ciliegio bugiardo?
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Posted in Music, Names, Parody, Silliness | 2 Comments »
August 15, 2019
In anticipation of a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden with motss.conners on Saturday, two items from my last visit to the garden (on 7/31): blue flax-lilies, which are neither flax nor lily plants, but do have bright blue berries; and dark purple, almost black, hollyhocks.
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Posted in Art, Color, Language and gender, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language play, Metaphor, Metonymy, Music, Names, Poetry | 1 Comment »
