Archive for the ‘Names’ Category

jackery at the jackery

May 13, 2024

(Playing around with English morphology and male masturbation, so not to everyone’s taste)

It all started with a chance encounter with an ad for Jackery portable power stations, like this one:

(#1)

Given the orientation of my imagination, I was immediately taken to the idea of jackery ‘male masturbation, jacking off’, at places especially devoted to the practice, jackeries (aka jack-off / jerk-off / JO clubs). Clearly not what the Jackery Company had in mind, but where did they get their name?

From the “get to know Jackery” page on the company’s website:

(#2)

Jackery was established in 2012 and co-founded by a former Apple senior engineer and a CEO called Z Sun, a pioneer in the field of Li-battery technology. The original founder developed a battery jacket for the Apple iPhone, which is where the name Jackery comes from.

… Jackery makes portable power stations, solar panels, solar generators, and accessories for the outdoor and mobile market, but they are best known for their portable power stations.

So Jackery has the derivational suffix –ery  (denoting ‘a place where some occupation, trade, or activity is carried on’) attached to an abbreviated form of jacket, referring to one of the company’s first products.

The details of words with the the noun-forming derivational suffix –ery are not at all straightforward, full of oddities of history; it’s not a particularly productive suffix. But there’s enough there that you can play with it.

On to this interesting messiness in some detail, and moving from battery jackets to male masturbation.

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Annals of verbing: to get storrowed

May 10, 2024

A brief Friday delight, to which I was alerted by Gadi Niram on Facebook: a passive-only verbing based on a proper place name. In today’s CBS News from Boston, the story “3 trucks, including one from Trillium Brewing, get “storrowed” in one day on Storrow Drive”:

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Name that taqueria

April 29, 2024

From the annals of remarkable commercial names, a delicious punmanteau name for a Phoenix AZ taco truck, which just flashed by, without remark, in the first sentence of the piece “Motor Mouth” by Aaron Timms in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:

Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix.

Juanderful = Juan (a stereotypical Mexican name) + wonderful, so conveying something like ‘wonderfully Mexican’ or ‘wonderful in a typically Mexican way’.


(#1) The sprightly logo (you can imagine the patter: “Hi! I’ll be your carnitas tacos today! Enjoy my meat!”); the food truck has a website, here

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Better the second day

April 24, 2024

I haven’t been coping well with daily life for a while now, but see no reason to issue fresh bulletins on my anxieties, incapacities, and infirmities in these difficult times, so I’ve been posting on things that entertain me and might entertain you, often just the wispiest of notes in the spirit of the Pythonic Mary, Queen of Scots. As here, with a report on what I had for lunch today — and yesterday too, but it was much better the second day.

Better The Second Day, a general principle for most hot soups, and a variety of other foods too. In this case, for lamb and spinach curry (with fenugreek leaves): so, palak mathi gosht plus a lot of basmati rice, from Zareens (a Z! a good omen) Indian restaurant on Broadway in Redwood City CA:

palak ‘spinach’; methi ‘fenugreek leaves’; gosht, literally ‘meat’, specifically referring to goat, mutton, or lamb

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Briefly noted: Oceanic Opus

April 19, 2024

… Wayno’s title for today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, which I think of “MobyDicPOP”, to recognize the phrasal overlap portmanteau Moby Dictionary in it:


Moby Dick + dictionary (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

Easy to imagine other DicPOPs: Tricky Dictionary, for Richard Nixon’s pungent vocabulary of contempt and abuse; Private Dictionary, for the lexicon of private eyes; Pencil Dictionary, for a list of famous men with thin penises; and so on.

I suppose it’s merely caviling to note that a Moby Dictionary should be huge, and white.

 

Stanford hymns

April 17, 2024

In my final dream of the night, I was explaining to a group of rapt visitors that “Come, thou fount of every blessing” was the official hymn of Stanford University — an idea no doubt provoked by the fact that my Apple Music was at the time playing a series of performances of this very hymn (most often set in the US to the tune NETTLETON), of which I am very fond. As it turns out, in addition to an official fight song, Stanford does have an official hymn, its alma mater, “Hail, Stanford Hail” (which is rarely played — deservedly so, in my opinion —  except that it’s obligatory at Commencement). Meanwhile, though I have hymn resources from three largely separate traditions and have consulted hymn repositories, there appears to be no tune named STANFORD (STAMFORD is something else entirely), despite the fact that the prolific Anglo-Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford wrote a number of hymn tunes, among them the often-set ENGELBERG.

So there is in fact a Stanford (University) hymn and a number of (C. V.) Stanford hymns, but no STANFORD hymn (tune).

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Ancestral investigations

March 26, 2024

In recent days, I’ve been exchanging e-mail with my (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi) linguistics colleague Luc Baronian about ethnic and linguistic history, with special reference to the Welsh (and the Welsh language, Cymraeg) in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Dutch (and their language, Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch); and about tracing ancestral history. Three pieces of background here:

First, Luc is an Armenian-Canadian, the way I’m a Swiss-American. Luc is by recent paternal ancestry Armenian (as you can tell from his surname), by upbringing French Canadian; I am by recent paternal ancestry Swiss (as you can tell by my surname), by upbringing (and maternal ancestry) Pennsylvania Dutch (a descendant of primarily 18th-century immigrants to southeastern Pennsylvania, mostly from the Palatinate region of southern Germany).

Second, some years back, Luc — whose ancestry-search competence is vastly better than mine — helped me trace connections on my mother’s side and correct my misrecollections of several facts.

Third, Luc had gotten interested in the history of the Welsh language in Pennsylvania, which begins in colonial times, with late 17th-century negotiations over the Welsh Tract as a landmark event, and then apparently vanishes, leaving only place-names in its wake.

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More Hummels

March 25, 2024

On the heels of yesterday’s posting about the early 19th-century composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, more people named Hummel (with the accented vowel rounded [U] (as in English put) in German or German-influenced English varieties, like Pennsylvania Dutch English; but unrounded [Ʌ] (as in English putt) in ordinary American English). The German landscape painter Carl Hummel. The fictional Kurt Hummel in the American tv series Glee. And the artist nun Maria Innocentia Hummel, whose paintings provided the original models for Hummel figurines, which is what this posting is mostly about.

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Grunt Oil

March 15, 2024

(Man-man sex discussed in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

It’s 3/15, the day after Pi/Pie Day (in the US), and the Ides of March (everywhere), and also (in ZwickyWorld) Higashi Day — when, back in the last century, Jacques and I set off from Palo Alto CA (and Stanford) on our annual journey east (higashi) back to Columbus OH (and Ohio State); Nishi Day, for embarking on  the journey to the west, was on 12/15.

My Higashi Day was enlivened by a Fort Troff e-mail sale ad for their Grunt Oil silicone-based lube (named for the sound men make during anal intercourse). A tube of the actual product, with a plug for it that gives a relatively straightforward description of the stuff:


(#1) The packaging varies; there are less raunchy variants (missing the finger and the FUCK ME, COCK TOY! graffiti) and even raunchier ones, as we’ll see in a moment

Description: Hands-down, silicone is the gold standard for durability and slickness. Sure, water-based lubes are good when you need a quick clean up… but nothing beats the smooth, silky feel of pure high-grade silicone. Grunt Oil is super-concentrated for max longevity. It doesn’t break down in water, so you can use it in the shower. Clean up with soap and water.

Fort Troff caters to what I’ve called Ruff Dudes, hypersexual hypermacho anally hyperreceptive man-oriented men (with a fetish for sex machinery), existing in some paradoxical liminal world between actual leathermen and fantastical bdsm creatures. So #1 counts as vanilla in Fort Troff’s world.

But that’s not what assaulted my eye this morning. It turns out that the exciting feature of Grunt Oil is that it looks like cum. Creamy white jizz. This is supposed to be incredibly hot to Fort Troff’s clientele, and I’m really into cum, but an anal lube that looks like cum strikes me as a goofy idea. Even goofier than dildos scrupulously designed to replicate actual penises. (In both cases, the appeal is to the imagination, not to the senses.)

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Powdery residue falls on Canadian plains

March 12, 2024

It’s held on the tips of three fingers, it’s orange, it’s fully erect, and it leaves a messy powder. But is it art? Is it edible? Is it, omigod, about to shoot? A swirl of questions envelope the phallic cheese puff resting in the Cheetle Hand of Cheadle, Alberta, shown here accompanied by a bag of the cheese snack Cheetos, for scale:

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