Archive for the ‘Nicknames’ Category

Sunday’s pseudonym synchronicity

May 27, 2025

(Well-endowed porn actors and masturbation sleeves are on the menu, so this posting is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

On Sunday, my e-mail once again brought me, by happy accident, two mailings (as it happened, back-to-back this time) on a theme (AMZ pseudonyms this time). As reported in that day’s posting, “Gigantic cylinders”, the earlier fortuitous confluence had to do with two gigantic solid-cylindrical things: one raunchy — porn actor Sir Peter’s gigantic penis — and one innocent — White Giant calla lilies — while Sunday’s pseudonymy theme involved, first a raunchy name — Baxxx, the name of a fitness model and gay porn actor (aka Baxter Linn), who’s now the spokesperson for the Fleshjack masturbation sleeve — and then, in the very next message, an innocent name — BigAlex, the trade name for a fancy walking cane that my friend Bonnie Bendon Campbell uses.

Both of these names fortuitously allude to AMZ pseudonyms. I am sometimes Alex Adams, or just Alex, and I am sometimes ba (for biiig arnold, a playful spelling for the jocular Big Arnold). I am also the creator of XXX-rated comic homoerotic collages, so I could be said to be baXXX. And then from Big Arnold and Alex for Arnold, we get Big Alex / BigAlex.

Knowing the history of my pseudonyms, Bonnie was entirely aware of the significance of the name BigAlex, so sent me a photo of her cane. Fleshjack’s guy being called Baxxx, however, was just a wonderful surprise — an onomastic windfall.

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Suzerains of sheldrake

April 26, 2025

Today’s (4/26) morning names: sheldrake (or Sheldrake) and suzerainty. I have no idea how the gorgeous big duck (or the parapsychologist) got into my head; suzerainty might have popped up because of its prominent medial /z/ — I am ever Z-alert — though I don’t recall having seen it in print recently (I don’t think I’ve ever heard it spoken), so it might have come to me just for its oddness. The workings of my mind are often mysterious.

(The music playing at the time — well into a performance of Handel’s Messiah — provides no obvious source for any of these words.)

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Foxes, camels, and Jeff the Tongue

April 5, 2025

From Jeffrey Golderg the Linguist (not Jeffrey Goldberg the Journalist — Jeff the Tongue, not Jeff the Pen) on April 3, passing on a Facebook posting with an old Soviet joke, along with monitory commentary from On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder the Historian:

(News note: Snyder, his historian wife Marci Shore, and his philosophy colleague Jason Stanley are all leaving Yale to move to the University of Toronto in the fall)

I’ll comment here briefly on two things: old Soviet jokes, some of them now startlingly applicable to life in the Soviet States of America under President Putinitsa and her sidekick Evilon; and the naming convention in Jeffrey Goldberg the Journalist and Jeff the Tongue.

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Briefly noted: the new Caligula

October 25, 2024

Posted to Facebook yesterday. I had been recalling Albert Camus’s play Caligula (adapted into English by Justin O’Brien), which I happened to see in February 1960, during its famously brief — one month long — run at the 54th Street Theatre in NYC — which led me to investigate Wikipedia’s long and intricate entry on

Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (31 August 12 – 24 January 41), better known by his nickname Caligula …, Roman emperor from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41.

and then to write on FB:

Was just musing on TFG as the new Caligula (vengeful, unclear on the separation of his personal fortune and the state’s coffers, declaring himself a god, etc.) when I thought to look for parallel uses in the press. I bring you

the Daily Beast in 2011, Benjamin Netanyahu as the new Caligula; the Times (of London) in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, the new Caligula; the Irish Times in 2016, [Helmut Grabpussy], the new Caligula?; POLITICO.eu in 2020, Boris Johnson the new Caligula

(there are probably more)

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A Mexican in Paris

August 23, 2024

(About art, and about some Z-folk (yay us!), but the Z-folk are knee-deep in homoerotic art (yay for Team Sodomite!), and male bodies and man-on-man sex will be discussed in plain language, so this posting is off-limits for kids and the sexually modest)

A Mexican in Paris — Ángel Zárraga, a painter who has brought us yet another remarkable painting of St. Sebastian (I know, I know, when will this rain of Sebastians end?, you cry out; well, not quite yet), the sensuous Votive Offering, more commonly known as (The Martyrdom ofSaint Sebastian:


(#1) I’ll have a fair amount to say about the elements of this painting, but there are endless further questions about them: why the contrapposto stance, why this posing of the saint’s arms, why stars in the saint’s halo? why only one arrow, just barely embedded in the saint’s left nipple, and with handsome black and white checks on its fletching? and on and on; you’ll probably have more questions yourself

So we see what looks like a a fashionable Parisian woman in Art Nouveau dress, on her knees in devotion before a handsome Italian man with wavy black Romantic hair. He’s Saint Sebastian, dying for his Christian beliefs, from wicked sharp arrows penetrating into his flesh; she’s Saint Irene of Rome, tending to him and healing his wounds. But there’s no agony, no tears, only the striking of poses. There’s no exertion, no fear, not one drop of sweat. Remarkably, there’s not a drop of blood, either, only these two powerfully beautiful people, radiating sensuous elegance.

The inscription in the lower right corner is a genuinely pious and humble dedication by the artist of his work to the Lord; meanwhile, in the work, the body of the saint is framed as itself a votive offering, a gift to God. But let’s face it, this Sebastian is one hot number (and so is this very worldly Irene, in her own way), presenting himself as strikingly unmartyrial, more like something cooked up by Pierre et Gilles. I find it easier to imagine Zárraga’s Sebastian stud-hustling on a city street — well, I have actually seen his brothers in action, though with more clothes on and no arrow — than to see him as a blood sacrifice in the service of Jesus Christ.

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Breasts on buckwheat groats

December 19, 2022

Or something like that. In yesterday’s (12/18) morning name, which beats anything I’ve come up with before all hollow: the truly bizarre name I’ll spell Tits Varnishke, where the LN is pronounced /várnɪški/. Even more bizarrely, in whatever fever-dream fantasy gave rise to the name, it referred to a gangster.

Background. I’m in day 3 of what I think of as sick-day leave, when my usual responsibilities are lifted (though I try to do at least one small useful thing each day) and, because the illness is respiratory, I am even further isolated than before (and live behind a mask when people are obliged to be near me).

This is on top of all the other afflictions affecting me; at first it was just a very bad head cold, but then it took in my chest as well, so it hurts to breathe. I sleep sitting up in my recliner chair and I feel really crappy, but it’s just a cold. (My 02 stays at 97% or better, despite all the junk I cough up, and I have only occasional periods of a little bit of fever. I’m an old acquaintance of bronchitis and pneumonia, which I would recognize, but all I have now is a wretched cold. It will pass. There’s no reason to think it’s COVID, but I’ll check tomorrow.)

Mostly the rule is: if you have a respiratory virus, STAY HOME; don’t go to work or wherever and expose other people to your virus. Especially now, when respiratory illnesses are at very high levels.

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Mortal power

September 9, 2022

The 8/11/22 Rhymes With Orange, exploiting an ambiguity in the noun killer as the modifier N1 in N1 + N2 compounds, in this case in killer abs (literal ‘abs that are killers, abs that kill’ vs. figurative ‘abs that are killer / remarkable’):


(#1) In the worlds of advertisements featuring beautiful people, the health and fitness literature, and soft porn, figurative killer abs are commonplace; abs that kill, however, have (so far as I know) never once appeared on a police blotter

Wider topic: the figurative modifiers of mortal power — premodifying killer (killer abs, a killer app), postmodifying of death (the cruise of death, referring to a penetrating sexual facial expression).

Male body parts and sexual connections between men plus a ton of linguistic expressions in their social contexts, what more could I ask for?

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The character of a creature

September 5, 2022

… as explored in the playful animal artwork of photographer Yago Partal, available for inspection in his 2017 book Zoo Portraits and for sale from his on-line site. The book cover, which shows a panda character holding a portrait of a koala character:


(#1) The portraits are meant to bring out characteristic features of a creature — not, however, as abstractions, but as embodiments in highly individual animal personages, with their own personal names: Bao the giant panda, Cooper the koala

Yes, I’m playing with two senses of character. From NOAD:

noun character: 1 the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual: running away was not in keeping with her character. … 2 a person [AZ: perhaps, better a personage / a figure / an individual] in a novel, play, or movie: the author’s compassionate identification with his characters.

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The heifer executive

May 17, 2022

Yesterday’s wry Rhymes With Orange strip, wordless and spare-looking, but packed with tons of meaning on two fronts, the dairy and the managerial; meanwhile, it presents a challenging exercise in cartoon understanding.


(#1) If you see that there’s something sweetly funny about a dairy cow managing a business, well, that will do — but the pleasure of the cartoon is in the details

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A masculinity meze: face men

April 27, 2022

(This has turned out to be quite a large meze, but it’s only about one idiomatic slang expression. Well, men and masculinity come into the thing, and you know what can happen then.)

Reflecting a couple days ago on my Princeton days (1958-62) and the tangle of the attitudes of the (all-male) students at the time towards (among things) masculinity, male affiliation (as systematized in a pervasive system of male bands, the eating clubs of the time), women, homosexuals, race, and social class. The topic is vast, also deeply distressing to me personally, and I suspect that I’ll never manage to write about the bad parts of it in any detail — note: there were some stunningly good parts — but in all of that I retrieved one lexical item of some sociolinguistic interest (and entertainment value), one slang nugget: the idiomatic N1 + N2 compound noun face man / faceman / face-man.

A common noun frequently used among my friends, which was then also deployed as a proper noun nicknaming one of our classmates, a young man notable for his facial male beauty: everybody had to have a nickname (mine was Zot, for the Z of my name and the cartoon anteater), so we called him Face Man because he was a face man.

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