Archive for the ‘Names’ Category

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The legions of BD

May 23, 2026

(genitals and sex acts discussed in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

From the Monty Python fandom wiki:

Biggus Dickus is a fictional character in the Monty Python film Life of Brian, portrayed by Graham Chapman. He is a Roman nobleman and officer. He is married, according to his friend Pontius Pilate, to Incontinentia Buttocks.

BD’s sexual-onomastic legions have advanced throughout modern media, where they have a particularly powerful role in gay male pornography; some productions are staffed almost entirely by raunchily named performers, their names travesties on those of masculine icons; louche plays on vivid everyday words; and vocabulary smeared with the X, XX, and XXX of obscenity.

Two striking examples that have come by me recently: a man who does business as Feral Fux or Feral Fuxxx; and another who performs as Fabio Stallion or Stallion Fabio.

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Posted in Figurative language, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Identities, Implicature, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Names, Professional names | 2 Comments »

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 »

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 »

Out of Switzerland on 942

May 3, 2026

Explorations of the channels on my Comcast cable subscription led me to a big block of “music choice” channels in the very high numbers, where I (with my basic cable subscription) don’t normally venture. And there I found channel 942, “classical masterpieces”, offering what ordinary Americans think of as “classical music” (of the serious variety, not the soupy stuff intended for elevators or supermarkets).

Some experience with 942 suggests that it’s very heavily biased towards orchestral music (including orchestral transcriptions of vocal, solo-instrument, and chamber music), especially from the Romantic period. My personal tastes are centered on solo-instrument music (especially for my instrument, the piano), chamber music (which I think of as musical conversations), and opera and art song — especially from the Baroque and Classical periods — so 942’s programming is an imperfect fit for me.

On the other hand, the programming tends to favor obscure composers (a fair number are people I’ve never heard of, though you might take that just to mean that I’m a poorly educated philistine) and obscure compositions by more well-known composers (for instance, a work by Elgar I’d never heard of) — which brings me to what was playing when I first tuned in to 942: Joachim Raff’s (very long, and dramatic) Symphony No. 1, in a recording by the Bamberg Symphony under Hans Stadlmair.

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Posted in German, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Names, Switzerland and Swiss things | Leave a Comment »

Notable Zwickys

April 29, 2026

I had somehow missed this Wikipedia page until I stumbled on it this morning:

Zwicky is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

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Posted in Movies and tv, Names, Switzerland and Swiss things, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

Stylish? Or in costume?

April 25, 2026

(lots of discussion of men’s bodies in street language and similar references to sex between men, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

Stylish? Or in costume? There can be a fine line here, often crossed flagrantly  — in my opinion, at any rate — in high-fashion shows. And then also in the far reaches of premium underwear for men, especially from the raunchily named Breedwell company — whose name includes the sexual verb breed ‘pedicate a man bareback (without a condom) to orgasm’.

(Translation in plain, but seriously vulgar, language: pedicate is a Latinate verb for engaging in insertive anal intercourse — fucking someone up the ass — and breed is the related slang achievement verb for bareback man-on-man sex — conveying that the fucker comes (shoots his load) in the other man’s ass.)]

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Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Names, Portmanteaus, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Z number

April 10, 2026

E-mail from Ellen Kaisse this morning:

I don’t know how I failed to learn this for 60 years or so but Purcell’s cataloguer is a Z person, Franklin Zimmerman. You probably have known forever, but thought I’d mention it just in case. How can someone who died so young have 860 Z numbers? And probably most are glorious.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Death and dying, Figurative language, Music, Names | Leave a Comment »

Living tubes, no sex

April 4, 2026

Walking the neighborhood with Isaac brought us to resting by a planter of weird plants — tall, stiff, hollow tubes in sections, living green things with no hint of flowers or seeds — outside Joe and the Juice at 240 Hamilton Ave. (at Ramona St., a block and a half from my house).  I noted how tough the plants were (with some moisture, they grow ferociously, and their stems are naturally coated with silica, so that the stems can actually be used to scour pots and pans).  Unfortunately, I forgot the evocative names of the plant — common name horsetail, botanical name Equisetum (Latin for ‘horse bristle’) — or the significant fact that the plants had neither flowers nor seeds because (like ferns) they were modern plants surviving in much the same form as their ancestors from prehistoric times, before the invention of sex in plants, and produced spores rather than seeds.

An impressive stand, in the wild, of the species Isaac and I rested by at Joe and the Juice, Equisetum hyemale:


The prehistoric plants included gigantic horsetail trees

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Posted in Language and plants, My life, Names, Palo Alto, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »

A moment with my mates Baz and Hazza

March 20, 2026

As a Z-person, I was immediately pulled into Bert Vaux’s query to his “British and Antipodean friends” on Facebook this morning: Bert is collecting examples of -Z(ZA) nicknames (what I’ll call znicknames), like Baz for Barry and Hazza for Harry. The -Z(ZA) (phonetically -z / -zǝ) replaces an intervocalic r following what is, in the varieties in question, an accented short / lax / open vowel: ɪ ɛ æ a ʌ ɔ.  Some more conversions of model names to znicknames from Bert’s collection:

Carrie, Carol → Caz
Darren, Darryl → Daz, Dazza
Jerry, Jeremy → Jez, Jezza
Karen → Kazza
Larry → Laz, Lazza
Mary → Maz, Mazza

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Posted in Dialects, Language play, Names, Playful morphology | 1 Comment »

Animated families

March 18, 2026

In the Wayno / Piraro Bizarro for 3/16/26, two characters from Disney animation commiserate in a bar: Dopey (the least of the Seven Dwarfs in Disney’s telling of the Snow White tale from the Brothers Grimm) with a mug of beer, Goofy (the canine companion of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in a long series of short features) doing shots. If you don’t recognize who they are and what their names are, the cartoon is incomprehensible, because the dwarf and the dog are sharing their regret at the names their parents gave them:

What kind of parent would name their son Dopey or Goofy? Those are epithets, not ordinary names, and while the names of all seven dwarfs are actually (evocative) epithets, Goofy hangs with his buddies Mickey and Donald (who have alliterative, but not epithetic, names), so he can feel especially aggrieved (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

The Seven Dwarfs are a band of miners, in both the Grimm and Disney telling of the tale of Snow White, and though they all must have had parents, we know nothing about them; the dwarfs just materialize in their little house, in need of a housekeeper’s touch. The Disney comic animals have vaguely delineated, largely unseen families; about them we know little. Goofy appears to be the screw-up child in his family. And ended up getting called by an epithet.

Well, Goofy began life as Dippy Dawg, again with an unflattering epithet. (My father, with whom I shared a name, sailed through his adult life addressed by an epithet, not his name: the positive-vibe epithet Zip, alluding to his pleasant energy.)

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Names, Nicknames, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

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