Archive for the ‘Professional names’ Category
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 »
June 16, 2025
The morning names of 6/14, all Z names — well, I’m a Z-person, and I notice — all of which were in my mind from recent mentions on Facebook
of Zapf dingbats (named for the typeface designer Hermann Zapf)
of the Zagat restaurant guides (now taken over by Google)
and of the singer-songwriter Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing MN (who became famous as a very young man in NYC under the name Bob Dylan and is more or less constantly in the news)
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Posted in Design, Language and food, Morning names, Music, Names, Professional names, Typography | Leave a Comment »
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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Posted in Chinese, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Names, Nicknames, Professional names | 2 Comments »
June 15, 2024
(Not for kids or the sexually modest)
A particularly well-made ad in my e-mail on 6/8, which I’ve cropped so as to split off two aspects of the composition:
(#1) The Band of Four, who I’ll refer to unimaginatively as Man1 though Man4 (they’re actors, of course, posed for this ad; I’ll give you their stage names below); the first three apparently have their gaze fixed on Man4 (possibly their leader, but certainly their conduit to the world outside their little group, as his gaze is to the side, on us, the viewers of the photo)
#1 shows the four men in close conference with another, the suggestion being that they’re what I’ve called a male band (more on this to come); they could be a sports team, a singing group, a smash-and-grab robbery gang, a police unit, frat brothers, a band of musicians, a street-corner gang, a faculty committee, a religious study group, an improv troupe, and so on, or just a bunch of buddies who hang out together.
But wait. They’re all shirtless, or quite possibly naked. And seriously buffed. They’re also racioethnically diverse. Who are these guys? What is this group? What are they conferring about? And, while we’re puzzling, where are they? In the midst of yellow-focus tropical foliage, it seems. (That’s obviously a stage setting, but it’s undeniably tropical in intent.)
The characters are in Brazil, in multiethnic Rio de Janiero, where the actors were filmed in one episode of the recent gay porn flick Muito Quente:
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Posted in Anthropology, Books, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gaze, Language and the body, Language of sex, Portuguese, Professional names, Race and ethnicity, Social life, Titles | 1 Comment »
August 4, 2023
(About men’s genitals and man-on-man sex, in street language, with an image that’s WordPressable only because I’ve fuzzed out a ton of penises — so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Today only: yet another flash sale from gay-pornmongers Falcon | Naked Sword:
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Posted in Gay porn, Gayland, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Professional names, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »
November 20, 2022
My life continues to be mostly absorbed by the Respiratory Virus and what I’ve come to call the Sleep Monster, which has had me knocked out for five hours of today already. Bits of my waking time have been taken up by useful domestic things, like replacing my dead slipper / moccasins and assembling a pleasing Thanksgiving meal for myself (a bowl of very eccentric but satisfying posole — pork, white hominy, red, with idiosyncratic embellishments).
Otherwise, I’ve been consumed by fits of red-hot rage combined with body-wracking weeping sorrow over the shootings at Club Q in Colorado Springs; I hope to be able to post on that subject soon, but not now. In any case, before this news came to me, today’s Zippy strip came in, with a touching (and characteristically funny) memorial by cartoonist Bill Griffith to his cartoonist wife, Diane Noomin, who died back in September and then was memorialized in a service by a bunch of unruly friends back on the 10th.
This is way too brief, but it’s the best I can do before my day runs out.
Just to note that these people are of my generation: Griffith is 4 years younger than me, Noomin was 7 years younger. For comparison: I’m essentially the same age as Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, and only 2 years older than Joe Biden.
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Posted in Cartoonists, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Professional names | 2 Comments »
November 19, 2022
(Another Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting. I’m still in the Sick Zone — up at 4 after a rocky, painful night, then two two-hour periods of knocked-out unconsciousness by 10, so I don’t expect to get much work done today.)
(Oh yes, a pornstar flaunts his body shamelessly, so the posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The text for today was supplied late last night on Facebook:
— Owen Campbell: What am I doing you ask? Just simmering a midnight oxtail stew for tomorrow
— AZ > OC: I do like midnight oxtail stew. Not a bad band name. And then there’s the gay pornstar Midknight Oxtail Stu.
First the food, then the gay pornstars.
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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Names, Palo Alto, Professional names | Leave a Comment »
July 8, 2022
Zippy’s guide to food-buying in today’s strip: packaging, monosyllabicity (hereafter 1-icity), and collectibility, in that order:
(#1) As ever, thoroughly steeped in pop / mass culture: in the 3rd panel, not just the orange-flavored drink mix Tang, but also the astronaut allusion (“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”); it then turns out that the panel also takes us to orangutans (which are neither orange in color — ok, some reddish tones, but not orange, see #3 below — nor have a tang in their name, but but …)
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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Names, Naming, Professional names, Publications, Quotations, Trade names | 3 Comments »
April 29, 2022
Morning names for today (4/29), set off by a cadenza in a Mozart piano concerto that was playing when I got up just after midnight for a brief whizz break. The word cadenza led me immediately to coda, both musical bits coming at the end, also both sounding sort of Italian (which, in fact, they once were), indeed sounding very similar at their beginnings (/kǝd/ vs. /kod/) — but it turns out that though their etymologies both go back to Latin, a cadenza is a falling (or, metaphorically, a death) and a coda is a tail.
(#1) A tv ad: Help me! I’m in a cadenza and I can’t get up!
(#2) A linguistic Tom Swifty: “Coda, my ass! That’s a coati or a koala, I don’t know which”, quoted Cody in Kodiak.
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Posted in Etymology, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Jokes, Languages, Metaphor, Morning names, Music, Placenames, Professional names, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »
February 2, 2022
(Jam-packed with male bodies and man-man sex discussed in street language — admittedly, along with a lot of other stuff, but there’s no denying the high raunch content — so not even remotely suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
2/2/22 Happy Twoday! The Groundhog Day that won’t come again for a century. This morning the groundhog emerged from its burrow and was immediately devoured by a day-old tiger, who growled lewdly, “Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side”, while some colored girls sang about kissing the cross.
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Posted in Books, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and the body, Language of sex, Literature, Music, Poetry, Professional names | 2 Comments »
