Archive for the ‘Obscenity’ Category

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hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 1

April 29, 2025

👨‍🏭 👨‍🏭 penultimate April: in only two days, a gaggle of rabbits, strewing lilies of the valley promiscuously, will dance around an International Workers pole; be prepared

Meanwhile, Masayoshi Yamada, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics in Shimane University, in western Honshu (author of, inter alia: A Dictionary of Trade Names and A Dictionary of English Taboo and Euphemism), has appealed to me by e-mail on 4/24 with another puzzle from cartoons in English (his last query, reported on in my 9/25/24 posting “This idiom has had the radish”, had to do with the idiom have the radish in a Zits strip). This time it’s about one of Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse strips, (re)published on 6/19/24:


There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented -illions words; and the thing MY was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions

After some background words about the strip, I’ll take up these three things one by one, expanding on things I wrote to MY.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Mathematics, Onomatopoeia, Sound symbolism | 6 Comments »

Friday word play in the comics

April 28, 2017

Two cartoons to end the week: a Rhymes With Orange with a four-word play and a Bizarro with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):

(#1)

The Cantonese American dish moo goo gai pan ‘chicken with button mushrooms and sliced vegetables’, with a pun on each word: onomatopoetic moo, onomatopoetic goo, the informal noun guy, the Greek god Pan.

(#2)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

Doctors Without Borders + Border Collie(s).

(Note that there are a lot of things you need to know to appreciate these comics.)

(more…)

Posted in Language and animals, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Shirtlessness, Sound symbolism | Leave a Comment »

Let’s just call it “grammar”

July 20, 2016

Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:

A visit to a theme park with a linguistic theme: it deals, at least, in onomatopoeia (rattle for the sound a rattlesnake’s tail makes), palindromes (expressions that read the same forwards and backwards, like the names Anna and Otto), and portmanteaus (like palindomedary, palindrome + dromedary) and their visual equivalents, like the palindromedary in the cartoon, a nice counterpart to Anna and Otto.

What to call a place that displayed such things — and anagrams and chiasmus and puns and limericks and knock-knock jokes and sports chants and ritualized insults and auctioneers’ patter and damning with faint praise and Cockney rhyming slang and all sorts of culture-specific phenomena that are manifested in a language (in this case, all are manifested in  English) but are not part of the system of that language, the way, say, Subject-Auxiliary Inversion is part of the system of English. Instead, they are things you can do with, or in, the language.

But we have no good word (or other fixed expression) for this rich assortment of language uses and rouitines, so (as in other cases) the poor overworked word grammar is pressed into service. And the theme park is called Grammar Land.

Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Sound symbolism | 3 Comments »

More sexual fap(p), plus shlick

September 11, 2014

Background: a posting on the verb fapp (with variant fap) ‘to masturbate furiously’ and one on the exclamation of annoyance Fap!. And now reader Paul comments on the former:

My understanding is that fap as onomatopoeia comes from [the webcomic Sexy Losers]

I do not know when the second p started to appear.

There seems to be some agreement that Sexy Losers at least popularized the sexual verb, whether or not it originated it — and that takes it back to 1999. Also in 1999 in Sexy Losers, the feminine counterpart, shlick (Urban Dictionary in 2004: “The onomatopoeic representation of female masturbation”).

Two examples, with the strips reduced to the final panel, and genitals cropped:

SL #158 “War Games” 10/13/02, in which guys find that long sessions of gaming can improve their ejaculation distance:

(#1)

SL #166 “Psychology Games” 12/24/02, with both terms:

(#2)

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Sound symbolism | 1 Comment »

It was 42 years ago today…

July 10, 2013

From John Lawler via Facebook, a link to my 1971 Linguistic Inquiry squib on manner-of-speaking verbs (like snap in Kim snapped that it was time to leave), along with a captioned image of the Rice Krispies elves:

(#1)

(more…)

Posted in Language in advertising, Phonology, Sound symbolism, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

At the X line with remarkably named pornstars

July 6, 2013

(Warning: This posting has an image of man-man sex that is right at the X line — that’s one of the topics of the posting, in fact — and some frank description of gay sex, so it might not be to everyone’s taste.)

In my e-mail yesterday, a stirring ad from Lucas Entertainment (Michael Lucas’s porn flick company, not George Lucas’s film company) for its film Lovers in Paradise, with a shot of Wagner Vittoria penetrating Tiziano Fuentes — an image that I’ll show some distance below the fold; it’s technically not X-rated (there’s no penis, testicles, or anus visible in it), though no one could mistake what’s going on there. As in my posting “X or not?” of 5/19/13, I’ll muse some on where the X line gets drawn.

First, though, a description of the scene and some information about three remarkably named pornstars (these two and Vittoria’s pornstar boyfriend Diego Lauzen).

(more…)

Posted in Facial expression and gesture, Gender and sexuality, Movies, Names, Obscenity, Sociocultural conventions | 2 Comments »

Onomatopoeia in the comics

July 2, 2013

Today’s Zippy:

The onomatopoetic lexical items murmur, yodel, belch, and gargle give Bill Griffith an excuse for the phrasal overlap portmanteau Yoko Onomatopoeia.

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Sound symbolism | Leave a Comment »

greeblies

December 23, 2012

A story from almost 50 years ago, in Cambridge MA, in which a young woman talks with exasperation about the slapdash housekeeping skills of some male friends of hers sharing an apartment in Cambridge. One of them had done a load of laundry, washing, along with a lot of dark clothes, a brand-new fuzzy yellow garment, with the predictable unfortunate outcome that, as she put it:

*Everything* was covered with little yellow greeblies!

Ann and I hadn’t heard the word greeblies before, but from the context and the word’s sound, it was clear what the greeblies were: little bits of fluff (which attached themselves unwelcomely to other things). And when we told the story to others, no one had any problem dealing with the unfamiliar word.

(Greeblies are relevant in my life right now, because I’m washing my new plush bathrobe, which has shown some tendency to shed the occasional greebly here and there, and has to be washed on its own, not even with other dark-colored clothes, so as not to risk a plague of dark blue greeblies. Not for me the mistake of those guys back in Cambridge.)

And it seems that people have invented this noun (and the similar noun greeble), independently, many times, using the phonosemantic resources of English to craft a new word that vividly suggests the image they have in mind.

(more…)

Posted in Phonology, Sound symbolism, Words | 2 Comments »

Think of the children

August 24, 2011

It’s hard to talk about taboo vocabulary without someone explaining that children need to be protected from “adult” language, because it’s intrinsically damaging to them. So with “adult” imagery — at least (in the United States) if it’s sexual in character, but not (in the United States) if it’s violent. Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug on the subject:

For those of you outside the Americas, Cheez E. Chainsaw’s is a play on Chuck E. Cheese’s (Wikipedia page here). (Local note: The first Chuck E. Cheese’s was located right here in Santa Clara County, in San Jose, in 1977.)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Obscenity | Leave a Comment »

Censoring web images

July 19, 2010

When I linked to my recent Tom Bianchi posting (complete with photos) in a Facebook posting, Emily Rizzo pointed us to

An article in the NY Times [“Policing the Web’s Lurid Precincts”, in the Technology part of the Business Day section for today] on the low wage workers who screen and censor web images including, presumably, this photo. Not a good job to have…

Apparently the job of dealing with “despicable and illegal images” (in the words of a former MySpace security officer) is very stressful, and the company reported on here, Telecommunications On Demand, tries to help the screeners over the rough spots (decent pay and reasonable hours might be a big help — I suspect these are contract workers who don’t get benefits, either — but that would cost more than the current arrangement). Other companies actually hire counselors for the purpose.

Then again, Facebook relies on its users to turn potential offenders in.

I wonder when They will come for me.

(Note: none of this counts as censorship, within the meaning of the law in the U.S., since it’s regulated not by any sort of government entity, but by private companies — there’s that problematic private again — who are merely enforcing the rules they have obliged users to agree to.)

Posted in Censorship, Obscenity, Pornography | 1 Comment »

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