Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
June 5, 2026
(dripping with raunchy sexual content, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Not what TSE had in mind, but peach-eating was the topic for some bros in a Facebook reel that came by me this morning. Another chapter in the great book of schemes for talking about analingus without sounding really gross. (And the topic comes up because a great many people find the act deeply pleasant to receive, and a fair number of us find it satisfying to perform, for the sense of bodily intimacy it affords, as a display of insertive dominance (for its own sake or as foreplay to fucking someone), as a offering of submissive service (for its own sake or as foreplay to getting fucked), or for some amorphous swirl of such feelings.
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Posted in Argument structure, Emoji, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Poetry, Puns, Signs and symbols, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
May 31, 2026
Hey, there, server lad,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
One alpaca full!
This Drew Dernavich cartoon in the 6/1/26 issue of the New Yorker:
A wonderfully absurd riff on the custom of restaurant servers offering freshly ground black pepper (occasionally, also freshly ground sea salt) upon the appearance of food at the table, obliging the diners to participate in a pretentious edgy ritual of condiment dispensation
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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parodies, Poetry, Pop culture | 1 Comment »
May 25, 2026
(a dip into the rhetorical organization of texts and into figurative language, but getting its raw material from gay porn and so it’s going to be entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
In the opening of Raging Stallion’s 2024 porn flick Tourist Attractions (scenes from the stream of visitors to Beau Butler’s (fantasy) rental house in Barcelona), BB explains the pleasures of the city:
I like to take in everything Barcelona has to offer: art, culture, food, cock — you know, the basics.
Thus launching this seaside D&A S&F circus with a stroke of comic bathos. From the high level of art and culture, dropping to the artful and cultivated satisfaction of an animal need and then plunging to what we think of as raw vulgar pleasure.
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Posted in Allusion, Bathos, Figurative language, Gay porn, Jokes, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Poetry, Pop culture, Porn actors | Leave a Comment »
April 24, 2026
(some vulgar slang, but (I think) tolerable by kids and the sexually modest)
Today’s (4/24) morning name, the final line of a quatrain I learned as boy lore about 1950:
How’s your ma and how’s your pa
And how’s your sister Sue?
And while we’re on the subject,
How’s your old wazoo?
(#1) The family-wazoo rhyme; I didn’t know the quantity adverbial up the wazoo at the time, so I mistakenly took wazoo to be a variant of street slang dick / cock ‘penis’
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Posted in Deixis, Figurative language, Humor, Lexical semantics, Metonymy, My life, Poetic form, Poetry, Semantics, Taboo language and slurs | 4 Comments »
March 30, 2026
Going past me yesterday morning, a tv ad for some remedy for, as I heard it, teeth stained by poppies (and other foods).
Yes, coffee. With blueberries, black tea, and red wine, a classic offender against dental whiteness. Granting that I have /a/ (in addition to /ɔ/) as an alternative accented vowel in coffee, poppies is a complex but phonologically unsurprising mishearing; coffee and poppies are in fact excellent half-rhymes / imperfect rhymes:
My morning coffee
By a field of poppies
(with two feature rhymes, both well-attested — (initial) p for k and (medial) p for f — plus a subsequence rhyme, with the final z of poppies against the absence of a final consonant in coffee; for the terminology, see my 1976 Chicago Linguistic Society paper “Well, this rock and roll has got to stop. Junior’s head is hard as a rock.”, available on-line here)
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Posted in Errors, Language and plants, Language play, Mishearings, My life, Poetry | 4 Comments »
March 9, 2026
On 3/7 (on this blog) I posted “The travails of etymology”, about the sources of some phrasal verbs meaning ‘to die’. Which elicited from Troy Anderson friendly but anxious e-mail on 3/8:
dai s’la (hello friend/cousin, in Miluk),
Your last post on Facebook makes me think you’re thinking you’re about done? I’m sad we haven’t kept the conversation going.
Know I’m here rooting for you.
(The reference to the language Miluk will get clarified eventually, when I tell you more about TA.)
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Posted in Death and dying, Etymology, Etymythology, Humor, Language and religion, Lexicography, Music, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
December 24, 2025
Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells —
Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the local iguanas can feed on them
— was his caption, the donée for a poem in trochaic tetrameter (with a couple leading unaccented syllables), the most common meter for folk poetry of all kinds in English:
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
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Posted in Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguists, Photography, Poetic form, Poetry | 2 Comments »
December 13, 2025
Today on Facebook, Hana Filip passed on a two-sentence poem in prose (an English translation from the German original):
Jan Antonin Baťa, or Bata, the genius entrepreneur who founded the Bata shoe emporium, had in his main headquarters in Zlín (Moravia, Czech Republic), an elevator in the size of a fully equipped office. While sitting in this office, he could move up and down his headquarters building and visit its different departments.
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Posted in Poetry | 2 Comments »
