Archive for the ‘Semantics’ Category

Mess, oops or yes

April 26, 2026

(about sexual acts, especially between men, and also about excrement as an accompaniment to sexual acts, all described in vulgar street language, so this posting is massively unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest)

Two messy situations. Anal intercourse sometimes involves the mess of excrement — feces, inadverent (oops!) or intentional (yes!) — and American gay usage has supplied vocabulary for both situations (now extended to women, as well as men, as receptive partners in anal intercourse).

This is as far as I will go using distanced, technical language; from now on, I’ll use the current street language — heavy in F-bombs and S-bombs, among other things — of my sources. This isn’t just a stylistic decision; again and again, it turns out that the distanced language is imprecise and fuzzy, while the street language comes with specific and detailed reference — just as you would expect, because the distanced language is designed to avoid embarrassing reality, while the street language needs to be clear on details that affect how we conduct our everyday lives.

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How’s your old wazoo?

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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On the trail of polypersonalism

April 24, 2026

A report on an exchange between me and my UNC-Chapel Hill colleague Bruno Estigarribia about polypersonalism (explanation to follow). As it unfolded in e-mail between us, presented here with BE’s permission.

This is one in a series of reports on linguists musing about stuff and groping with ideas — showing people something of what we do professionally (before actual publication, if that eventually comes) and something of our passion for and commitment to this work.

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Prodigious macrophallicity, contemptuous noblesse

April 21, 2026

(all about man-on-man sex, described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest)

My latest gay porn DVD, ordered on sale and on spec, on the basis of Malik Delgaty’s brief appearance in a different MEN.com compendium, The Men’s Room. The DVD Malik Delgaty: The Ultimate Ride (2026), with 4 scenes: “Ass Blaster” (2020), “(The) Bootyguard” (2022), “Bussy Control” (2023), and “Hook Up Trade” (2023).

About MD, from Wikipedia:

Justin Lesage (born 29 September 2000), known professionally as Malik Delgaty, is a Canadian actor in gay pornographic films. He began working as a stripper at 18 years old in his hometown of Montreal before signing an exclusive contract with Men.com in 2020. He was the most searched-for gay pornographic actor online from 2022 to 2024 and has won three GayVN Awards.

… Delgaty identifies as straight and has stated that he “had never been attracted to men before being on camera”. He has been described as “gay-for-pay”

Justin Lesage makes his living by acting in gay porn movies as Malik Delgaty, an identity that allows him to take advantage of (1) the gifts of nature (he is a tall man — 6′ 3″ — with a big frame and a matching long — 8.5″ — and thick (cut) penis), as improved by gym workouts to achieve (2) an impressive bodybuilder’s heavy musculature, these physical advantages allied with (3) the ability to maintain a hard-on unflaggingly through extended reverential blow jobs and ass-fucking.

Two themes emerge. One is the celebration of penis size, what I’ve called macrophallicism; the other is a version of contemptuous noblesse oblige, coming for MD along with his attitude to being gay for pay (g4p).

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The sno cone

April 18, 2026

Yesterday’s (4./17) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon shows two snowmen conferring:


Left Snowman reassures Right Snowman that the frozen confection that they are eating in a cone (“fruit-flavored crushed ice” (NOAD)) is not in fact snow — that would smack of, ick, cannibalism — but instead sno, a substance that merely resembles snow (Wayno’s title for the cartoon is Faux Cone); it’s just a sno cone / sno-cone (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

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Over-sensitive ambiguity alarms

April 17, 2026

As I regularly point out on this blog: if you look for it, ambiguity is everywhere; almost any expression can be understood in multiple ways, especially if you’re willing to entertain preposterous or unlikely ideas. So if you had a device that detects every possible ambiguity, it would be ringing forever and driving everyone crazy.

People typically fail to notice most of the possibilities, and then disregard the unlikely ones they do entertain (there’s evidence that most people hearing the word straw entertain, for a fleeting moment, both the interpretations ‘dried stalk of grain’ and ‘hollow tube for sucking a drink’ — even in The straw was mixed with hay and The straw was fabricated from plastic). So most ambiguity lies beneath the level of consciousness.

But some people have become accustomed to listening to and looking for details of language use — it’s one of the things they do — and so are inclined to have over-sensitive ambiguity alarms. Their ambiguity alarms are as a kind of occupational hazard. I am such a person, by profession. I have had to learn to suppress commentary on much of what I notice, because the details aren’t important for most people, though occasionally I’ll cite something that entertains me.

My friend Tim Evanson is also such a person, and since he’s a prodigious writer on Facebook, we get to see his ambiguity alarm in action. On 4/13, he citex a headline from Crain’s Cleveland Business:

CFO [is] named for Akron’s Trailhead Foundation (call this CCB)

And then quipped:

So, I have an etiquette question: Do we refer to her as “Ms. Trailhead”? Or as “Ms. Akron Trailhead”?

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Focusing on form rather than content

April 15, 2026

In today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro, a bank teller focuses on how quaint it is that a bank robber has written his demand on paper (the way they did it in old movies), while disregarding the pressing threat of the robber’s gun:


(1) A quibbling triumph of details of form over the real threat of content (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

Faced with dreadful, uncontrollable situations, people sometimes take to fretting about some minor issue that is more easily remedied.

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human urinal

April 8, 2026

(a brief note about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

The hybrid. From “The Human Urinal” episode of MEN.com’s The Men’s Room DVD (the first scene (of 5) on my recently arrived copy of the 2/26 DVD:

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Easter cressheads

April 6, 2026

A Jacquie Lawson digital greeting card from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell (who appears frequently on this blog) for Easter, featuring garden flowers, cresshead eggs (eggshells with human faces drawn on them and with green plants — cresses especially — sprouting from them, like hair), and, eventually, large amiable rabbits (not shown below). A penultimate shot of the developing scene:


(#1) A festival of spring flowers and cressheads

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Notes on Fijian

March 10, 2026

My main helper these days has lived and worked in the US for many years, but he’s a native of Fiji. I call him Isaac in my postings, but his actual personal name is the Fijian version of the name, Aisake, and the syntax of his native language Fijian turns out to have lots of characteristics that are a surprise to, say, speakers of English. So I offer you some notes on the language, building on the material in the Wikipedia article on the language.

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