I’ve been sleeping most of my days away, not happily, so not advancing on raunchy appetizer boards and the like. Thanks to Hana Filip, reporting on Google Translate, for today’s Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting.
Today on Facebook, from Hana:
Discussion (somewhat edited):
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It’s Midsummer Eve, the day before St. John’s Day and Midsummer Night, on which we can dream about reveling with the fairies. High summer, fiercely hot — I’ve been poleaxed by the heat for several days and trying to write this before today’s shimmer fells me once again — and Stanford (the edge of which is, like, six blocks from the Palo Alto house I’m writing this in) is in day 3 of a PG&E power outage crisis (my electric power is supplied by Palo Alto Utilities, which has so far coped with the heat demands and the occasional small fire, though it all seems distressingly tenuous to me).
Stanford has shut down everything it could and told staff and faculty to stay away if at all possible. But there are all those students in university housing, which is without power for cooling, for lighting, for charging electronic equipment, for opening (keycard-controlled) doors. For them, the university has provided places — spaces or areas — that have emergency power sources and can provide temporary relief in the form of cooling, lighting, and charging. What to call such places?
Stanford’s solution was expressions using the noun respite — respite space, respite area, area of respite — which were new turns of phrase for me, though they probably have a history I’m ignorant of. They have the advantage of being general (cooling station, which has been used in other public heat-crisis emergencies, covers only one of the students’ needs), but not so general that it’s uninformative (as, say, emergency area would be), and not, at least yet, associated specifically with the excretion of bodily wastes (as expressions with the nouns rest, comfort, and relief have become). (Not that excretion is irrelevant in a power outage; the lighting supplied in respite areas lets people see what they’re doing in bathrooms / toilets there, and that’s a very good thing. Meanwhile, back at the dark stifling dorms: flashlights.)
Today’s morning name: South Cackalacky, mildly derogatory slang for South Carolina (suggesting crudeness, rusticity, and remoteness: the boondocks). And Cackalacky, for the Carolinas taken together, with the same associations. (Sorry, Charleston, Charlotte, and Research Triangle.)
Then, of course, such associations can be inverted, to connote local pride, down-hominess, and the like. As has happened in this case.
(Sex toys and all they bring with them, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Today, a leek (for St. David’s Day, March 1st), but yesterday (the intercalary day February 29th) a leap.
The mail arrives and wow! (you exclaim) there’s a Leap Day flash sale at the Guy Gear Store, just for today! You have visions of well-designed equipment for hunting, fishing, and camping; cool bikes; hot athletic shoes; t-shirts for teams, bands, and plain ol’ aggression; tools Craftsman never dreamed of; electronics to rule the world of the future; and all that good guy stuff.
And then you examine the ad in detail:
(#1) Quick! Identify the three sale items in the ad; the model’s shapely buttocks are not actually on offer
Probaby not your father’s idea of guy gear.
(Sex toys and all they bring with them, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Today, a leek (for St. David’s Day, March 1st), but yesterday (the intercalary day February 29th) a leap.
The mail arrives and wow! (you exclaim) there’s a Leap Day flash sale at the Guy Gear Store, just for today! You have visions of well-designed equipment for hunting, fishing, and camping; cool bikes; hot athletic shoes; t-shirts for teams, bands, and plain ol’ aggression; tools Craftsman never dreamed of; electronics to rule the world of the future; and all that good guy stuff.
And then you examine the ad in detail:
(#1) Quick! Identify the three sale items in the ad; the model’s shapely buttocks are not actually on offer
Probaby not your father’s idea of guy gear.
The associations of the word pain are mostly strongly negative; it’s the opposite of pleasure, and pain is normally to be avoided. But there are contexts in which pain is embraced, for its psychological values — as in BDSM practices. For instance, in man-man sex, as noted in an AZBlogX posting of mine (of 2/25/13) on “Fetish/kink porn”:
An overarching theme [as in the gay porn flick Hoodies] is Taking It: experiencing, and enjoying, pain, humiliation, and abuse … An exhibition of parodoxical masculinity, showing how much of a man you are by showing how much you can take from other men. But also Submission, an abandonment of will to another man, recognizing him as superior to you.
Pain, suitably limited, also stimulates the release of hormones that can be experienced as intense pleasure. In addition, the Way of Pain in BDSM is highly ritualized, designed to work for both participants, which opens BDSM to being understood as a kind of ceremony or therapy.
That brings me to Leo Forte (treated in an 7/28/13 AZBlogX posting here), a star on the gay BDSM circuit who sometimes bills himself as “The Prince of Pain”, because of his appetite for torment (and other forms of kink).
Yes, there are words — compound nouns — specifically for this meaning, but unless you’re into gay porn, you might not be familiar with man pussy, boy pussy, man cunt, boy cunt, man hole, or boy hole. These are terms strongly associated with gay porn (fiction, scripts of videos, and descriptions of videos) but not much used by gay men in everyday life; they are part of a specialized porn register, akin to the specialized registers in some other domains, for instance, restaurant menus (with vocabulary items like the adjective tasty that rarely occur outside the menu context).
Today’s Dilbert:
Alice gives a witheringly sarcastic response to the pointy-headed boss, supplying a definition of collaborate that unpacks some of the connotations of the word for her. The boss then puts her down by maintaining that she is uncooperative (she ought to “play well with others” by collaborating with Larry), and she counters by pulling out the gender assumptions in the boss’s observation (women are supposed to be cooperative and collaborative, men are supposed to be assertive and confident).
