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).
Archive for the ‘Connotation’ Category
‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ’
July 26, 2013Define “collaborate”
June 8, 2013Today’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).
a big little kitchen
June 18, 2012A follow-up to Tyler Schnoebelen’s dissertation abstract, which included a section on the use of little in conversation, this find from Megan O’Neil last July:
[from a friend, talking about the rooms in a household] a big little kitchen
meaning not ‘a room that is big for a little kitchen’, but illustrating a shift from an objective, literally diminutive, sense of little to a subjective, affective sense, indicating emotional evaluation (affection, closeness, etc.) — a shift also seen in the use of diminutive affixes in many languages.
Associations and connotations
March 11, 2011[I spent yesterday getting together a handout for my Stanford Sematics Fest paper (today):
Categories and Labels: LGBPPTQQQEIOAAAF2/SGL …
(abstract here, discussion of the giant initialism here). Here’s a section of the handout that pursues a theme from my posting “Labels: homosexual” (here) on associations and connotations of labels. (I will eventually post a link to the whole handout.)]
More synonymy
January 2, 2011It occurred to me (during fevered sleep) that it might be worth checking out {“is synonymous with quality”} and similar expressions linking a product or company name with a desirable characteristic. It’s a gold mine.
Word associations as synonymy
December 31, 2010From “Disappearing ink: Afghanistan’s sham democracy” by Matthieu Aikins, Harper’s Magazine for January 2011, p. 40:
The Anglicism “democracy,” for many Afghans, has become synonymous with unprecedented corruption, moral decay, and hypocrisy; it is another one of the plagues that the West has brought to this country.
So, for these Afghans, the word democracy has picked up (specific) negative connotations in certain sociocultural contexts. This is bad word association — [bad] [word association] , not [bad word] [association] — in fact, bad word association described by synonymous with in an extended sense.