Archive for the ‘Connotation’ Category

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Guy gear

February 1, 2020

(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.

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Posted in Connotation, Language and gender, Language in advertising, Lexical semantics, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

Syntactic phrase, compound word, portmanteau

May 24, 2018

(Gay sex talk in street language: use your judgment.)

Encountered today in reports of the slang of young gay men, three words for ‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ, male sexcavity, (figurative) vagina of a man’:

munt /mʌnt/; mussy /’mUsi/, bussy /’bUsi/ (bunt /bʌnt/ is not recorded, but has probably been coined on occasion)

These are portmanteaus derived from the compound nouns man / boy + cunt / pussy, as examined in my 7/26/13 posting on expressions for the male anus viewed as a sexual organ.

Three steps in the tightness of connection between the elements participating in an expression:

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Posted in Compounds, Connotation, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Metaphor, Morphology and syntax, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

The tao of pain

July 29, 2013

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).

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Posted in Connotation, Gender and sexuality, Semantics | 1 Comment »

‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ’

July 26, 2013

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).

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Posted in Compounds, Connotation, Count & mass, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Slang, Style and register | 2 Comments »

Define “collaborate”

June 8, 2013

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).

Posted in Connotation, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics | 1 Comment »

a big little kitchen

June 18, 2012

A 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.

 

 

Posted in Connotation, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

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.)]

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Connotation, Gender and sexuality, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

More synonymy

January 2, 2011

It 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.

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Posted in Connotation, Words and things | 4 Comments »

Word associations as synonymy

December 31, 2010

From “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.

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Posted in Connotation, Language and politics, Language and sexuality, Language and society, Words and things | 1 Comment »

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