(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’
(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).
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)
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”?
(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:
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
A standard notice from the Instacart home-delivery service about a grocery order in progress from the Safeway supermarket:
You’ve still got time to shop
Add items until your shopper checks out
The intent is to convey the oldest intransitive phrasal verb check out: you can add items until your shopper has completed their search for items, informed the service of this, and left the store — 1b in the OED list below. But there are three other readings for check out, and the one that came to my twisted mind first was 4c ‘to die’. Evoking images of the fatal grocery order, which will never get delivered because the shopper dropped dead. (Presumably, the 4c reading had recently come by me in some other context, so it was somehow salient to me; my imagination is not normally so dark.)
From Ben Yagoda on Facebook today (2/19):
[about] today’s Philadelphia Inquirer investigation of Philly Managing Director Adam “No Show Jones” Thiel, who was away from the office for nearly five months last year, including time in the military reserve and (presumably) running his consulting firm, from which he reported income of more than $300,000. (That’s in addition to his city salary of $316,000.)
… The Inquirer article … shows continued morphing of the verb don from meaning ‘put on’ (don we now our gay apparel) to meaning ‘wear’. The newspaper reports: “Ahead of a snowstorm in January 2024, Thiel stood with [Mayor] Parker during a news conference about preparations. He donned a suit while snowflakes fell, and he reassured the city that the administration was ready for the service disruptions that bad weather can bring”.
For those of us who still hew to the old meaning, that’s quite a visual image.
Today’s Pearls Before Swine, in which Rat lives up to his name:
The crucial point: take you to lunch in the context of birthday greetings to Goat — in this context, clearly an instance of the phrasal idiom I’ll label take someone to (‘host someone at (an event), treat someone to (an event)’), and so understood by Goat (and, I think, by all readers of this strip); but then, in a kind of lexicographic bait and switch, Rat maintains that he meant only the caused-motion verb take (‘convey something to (an event at) some place’) and takes no responsibility for paying for the occasion
Then, in an appendix to this main discussion, I expose my bafflement at the treatment of the phrasal idiom take someone to in dictionaries: I can’t find one that lists it (while treat someone to is well covered).
In e-mail from Tony Velasquez on 11/8:
your 11/7 blog post about category errors and the potential for making jokes with them … reminded me of something I’m reading, How God Becomes Real, by Tanya Luhrmann …, who argues that knowing … that a god exists uses a different ontological attitude than knowing … that a table exists. She also points out that this attitude toward the spiritual has a lot of affinity with the sort of ontological attitude taken in play. It’s interesting to me to think that the attitude toward category errors you take that leads you to create jokes is opposed to a very different attitude to what could be called the category error, on Luhrmann’s thinking, that spiritual beings are real in the same sense that tables are real — an attitude that, instead of leading to play or jokes, often leads to violence and war.
