Archive for the ‘Signs and symbols’ Category
August 31, 2022
🐅 🐅 🐅 (three tigers for the last day of the month, ultimate August) In search — not for the first time — of an attractive image of Apollo Resplendens, I fixed on this guy, who’s only roughly one-quarter Apollo and (for my Sacred Harp purposes in the search) regrettably lacks a musical instrument:
(#1) Apollo, Mercury, Eros, and Mars (well, at least these) folded together in Richard de Chazal’s homoerotic conceptualization of the Zodiacal sign Virgo (late August through late September — like, right now), the province of people who are intelligent, analytical, and attentive to detail, but also practical and commonsensical
Apollo’s male beauty surmounted by rays of sunlight, the messenger Mercury’s wings, Eros’s wings and heart, the bellicose Mars’s bandolier and metal armguards (on his left, topman, arm). But no musicality.
Why do I care about the musicality of my Apollo figures? In my 8/29 posting “Sacred Harp numerology for my birthday”, I report on a Sunday (8/28) Sacred Harp singing in which I produced
the strongest, most sonorous singing I’ve managed in years. Utterly surprising, and totally fabulous. … Weep not for me, my friends — for a little while yesterday I was Apollo Resplendens.
I’ll get back to de Chazal in a while. First, musical Apollo and Apollo Resplendens, as represented in artworks of various kinds.
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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Male art, My life, Myths, Signs and symbols, Singing | Leave a Comment »
August 30, 2022
Today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange strip is a play on specific American tv commercials (with some gentle old-age mockery folded in), so will be baffling to any reader who doesn’t recognize the Kool-Aid Man mascot or know the wall-breaking “Oh Yeah!” tv ads featuring KAM:
(#1) There is, however, a hint to the reader in the “So not kool” (with kool instead of cool) in the title panel; note also the generational disparity reinforced by the GenX so there (see my 11/14/11 posting “GenX so“)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Context, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Mascots, Technical and ordinary language, Understanding comics, Variation | 1 Comment »
August 18, 2022
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, requiring a boatload of popcultural knowledge to understand:
(#1) The easy part: these are three anthropomorphic peanuts, M, M, F from left to right, and they are sitting at a bar, with drinks in front of them (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Somehow the meeting of these three exemplifies the N1 + N2 compound N wingnut / wing-nut / wing nut (which has 4 senses in NOAD, plus a bunch more you can imagine). But how?
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, Language of sex, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Mascots, Masculinity, Metaphor, Metonymy, Portmanteaus, Signs and symbols, Snowclonelet composites, Understanding comics | 4 Comments »
August 16, 2022
(Well, yes, about — among other things — men’s genitals and the beauty of Black bodies, some of it in plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Joy of the Penis: A Study in Chocolate. A stunningly designed Daily Jock ad that came in my e-mail today: a Self-Regard composition, showing a man contemplating his penis with a gaze downward. Not gravely (as with the examples collected in my 11/18/21 posting “Helgi Narcissus (again)”), but with joy, pleasure, delight (his smile made me smile reflexively in response). Also, unlike my earlier examples, he’s a handsome Black man with luminously brown skin. The whole thing is a loving study in brown tones — charcoal, chocolate, leather, golden brown — and amiable masculinity (with his penis and testicles neatly, but not obtrusively, outlined in his charcoal longline trunks):
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Posted in Color, Language and food, Masculinity, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Race and ethnicity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
August 10, 2022
(Warning: the posting quickly descends into various kinds of vulgar, unsavory slang.)
From Kyle Wohlmut (from Twitter) on Facebook this morning, with the comment “good morning fuckers’:
(#1) A set of three plastic kitchen scoops, in a package designed to hang on a supermarket display hook; note the notch at the top of the package, for slipping over the hook; the back of the package has the name of the item in four languages, from four countries, the countries identified by flags (in tiny, muddy, b&w images), and as you go down the list, the referents of the names — names evidently supplied by some translation software — drift rapidly away from a kitchen scoop and get raunchier and raunchier: ‘scraping, scratching’, figurative ‘son of a bitch’ (literally ‘son of a whore’), figurative ‘fucker’ (referring to a contemptible or stupid person; to any man, to a guy; or to some unspecified object)
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Posted in Flags, Italian, Metaphor, Portuguese, Slang, Spanish, Taboo language and slurs, Technology | 1 Comment »
July 29, 2022
O pickle, my love / What a beautiful pickle you are!
Blame it on Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy on Twitter), who took us down to the pickle plant in Santa Barbara on 7/18, citing these 5 delights, with their label descriptions:
Unbeetables (pickled beets with unbeatable heat) – pun on unbeatable
Carriots of Fire (pickled carrots to light your torch) – punning allusion to the film Chariots of Fire
¡Ay Cukarambas! (dill-icious spicy dill pickle spears) – complex portmanteau of the American Spanish exclamation ¡ay caramba! and the noun cuke ‘cucumber’
Asparagusto (pickled asparagus with a kick) – portmanteau of asparagus and gusto
Bread & Buddhas (semi-sweet bread & butter pickles) – pun on bread and butter (pickles)
(#1)
Pickles are automatically phallicity territory, and the Pacific Pickle Works in Santa Barbara CA (website here) doesn’t shy away from their penis potential, augmenting it by references to phallic carrots, asparagus spears, and unpickled cucumbers. If you have the eye for it, we all live in Penis Town.
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Posted in Alliteration, Double entendres, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language play, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Poetry, Portmanteaus, Puns, Rhyme, Slogans, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
July 25, 2022
(Obviously not to everyone’s taste: consider the title and #1 below.)
This morning’s genital surprise from Daily Jocks, the Alpha Swim Trunk for the alpha dog, the big dog on the beach:
(#1) [ad copy:] ALPHA SWIM TRUNK: Available in 3 colours [black, white, blue]. Like a little more coverage but still want to show off your assets? The Alpha Swim Trunk [from Elia beachwear] has you covered.
Obviously enhanced somehow, but nowhere I could find on the DJ site is there any information about how the Elia company achieves its codpiece swim trunks. Way past moose-knuckling and into massive hood-ornament territory.
I find codpieces entertaining, because they’re so earnestly blatant: pure display, giving no hint as to the size of the equipment within, in fact hinting that the codpiece is entirely compensatory. That huge bulge in #1 doesn’t look life a gigantic penis, it looks like a big pillow. Obviously, what it needs is some metal spikes, as singer Adam Lambert projects here:
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Phallicity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
July 15, 2022
(Symbolic allusions to men’s raunchy bits, so not to everyone’s taste.)
Poolside image in a Daily Jocks sale ad in this morning’s mail, in which three men hawk Elia beachwear in gayboy-themed patterns:
(#1) Paros swim briefs, left to right: Rainbow Cloud, Ice Cream Pop (symbolic penises), Donut Sky (symbolic anal rings)
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Posted in Facial expressions, Language and food, Language and plants, Phallicity, Underwear | 2 Comments »
July 9, 2022
(Some indirect and asterisked reference to man-on-man sex, but, hey, it’s from the Associated Press.)
Or: Love among the mobsters. In some hot news:
Chicago (AP wire story) — An odd chapter in American mobsterdom came to an end in a hail of bullets yesterday as thugs of the Buonanotte crime family gunned down Pasquale “Patsy” Baloney, the famously vicious soldato for — and long-time secret lover of — capo Carlo “Charlie” Ravioli of the Bastardo family, who died of a massive heart attack only two months ago.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Beheading, Count & mass, Etymology, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Idioms, Language and ethnicity, Language and food, Language of sex, Masculinity, Metaphor, Phallicity, Puns, Taboo language and slurs, Vaginality | 1 Comment »
June 27, 2022
Today’s Zippy strip is a triple riff on masspop culture — on bowling as recreation, on the Googie style of architecture, and on Polynesian-stye “Tiki” culture (architecture, food and drink, and entertainment) — enlivened by our Pinhead’s fascination with words (and the images they call up), here with: bowl, Java, lane, cocktail, alley, ball. Cocktail, with its combination of sexual associations (plus penumbral associations with mai tais and other Polynesian-associated drinks), gets a panel all to itself, so setting the tone for interpreting the rest:
(#1) As usual, the setting is taken from real life; those are drawings of Java Lanes in Long Beach CA (3800 E. Pacific Coast Highway) — but a Java Lanes from the past, since the place was demolished in 2004, almost 20 years ago, to be turned into condos
The historical setting, first from the bowling point of view, then from the architectural and Tiki-culture point of view:
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Posted in Architecture, Art, Language and food, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras, Metaphor, Phallicity, Pop culture, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
