Archive for the ‘Vaginality’ Category
June 17, 2026
(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest)
Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26:
(#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our overlord Grabpussy now), through two different renditions of the song “Happy Birthday”: in 1962, in a potent haze of female sexual desire and sexual desirability (by Marilyn Monroe, in as close to naked as she should get while being in principle fully and elaborately clothed), but in this week’s cartoon, by a muscular machine of male aggression (who doesn’t look at all ready to deliver an adoring serenade to this particular President)
And now: backstory, tons of backstory.
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Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Understanding comics, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
May 22, 2026
Yesterday, in my posting “Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience”, a Zippy strip in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme. And there we have the two-strip set-up for today’s discussion:
(#1) [The 5/21/26] strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
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Posted in Address terms, Art, Books, Count & Mass, Insults, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Phallicity, Pop culture, Pragmatics, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
May 21, 2026
The crucial moment of today’s (5/21) Zippy strip, in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It’s hard to know where to start with this — and then it turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme.
(#1) Today’s strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
Just to get the two strips on display, for discussion to come. My l life has been overfull, but almost entirely in wonderful ways, and that’s something else for me to talk about.
Posted in Academic life, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, My life, Phallicity, Pop culture, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
August 19, 2025
In human beings, the mouth is the only bodypart that comes equipped with teeth. Well, there are fables of the fearsome vagina dentata and even — top men, beware! — of the occasional anus dentatus. Now the wonderful world of prehistoric nature brings us a penis dentatus. Or so we learn from the latest WIRED.
From WIRED Science, “An Ancient Penis Worm With Rings of Sharp Teeth Has Been Discovered in the Grand Canyon: The 500-million-year-old fossil, containing a species named in honor of the krayt dragons in Star Wars, is a much larger ancestor of phallic marine worms that can be found on the seabed today” by Marta Abba on 8/19/25:
Penis worms are marine creatures with a distinctly phallic appearance. There are more than 20 known species living across the world’s oceans today, as well as a number of extinct ones, like this new discovery. The researcher who made the find was searching for fossils in the Grand Canyon and named the species Kraytdraco spectatus in honor of the huge burrowing krayt dragons that appear in the Star Wars universe. Details of the discovery were published in the journal Science Advances.
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Posted in Compounds, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, Phallicity, Semantics of compounds, Subsectivity, Vaginality | 6 Comments »
June 21, 2025
An occasional poem (in free verse) for my friend Sharon on her recent birthday, wrapped up in the calendar, the female body, and plants and their sexual symbolisms, with photos. The poem first, then remarks on its form, then a bit of background information.
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Posted in Art, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language of sex, Names, Phallicity, Poetry, Signs and symbols, Taxonomic vs. common, Tongue twisters, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
May 25, 2025
(A good bit that’s totally unsuitable, in subject matter and language, for kids and the sexually modest)
This posting started out on 5/21 as two separate postings, each about extraordinary size, about a thing that caused viewers (me included, in each case) to marvel at its size.
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Posted in Art, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language of sex, Mathematics, My life, Phallicity, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
July 25, 2024
Nelson Minar writing on Facebook on 7/19 alludes to the controversial oysters vs. snails bath scene in the 1960 movie Spartacus:
Facebook has now figured out that I prefer snails to oysters so it is serving me ads featuring improbable men’s butts instead of improbable women’s butts. It hasn’t figured me out on the daddy / twink axis yet though.
I was derailed for a moment by a vision of a rock band called Improbable Butts. And, entertained by NM’s report that he’s a snail guy, derailed for a longer period by this vision of a notably phallic rainbow snail:
(#1) From the Craiyon site, an AI image generated from the prompt “A whimsical rainbow-colored snail with a trail of sparkling slime”
But now to Spartacus, after which I can return to snails as food and the verb eat.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Rainbow, Vaginality | 1 Comment »
May 9, 2024
An astounding story of linguistics in the public eye that begins with Beyoncé’s name being added to the new edition of the Larousse dictionary, an event that so impressed the BBC that on 5/2 they approached the distinguished German linguist Martin Haspelmath to comment on it, a request that MH found utterly bewildering (as did pretty much everyone who knows MH and his work — his meticulous scholarship — and Queen Bey and her work — her extraordinary voice and her presentation of herself as a flaming-hot sexual being). In fact, the more you know, the weirder it gets.
Eventually, as a genuine éminence grise (I was born in 1940, MH in 1963, and QB in 1981, so we’re dealing with three generations here), I undertook to recount some of my experience in being interviewed by the media; I’ll re-play this below. But first, an enormous amount of background.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the media, Linguists, Music, Taboo language and slurs, Vaginality | 1 Comment »
October 16, 2022
(Gets right into gay men’s sexual parts, fore and aft, and man-on-man sexual acts, using street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
… or like cherry, vanilla, peach, or pumpkin spice. These are the Tasty Hole flavored body scrubs, formulated to make your hole tasty for the guy who’ll be rimming you.
(Just for the record: I hate flavored condoms. And flavored lubes. And flavored douches, which is the territory we’re moving into here. Unless the flavor is something like Male Sex Sweat. As for cherry flavoring, I hate it in cough drops and syrups and all that stuff, so I’m certainly not going to get it up for licking cherry scrub out of my trick’s hole. Your tastes might differ, of course. But you should know ahead of time that I’m inclined to mock the basic idea of Tasty Hole products.)
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Posted in Double entendres, Emoji, Language and food, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Smell, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
October 14, 2022
(There will be discussion of penises and vaginas, some of it using street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Having discovered and posted about a vintage photograph of three young men displaying their swimmer’s bodies (which I bought and mounted on a bookend, to make a free-standing portable photo display), I was led by Etsy to other sources of somewhat similar photographs, in particular the trove of photographic male art offered by The Male Image Art Shop (dba TheMaleImageArtShop), among which this photo caught my eye:
(#1) “Dmitry and Matteo”, as advertised on-line: the more Slavic-looking bodybuilder type on the left is presumably Dmitry, and the more Mediterranean-looking swimmer type on the right Matteo; their gazes are fixed on us, the viewers, with no expression; Dmitry has a friendly, or perhaps a proprietary, arm on Matteo’s shoulder
Other than this, we know nothing. But we struggle to extract a story that it’s telling us, some story about the relationship between the two men (and possibly about why they’re posing for us), so we ask: when was this photo taken? where are they? why are they naked? what are their lives like? what does that arm on the shoulder mean? is this photo a slice of these men’s lives, or are the men random male models posed to create a puzzle for us?
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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Language and the body, Male art, Music, My life, Myths, Phallicity, Photography, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
