Archive for the ‘Slang’ Category
September 12, 2023
(some explorations in sexual slang, with some street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “down there”, on male-genital down there, with a section on locational down there in Christopher Isherwood’s title Down There on a Visit (which comes with a strongly sexual tinge) — effectively ‘being down there’. An e-mail comment from Victor Steinbok:
oddly enough, going down there doesn’t have the [AZ: oral sexual] meaning of going down
To which I replied:
Well, it can, with enough context — I can certainly construct the examples, which have going down as a constituent (with an oblique object marked with on), rather than down there as a constituent — but without such context, yes.
Of course, I’ve now gone on to supply an example, with some context supplied. And some comments on ambiguity.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Constituency, Idioms, Language of sex, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
August 22, 2023
On jerk, jerky, and jerking (off), quoting (in full) two excellent surveys of this domain: from the Grammarphobia site in 2016; from The Ringer site last month — the second of these using research by lexicographer Ben Zimmer reported on his Wall Street Journal column (which is behind a paywall).
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, Language change, Lexical semantics, Pop culture, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »
August 9, 2023
(Intimate talk about male bodies, mostly mine, in plain terms, though not so racy as to ban kids — but I will freely use the vernacular noun and verb piss, nouns dick and balls. In any case, some people will find the topic of crotch odor unsavory.)
I’d hoped to be able to post about meat dreams and crotch pong on the same day — just for the sound of the two off-color compounds together, but meat dreams took a lot longer than I’d expected (I somehow ended up in the 16th century), so crotch pong had to wait a day. So it goes.
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Posted in Alliteration, Assonance, Clothing, Compounds, Dialects, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Signs and symbols, Slang, Smell, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | 1 Comment »
June 11, 2023
Kristin Landis Lowry posted on Facebook on 6/4 about making meatballs — which she spells as meat balls — for her household, with photos of (among other things) the meatballs in a roasting pan, the browned meatballs after their time in the oven, the meatballs cooking in a saucepan with marinara sauce (from a bottle: one of the Rao’s sauces). The last of these:
(#1)
These meatballs were destined to go into sandwiches, in buns, but of course they could go on pasta or rice or some other starch, or serve as a meat dish on their own.
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Posted in Figurative language, Language and food, Movies and tv, My life, Slang | Leave a Comment »
May 29, 2023
An extremely busy photo that my Peruvian colleague Ernesto Cuba took on 5/24 inside the St. Lawrence Market in downtown Toronto. The shop in the photo is offering sausages, no preservatives — innocent enough, but EC immediately translated the sign into Spanish, got salchichas, no preservativos, and protested against the content of the slangy and figurative salchicha sin preservativo ‘penis without a condom’ (vs. the literal salchicha sin preservativo ‘sausage without a preservative’)
It was as if the sign had said, in English sausages, no prophylactics, which would instantly have allowed the English slang sausage ‘penis’ to surface. As it happens, the Spanish word for ‘preservative’ has been pressed into service as a rather technical-sounding euphemism referring to a life-preserving condom; that makes sense, but the parallel development just hasn’t happened in English, where the corresponding technical-sounding euphemism is prophylactic ‘preventive’, referring to a disease-preventing condom.
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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Metaphor, Slang, Spanish, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »
May 27, 2023
(this posting descends fairy rapidly to discussions of the male genitals, and of man-man sex, in street language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest)
From Michael Palmer on Facebook yesterday, this memic marriage of image — smiling man holding a small can of vienna sausage (tipped to suggest he’s about to drink from it — and text — snarkiness about sausage juice:
(#1) As with so much memic material, the ultimate sources of the image, of the text, and of their conjunction are all unknown
From NOAD:
compound noun Vienna sausage [AZ: sometimes vienna sausage]: a small frankfurter made of pork, beef, or veal.
Now: some notes on the disgust factor here; and then on the compound noun sausage juice ‘semen’ (based on viewing sausages — and all sorts of Würste — as phallic symbols, leading to sausage as slang for ‘penis, dick’); and on to the attested compound sausage jockey ‘male homosexual’ (imagined demurral: “No chicks for me, dude, I’m a sausage jockey”) and the entertaining potential compound sausage jockey ‘man who enjoys the rider role in Cowboy-position anal sex’.
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Posted in Figurative language, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Memes, Phallicity, Slang | Leave a Comment »
January 23, 2023
(Packed with raunch of several varieties, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
A digression from one of the topics of yesterday’s posting “Moments of rebirth” — the lunar new year yesterday, the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese calendar. Here celebrated by this homoerotic digital image created by Vadim Temkin:
(#1) My caption: Ride the Wild Rabbit!
Aside from the smiling young hunk, the image taps two springs of raunchiness: rabbits (and their fabled sexual licentiousness — fucking like bunnies, as the idiom has it) and riding (and its similarity to insertive intercourse, to fucking). So it’s all about fucking: metonymically, in the association of rabbits with prolific breeding; and metaphorically, in the resemblance of riding to intercourse.
My caption just packages the rabbit raunchiness and the riding raunchiness together in the phrase ride the rabbit, adding the wild for a whiff of unchecked abandon, the whole thing then evoking wild pony rides, as celebrated in popular song.
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and animals, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy, Music, Signs and symbols, Slang | 2 Comments »
January 3, 2023
(On the personal background, see my Zardoz posting; the posting below is one I started yesterday but was unable to finish. Hard days.)
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon shows a collection of (apparently all male, to judge from the prickly body hair) penguins putting on their (tuxedo-like) overcoats for journeying home after a winter party:
(#1) Translation between worlds: the characters are all penguins, but they are also human beings in a modern social situation
These penguin suits are overcoats (somewhat resembling tuxedos); in the classic penguin-suit cartoon, however, the suits are actual tuxedos.
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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Penguins, Slang | Leave a Comment »
December 10, 2022
Today’s very brief Not Dead Yet posting, in an interim between narcoleptic episodes (which still crowd out most of my days): letting old episodes of the sitcom Cheers run past, soothingly, in the background, I heard the horndog Sam Malone character (played by Ted Danson) exult about the possibility of making the naked pretzel with a target woman. A colorful sexual metaphor with a modest number of cites on the net.
I note in passing that naked pretzel is also a name for an unsalted pretzel, and a number of firms sell them. Something to look out for if you’re trying to restrict your intake of salt.
And then we wander into the Sex On The Beach Dunes, the rich and complex nexus between sexual expressions and the names of cocktails. Because there is, of course, a Naked Pretzel cocktail. From the Smirnoff vodka folks:
I have surely posted somewhere about watermelons (with a round opening cut into them) as objects of sexual gratification for men; there might conceivably be some association here between the ingredients of the cocktail — the melon liqueur giving it its green color — and making the naked pretzel.
Posted in Language and food, Language of sex, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Slang | Leave a Comment »
