Archive for the ‘Slang’ Category

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The SIR shirt

April 30, 2026

(plenty of references to a wide rage of sexual practices, mostly between men (though not in street language), so dubious for kids and not for the sexually modest)

A e-mail ad today for a new t-shirt from the Peachy Kings shop: the SIR mesh football jersey ($40), with this pitch:

Yes SIR… we’ve got the top for you! Our new SIR mesh jersey will let everyone know who’s the boss! This top will get you all the attention this summer with its slinky sleeves, peek-a-boo mesh and slight-crop.

SIR now joins PK’s existing t-shirt labels GOOD BOY, PORN STAR, STUD, and TRASH, but with a sociolinguistic twist: sir is primarily an address term; unlike the count nouns boy, star, and stud, and the mass noun trash, it has virtually no uses as a referential common noun. In man-on-man sex, it’s used by a subordinate addressing a superordinate: a bottom to his top, a Boy to his Daddy, a sub(missive) to a dom(inant), a (sexual) slave to his master. I am Sir is used in bdsm contexts, but I am a sir ‘I am a top / Daddy / dom / master’ is decidedly odd.

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Posted in Address terms, Clothing, Context, Emoji, Figurative language, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Signs and symbols, Slang | Leave a Comment »

By their remnants you shall know them

November 29, 2025

It’s penultimate November and the day after Black Friday, and the leftovers from Thanksgiving — my leftovers, being quirkily Korean, are surely not much like yours, but I have them and they are wonderful — will live again in other meals for several more days. And familiar old tv shows will be re-run as a background of pleasant memories.

Today’s re-runs are from the early days of the American police-procedural tv series NCIS. This morning, in the S4 E1 program “Shalom” (from 9/19/06), came a moment described in the episode summary as:

Tony remarks that Sacks is a self-centered, egotistical jackhole

You don’t need to know who Tony and Sacks are, because my interest in the summary is entirely in its notable final word, boldfaced above. A way of calling someone a jackass and an asshole without using a dirty word. The ass is silent. Twice. Only the respectable remnants of the insults are left over.

Now, jackhole isn’t a fresh discovery, even on this blog — though 2006 is 10 years earlier than the cite that set off an earlier posting of mine, “jockhole”, from 9/28/16 (which makes today’s posting “jockhole 2”). Return with me now to that posting.

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Posted in Holidays, Insults, Lexicography, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

A seminar on raunchy play

September 23, 2025

(entertaining, but totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

The seminar was called to order on 9/21 on Facebook by Michael Thomas, who introduced the key background element, the internet fridge. The participants were three gay men, long-time friends (our shared backgrounds and the relaxed, playful atmosphere are important here): speakers Michael Thomas and me, with Michael’s husband Aric Olnes in a non-speaking role. From the transcript (somewhat edited):

— MT: We [MT and AO] hooked our fridge up to the internet the other day. Here’s a question for the ages: do fridges watch porn while the doors are shut?

— AZ: But of course. And then they fall asleep and dream of abusing electric sheep. And you thought that was condensation on the fridge walls, didn’t you?

— MT > AZ: fridge spunk. just scrape it off for your coffee in the morning.

— AZ > MT: Absolutely. The best jizz there is.

There’s an enormous amount of stuff packed into this — some from the widespread sexual culture of modern America or from popular culture but also some from gay male sexual culture. I will now do some unpacking.

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Porn, Rhyme, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »

rollsuck, verb and noun

June 4, 2025

Yesterday’s Strange Planet comic strip by Nathan W. Pyle introduces the delightful verb / noun rollsuck ‘to vacuum’ / ‘vacuum cleaner’ (on Pyle’s strange planet, which has our customs but not our vocabulary):


The verb / noun as in: I am rollsucking the foot fabric ‘I am vacuuming the rug’

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Posted in Ambiguity, Innovations, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Slang | 3 Comments »

Elegantized insults

January 29, 2025

elegantized insult: a replacement for an insulting word or phrase that’s notably more elegant than the replaced item, by using material from either the specialized or technical Greco-Latin stratum of English vocabulary or its very formal registers, for the purpose of humor, either pointed mockery (amplifying the insult) or droll playfulness (entertaining the audience).

Two examples conveying ‘without courage’. An example of the first type (and conveying mockery) came to me a few days ago in e-mail: anorchídic as a replacement for the insult ball-less. Then an example of the second type (and conveying jocularity): lacking intestinal fortitude for the insult gutless. I’ll go through the examples in some detail, and then riff some on sophisticated insults, in various senses of sophisticated.

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Posted in Euphemism, Figurative language, Humor, Insults, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Slang, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »

favoris

October 21, 2024

A fallout from my 10/17 posting “An underwater Psychiatrist cartoon” (“all about the noun favorite: an implicit superlative, denoting a top-ranking element in some comparison set”), this e-mail from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell this morning:

the word favoris in French, as you probably know, means ‘sideburns’ and I can’t imagine why

Bonnie, who’s had a long career as a teacher of French, tends to assume that my command of that language is vastly greater than it actually is — a kindly person would say that my knowledge of French is spotty — but in this case, yes, I had a dim recollection of this odd fact, mostly because favoris ‘sideburns’ got borrowed into (British) English, where it enjoyed a brief fashion in the 19th century. Summarized from OED (1972) under the noun favourite, with a colorful cite from Benjamin Disraeli (the British novelist and Prime Minister):

noun favori ‘sideburn’ (usually in plural); 3 19th-century British examples (Disraeli from 1831: His beard, his mustachios, his whiskers, his favoris.) Etymology: a borrowing from French.

So it’s into French that we must go.

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Posted in Art, French, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Slang | 2 Comments »

This idiom has had the radish

September 25, 2024

In e-mail on 9/24 from Masayoshi Yamada, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Shimane University (author of, inter alia: A Dictionary of Trade Names and A Dictionary of English Taboo and Euphemism), substantially edited:

Recently, I happened to read the newspaper comic strip Zits; on September 23 and 24, the main character Jeremy uses the expression “I had the radish”. One of the few dictionaries which defines it:

have had the radish ‘to be no longer functional or useful; to be dead or about to perish’. Local to the state of Vermont. Primarily heard in US. (Farlex Dictionary of Idioms, 2024) (Free Dictionary link)

However, I don’t have any clue to its etymology: why radish? And is it so local to Vermont? I have no idea which language source the Farlex Dictionary is based on. [AZ: It cites the Free Dictionary, which aggregates information from many sources, so that’s not especially helpful.]

I pointed out to MY that in the strip, Jeremy decides to just invent (make up) some expression, to see if he can get it accepted. And picks had the radish. Presumably in the belief that no one had ever used it as an idiom. The first three strips (in strips to come, Jeremy eventually concedes that his idiom has had the radish):

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Posted in Catchphrases, Dialects, Formulaic language, Idioms, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Slang | 6 Comments »

JCL for Hump Day

September 18, 2024

In recognition of Wednesday as Hump Day, I offer you (from today’s Pinterest mailing) a brief notice of some hump-worthy (verb hump: … 3 [with object] vulgar slang have sex with (NOAD)) young men in a vintage ad by J.C. Leyendecker (who appeared most recently on this blog in my 9/2 posting “Leyendecker Labor Day”):

A JCL ad for Ivory Soap, set in an athletic homosocial space, the locker room showers (note the male buttocks, a recurrent object of JCL’s artistic — and presumably also personal — engagement).

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of checking-out going on in that shower room. No doubt dwelling on those “muscles … in perfect trim” and the “sweating skin” that has been cleansed “under the rushing water”.

 

 

Posted in Art, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Male art, Masculinity, Slang | Leave a Comment »

Cadbury’s puds

September 6, 2024

On Facebook today, an astonished observation by Martyn Cornell:

It’s early September — must be time for selling Christmas confectionery in the supermarkets of Britain …

Providing us with this store display for Christmas versions of Cadbury’s Puds:


The original Cadbury Pud — a brand name —  is a Cadbury milk chocolate bar with a truffle centre, hazelnut pieces, and crunchy puffed rice pieces

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Posted in Abbreviation, Books, Dialects, Holidays, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Variation | Leave a Comment »

The coming duodecfest

July 15, 2024

Not pocalypse, but fest / A day on which I’m blest: September 6th is the coming AMZ duodecfest, the celebration of my 84th birthday, 84 being the 7th — and therefore lucky — duodecade (a duodecade is a dozen years, the duodecimal counterpart of the decade in the decimal system).  I’m posting now about my associations with 84, to get that stuff out of my head, so that 8 weeks from now I can just lie back and let the occasion wash over me.

So: first thing, my lucky duodecade. A notion that bubbled up from my mathematical past, along with things like triangular numbers, the Fibonacci sequence, repeating decimals, the infinity of primes, transfinite numbers, and all that good stuff.

Then, second thing, the 84 Lumber Company and the Pennsylvania town of Eighty Four, which leads me to the phallicity of lumber, logs, and planks; if there’s a phallus or phallic act somewhere in a topic, I’ll find it. (I continue to hope that someone has used 84 like 69, to name a sexual act — he 84ed like a crazed mink.)

Finally, Helene Hanff’s delightful 1970 book 84, Charing Cross Road, which takes me to life histories (in this case, of two people) and to rambles through books, both old friends and fresh discoveries (which is what those two people engage in, in transatlantic correspondence). Two more themes from my writing.

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Posted in Books, Holidays, Homosexuality, Mathematics, My life, Names, Phallicity, Placenames, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »

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