Archive for the ‘Slang’ Category
July 24, 2019
(As you might guess from the title, this posting treats several English expressions of varying degrees of offensiveness, so some readers might want to avoid it.)
A message from Gadi Niram a month ago:
I can’t get past the name of this school: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/law
The Dickson Poon School of Law in the University of London
— and wondering if poon doesn’t have the meaning in BrE that it does in AmE. (And then there’s the dick in Dickson.)
Briefly, the answer is: no, the lexical item poon ‘vagina, pussy’ is largely unknown in BrE. But it is an estimable Chinese name, especially in Hong Kong. If they had known about the crude offensiveness of poon in AmE, Dickson Poon’s family might have chosen another variant of their name in English, say Pan. Or maybe not; they might have decided that it’s their family’s English name and they’re proud of it. (I will compare it to the Hindi surname often spelling Dikshit in English.)
Then there’s the question of why the University of London has anything named after Dickson Poon. That’s where I’ll start.
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Posted in Chinese, Metaphor, Metonymy, Names, Sanskrit, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
July 11, 2019
Pride Month is past, and so is the Fourth of July (US Independence Day), but my postings on these celebrations will go on for some time. Today, three images for Pride: the art of the flag; penguins at work; and the M&S sandwich.
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Posted in Academic life, Art, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language of sex, Metaphor, Parody, Penguins, Photography, Rainbow, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Technical and ordinary language | 6 Comments »
June 29, 2019
Just one day after a particularly fine Rhymes With Orange cartoon combining the Desert Island cartoon meme and the Grim Reaper meme — in my 6/27 posting “The Desert Island Reaper” — came a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with a groaner Grim Reaper pun:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
The figure of the Grim Reaper — the bringer of death — as a window-washer, removing — destroying — the grime on the windows of a high-rise building, with the blade of his scythe replaced by a window-washer’s squeegee.
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Posted in Art, Books, Clipping, Comic conventions, Eggcorns, Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Movies and tv, Puns, Slang | Leave a Comment »
May 25, 2019
(After the cartoons and the lexicography, John Rechy will take this posting into the world of mansex, in some detail and in very plain talk; that section is not for kids or the sexually modest, but I’ll warn you when it’s looming on the horizon.)
Two bison greet each other in a John Baynham cartoon with a wonderful pun:
(#1)
That’s numbers (roughly ‘amount’, but as a PL C noun) — and indeed large numbers of buffalo did once roam the plains of North America — vs. numbers referring to physical models, or simulacra, of symbols for certain abstract mathematical entities — in this case, the natural numbers. Such physical models are also familiar: think of the letters in the HOLLYWOOD sign, or the numbers on the building at 666 Fifth Ave. in NYC (with its own kind of fame as a Jared Kushner property). But people don’t walk around with, much less inside, giant versions of such models. That’s deliciously absurd.
Looking at the lexical items involved will take us deep into the lexicographic weeds and then to the secret places of mansex, starting with the dim recesses of Griffith Park in Los Angeles.
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Posted in Books, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Porn actors, Puns, Slang | Leave a Comment »
April 21, 2019
(Men’s bodies, clicks, mansex, dactyls, homowear, eggcorns, street talk, and more. Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Daily Jocks mailing of the 15th, with a studiedly homo-smouldering ad for crop tops from the fetish-wear company Barcode Berlin. Plus a foul derangement of (heavily enjambed) dactyls as a caption.
(#1)
Kiko the crop-top kid,
Impudent pussy boy,
Butch faggy target for
Amorous arrows — a
mazing for festivals,
Parties with gangbangers,
Mid-drifting kikis with
Quatrains of dactyls
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Posted in Address terms, Captions, Eggcorns, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Phallicity, Poetic form, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | 2 Comments »
April 7, 2019
(Lexicographic news for penises, but nothing more alarming than that.)
From a friend in the lgbt precinct of Facebook on the 4th:
Passed a Johnson Controls van on the way home from work. I’ve always said if you have to hire a company to control your johnson you’re in real trouble.
Remarkably, the slang johnson ‘penis’ seems not to have appeared on this blog. But first, the Johnson Controls company (which does not concern itself with penises) and the movie Bad Johnson (which is all about them).
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Posted in Language and the body, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness, Slang, Trade names | 5 Comments »
April 2, 2019
A sidebar to the Moon family history in my 3/31 posting “Moon shorts 1: the Moons”, with the extraordinary character Cosmé McMoon, who was embodied (or realized) by the pianist and composer Cosmé McMunn (using the stage name Cosmé McMoon) and, in a 2016 movie, by the actor Simon Helberg:
(#1) Cosmé McMunn/McMoon with Florence Foster Jenkins (FFJ)
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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Memory, Movies and tv, Slang | 3 Comments »
March 30, 2019
(No actual penises, but some decidedly peniform plants and lots of intimate anatomical references, sometimes in street language; urethras abound. So clearly not to everyone’s taste.)
It began with a Facebook posting by Jens Fiederer, with a photo of the Botanical Penis of Doom, from the Thailand-Secrets site:
(#1) Cheng Kam Wor: “This is a pitcher plant of the genus Nepenthes sp. The glans-like top is actually a lid for the bottom pitcher structure. A carnivorous plant like the Venus flytrap!”
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Posted in Language and animals, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language of sex, Phallicity, Slang, Sociocultural conventions, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
March 24, 2019
This week’s inspiring words on the social progress front, from Gloria Ladson-Billings, circulated on Facebook by H. Sami Alim on the 22nd:
I know that I am 4 generations out of chattel slavery, 3 generations out of sharecropping, 2 out of legalized apartheid, and I’m an endowed university professor. Not because I’m great, but because people kept on pushing the boulder up the hill.
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Posted in Compounds, Euphemism, Language and the body, Language play, Race and ethnicity, Slang, Social life | 4 Comments »
March 17, 2019
(Archive news for penises.)
Brought to me by Pinterest, a striking use of the Union Jack to clothe the model Iman and her husband David Bowie, who is sporting a major jack ‘penis”, ‘erection’ (GDoS: 1989 J. Morton Lowspeak … as in ‘I had a jack up to my eyebrows’). And a Freddy Mercury counterpart, with both the flag and the package.
So, as the UK sails away from the EU, we bid farewell to the striking tricolor British Jack that once flew over an empire and also to the strikingly engorged jacks of British flesh that once held sway over seas of music fans.
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Posted in Flags, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Music, Phallicity, Slang | Leave a Comment »
