Archive for the ‘Slang’ Category

« Older Entries

The same great classic rock

April 8, 2024

☀️ 🌑 for Solar Eclipse Day, Sisyphus and drive-time DJs intersect in a Venn diagram, where they generate a wonderful even-handed pun:


(#1) The hinge is the ambiguous NP great classic rock; what Sisyphus and drive-time DJs share — what’s in the area in the diagram that represents the intersection of the categories in the two circles — is that they’re people who bring you the same great classic rock every night (but in two different senses of the great classic rock)

We understand what the categories are in a Venn diagram from the labels on the intersecting circles and on the areas of their intersection, which are meant to be informative (and clear in their reference). But of course the labels are expressions in some language, which means that ambiguous expressions can be exploited for a joke. As in #1.

(#1 came to me on Facebook from from pun enthusiast Susan Fischer, the syntactician and psycholinguist specializing in sign languages; the ultimate source is the vox + stix website, on which see below)

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Philosophy, Puns, Riddles, Signs and symbols, Slang, Words and things | 4 Comments »

The headline writer’s dream story

March 21, 2024

Yesterday’s news from East Sussex (the old original Sussex, in southern England), a Sussex News story (by Jo Wadsworth) that kicks off with this juicy summary sentence:

A handyman who masturbated over a tenant’s knickers has been acquitted of criminal damage. 

The story is pretty much unavoidably raunchy, given the nature of the offense; nobody writes stuff like commit an obscene act these days. The reporter used the technical and punchier masturbated in the intro, I’d imagine because it was compact, but then opted for the euphemistic pleasured himself in the full story, which continues:

Simon Lawrence, 55, had been called to fix a faulty washing machine when he entered Joanna Hatton’s bedroom at the cottage she rented with her partner Thomas Jones.

But he didn’t realise the couple had installed a motion sensor camera there to watch their cat.

The couple were driving to Somerset for Christmas when Joanna got an alert on her phone that the camera had been activated on 19 December, 2022.

She watched in horror as Lawrence laid out her underwear on the bed and began pleasuring himself.

The reporter must have yearned to use the British slang wanked, which is vulgar but what ordinary people say in the UK. But you can’t talk like that in a respectable newspaper (though the tabloids can go pretty far).

But there would be room to veer towards vulgarity in the head; in fact, this is a dream story for an alert headline writer, who while casting about for alternatives to masturbated, to knickers (which is kind of giggly slang but not vulgar, and which doesn’t have to get into the head), and to be acquitted (which is legalese), might hit on the possibility for a somewhat rude pun on ‘masturbate’ vs. ‘be acquitted ‘, via the phrasal verb get off.

Or, of course, a headline writer might go for get off rather than be acquitted just because it’s a bit shorter (writing heads is sometimes like solving a devilishly complicated puzzle), in which case they could come up with the actual Sussex News headline in all innocence (until the laughter rolled in):

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Headlines, Language and the law, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

JKZ on a short snorter

March 9, 2024

AMaZing Mail Department, from yesterday: this object:


(#1) A short snorter whose signers include John K. Zwicky (across the very right edge of George Washington’s face); JKZ, of Coalinga CA, is a familiar — as well as familial — character on this blog

#1 came in surprise e-mail yesterday from James A. Downey, who’s been researching the names on the short snorter and so was led to this blog. So, two things: JKZ and short snorters.

(more…)

Posted in Slang, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

Exceptional vocabulary comprehension for her age

March 5, 2024

On the other hand, exceptional vocabulary comprehension is not yet within the grasp of her exceptional vocabulary comprehension; Ruthie, in this One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed recently, does indeed know a lot of words, just not some of the 4- and 5-syllable killer items:

But you can bet that if we had the next few panels, we would see Ruthie quizzing her mother on those 2-dollar words — though by now they’re probably 10-dollar words — and incorporating them into her exceptional vocabulary, so that she can show them off.

From GDoS on two-dollar words:

(US) any language considered ‘difficult’ or ‘intellectual’, most likely by a speaker who claims to despise such locutions [with cites from 1929 on]

 

Posted in Child language, Linguistics in the comics, Slang, Vocabulary | Leave a Comment »

Hot Days of Christmas: geese and swans

January 11, 2024

(A certain amount of penis-talk, so not to everyone’s taste.)

My digital-artist friend continues their tour through the 12 days of Christmas in the carol, with the daily gifts embellished by hot hunks chosen to give me a moment of delighted arousal; the artist knows my ways.

They mail out greeting-card prints of their compositions to me on the day depicted in them, and when USPS manages the task of getting the cards from one American coast to the other with dispatch, they arrive in my mail 4 days later. (The performance of USPS is, to put it very kindly, erratic; yesterday was 1/10, and the cards from days 8-10, for 1/1-3, had not yet arrived.)

In any case, the cards from days 6 (geese a-laying, 12/31) and 7 (swans a-swimming, 1/1), which did arrive in 4 days, represent a shift in the artist’s approach to their subjects: instead of showing a hot hunk together with the gifts of the day (as in the first 5 days), the gift birds are treated as manifested in Hot Hunks: 6 feathered hunks who are clearly hot lays; and a putative 7-man swim team, wearing tight long johns to accentuate their figurative swan necks (their down-curved penises). Exponential explosion of hotness ensues.

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Music, Slang, Underwear | 2 Comments »

The power of a tiny prick

December 28, 2023

(Vast amounts of penis-talk, and frank discussion of sexual acts, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Appearing in the last few days, a spot tv commercial for Roman — or Ro, or ro — generic ED (erectile dysfunction) medication. It goes by very fast, but involves the administration of some medication with a needle, accompanied by a breathless voiceover, approximately:

Who would have thought that a little tiny prick could be so powerful?

I’m sure about little tiny prick / tiny little prick; in the sociosexual culture that surrounds me (in which big dicks are highly valued), my dick (which is on the lower end of normal) is pegged, sometimes contemptuously, as small (I’m happy with it, and I have some fans, but I’m understandably a bit sensitive on this point); and, in addition, like most men of my advanced age, I’m erectilely dysfunctional — hardonless — and have been for about 20 years, something I’m not particularly sensitive about (since during this time all my sex has been solitary, and there’s been a hell of a lot of it — one to three times a day, prompted by my fantasies, my dick gets a bit firm, my balls get tight, and I shoot, whoopee, like Billy the Kid) — and I wouldn’t want to add a powerful drug to the roughly 20 medications I’m taking now (but I appreciate that other guys might be anxious to get it up to please their partners and ashamed when they can’t, so ED medication is a wonderful thing at the personal level, and also to be applauded as a genuine social good).

But the commercial, with its obtrusive crude pun — prick, vulgar slang for ‘penis’ and for ‘contemptible man’ — on prick ‘a piercing, puncture’, what about the commercial?

The ads for Roman products that I’d experienced up to this one had all been serious, comforting, and reassuring, offering treatments for premature ejaculation, hair loss, and more, as well as for hardonlessness. But this one had to be a joke, one that Adweek hadn’t yet gotten around to reporting on.

Well, it wouldn’t be Roman’s first ED joke ad. There’s their 2017 number “Thinly Veiled Metaphors”. It’s a hoot.

(more…)

Posted in Language and music, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, My life, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »

Kissing the proverbial you know what

December 20, 2023

From the Raw Story site, “‘The stain is on you’: Ex-RNC chair slams GOP for silence on [GP]’s call for blood purity” by Matthew Chapman on 12/18/23 (in this story [GP] refers to (Helmet) Grabpussy), beginning:

The Republican Party at large owns former President [GP]’s increasing descent into fascistic and racist rhetoric, former GOP chair Michael Steele told MSNBC’s Katie Phang [sitting in for the host of “The Beat With Ari Melber”] on Monday.

This comes as [GP] stated at a rally that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” language that has clear roots in Nazi Germany — and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) defended it furiously when cornered by reporters.

“Michael, it is not just [GP] that’s doing the bad thing, it’s the enablers that are doing the bad thing,” said Phang. “We all know why they are kissing the proverbial you know what. And, when you have somebody like Marc Short [Republican operative, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence] saying ‘I doubt that [GP] has read Mein Kampf,’ I don’t disagree with him, I don’t think he has the capacity to read, but it is not the point. These people enable [GP] to be able to say this with zero consequence.”

In the crucial quote, boldfaced above, Phang was choosing between two idioms, both of the form kiss + object, both expressing submission to someone: the elevated idiom (with the C[ount] Sg object noun ring):

kiss someone’s ring or: kiss the ring

and the vulgar slang idiom (with the M[ass] Sg object noun ass):

kiss someone’s ass or: kiss ass

In any case, Phang chose to indicate that she was using a formulaic expression, via the formula-signaling adjective proverbial modifying the head noun of the object. She said kiss the proverbial X and not kiss proverbial X, and that would seem to indicate that she was using the elevated idiom (with ring), which comes with a definite article, and not the vulgar idiom (with ass), which is anarthrous: kiss the ring, kiss the proverbial ring; kiss ass, kiss proverbial ass.

But we can feel pretty sure that she was aiming for the vulgar idiom, because she also used a scheme for avoiding taboo words (like ass ‘buttocks’ or ‘anus’): the filler you know what replacing the taboo item (I’m not going to kiss (his) you know what, He told me to stick it up my you know what).

The result is that at first glance she just looks confused, mixing features of the two competitors for a submission idiom. But it turns out that the syntax of formula-signaling proverbial is more complex than I had thought, and she was saying exactly what she intended.

(more…)

Posted in Figurative language, Formulaic language, Idioms, Lexical semantics, Possession, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Naked men in Santa caps

December 4, 2023

(Rampant nakedness, juicy description of man-on-man sex, definitely not for kids or the sexually modest)

A piece of sheer raunchy frivolity. Two naked lads, a hunky bottom and a twink top, both wearing Santa caps, meet in a 12/1 mailer ad for a scene from Falcon’s gay porn flick Cum All Ye Faithful. Bottom Beau Butler has a package, a box, to offer top Trevor Brooks, who has pulled his briefs down to show what he’s got available to put into Butler’s package:

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Costumes, Euphemism, Gay porn, Hats, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Male art, Metaphor, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Slutty T-Rex

November 30, 2023

🐅 🐅 tiger tiger for ultimate November, also St. Andrew’s Day (Scotland’s national day); meanwhile, I bring you two dinosaurs trading ideas about popularity and sluttiness

A pair of Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics strips, coming in succession on 11/10 and 11/13, in which T-Rex rambles on to his buddy Utahraptor about a fairly well-known paradoxical-sounding phenomenon in social networks, the friendship paradox. Actually, it applies more generally, and I’ll talk you through the (apparent) paradox in the general case. Yes, I’ll get to the comics, and to the way T-Rex uses the adjective slutty, but first let’s talk about your lunch partners.

The symmetric-relation paradox. Brace yourself for some mathematician-talk, but don’t despair: I’ll work up a concrete example (about you and your lunch partners) along the way.

Consider a a set N (for example, the set of people in a social network) and a symmetric relation R between members of N; R might be being friends with, say, or having gone to grade school with or — my concrete example — having had lunch with. Then for any member m of N (like you, for definiteness), define m’s R:N-cohort to be the set of members of N that m bears R to (like, the set of all your lunch partners), and m’s R:N-index to be the size of m’s R:N-cohort (like, how many lunch partners you’d had). Then it can be shown that, on average, the R:N-indices of members of m’s R:N-cohort are greater than m’s R:N-index — like, on average, the number of lunch partners your lunch partners have had is greater than the number of lunch partners you have had. Yes, it sounds paradoxical. But it’s provably so.

Now, listen up: what the symmetric-relation paradox does not say is that (all) your lunch partners have more lunch partners than you do. That would be genuinely paradoxical. All it says is that the (arithmetic) mean of their lunch-partner figures is higher than yours, which is a great deal less thrilling (though it still has a whiff of the perverse about it). So let’s look at the special case, the friendship paradox, where N is a social network and R is the being friends with relation (which is where T-Rex starts in his Dinosaur Comics ramble, before he goes on to the having had sex with relation (parallel to the having had lunch with relation) and to sluttiness, having had many sexual (rather than lunch) partners.

(more…)

Posted in Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Mathematics, Metaphor, Slang, Social interactions, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs, Usage, Variation | 2 Comments »

Fur stoles, furry boots, and f*cking like minks

November 26, 2023

(Note this posting’s title — it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

It’s all about fucking in fur: two scenes from the MEN.com gay porn flick Norse Fuckers in which men mate wildly and promiscuously, like the proverbial fur-bearing carnivores, while wearing fluffy fur stoles (which they discard as impediments when they dig into their pronging) and delightful furry boots (which stay on, even while the men, otherwise stark naked, are fucking their mates).

There will be pictures.

(more…)

Posted in Accents, Clothing, Costumes, Gay porn, Idioms, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Myths, Shoes, Slang | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries