From Ben Zimmer, two instances of ass-avoidance in the news.
Archive for the ‘Slang’ Category
kick-ass news
September 7, 2013cherry
August 30, 2013Some time ago on Facebook, several posters ended up chatting about the vocabulary for talking about a gay man’s anal virginity. The term cherry plays a central role in this vocabulary domain — taken over, like some other sexual vocabulary, from reference to women and their sexuality.
Porn prosody
August 29, 2013Another installment of material on the (gay) porn register, following up on this posting, where I looked at some lexical features, saying about
man pussy, boy pussy, man cunt, boy cunt, man hole, [and] boy hole. These are terms strongly associated with gay porn (fiction, scripts of videos, and descriptions of videos) but not much used by gay men in everyday life; they are part of a specialized porn register, akin to the specialized registers in some other domains
Today there’s some more lexical stuff, but mostly it’s about the prosody of some writing about porn; like some other advertising copy, there’s some tendency for it to fall into metrically regular patterns.
The text is the copy on the front cover of the Dream World (1994) DVD:
clean someone’s clock
August 22, 2013In today’s Pearls Before Swine, Pig continues to struggle with idioms:
Michael Quinion was on the case back in 2007. Both clean ‘thrash’ and clock ‘face’ are involved.
on the fritz
August 21, 2013A while back, when Ned Deily was visiting me, my iTunes produced an album of Joshua Bell playing Fritz Kreisler violin music, and Ned joked about my computer being on the fritz — and we both wondered about the source of the slang idiom. It turns out that it’s not very old — the OED‘s first cite is from 1903 — but is nevertheless of unknown origin, and the etymologies that come first to mind are very unlikely.
Groovin’ on the Glocken
July 30, 2013Today’s Zippy has Zerbina totally in the groove:
A series of slangy panels, culminating in an air glockenspiel (a percussion counterpart of the air guitar, quite possibly a simulation of playing an electric glockenspiel). A glockenspiel gets into it because so many people think the word glockenspiel is silly.
be toast
July 29, 2013From Gail Collins’s NYT op-ed column on the 18th, “The Cheney in Waiting”:
So what do you think Wyoming wants? Somebody younger? [Liz] Cheney is 46, and apparently planning on suggesting — in the most discreet way possible — that [incumbent Senator Mike] Enzi is toast at 69. Since the average age of the current Senate is around 62, however, he is barely brown around the edges.
Collins is taking the slang idiom be toast and playing with it — treating being toast as the end-stage or completion of the process of doom or (metaphorical) death, so that she can refer to earlier stages of the process as analogous to earlier stages of toasting. Cute.
‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ’
July 26, 2013Yes, there are words — compound nouns — specifically for this meaning, but unless you’re into gay porn, you might not be familiar with man pussy, boy pussy, man cunt, boy cunt, man hole, or boy hole. These are terms strongly associated with gay porn (fiction, scripts of videos, and descriptions of videos) but not much used by gay men in everyday life; they are part of a specialized porn register, akin to the specialized registers in some other domains, for instance, restaurant menus (with vocabulary items like the adjective tasty that rarely occur outside the menu context).
SRS: the music video
July 23, 2013Now out on YouTube, the Steam Room Stories music video:
(#1)
Let’s go relax
In the steam room,
Get back and hang with all the bros
Full of dude, bro, etc., plus towel play and four-part harmony.
More sexual slang
July 19, 2013(Warning: high sexual content.)
Continuing my series of postings on sexual practices and slang terms for them, I turn today to cum play of various kinds, in particular snowballing and gokkun (illustrated in #1 and #2, respectively, in this posting on AZBlogX). The first practice was familiar to me, though I didn’t know it had a slang name, other than the transparent name cum sharing; and the second I vaguely recalled having heard about, but under the transparent name cum drinking.