In this posting I’m going to try to tie together several threads: a recent story about a dancer forced out of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet school for making gay porn videos on the side; the proverbial sexual activity of certain animals, in particular minks (a topic suggested by my recent posting on three fur-bearing mustelids); and the lexical semantics of the verb fuck. You can see the connections — and you can see why this posting might not be to everyone’s taste (though no images over the X line will appear in it).
Archive for the ‘Slang’ Category
Sexual lexical semantics
July 9, 2013It’s been a slice
July 4, 2013Today’s Zits:
(#1)
It’s been a slice, as a way of saying ‘it’s been good; goodbye’, was new to me. It’s in a few recent dictionaries of American slang / idioms, but not in Green’s Dictionary of Slang or (unsurprisingly) the OED; I have a citation from the late 1990s, but not (yet) anything earlier than that. And its origins are murky.
-licious sex
June 11, 2013It began with the porn flick Twinkalicious (a 5-hour compilation of scenes featuring twink sex, that is, sex between twinks). The front cover of the DVD (showing a twink sucking cock) and the back cover (a montage of twinks in heat) can be viewed in the posting “Twinkalicious porn” on AZBlogX (where such images are allowed). The word twinkalicious has two parts, the twink part (with a piece of sexuality slang) and the -licious part (related in some way to delicious). I’ll comment on both parts. But first, some other combinations of these two parts.
Crowdsourced lexicography
June 8, 2013In the NYT on May 21st, a front-page story by Leslie Kaufman, “For the Word on the Street, Courts Call Up an Online Witness”, beginning:
The wheels of justice move slowly sometimes, but not, apparently, as slowly as Webster’s New World Dictionary.
Slang has always been a challenge for the courts in cases that involve vulgar or insulting language. Conventional dictionaries lag the spoken word by design. That has lawyers and judges turning to a more fluid source of definitions: Urban Dictionary, a crowdsourced collection of slang words on the Internet.
The online site, created by a college freshman in 1999, has found itself in the thick of cases involving everything from sexual harassment to armed robbery to requests for personalized license plates, as courts look to discern meaning and intent in the modern lexicon.
Meta-Pearls
June 5, 2013Zippy the Pinhead has long played with metastrips, in which the cartoonist figures as a character or the characters talk about cartooning or both. Other strips sometimes indulge in this play: I posted about a recent Doonesbury in this vein, and Pearls Before Swine fairly often goes into this territory, with cartoonist Stefan Pastis appearing in the cartoon (as here). The current story line in Pearls goes deep into metacartooning. Yesterday’s strip:
(#1)
and today’s:
(#2)
whoopee cushion
June 4, 2013I was moved yesterday to wonder about the whoopee cushion, its history, and the various names for it. In particular, I mused that there would be no good way to predict what the thing is called in English, given a description of it; fart cushion would be the obvious candidate.
smartass
May 12, 2013An eCard:
Well, smartass isn’t directly a compound of the adjective smart ‘impertinent’ and the noun ass; instead, -ass serves here as an expressive extension of smart (as in sweet-ass ‘really sweet, big-ass ‘really big’, dumb-ass ‘really dumb’, etc.) — note He’s always asking smart-ass / dumb-ass questions — and the extended adjective was then nouned, giving an alternative to smart aleck, smartypants, and in fact the noun smarty.
Code 404
May 9, 2013Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a pun on page:
A pun of a type that juxtaposes two strikingly different contexts (here, court life in a monarchy, on the one hand, and the internet, on the other) in such a way that two different senses of an expression are both applicable.
