Archive for the ‘Slang’ Category
May 29, 2023
An extremely busy photo that my Peruvian colleague Ernesto Cuba took on 5/24 inside the St. Lawrence Market in downtown Toronto. The shop in the photo is offering sausages, no preservatives — innocent enough, but EC immediately translated the sign into Spanish, got salchichas, no preservativos, and protested against the content of the slangy and figurative salchicha sin preservativo ‘penis without a condom’ (vs. the literal salchicha sin preservativo ‘sausage without a preservative’)
It was as if the sign had said, in English sausages, no prophylactics, which would instantly have allowed the English slang sausage ‘penis’ to surface. As it happens, the Spanish word for ‘preservative’ has been pressed into service as a rather technical-sounding euphemism referring to a life-preserving condom; that makes sense, but the parallel development just hasn’t happened in English, where the corresponding technical-sounding euphemism is prophylactic ‘preventive’, referring to a disease-preventing condom.
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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Metaphor, Slang, Spanish, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »
May 27, 2023
(this posting descends fairy rapidly to discussions of the male genitals, and of man-man sex, in street language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest)
From Michael Palmer on Facebook yesterday, this memic marriage of image — smiling man holding a small can of vienna sausage (tipped to suggest he’s about to drink from it — and text — snarkiness about sausage juice:
(#1) As with so much memic material, the ultimate sources of the image, of the text, and of their conjunction are all unknown
From NOAD:
compound noun Vienna sausage [AZ: sometimes vienna sausage]: a small frankfurter made of pork, beef, or veal.
Now: some notes on the disgust factor here; and then on the compound noun sausage juice ‘semen’ (based on viewing sausages — and all sorts of Würste — as phallic symbols, leading to sausage as slang for ‘penis, dick’); and on to the attested compound sausage jockey ‘male homosexual’ (imagined demurral: “No chicks for me, dude, I’m a sausage jockey”) and the entertaining potential compound sausage jockey ‘man who enjoys the rider role in Cowboy-position anal sex’.
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Posted in Figurative language, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Memes, Phallicity, Slang | Leave a Comment »
January 23, 2023
(Packed with raunch of several varieties, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
A digression from one of the topics of yesterday’s posting “Moments of rebirth” — the lunar new year yesterday, the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese calendar. Here celebrated by this homoerotic digital image created by Vadim Temkin:
(#1) My caption: Ride the Wild Rabbit!
Aside from the smiling young hunk, the image taps two springs of raunchiness: rabbits (and their fabled sexual licentiousness — fucking like bunnies, as the idiom has it) and riding (and its similarity to insertive intercourse, to fucking). So it’s all about fucking: metonymically, in the association of rabbits with prolific breeding; and metaphorically, in the resemblance of riding to intercourse.
My caption just packages the rabbit raunchiness and the riding raunchiness together in the phrase ride the rabbit, adding the wild for a whiff of unchecked abandon, the whole thing then evoking wild pony rides, as celebrated in popular song.
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and animals, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy, Music, Signs and symbols, Slang | 2 Comments »
January 3, 2023
(On the personal background, see my Zardoz posting; the posting below is one I started yesterday but was unable to finish. Hard days.)
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon shows a collection of (apparently all male, to judge from the prickly body hair) penguins putting on their (tuxedo-like) overcoats for journeying home after a winter party:
(#1) Translation between worlds: the characters are all penguins, but they are also human beings in a modern social situation
These penguin suits are overcoats (somewhat resembling tuxedos); in the classic penguin-suit cartoon, however, the suits are actual tuxedos.
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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Penguins, Slang | Leave a Comment »
December 10, 2022
Today’s very brief Not Dead Yet posting, in an interim between narcoleptic episodes (which still crowd out most of my days): letting old episodes of the sitcom Cheers run past, soothingly, in the background, I heard the horndog Sam Malone character (played by Ted Danson) exult about the possibility of making the naked pretzel with a target woman. A colorful sexual metaphor with a modest number of cites on the net.
I note in passing that naked pretzel is also a name for an unsalted pretzel, and a number of firms sell them. Something to look out for if you’re trying to restrict your intake of salt.
And then we wander into the Sex On The Beach Dunes, the rich and complex nexus between sexual expressions and the names of cocktails. Because there is, of course, a Naked Pretzel cocktail. From the Smirnoff vodka folks:
I have surely posted somewhere about watermelons (with a round opening cut into them) as objects of sexual gratification for men; there might conceivably be some association here between the ingredients of the cocktail — the melon liqueur giving it its green color — and making the naked pretzel.
Posted in Language and food, Language of sex, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Slang | Leave a Comment »
December 8, 2022
That would be “Ragtime Cowboy Joe”, in the western novelty tune from 1912 — with many variations in the wording in different performances, but all using the adjective highfalutin (in some spelling), which is why I bring it up here, as a follow-up to my 12/6 posting “highfalutin”, on that bit of characteristically American jocular slang.
My attention was drawn to highfalutin, scooting, shooting / rootin’ tootin’ RCJ by Benita Bendon Campbell, whose father danced with her to (a version of) the song when she was a small child, and who has his version firmly in her memory even now, over 75 years later. She offered to sing it for me, but now I have unearthed quite a range of recorded versions, from which I’ve selected one to subject you to.
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Posted in Music, Slang | 1 Comment »
December 6, 2022
Today’s Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, some diversion from the difficulties of daily life. I take my cue from Ann Burlingham, posting on Facebook on 12/4:
Last night I was watching Nick Cave being interviewed on the BBC when he used the word highfalutin. I looked it up to confirm my sense that that is a word Americans came up with, and it is, and it’s wonderful.
Now, you need to know, first of all, who this Nick Cave is and why it might be notable that he used the slang adjective highfalutin ‘pompous, pretentious’. Then on to the word and who uses it, with two wonderful bonuses, one supplied by OED3, the other by a winery in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.
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Posted in Art, Dialects, Slang, Sociolinguistics, Style and register | 3 Comments »
October 14, 2022
(There will be discussion of penises and vaginas, some of it using street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Having discovered and posted about a vintage photograph of three young men displaying their swimmer’s bodies (which I bought and mounted on a bookend, to make a free-standing portable photo display), I was led by Etsy to other sources of somewhat similar photographs, in particular the trove of photographic male art offered by The Male Image Art Shop (dba TheMaleImageArtShop), among which this photo caught my eye:
(#1) “Dmitry and Matteo”, as advertised on-line: the more Slavic-looking bodybuilder type on the left is presumably Dmitry, and the more Mediterranean-looking swimmer type on the right Matteo; their gazes are fixed on us, the viewers, with no expression; Dmitry has a friendly, or perhaps a proprietary, arm on Matteo’s shoulder
Other than this, we know nothing. But we struggle to extract a story that it’s telling us, some story about the relationship between the two men (and possibly about why they’re posing for us), so we ask: when was this photo taken? where are they? why are they naked? what are their lives like? what does that arm on the shoulder mean? is this photo a slice of these men’s lives, or are the men random male models posed to create a puzzle for us?
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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Language and the body, Male art, Music, My life, Myths, Phallicity, Photography, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
September 26, 2022
(Phallic preoccupations abound in this posting, sometimes in street language — I mean, look at the title above — so some readers may want to skip over it)
Passed on by a friend on Facebook yesterday, this German grocery-store snapshot plus a joking double-entendre intro in English (together making what appears to be a a fast-spreading meme):
(#1) Hähnchenschnitten Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style chicken cutlets’ from the (German) Vossko company, the name of the product including the German phrase Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ — that is, prepared like Wiener Schnitzel / Wienerschnitzel); meanwhile, the English-language intro alludes to wiener art, in the sense ‘penis art’, referring to artworks in which penises are significant elements (or, in an hugely extended sense, to any artworks in which human penises are visible) — the label wiener art involving the (mildly racy) AmE sexual slang term wiener ‘penis’
German Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ (a) leads to English Wiener art ‘Viennese art’ (b) and then to four AmE slang uses of wiener art: (c) ‘sausage / frankfurter art’; (d) ‘dachshund art’; (e) ‘penis art’; (f) ‘weenie art’. All will be illustrated below.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Double entendres, German, Language and food, Language and the body, Metaphor, Metonymy, Parodies, Parody, Phallicity, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
September 6, 2022
For Woo(l)ly Mammoth’s #82: a fresh greeting formula, a morning hummer, and a fairy woodland bouquet. To which I’m adding some carrot cake and coffee ice cream: it’s not only my birthday, it’s also National Coffee Ice Cream Day, which I’m honoring all aslant (with coffee gelato), as I do so many things. To alter a family saying (If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly): If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing eccentrically (for other occasions: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing outrageously).
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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Greetings, Holidays, Homosexuality, Humor, Language and plants, Language of sex, Mammoths, Music, My life, Penguins, Phallicity, Pragmatics, Signs and symbols, Slang | 2 Comments »
