Archive for the ‘Social interactions’ Category

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Advantages

August 4, 2025

A brief follow-up to my 7/31 posting “Of money, class, and prejudice”, where I told a story about an acquaintance, Johnny, from early in my life, who was blessed with privilege, family money, and social connections, and turned out to be, unsuspectedly, a reflexive anti-Semite, revealing himself while he was dissing me and my family (“they might as well be Jews”). My friend Bill (from summer camp in childhood, then from Princeton, and then from the summer of 1961, when I stayed in his family’s house) served as a kind of counterbalance in this tale, as someone blessed with privilege, family money, and social connections who has been a good friend to me and also has devoted a big slice of his life working doggedly against poverty, urban decline, and racial injustice, just because he thinks these things need fixing and he can do something to help).

At this point there’s a posting to be written on the nature of friendship, involving as it does a recognition, on both sides, of significant disparities between the two of you, which each of you then respect by working around them with as little comment as possible (adjustments often made without conscious reflection), in exchange for enjoying the good qualities the other person brings to the relationship.

In e-mail Bill and I have been looking at these disparities, at how we dealt with them long ago and how we come at them now. Back then, he was somewhat uncomfortable with his position of privilege, family money, and social connection, but is now untroubled by these things, understanding that, as I said to him:

in large part, these are things that just come to you, and the question is what you’ll do with them

and that he had in fact put these advantages to good use throughout his life. Indeed, one of our first exchanges had to be cut short because he was off to demonstrate in the local Good Trouble National Day of Action (honoring John Lewis) — at the age of 85 (Bill is 6 months older than I am, and obviously vigorous in a way I am not).

And then I riffed some on advantages:

privilege, family money, and social connections, along with other advantages on this (seriously incomplete) list (some of them guy-specific):

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Posted in Friendship, My life, Social class, Social interactions, Social life | Leave a Comment »

May I take your coat?

February 7, 2025

A Sandra Boynton turkey cartoon from 1980, showing a  (polite) offer framed as a request in the form of a question, using the formula May I VP?:


(#1) The exchange — with the offer made by a turkey who appears to be an attendant at a women’s checkroom (see the window in the background, with women’s dresses on hangers in the room behind the window) — follows the polite service script (involving an attendant and a customer, female in this case) in the first two panels, then runs off the rails in the third panel, where an ambiguity in the verb take rears up; the turkey assumes ownership of the coat and walks off with it as their own, leaving a nonplussed coatless customer

Three things here: the turkeys (who are a long-standing thing for Sandra Boynton); the polite service script (which incorporates conventionalized versions of some very indirect speech acts); and the ambiguity of take (which provides a surprise shift from the sense appropriate to the service script to an outrageous and dumbfounding larcenous sense).

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Posted in Allusion, Books, Cartoonists, Jokes, Language and animals, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Politeness, Pragmatics, Semantics, Social interactions, Speech acts | 1 Comment »

The etiquette lesson

February 3, 2025

Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Planet strip from 1/27/25:


Pyle’s beings on an alien planet cope with the sociocultural world of this one with their views framed in a variety of English that lacks the usual terms, so they concoct fresh ones (slicer for knife, stabber for fork, scooper for spoon, ingest for eat); in this strip, the subject is the education of the young in the etiquette of dining, and it comes with a meta-lesson

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Social interactions, Social life, Sociocultural conventions, Words and things | Leave a Comment »

Pengrooms on parade

July 13, 2024

A surprise from my tiny family this morning, as my grandchild Opal presented me with two gifts: the children’s picture book The Pengrooms by Paul Castle (Paul Castle Studio, 2022), together with an adorable plushie toy of Pringle the Pengroom — Pringle, who is grooms with Finn (both sporting rainbow bow ties, in case you missed the same-sex theme). The cover of the book, showing the couple atop a wedding cake, with the publisher’s blurb:


(#1) Follow Pringle and Finn, two penguins with big hearts, as they deliver wedding cakes to their friends in the animal kingdom. Each cake tells a story, and each [same-sex] wedding offers a challenge that Pringle and Finn must face together. The Pengrooms is an enduring tale about love, diversity, and the importance of working as a team.

Pringle is larger than Finn — couples differ in many ways — but they’re equal partners as a team. The Pringle plushie:


(#2) Pringle, with a really big bow tie

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Posted in Books, Effeminacy, Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Penguins, Rainbow, Social interactions, Sociocultural Roles, Toys | Leave a Comment »

The gay handshake

May 11, 2024

(It’s about men going down on men, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

A subtopic extracted from a posting (in preparation) on Stanley Stellar’s career in male photography (previous posting on this blog: on 5/8 in “Stanley Stellar’s couch”), during which he has amassed a trove of tens of thousands of photos, almost all set in NYC (and is still at it). One part of his work is devoted to depicting the beauty of the male body; for this he solicits men to pose for him (that’s why his e-mail address is on his website). These men are of various sexualities.

The remainder of his work he thinks of photographing the gay community:

— chronicling Pride parades (in all their complexity)

— showing street life in gay neighborhoods and at locations of gay sociability — both places populated by an assortment of lgbt+ people, plus some others

— and recording the places of cruising and tricking for men who have sex with men: what I’ve called the subterranean world of sex between men in public

This subterranean world: cruising spots in public parks, the famous trucks in NYC’s West Village back in the day, gay baths and sex clubs, t-rooms (mensrooms repurposed for sex between men), and so on — including Stellar’s special province, the West Side piers in NYC. All places where sex between men (especially cocksucking, which is quick and easy, and requires no special preparation or clean-up, so can be smoothly managed pretty much anywhere) is available in spaces that are in some sense public and are open to other like-minded men but are carefully concealed from outsiders (hence, subterranean).

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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and society, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography, Social interactions | Leave a Comment »

Dinos in bed

January 16, 2024

Now that I have the three Dinos books (Dinosaur Therapy, Dinosaur Philosophy, Dinosaur Friendship), I’ve found further poignant Dino strips about what I called deep friendship in my 1/8 posting “The best bits of me”. Deep friendship is also known as a kind of love: philia, the love that friends have for one another (as distinguished from eros, romantic or sexual love). That has brought me to strips in which two of the Dino characters are attached erotically as well as philically — notably, this delightful “big bed” strip from 2022, involving the two characters the creators refer to as red and blue (called Brn and Blu in my earlier posting):


(#1) Bed space is nice, but the embrace of your lover is even nicer

The creators of the comic have gone to some trouble not to gender the two characters; they differ in color, but otherwise they’re identical in appearance. This means that #1 can be — though it doesn’t have to be — understood as showing same-sex eros. With this remarkable result, as reported by the creators on Twitter (now called X) on 6/16/22:

this comic was too much for Instagram and they deleted it

Consequently, the strip didn’t come up in my earlier net searches, which turned out to depend on Instagram; I didn’t discover it until I got my copy of Dinosaur Friendship. I am offended.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Social interactions | 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.

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

Annals of home upkeep: again, the plumber

July 20, 2023

Two chapters in this story. One from 7/13, the other from yesterday, 7/19.

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Posted in My life, Social class, Social interactions | Leave a Comment »

A Levinstein street hustler

July 17, 2023

(Focused on stud hustlers, with one really racy but not X-rated photo, and text that manages to talk about the male genitals and man-on-man sex entirely in decorous language. But still, it’s about stud hustlers, so not to everyone’s taste.)

Encountered through a Pinterest posting, this photo of a young street hustler from a 2010 exhibition of Leon Levinstein’s urban photography:


(#1) Street Scene: Young Man Leaning against Shopfront Window, from 1972

Now, about the exhibition, and then about this hustler and his presentation of himself.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Photography, Social interactions | 3 Comments »

The grocery order

August 17, 2021

A report from my grandchild Opal a few weeks ago, about one of their adventures as a customer service employee at a Redwood City Safeway supermarket / grocery store. In this event, they observed as another employee coped with a male customer who had come with a small but somewhat eccentric shopping list from his wife (who he had on the phone) and needed help in finding the items. (I’m telling the story from memory and no doubt have gotten some of the details wrong, and have embroidered on some of the others; an experienced story-teller always reserves the right to improve on their tales.)

First, some soap. Bar soap. Lavender bar soap. Possibly it had to be some specific brand. I’ve picked a very earnest lavender bar soap to fill this slot.

Then, Vaseline. The original petroleum jelly — once from Chesebrough, now from Unilever, still available.

Then a third item I’ll put off. It’s the clincher.

As it turned out, the store had no lavender bar soap, though stores very close to it carried some. And then, somewhat surprisingly to me, they had no Vaseline either, though neighboring drugstores did. Well, for a Safeway it’s not very big, and it’s in a shopping center with lots of well-stocked specialty shops, so it’s inclined to focus on, you know, groceries. Anyway, she wanted all three together: the order was coherent, serving a single purpose, not a random assortment of household items the woman needed (cat fd, loaf pumpernickel, tampons, grn chartreuse — that sort of thing).

Stop for a moment to reflect: what might unite the lavender bar soap and the Vaseline? (My friend and helper Kim got it right off, called it out, even before I got to item #3.)

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Posted in Language and the body, Social interactions, Stories | 6 Comments »

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