Archive for the ‘Social life’ Category
March 20, 2018
(Underwear guys, gay male culture, lots of pink, but nothing pointedly carnal. Use your judgment.)
The spur is yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for a Marco Marco pink sequin jock-thong, here in two views, with my caption poem:
(#1) Perfectionist in pink sequin
(#2) Patrick’s pouch
Patrick dreamed he
Pranced at the Pansy Party in
Nothing but his
Pink sequin ballcap, his
Pink leather harness, and his
Pink sequin jock-thong
Still shopping for the
Perfect
Pink sequin pumps
(more…)
Posted in Captions, Clothing, Color, Fashion, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and gesture, Language in advertising, Language play, Movies and tv, Music, Social life, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
April 12, 2017
Yesterday’s Dilbert takes us into a dark world of language, the Jargon Matrix:
(#1)
The Matrix, but with jargon from the world of technology businesses.
(more…)
Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Jargon, Movies and tv, Pidgins and creoles, Slang, Social life, Technical and ordinary language, Usage, Usage advice | 1 Comment »
March 15, 2017
In the NYT Book Review on 3/5/1 7, under the heading “Walk on By” — subtitle (in print) “A tribute to the pleasures of aimless urban exploration, female style”, (on-line) “A Celebration of Women’s Pleasure in Wandering a City” — a review by Diane Johnson of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).
(#1)
The cover art captures well Elkin’s reconfiguring the identity of the flâneur, for nearly 200 years the exclusive property of men, as a female identity, the flâneuse. Still urban and modern and primarily European in outlook, but now available to women (of independent spirit).
(more…)
Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Language and the sexes, Social life | Leave a Comment »
November 6, 2016
Today’s Bizarro, with a play on the slogan “If you see something, say something”, plus the opposition of PRS see and PST saw, plus the homophony of PST saw (of SEE) and BSE/PRS saw (of SAW), plus the idiomatic name see-saw / seesaw (aka teeter-totter):
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
From Piraro on his site:
Sometime after 9/11 (the infamously tragic one, not the one two months ago) the New York City Metropolitan Transit Agency (the folks that run the buses and subways) started a public safety campaign urging citizens to report suspicious behavior with the slogan, “If you see something, say something”. The campaign was later adopted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and used nationally. A longtime Bizarro Jazz Pickle [presumably Imad Libbus] suggested turning the phrase to what is displayed on the sign above. It made me chuckle, so I turned it into this cartoon. As a tip of the hat to the contributor, I named the sawmill after him.
(more…)
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Race and ethnicity, Social life | Leave a Comment »
October 28, 2016
Emoji(s) are hot news these days. In the NYT yesterday, “Look Who’s Smiley Now: MoMA Acquires Original Emoji” by Amanda Hess. And just a bit earlier, two cartoons linking emoji to hieroglyphics, one by Cameron Harvey, the other by a cartoonist I haven’t identified. And before that, an article about emoji scholars, including our local specialist, Tyler Schnoebelen.
(more…)
Posted in Language technology, Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols, Social life, Social media, Terminology, Writing systems | Leave a Comment »
March 29, 2016
Today’s Zippy takes place in the Brunswick Diner in Brunswick ME, with a side trip to bowling balls; meanwhile, the Pinheads and the Roundheads each regard the other (somewhat surreptitiously) as exotic creatures:
(#1)
Lots of stuff about names to come, taking us from Brunswick ME to Brunswick stew with a lot of stops in between.
(more…)
Posted in Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Social life | Leave a Comment »
March 29, 2016
Passed on recently on Facebook, this Wondermark cartoon from 6/25/15, “Throw Back the Dead Man’s Coin” (#1135), with two of David Malki’s top-hatted characters who are deeply contemptuous of their social inferiors (as evidenced in other strips), one of whom is given (as here) to arguing for the sake of argument:

This strip introduced the Earthworm Bucket metaphor that was then the basis for a series of four strips (#1136-9) that I posted about here in “Disruptive conversation” of 7/8/15, about (among other things) the troll of arguing for the sake of argument.
(Cartoonist David Malki has given names to his recurring characters — like the black-hatted asshole in this strip — but I don’t know this one’s name.)
Meanwhile, the strip gives some freshness to the figure labored metaphor.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Social life | Leave a Comment »
March 13, 2016
On the heels of my posting on the “Ivy League shirt” and its complex associations with class, status, masculinity, and sexuality, I finally got to a thought-provoking piece by Troy Patterson in last Sunday’s NYT Magazine: “The Politics of the Hoodie”, beginning:
On a recent night, shopping online for a light jacket or a cotton sweater — some kind of outerwear to guard my body against a springlike breeze — I clicked on the ‘‘new arrivals’’ page of the website of a popular retailer and encountered, unexpectedly, another instance of the complex oddity of race. Here, projecting catalog-model cordiality in the sterile space of an off-white backdrop, was a young black man in a hoodie.
On the street, a black guy in a hoodie is just another of the many millions of men and boys dressed in the practical gear of an easygoing era. Or he should be. This is less an analysis than a wish. The electric charge of the isolated image — which provokes a flinch away from thought, a desire to evade the issue by moving on to check the sizing guide — attests to a consciousness of the hoodie’s recent history of peculiar reception. In a cardigan or a crew neck, this model is just another model. In the hoodie, he is a folk demon and a scapegoat, a political symbol and a moving target, and the system of signs that weighs this upon him does not make special distinctions for an Italian cashmere hoodie timelessly designed in heather gray.
(more…)
Posted in Clothing, Social life | 2 Comments »