Archive for the ‘Style and register’ Category
February 19, 2026
From Ben Yagoda on Facebook today (2/19):
[about] today’s Philadelphia Inquirer investigation of Philly Managing Director Adam “No Show Jones” Thiel, who was away from the office for nearly five months last year, including time in the military reserve and (presumably) running his consulting firm, from which he reported income of more than $300,000. (That’s in addition to his city salary of $316,000.)
… The Inquirer article … shows continued morphing of the verb don from meaning ‘put on’ (don we now our gay apparel) to meaning ‘wear’. The newspaper reports: “Ahead of a snowstorm in January 2024, Thiel stood with [Mayor] Parker during a news conference about preparations. He donned a suit while snowflakes fell, and he reassured the city that the administration was ready for the service disruptions that bad weather can bring”.
For those of us who still hew to the old meaning, that’s quite a visual image.
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Posted in Lexical semantics, Style and register | 1 Comment »
June 17, 2025
(Consider the title; totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday, on a closed group for lgbt+ folk and their friends:
— MP relayed a posting from Gloryview Ranch, “Embrace biblical Manhood”
— SC: Yeehaw! “Biblical manhood”. Wtf is that?
— EH > SC: Seems to have a lot to do with horses and bacon. Just like in the Bible, where Jesus broke bacon with his disciples.
— AZ > EH, breaking into raunchy verse, “The Cowboy’s Plea”:
Oh! Sweet buddy broke my bacon,
Made me sizzle with his fork;
I keep my bacon hot and greasy,
Pray he’ll give me more fresh pork!
I note that “The Cowboy’s Plea” contains no taboo / vulgar lexical items, but manages to be deeply raunchy by referring indirectly to sexual or excretory bodyparts and to sexual acts, all through the miracle of metaphor (some of it lexicalized, some of it fresh, but mostly — as with the nouns fork and pork ‘penis’ and the verbs fork and pork ‘fuck’ — skittering between the two).
The central metaphor, in break someone’s bacon ‘pop / bust someone’s cherry, break someone in sexually, have sex with someone who is a virgin’, is a fresh one; it achieves some degree of offensiveness through echoes of breaking Communion bread and the friendly sharing of meals. Meanwhile the central metaphor incorporates the freshly metaphorical bacon ‘fuckhole (vagina or anus)’, elaborated on in greasy, alluding to lubes as aids in fucking.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Poetry, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »
January 29, 2025
elegantized insult: a replacement for an insulting word or phrase that’s notably more elegant than the replaced item, by using material from either the specialized or technical Greco-Latin stratum of English vocabulary or its very formal registers, for the purpose of humor, either pointed mockery (amplifying the insult) or droll playfulness (entertaining the audience).
Two examples conveying ‘without courage’. An example of the first type (and conveying mockery) came to me a few days ago in e-mail: anorchídic as a replacement for the insult ball-less. Then an example of the second type (and conveying jocularity): lacking intestinal fortitude for the insult gutless. I’ll go through the examples in some detail, and then riff some on sophisticated insults, in various senses of sophisticated.
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Posted in Euphemism, Figurative language, Humor, Insults, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Slang, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »
November 22, 2024
(Well, consider the title if this posting, which tells you that it’s going to get into some vivid descriptions of sexual parts and sexual acts — plus a photo that’s just barely WordPressable — and you’ll see that it’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; and from here on, you’re going to get the C-word raw and unconcealed, but your enthusiasm for this dirty talk will probably be diminished when it turns out that this posting is mostly about lexical semantics)
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Posted in Address terms, Context, Dialects, Gay porn, Insults, Language and the body, Language change, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Personification, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs, Variation | 6 Comments »
November 16, 2024
Wayno’s Bizarro for 11/8 — yes, I am hopelessly overwhelmed with posting material, wondering whether I’ll ever catch up; on the other hand, my health has taken a turn back to normal awful, which I’m entirely able to cope with — is a Psychiatrist strip in which the patient is said to be suffering from (in fact, cowering behind the therapeutic couch in the grips of) the fear of contractions:
Of the types of traditionally-labeled “contractions” in English, the patient here — call him NoA — seems to exhibit sensitivity specifically to just one, now known in the linguistic literature as Auxiliary Reduction, AuxRed for short (in I am > I’m, I had > I’d, and you are > you’re), though in fact Wayno sees NoA’s sensitivity as triggered by all occurrences of the punctuation mark the apostrophe, of which there are a great many types — hence Wayno’s title for this cartoon, “Punctuation Trepidation” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
Now if this is NoA’s affliction, he’s in for a world of trouble, because in modern English spelling the apostrophe is used as an abstract mark for possessive forms of nominals — singular in someone’s cat and the queen of England’s hat, plural in the boys’ bat — a visual mark accompanying the possessive S; but while the the letter S in such forms corresponds to phonological content, the apostrophe neither represents phonological content nor indicates a place where some phonological content is omitted. So, how does NoA know that /sʌm.wǝnz.kæt/ in some sense has an apostrophe in it and he should cringe in fear at it?
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Posted in Comic conventions, Language processing, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Possession, Psycholinguistics, Psychology, Singular & plural, Spelling, Style and register, Variation, Writing conventions | 1 Comment »
October 30, 2024
(Publicity for a gay porn video, entertaining in its way but absolutely off-limits for kids and the sexually modest)
🎃 🎃 🎃 three jack-o’-lanterns for penultimate October, Halloween Eve (that is, the day before the day before the day of the dead) — in my house, the day when the pussyboys go out to seek their phallic prey
Into this scene comes this morning’s e-mail from the Falcon | NakedSword Store, offering:
Hot House movie download discounts — full movies $11.95 each
With, right at the top, the crudely pun-titled video Swim Meat and its cover illustration, offering four fine pieces of swim meat, one (Johnny V’s) just barely concealed by his swimwear; plus three proudly jutting tubesteaks that I’ve had to suppress for WordPress modesty (but here you can view the uncensored cover, along with the publicity text):
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Posted in Compounds, Discourse organization, Gay porn, Holidays, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
October 13, 2024
It is my annual November pleasure to discourse some on the just-revealed winner of the AZ Award from the Linguistic Society of America; the minimal announcement from the LSA:
This award … is intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in linguistics and is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.
Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics in congratulating Robert J. Podesva on receiving this prestigious award! A Stanford Associate Professor, he researches phonetic variation and identity while actively mentoring LGBTQ+ students to promote inclusivity in academia.
Rob is the fourth awardee — preceded by Kirby Conrod for 2022, Rusty Barrett for 2023, and Lal Zimman for 2024 — and will be officially feted at the LSA’s annual meetings in January. I always provide some encomium material for the awardees on this blog, but this year is special, because Rob is an old friend; a former student of mine (his PhD dissertation committee was Penny Eckert (chair), John Rickford, and me, which is about as socioculturally diverse a committee of three as you could concoct in the academic world); and a valued colleague of mine at Stanford. So there are four reasons for me to write this posting, and I will take some liberties in digressing into personal remarks along the way.
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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Linguists, Sociolinguistics, Stanford, Style and register | Leave a Comment »
August 24, 2024
It appeared on Pinterest this morning, with no information beyond the artist’s name, Anthony Cudahy: a dreamlike sexual encounter like this one:
(#1) Like this one, but with a significant dream penis and testicle, which hog our attention; eventually, I’ll show you Full Frontal Man, but here, we’re drawn to the relationship between the somewhat anxious yellow-hued guy and the purple guy looming over him — note the subtle hand on yellow guys’s head, and then the head of another purple figure behind him, a remembered character, no doubt from another artwork, Cudahy’s or someone else’s
(I’d tell you more about this painting, but this is all I’ve got. So far the only copy of the image on the net seems to be this one on Pinterest.)
My first experience of Cudahy’s world. A quick intro from Wikipedia:
Anthony Cudahy (born [in] Florida, 1989) is an American painter. Cudahy’s approach is both figurative and abstract and takes inspiration from a breadth of source material ranging from personal photographs, movie stills, queer archival images and ephemera, and art history. Cudahy lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
… Cudahy’s paintings are often a hybrid of visual histories blending various figures from art history and queer photography into contemporary scenes such as portraiture, domestic spaces, or social sites.
Now for more detail.
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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and gender, Language and medicine, Language and plants, Male art, Music, Style and register | Leave a Comment »
June 25, 2024
Well, it’s about attachment ambiguity, in a family of memes about dogs chasing people on two-wheeled vehicles (mostly bicycles). Along the way, I’ll use this opportunity to expose some of the complexities of my blogging life.
The story begins on 6/23, with a message from Ellen Kaisse — a regular on this blog — offering me this memic wheel-dog joke that turns on an ambiguity between low and high attachment of the modifying PP on a bicycle:
(#1) Did the neighbo(u)r report that some people on a bicycle were being chased by the dog, or that the dog was on a bicycle in pursuit of some people? The human in the photo cartoon supposes the former, the dog the latter
In the human’s report, the PP is intended as a modifier of the head N people within the direct object NP of the verb chasing (low attachment (LA), which you could also think of as narrow attachment); but the dog’s response makes it clear that it understands the PP as modifying the VP are chasing people (high attachment (HA), which you could also think of as wide attachment). (There is a Page on this blog about my postings on modifier attachment, including lots of cases of potential LA vs. HA ambiguity; there’s some overall preference for LA, but how things are understood in actual usage depends very much on the plausibility in context of the two understanding.)
The text in #1 has the BrE spelling neighbour, but there are otherwise identical versions out there with the AmE spelling neighbor, plus otherwise identical versions in which the cycle in the text is a motorcycle rather than a bicycle. And then there are further variations, lots of them, on both image and text (a couple of them reproduced below).
In any case, EK cautiously added the note, “You’ve probably seen this before” — her caution the product of previous occasions on which she sent me some cool example and I told her that I’d posted an analysis of it in 2008 or 2015 or whenever. This time, I was in fact sure that I’d seen a version of #1 and had posted about it; but then I couldn’t find it on any of my blogs or in the “to blog” files on my computer or in the “to blog” images on my desktop or in my stored albums of images. Much annoyed growling.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Modifier attachment, Style and register, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »
May 17, 2024
In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, the punning portmanteau pontiff no return:
pontiff ‘the Pope’ + point of no return ‘point at which turning back is no longer possible’ = pontiff no return ‘the Pope will not return (for some time)’ in a simplified register — foreigner talk, caveman talk, Tonto talk, etc. (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns, Style and register | Leave a Comment »
