(some vulgar slang, but (I think) tolerable by kids and the sexually modest)
Today’s (4/24) morning name, the final line of a quatrain I learned as boy lore about 1950:
How’s your ma and how’s your pa
And how’s your sister Sue?
And while we’re on the subject,
How’s your old wazoo?
(#1) The family-wazoo rhyme; I didn’t know the quantity adverbial up the wazoo at the time, so I mistakenly took wazoo to be a variant of street slang dick / cock ‘penis’
A Jacquie Lawson digital greeting card from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell (who appears frequently on this blog) for Easter, featuring garden flowers, cresshead eggs (eggshells with human faces drawn on them and with green plants — cresses especially — sprouting from them, like hair), and, eventually, large amiable rabbits (not shown below). A penultimate shot of the developing scene:
(#1) A festival of spring flowers and cressheads
It’s penultimate November and the day after Black Friday, and the leftovers from Thanksgiving — my leftovers, being quirkily Korean, are surely not much like yours, but I have them and they are wonderful — will live again in other meals for several more days. And familiar old tv shows will be re-run as a background of pleasant memories.
Today’s re-runs are from the early days of the American police-procedural tv series NCIS. This morning, in the S4 E1 program “Shalom” (from 9/19/06), came a moment described in the episode summary as:
Tony remarks that Sacks is a self-centered, egotistical jackhole
You don’t need to know who Tony and Sacks are, because my interest in the summary is entirely in its notable final word, boldfaced above. A way of calling someone a jackass and an asshole without using a dirty word. The ass is silent. Twice. Only the respectable remnants of the insults are left over.
Now, jackhole isn’t a fresh discovery, even on this blog — though 2006 is 10 years earlier than the cite that set off an earlier posting of mine, “jockhole”, from 9/28/16 (which makes today’s posting “jockhole 2”). Return with me now to that posting.
The most recent Stephan Pastis Pearls Before Swine strip:
A classic NAA (non-apology apology): if you take offence, it’s your problem (in the strip: I’m sorry you were offended; ramped up: I’m sorry you’re an oversensitive ninny) (see Edwin L. Battistella’s Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology (Oxford, 2014))
From Wikipedia:
A non-apology apology, sometimes called a backhanded apology, empty apology, nonpology, or fauxpology, is a statement in the form of an apology that does not express remorse for what was done or said, or assigns fault to those ostensibly receiving the apology. It is common in politics and public relations.
Following on my 9/27/25 posting “From the annals of remarkable commercial names” (about the Chew Chew Grill / Chew Chew’s Diner in Toronto), Sim Aberson wrote on Facebook on 10/3:
— SA > AZ: While discussing commercial names, a very good Vietnamese restaurant in Miami, Phuc Yea — of course it’s pronounced fook yeh. [I omit commentary on the well-deployed SPAR (aka dangler) and the NP (topic-introducing) sentence fragment]
— AZ > SA: Oh my. No doubt intentional. Though I’ll point out that the enthusiastic intensive-modifier use of the F-word in Fuck yeah! is pretty much as low on the raunchiness scale as the F-word gets.
As it turns out, definitely intentional. And cheeky.
More from the annals of commercial names, thanks to this Facebook report from Steven Levine, on the road in Asbury Park NJ:
On the way to Ocean Grove NJ for a weekend with some friends, our culinary tour of the Jersey Shore, I passed this sign:
(#1) The Meat & More Corporation of Asbury Park: a butcher shop, noted here for its double entendre name
(entertaining, but totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
The seminar was called to order on 9/21 on Facebook by Michael Thomas, who introduced the key background element, the internet fridge. The participants were three gay men, long-time friends (our shared backgrounds and the relaxed, playful atmosphere are important here): speakers Michael Thomas and me, with Michael’s husband Aric Olnes in a non-speaking role. From the transcript (somewhat edited):
— MT: We [MT and AO] hooked our fridge up to the internet the other day. Here’s a question for the ages: do fridges watch porn while the doors are shut?
— AZ: But of course. And then they fall asleep and dream of abusing electric sheep. And you thought that was condensation on the fridge walls, didn’t you?
— MT > AZ: fridge spunk. just scrape it off for your coffee in the morning.
— AZ > MT: Absolutely. The best jizz there is.
There’s an enormous amount of stuff packed into this — some from the widespread sexual culture of modern America or from popular culture but also some from gay male sexual culture. I will now do some unpacking.
(Plain talk about male bodies and man-on-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest — though raunchification is pretty much the apex of funny for early-teen boys)
☹️ 😢 😡 sad weeping furious on the anniversary of 9/11/01 , also on the day after the assassination of Charley-Horst Kirk-Wessel, occasions whose stench can only be properly countered by the celebration of small everyday human experiences that bring moments of delight, joy, and pleasurable physicality — not to take us away from the wreckage falling around us, but to assert and nourish what’s best in us, and not in any grand gesture or powerful speech, but in simple, everyday, silly, and earthy acts. Kharkiv Opera, but on a more intimate scale. Darwin had considerable reverence for the earthworm and its doings; let’s look to Darwin.
Two Facebook exchanges from yesterday, in which I write innocent comments (boldfaced below) that can, if you have the mind for it, be raunchified — understood as a raunchy double entendre:
(Swearing in French, and English, so not to everyone’s taste)
Today’s Bizarro strip, in which Wayno shows us what goes on in a lower education classroom:
MonkeyJack (as I’l call him) asks the question, expecting the answer, in chorus: Fuck, yeah! To which he will tell them all to shout it out the way he does, loud and clear: Putain ouais! (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
But then there’s Wayno’s title, a play on higher education (sometimes known as tertiary or post-secondary ed): this semi-technical term has higher ‘closer to the high end, the top of something’ (of formal education here, so referring to university education); and it’s opposed to K-12 education, referring to school education, that is, primary and secondary ed. Though lower ‘closer to the low end, the bottom of something’ is the opposite of spatial higher, lower education seems rarely if ever used to refer to K-12 ed.
Then lower education becomes available for play, using one of the other senses of low. And if we’re going down there, might as well go raunchy, so we get low as a rough synonym of louche ‘disreputable, sordid’, the opposite of high ‘morally or culturally superior’ — and lower education, an education in the seamier side of things, in vulgarity, like swear words. And swear words in French, ’cause everyone knows everything’s dirtier in French.
And that’s today’s quick linguistic joke. Meanwhile, life has been amazing in some ways (people said the most wonderful things about me on my 85th birthday) but almost unmanageably difficult in most ways. I am hanging on.
The song, from the 1975 musical Chicago, which has been in my head constantly the past couple of days, thanks to my coming across a vein of brief retro-choreography performances of it by the dance pair Twinsauce. Just delightful, even more so when you see them doing their shtick (infused with energy and enthusiasm) in a wild variety of settings (and in an assortment of costumes): for example, in a pouring rainstorm in NYC (video here), on the snowy sidewalks of Chicago (video here), in a shoe store (with beautiful wood flooring) (video here), and in a cobblestoned passageway, as Rat and Mouse (video here).
(#1) Rat and Mouse hoofing “All That Jazz”; great fun
