Archive for the ‘Taboo language and slurs’ Category

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I’m a big gooner

June 8, 2026

(plenty of raunchy sex talk, not for kids or the sexually modest)


(#1) That’s gooner ‘someone who masturbates a lot, enthusiastically’ — one of a family of senses for this noun — and it’s a fair cop (on the song, see the footnote at the end of this posting)

But that’s not how I got wrapped up in goonerology (and what Mickey Dolenz sang in 1966 — back in pre-gooner days — was, of course, I’m a believer). That I blame on the Peachy Kings 30%-off Memorial Day sale on (100% polyester) mesh football jerseys with sexual or sexualized identity labels on them, among them:


(#2) At $40 a pop; the labels include GOOD BOY [Boy for Daddy], EVIL GAY, TRASH [‘slut’], STUD, HO HO HO [with ho(e) ‘slut’ (etymologically ‘whore’)], PORN STAR, DEMON TWINK, WOOF, SIR — and, as above, GOONER

Now, it turns out that a sexual verb goon, agent noun gooner, and activity noun gooning are all, according to Merriam-Webster online, recently coined (with goon‘s first known uses from about 2005). As is common with recent coinages, especially of markedly slangy or taboo nature, these items are highly variable in their reference (people play with them), taking in a range of uses — in this case, at least 5 distinguishable uses, all having to do, in some way or another, with masturbation. The result is that I have no idea of what a guy would intend to convey by wearing the shirt in #2. (I am a gooner-3 and gooner-4, definitely not a gooner-1 or gooner-5, and will disavow gooner-2.)

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Posted in Euphemism, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Music, My life, Taboo language and slurs, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »

Do I dare to eat a peach?

June 5, 2026

(dripping with raunchy sexual content, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

Not what TSE had in mind, but peach-eating was the topic for some bros in a Facebook reel that came by me this morning. Another chapter in the great book of schemes for talking about analingus without sounding really gross. (And the topic comes up because a great many people find the act deeply pleasant to receive, and a fair number of us find it satisfying to perform, for the sense of bodily intimacy it affords, as a display of insertive dominance (for its own sake or as foreplay to fucking someone), as a offering of submissive service (for its own sake or as foreplay to getting fucked), or for some amorphous swirl of such feelings.

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Posted in Argument structure, Emoji, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Poetry, Puns, Signs and symbols, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

The seeds of rye bread lie deep in 19th-century England

June 2, 2026

(not the cartoonist’s fault, but my discussion veers occasionally onto fellatio, in vulgar street language, and that’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)

The Pearls Before Swine strip of 5/31, Stephan Pastis’s farewell to the month of May, devoted to one of his outrageously complex jokes (it’s so off-the-wall intricate that Rat, one of his characters, takes to protesting against it):


Three contributions: (1) the joke genre (the setup / payoff formula pun); (2) the English verb succeed, homophonous with suck seed; and (3) the familiar proverb, popularized by William Edward Hickson in 19th-century England: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again — all the while skirting (4) the sexual collocation suck seed (with seed ‘semen, cum’), a variant of suck cum

On to the four contributions.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Rhyme, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Three mishearings

May 29, 2026

(the third mishearing takes us, in street language, into fellatio-land, a place not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

Recently logged, three mishearings of televised reels, two from commercials, one from a joke reel on Facebook, all easily verifiable as to what was said (vs. what I heard when I wasn’t looking at the tv, so didn’t get visual information about the text):


I’m not sure which substance offering body pain relief item 1 came from, but the expression is common in ads of many kinds; Muddy Mat commercials (item 2), for easily washable doormats (especially valuable if you have dogs tracking in mud and dirt), are all over the place; item 3, with BJs (referring to food from a restaurant chain, ostentatiously playing on an abbreviation for fellations), comes from a joke Facebook reel about giving BJs to homeless people, which you can watch here

All three mishearings are surprising if you’re watching the reels they come from; it’s crucial that I was looking away from the tv when I heard paint instead of pain and  money instead of muddy and DJs (disc jockeys) inead of BJs (blow jobs)  — because in all three cases, the intended words appear on-screen.

But still, but still… all three are preposterous; who needs relief from body paint, a mat for the money the dog tracks in, or disk jockeys to give to homeless people?  And worse: the first two items came from commercials I had heard a number of times before, with no mishearing.

And then once I had that first mishearing, it was inclined to be sticky: on later repetitions, even looking at the screen, my mind very briefly dredged up the mishearing, triggering a startled moment during which I corrected course. A kind of information-retrieval earworm, very annoying.  I have no explanation for this effect, and suspect that most people have experienced nothing of the sort, but there it is.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Errors, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Misreadings, Music, Phonetics, Phonology, Portmanteaus, Puns, Rhyme, Snowclonelet composites, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »

Hang free or peter out

May 14, 2026

Today’s adventure in analyzing the jokey allusions in my postings. The target allusion is the one boldfaced in this passage from my posting yesterday (5/13), “The pocket bulge”:

[The DJX bulge booster] provides a soft but protective pocket in which a man’s package (of whatever size) can be unconstrained (hang free or peter out, as the slogan goes)

I explained half of the joke in a comment about my raw materials for this posting:

“Live Free or Die”, the official state motto of New Hampshire

But then there’s peter out, a verb of fading (before coming to an end), so ‘fade to death’ here, framed with a pun on peter, with a covert allusion to the penis hanging unconstrained within the bulge booster.

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Posted in Aktionsart, Allusion, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Puns, Slogans, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

How’s your old wazoo?

April 24, 2026

(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’

(more…)

Posted in Deixis, Figurative language, Humor, Lexical semantics, Metonymy, My life, Poetic form, Poetry, Semantics, Taboo language and slurs | 4 Comments »

Easter cressheads

April 6, 2026

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

(more…)

Posted in Art, Compounds, Events and occasions, Language and plants, Language play, Lexical semantics, Semantics of compounds, Taboo language and slurs | 6 Comments »

By their remnants you shall know them

November 29, 2025

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.

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Posted in Holidays, Insults, Lexicography, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

From the annals of NAA

October 15, 2025

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.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Apologies, Insults, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

The FY restaurant

October 5, 2025

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.

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Posted in Language and food, Names, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

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