(time for some bad-taste Headline News for Penises, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
It starts with the at least superficially modest advertising slogan (underlined below), in a Facebook pitch for Creed Fragrance that came by me on 7/12:
Aventus by Creed. Bright fruits and smoky woods, crafted into an unmistakable signature.
(fellatial fun — and disrespectful of religion as well — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday on the Facebook group soc-motss (for same-sex-inclined folk and their friends), Ellen Evans forwarded a 6/24 FB posting from Derekh Baruch Von Geiger on Facebook:
The ultimate source for this image is not identified; it could just be an invention, but it looks like a Christian church service borrowing from Jewish practices, in particular what’s customarily translated into English as the blowing of the shofar
(a note on taboo avoidance and euphemism, but with enough explication of the raw reference of various expressions to make this posting unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
A poster wrote:
I am a male corn actor.
— adding that he had worked in adult entertainment before getting into corn. Just enough background information for me to exclude, oh so reluctantly, a wide range of colorful but unlikely understandings of corn, in favor of its just being an intentional replacement for porn to avoid filters on-line. So: a subtler and harder to detect variant of the well-established filter-avoidance pr0n ‘pornography, porn’: an intentional misspelling of porn (with the middle letters transposed, and the letter o replaced by numeral 0). (The thing is, pr0n stands out as odd, so clever filtering could fairly easily pick it out; the beauty of corn is its utter ordinariness.)
(Now, of course, being the person I am, I am seized with carnal, raunchy, grossly sexual readings of corn on the cob, corn chowder, Children of the Corn, cornucopia, corny jokes, cornflakes, cornfields, popcorn, Cornwall, corner store, cornrow, Jimmy Crack Corn, cornet, acorn, …)
(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.)
(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.
(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.
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.
(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
