Received in e-mail this morning, from Dave Sayers on the Variationist mailing list:
We are delighted to announce the next in the 2023-24 series of online guest seminars here in the English section at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland — open to all!
On Tues 10 Oct at 11:00 East European Summer Time Mie Hiramoto (National University of Singapore) and Wes Robertson (Macquarie University, Australia) will give a talk titled ‘Framing masculinity and cultural norms: A case study of male VIO hair removal in Japan’.
That’s it. I was baffled by VIO hair removal; it has two possible parsings, and some large number of possible interpretations. And I was baffled by what looked like an unfamiliar initialism, VIO. Masculinity and cultural norms being one of my areas of interest within the G&S (gender and sexuality) field, I wasn’t willing to let these puzzles just slide.
Two parsings (and many interpretations).
[ VIO [ hair removal ] ‘hair removal related to VIO’, where VIO is one of: a social group, the removers of hair (cf. born-again hair removal, transsexual hair removal, Ainu hair removal, Japanese hair removal ‘hair removal by Japanese (people)’), a method of hair removal (cf. laser hair removal), a philosophy of hair removal (cf. Buddhist hair removal), a place where hair removal is practiced (cf. Japanese hair removal ‘hair removal in Japan’), or any number of other interpretations
[ [ VIO hair ] removal] ‘removal of VIO hair’, where VIO hair is hair related to VIO, VIO admitting of a wide variety of interpretations: an area of the body (cf. armpit hair, pubic hair), a racioethnic group (cf. Black hair, Jewish hair), an evaluative characterization (cf. ugly hair, unwanted hair), a physical characterization (cf. kinky hair), a color (cf. gray hair), and much more
The (apparent) initialism VIO. Acronym dictionaries list a great many unpackings for VIO, but none even remotely hair-relevant. Searching on “VIO hair removal”, I eventually discovered that VIO is Japanese terminology for the bikini zone, with the initials standing for
V line (the pubes and genitals), I line (the perineum), O line (the anus)
So: the three Latin letters are to be understood as iconic signs, as (highly abstract) pictures of the three bodyparts, not as an acronym, not as the initials in an abbreviation. I don’t think that such an interpretation would ever have occurred to me.
No doubt it never occurred to Hiramoto and Robertson, steeped as they are in Japanese sexual culture, that the letter-sequence VIO would be utterly opaque to outsiders, but it is; I had no clue as to what their paper is about, except that hair removal and males are involved, and that the removal takes place in Japan.
Missing lexical items. A recurrent theme on this blog is that languages regularly lack ordinary-language, widely used lexical items for referential categories of things that are in fact relevant in the sociocultural context the language is embedded in.
So it is for English and the body region that extends from the waistline under the crotch to the anus: the pubes, genitals, perineum, and anus, taken together. This is a region of modesty, and it’s socioculturally highly salient in English-speaking communities generally, but English has no lexical item covering just that territory.
The composite phrase private parts would have been a good choice, but it’s already taken, as a euphemism for the central portion of the region of modesty, the genitals. In this case, it’s hard to see how we could get by with a narrow sense of the phrase (the current usage) alongside a broad sense (for the region of modesty). So we’ll bump along with things as they are, as we do in lots of other cases; people cope. Maybe someone can start a fashion for VIO in English.
Cover your VIO, dude! Were you born in a barn? (And while you’re at it, close the front door!)
That’s down there ‘male genitals, junk’, in this Facebook ad (hat tip to Victor Steinbok) for the Dollar Shave Club’s razor starter set — the razor handle, razor blades, and three accompanying products, called the scrub (prep wash), the butter (shaving cream), and the dew (soothing lotion):
(#1) The Dollar Shave Club offer; in a small space, the ad manages to proclaim the $3 offer three times
Now, I’m not really interested in collecting further terms for the male genitals — my 9/4/23 posting “From the genital junkyard” covers the territory, and I have no enthusiasm for foolish completism — but male-genital down there evoked two strong associations for me that I want to explore here: it’s routinely used as a polite reference to the vulva (so, female-genital down there); and an allusion to Christopher Isherwood’s 1962 novel Down There on a Visit, whose title combines locational down there with actually sexual (not merely male-genital) down there.
Before I take up female-genital down there and the Isherwood book, though, a digression to slag off the $3 offer from the Dollar Shave Club, as an example of deliberately impenetrable (and therefore misleading) sales pitches. The product would have to be truly fabulous — but how fabulous can a shaving-supplies kit get? — before I would engage with a company that advertises this way.
Yesterday in my posting “Manscaping your junk”:
A tv spot ad (only 15 seconds long) for the Gillette Intimate Manscape Kit (Gillette Intimate Pubic Hair Trimmer, Gillette Intimate Pubic Hair Razor, Gillette Intimate Pubic Shave Cream + Cleanser), released at least twice, under different titles:
— ‘It’s Not Junk, so Treat It Right’ [apparently it’s your “pubic region” instead], published 10/31/22
— “Respect Your Junk!”, published 3/11/23
Two matters of linguistic interest here: the noun manscaping and verb manscape; and the noun junk ‘male genitals’. The material I’ve collected on these is extensive enough that I’m not going to try to cram it all into one posting, but will split things in two, in follow-up postings on the noun junk and on the noun manscaping / the verb manscape.
The spot ads play with the claim that referring to your genitals as junk is an insult to them, as if the (mildly) negative content of disposable junk unavoidably carries over to genital junk, contaminating it — an idea I disputed in yesterday’s posting. Beyond that, calling genital junk an insult seriously overestimates the power of its negative affect: far from being an insult, like, say, garbage and shit, it’s just a minimizer, treating the genitals as of little worth, what I referred to as a devaluation in my 9/1 posting “A bulletin from Pejora, the land of derogation and insult”:
The [insulting] slur jerk [what we might call “assholish jerk“] developed from jerk referring to a fool or incompetent [“foolish jerk“] — what I’ll call a (mere) devaluation, meaning a term that refers to [someone or something] regarded as of little worth.
Now on the lexicography of the noun(s) junk.
From Steven Levine, reporting from Amsterdam, on Facebook this morning:
If you have time to learn only one Dutch word, I’d say wildplassen makes an excellent candidate.
(#1) Du wildplassen ‘wild pissing’, with Du wild in the sense ‘free, loose’ (yes, it also has the sense ‘savage, fierce’, and that adds to the excellence of the signage)
… Wayno’s portmanteauing title for yesterday’s (12/27) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) A play on Shaw / slaw (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
Three things: one, plays on the Shaw of George Bernard Shaw (plenty of room for silliness here); two, on the wonders of (cole) slaw; and three, a note on the exclamation by George (which of course has nothing to do with GBS, but also nothing to with kings of Great Britain, since George I (from Hanover) didn’t ascent to the throne until 1714, while exclamations calling on a George go back at least to 1616).
In preparing yesterday’s posting “Garment vocabulary”, on the purported Victorian tabooing of the word trousers, I looked at the actual tabooing of the word breast (because of sociocultural anxiety over the female bodypart), even in reference to a type of chicken meat (from the breast of the bird), and found a small number of euphemisms for the female bodypart: bosom, bust (and for some people, also chest). Not a big haul, so I thought to do a search on “euphemism for breast” — and found long lists of vulgarities (mostly used by men), nothing like my idea of a euphemism, and nothing like the definition of euphemism in standard dictionaries.
What do you call an outer garment covering the body from the waist to the ankles, with a separate part for each leg? The referentially and socioculturally least restricted lexical item for this purpose, in both AmE and BrE, is the plural noun trousers. (The gloss in my first sentence is in fact the definition of trousers given, without restriction, in NOAD.)
It’s then remarkable that the Quite Interesting Twitter account maintained on 8/14/18 that
The Victorians thought the word ‘trousers’ so vulgar and rude that they used euphemisms such as ‘sit-upons’, ‘inexpressibles’, ‘unutterables’ and ‘unwhisperables’ instead.
The result of such an attitude would have been that there was literally no everyday expression to refer to such a garment — even one originating as a euphemism but naturalized as ordinary vocabulary — as has been the case for white meat as a replacement for (chicken) breast, for some speakers, and in many other cases.
(Consider the title; perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)
Recently, a message from Steven Levine, adding to my stock of euphemisms in the Gray Lady, as we know the New York Times. The paper is famously meticulous about avoiding taboo vocabulary, to the point of doing its best to eschew even asterisking (on the grounds that that’s virtually spelling out the offensive words). Their circumlocutory euphemisms are sometimes entertaining, but often baffling. (See the Page of postings on Taboo vocabulary on this blog, which tags avoidance discussions, including many from the Gray Lady.)
Steven’s exemplar: From the NYT on 5/30, “In Days of Discord, a President Fans the Flames”:
The turmoil came right to Mr. [REDACTED]’s doorstep for the second night in a row on Saturday as hundreds of people protesting Mr. Floyd’s death and the president’s response surged in streets near the White House. While most were peaceful, chanting “black lives matter” and “no peace, no justice,” some spray painted scatological advice for Mr. [REDACTED], ignited small fires, set off firecrackers and threw bricks, bottles and fruit at Secret Service and United States Park Police officers, who responded with pepper spray.
Yes, yes, scatological advice. I guessed this was SHIT ON [REDACTED], which is certainly scatological, but not in fact any kind of advice: it looks like an imperative, exhorting people to defecate on Grabpussy, but is in fact a derogatory dismissive, a more obscene version of (THE) HELL WITH [REDACTED] (admittedly, perhaps by suggesting that putting feces on him would be justly deserved).
But no. Shit was not involved.
This week’s inspiring words on the social progress front, from Gloria Ladson-Billings, circulated on Facebook by H. Sami Alim on the 22nd:
I know that I am 4 generations out of chattel slavery, 3 generations out of sharecropping, 2 out of legalized apartheid, and I’m an endowed university professor. Not because I’m great, but because people kept on pushing the boulder up the hill.
