In a Law & Order episode (S8 E15), a character explains that he’s going inside his house because he has to tap a kid — short for the idiom tap a/my kidney ‘urinate’, with kidney clipped to kid.
Archive for the ‘Euphemism’ Category
Wet words
November 15, 2017Ostentatious euphemisms
July 15, 2017A recent tv commercial for Jack Link’s beef jerky builds up to the punch line, the claim that the jerky
beats the snack out of other snacks
ostentatiously using snack as a euphemism for shit.
Verbal magic in the workplace
June 2, 2017Today’s Dilbert:
Your people are distressed about the cell-like connotations of cubicle? Easy solution: change the term, to something that sounds more substantial. Yes, they’ll still be working in cell-like spaces, but they might feel better about it. Apparently, the magic of euphemistic, elevating jargon can sometimes work even if the audience knows that it’s jargonistic invention.
Larkin and the Gray Lady, again
May 17, 2017I’ve been on break from remarking on some of the obsessions of the New York Times — its periodiphilia, its taboo avoidance, and so on — but I’m moved to return to the second of these topics because the Gray Lady has managed to reproduce, in deail, one of its previous encounters with taboo vocabulary, a tussle with poet Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”.
Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit: three cartoons for the 1st
May 1, 2017It’s May Day, an ancient spring festival — think maypoles and all that — so, the beginning of the cycle of the seasons. (Everybody knows the Vivaldi. Try listening instead to the Haydn, here.) And it’s the first of the month, an occasion for still other rituals, including one that calls for everyone to greet the new month, upon awakening, by saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” (or some variant thereof). There’s even a Rabbit Rabbit Day Facebook community, with this page art (not attributed to an artist):
(#1)
The three-rabbit variant is the one I’m familiar with. (I got it as an adult from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky. Since she was from the South, I thought it was a specifically Southern thing. But today I learned, from an astonishingly detailed Wikipedia page, that that is very much not so.)
Today also brought a Facebook posting from my friend Mary Ballard, to whom the whole inaugural-rabbit thing was news, and, by good fortune, three cartoons from various sources: a Bizarro I’ve already posted about; a Mother Goose and Grimm with an outrageous bit of language play; and a Calvin and Hobbes reflection on the meaning of the verb read.
Linguistics and its orthographically related disciplines
August 26, 2016Nathan Sanders writes on Facebook to display the nameplate for his new position at Haverford College:
There are few people in LINGUISTICS who have not been afflicted by the spelling LINQUISTICS, or else LINGUSITICS. But it is a little-known fact that these are actual names of academic disciplines quite distinct from linguistics.
Fixed expressions
August 7, 2016Two recent cartoons turning on fixed expressions, compounds in fact: a Rhymes With Orange and a One Big Happy:
(#1)
(#2)
Cereal mascots
August 1, 2016Today’s One Big Happy, with the kids’ grandparents at breakfast, contemplating the cereals on offer, with some dismay:
(#1)
Morning name: Baskit
December 31, 2015My recent “boxboys and transitive bottoming” posting led me to the informal English vocabulary for talking about the male genitals euphemistically: package, box, basket, junk, stuff, sack, unit, … (photo #1 there is an entertaining presentation of packages and boxes) — what you might think of as packagecabulary or boxcabulary. (NOAD2 has package ‘a man’s genitals’, but none of the other boxcabulary.)
That posting probably primed me to think of the premium underwear company Baskit; in the very crowded field of homoerotic underwear marketing, the company manages to be profoundly gay, starting with its name.