From John Baker yesterday, this strip from the webcomic Punch An’ Pie:
Archive for the ‘Euphemism’ Category
Sexual slang
June 4, 2012Anaphora in the park
April 17, 2012From Victor Steinbok (who found it on Google+), this entertaining sign (from Randwick, NSW, Australia):
The sign allows for two readings, according to whether it refers to the dog or the dog poo. The sign writer intended the second, but the person who took the picture set things up to make the first reading salient.
language ‘bad language’
March 21, 2012Back on the 16th on ADS-L, Joel Berson noted this attachment to a review of the movie 21 Jump Street by Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe:
Rated: R (crude and sexual content, pervasive language, drug material, teen drinking, and some violence)
Berson puzzled over pervasive language, but noted that the phrase seemed to go back to about 1994 in movie reviews on Google Books. Neal Whitman immediately nailed the expression’s natural habitat, in the U.S. at least: in movie ratings, where language is used to mean ‘offensive, obscene, bad language’ (either by semantic narrowing or by truncation of the longer expression); see Whitman’s posting on mild language ‘mildly offensive language’ with respect to movies rated PG, here.
Then I noted the OED3 subentry for language ‘bad language’ more generally — for which this dictionary provides only British cites. (NOAD2 does have a subentry for language ‘coarse, crude, or offensive language’ in AmE, but marks it as usually occurring in bad/strong language rather than on its own.)
Outside the MPAA ratings scheme, the narrow sense of language seems to be rare in AmE, though it’s not unknown. But Language! as an interjection does seem to be specifically BrE.
How can I put this?
February 15, 2012A cartoon by William Haefeli that was rejected by the New Yorker:
(This is reproduced from Matthew Diffee’s The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker (2006).)
Courting the gay vote is a euphemism for engaging in, or soliciting, gay sex (of some kind, not specified, though receptive fellatio — sucking cock — is the most likely act). It falls into a pattern of ostentatiously playful euphemisms of the form Ving the N, especially for reference to male masturbation (my favorite is firing the Surgeon General); there’s a huge list of euphemisms for masturbation, many of them of this form, here; some discussion of display through concealment in these euphemisms here; and a note on the extension to the meta-euphemism verbing the noun here.
But it’s not just masturbation. In 2009 we got hiking the Appalachian trail for reference to adultery, thanks to Mark Sanford; see Ben Zimmer’s “Birth of a euphemism” posting here, with a link to Mark Peters’s more detailed posting.
Haefeli’s cartoon was done before the Appalachian trail was hiked, but it did come (perhaps presciently) during an eruption of “family values” anti-gay public figures involved in gay sex scandals. In chronological order, with brief Wikipedia accounts:
(1) Mark Foley: The Mark Foley scandal, which broke in late September 2006, centers on soliciting e-mails and sexually suggestive instant messages sent by Mark Foley, a Republican Congressman from Florida, to teenaged boys who had formerly served as congressional pages. (link)
(2) Ted Haggard: Ted Arthur Haggard … is an American evangelical pastor. Known as Pastor Ted to the congregation he served, he was the founder and former pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado; a founder of the Association of Life-Giving Churches; and was leader of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) from 2003 until November 2006.
In November 2006, escort and masseur Mike Jones alleged that Haggard had paid him to engage in sex with him for three years and had also purchased and used crystal methamphetamine. (link)
(3) Larry Craig: The Larry Craig scandal was an incident that began on June 11, 2007, with the arrest of Larry Craig — who at the time was a Senator from Idaho — for lewd conduct in a men’s restroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. (link)
(4) Bob Allen: Bob Allen … is a former American politician who was a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives from 2000 until 2007, representing Florida’s 32nd district…
He made headlines in 2007 after being arrested for offering $20 for the opportunity to perform fellatio on an undercover male police officer in the restroom of a public park and was released on bail. (link)
There’s more, but it certainly was a banner time for hypocrisy. Haefeli’s cartoon was done before the Craig and Allen scandals, but he might have been influenced by the Foley or Haggard affairs.
As far as I can tell, courting the gay vote hasn’t caught on as a euphemism for gay sex, or for soliciting gay sex, but it has some potential.
ish and masculinity
February 13, 2012Charles M. Blow’s op-ed column in the NYT on Saturday (the 11th) begins:
Real Men and Pink Suits
This week, Roland Martin, a bombastic cultural and political commentator was suspended by CNN from his role as a political analyst on the network for Twitter messages published during the Super Bowl.
One message read: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him! #superbowl.” Another read: “Who the hell was that New England Patriot they just showed in a head to toe pink suit? Oh, he needs a visit from #teamwhipdatass.”
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said the messages advocated “violence against gay people” and asked CNN to fire Martin. CNN called the messages “regrettable and offensive” and suspended him “for the time being.” Martin issued an apology in which he said that he was just “joking about smacking someone.”
Two things here: ish as a euphemism for shit; and the contempt for gay men.
monkey-spank
February 7, 2012Heard on an old episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a reference to some films as “primo monkey-spank material”. Similarly:
Most men probably only know American Apparel as primo monkey-spank material. But there are a few men who actually wear the clothing. (link)
Now a few words on morphological developments from the colorful euphemistic idiom spank the / one’s monkey ‘masturbate’.
kicking fanny
January 18, 2012Oran Smith, who runs Palmetto Family, a group that lobbies on behalf of Christian conservatives, quoted by Matt Bai in “The Tea Party’s Not-So-Civil War”, NYT Magazine 1/15/12, p. 37:
“I expected by this time for Rick Perry to just be kicking fanny in South Carolina,” Smith told me. “He was going to ride in and lasso South Carolina, and he wasn’t going to be stopped.”
That’s the euphemistic slang idiom kick fanny (for kick ass) — which sounds positively quaint to me in this context, though (if he was quoted correctly) Smith might have been trying to balance political macho with appropriately Christian modesty.
Hunks and their sacks
December 19, 2011It starts with a Vanity Fair interview with actor Jaleel White:
[interviewer:] In later seasons [of the tv show Family Matters] you were getting quite tall.
[JW:] I was getting network notes on the bulge of my sack! I wore my pants so freaking tight and it was like, after awhile, we got a problem there. So, literally, the last season we loosened up his [his character Urkel’s] pants.
So that’s sack as yet another alternative to euphemistic deal, package, junk, unit, stuff, family jewels, tenders, equipment, and goods (see here, with links to earlier postings).
The link came from Arne Adolfsen, who also offered a photo of a hunk with a moose-knucklish sack: the French actor Alain Delon. Meanwhile, hunky tv actor Victor Webster showed up in an episode of Criminal Minds (playing a charming villain).
Annals of taboo avoidance
October 22, 2011From the Riff column in the NYT Magazine of October 16th, “‘Golden Boys With the Potential To Burn the World Down'” by Alex Pappademas:
There’s a popular Tumblr blog — I can’t say the name here, but it’s something like Heck Yeah! Ryan Gosling, only more emphatic — that features nothing but pictures of Ryan Gosling being good-looking, with goofy Gosling-voice captions. (“Hey, girl, I can’t wait to get home and give you a foot massage.”)
Googling on {“Ryan Gosling” Tumblr} will get you not only to Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling (with its invented “Hey, girl” quotes) but also to Ryan Fucking Gosling, Eff Yeah Ryan Gosling, Feminist Ryan Gosling (with feminist “Hey, girl” quotes: “Hey girl. We *could* keep talking about Spivak’s views of post-structuralism and their engagement with the narrative, but I thought it would be fun to go home, get in bed and watch some Buffy”), sites with video of Gosling self-mockingly reading “Hey, girl” quotes from Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling on MTV (here, for instance), and more.
It’s ridiculously easy to find the FYRG site from the other information given in the Pappademas column; the ostentatious taboo avoidance in it (with its euphemistic replacement of fuck by heck) is entirely unnecessary. But, as on other occasions, the Times has opted for conveying taboo language clearly while refusing to dirty its pages with the original.
confirmed bachelor
August 28, 2011From Aaron Hicklin’s Editor’s Letter “The Marrying Kind” in the September issue of Out magazine (p. 32):
Until very recently, British newspapers had a sly euphemism for known homosexuals who had resisted the kinds of sham marriages that were once par for the course. In the words of obituary writers, whose job it was to find substitute words for “gay,” they were “confirmed bachelors” — an infinitely lonely construction. Reading those obituaries, you would never get the impression these men (there was no equivalent phrase for women) had ever loved, or been loved in return. These were not confirmed bachelors in the American sense (commitment-phobic straight men on the merry-go-round of short-term relationships). They were men who were never getting married because they couldn’t.
The piece is about same-sex marriage, of course, but my interest here is in the expression confirmed bachelor.