Archive for the ‘Taboo language and slurs’ Category

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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 »

entre más carne mejor

October 3, 2025

More from the annals of commercial names, thanks to this Facebook report from Steven Levine, on the road in Asbury Park NJ:

On the way to Ocean Grove NJ for a weekend with some friends, our culinary tour of the Jersey Shore, I passed this sign:


(#1) The Meat & More Corporation of Asbury Park: a butcher shop, noted here for its double entendre name

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Posted in Double entendres, Jokes, Language and food, Spanish, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

A seminar on raunchy play

September 23, 2025

(entertaining, but totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

The seminar was called to order on 9/21 on Facebook by Michael Thomas, who introduced the key background element, the internet fridge. The participants were three gay men, long-time friends (our shared backgrounds and the relaxed, playful atmosphere are important here): speakers Michael Thomas and me, with Michael’s husband Aric Olnes in a non-speaking role. From the transcript (somewhat edited):

— MT: We [MT and AO] hooked our fridge up to the internet the other day. Here’s a question for the ages: do fridges watch porn while the doors are shut?

— AZ: But of course. And then they fall asleep and dream of abusing electric sheep. And you thought that was condensation on the fridge walls, didn’t you?

— MT > AZ: fridge spunk. just scrape it off for your coffee in the morning.

— AZ > MT: Absolutely. The best jizz there is.

There’s an enormous amount of stuff packed into this — some from the widespread sexual culture of modern America or from popular culture but also some from gay male sexual culture. I will now do some unpacking.

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Porn, Rhyme, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »

Entertaining raunch

September 11, 2025

(Plain talk about male bodies and man-on-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest — though raunchification is pretty much the apex of funny for early-teen boys)

☹️ 😢 😡 sad weeping furious on the anniversary of 9/11/01 , also on the day after the assassination of Charley-Horst Kirk-Wessel, occasions whose stench can only be properly countered by the celebration of small everyday human experiences that bring moments of delight, joy, and pleasurable physicality — not to take us away from the wreckage falling around us, but to assert and nourish what’s best in us, and not in any grand gesture or powerful speech, but in simple, everyday, silly, and earthy acts. Kharkiv Opera, but on a more intimate scale. Darwin had considerable reverence for the earthworm and its doings; let’s look to Darwin.

Two Facebook exchanges from yesterday, in which I write innocent comments (boldfaced below) that can, if you have the mind for it, be raunchified — understood as a raunchy double entendre:

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Seasons, Taboo language and slurs, Taste | Leave a Comment »

Putain ouais!

September 9, 2025

(Swearing in French, and English, so not to everyone’s taste)

Today’s Bizarro strip, in which Wayno shows us what goes on in a lower education classroom:


MonkeyJack (as I’l call him) asks the question, expecting the answer, in chorus: Fuck, yeah! To which he will tell them all to shout it out the way he does, loud and clear: Putain ouais! (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

But then there’s Wayno’s title, a play on higher education (sometimes known as tertiary or post-secondary ed): this semi-technical term has higher ‘closer to the high end, the top of something’ (of formal education here, so referring to university education); and it’s opposed to K-12 education, referring to school education, that is, primary and secondary ed. Though lower ‘closer to the low end, the bottom of something’ is the opposite of spatial higher, lower education seems rarely if ever used to refer to K-12 ed.

Then lower education becomes available for play, using one of the other senses of low. And if we’re going down there, might as well go raunchy, so we get low as a rough synonym of louche ‘disreputable, sordid’, the opposite of high ‘morally or culturally superior’ — and lower education, an education in the seamier side of things, in vulgarity, like swear words. And swear words in French, ’cause everyone knows everything’s dirtier in French.

And that’s today’s quick linguistic joke. Meanwhile, life has been amazing in some ways (people said the most wonderful things about me on my 85th birthday) but almost unmanageably difficult in most ways. I am hanging on.

 

 

 

Posted in Education, French, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

All That Jazz

August 21, 2025

The song, from the 1975 musical Chicago, which has been in my head constantly the past couple of days, thanks to my coming across a vein of brief retro-choreography performances of it by the dance pair Twinsauce. Just delightful, even more so when you see them doing their shtick (infused with energy and enthusiasm) in a wild variety of settings (and in an assortment of costumes): for example, in a pouring rainstorm in NYC (video here), on the snowy sidewalks of Chicago (video here), in a shoe store (with beautiful wood flooring) (video here), and in a cobblestoned passageway, as Rat and Mouse (video here).


(#1) Rat and Mouse hoofing “All That Jazz”; great fun

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Posted in Dance, Dancers, Idioms, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

lx and g&s

August 6, 2025

(Not lox and Gilbert & Sullivan, though that’s a charming idea for a matinee; I’d prefer to think of lx (linguistics) and g&s (gender and sexuality studies) as two gay linguists, Lex and Gus, who go together like, oh, politics and poker (from Act I of the 1959 Broadway musical Fiorello!) — or, more relevantly, like mind and body)

A non-academic friend, new to my net presence, wondered what the things I said my blog is mostly about — lx and g&s — have to do with one another. My immediate, overly glib, reply:

Nothing intrinsic, but they happen to come together in me, along with gardening, Sacred Harp singing, an interest in food and cooking, Mozart and Haydn, and more. Various accidents of history and outgrowths of different parts of my make-up.

Strictly true, but in fact my postings about lx tend to have a lot of g&s content, and my postings about g&s very often end up illustrating points of lx. And sometimes they meld together — as in my recent (from 7/26/25) posting “F-lexicography”, on the semantics of the sexual verb fuck.

So now a quick visit to Lex and Gus’s world, just picking out things from here and there in work by me and my colleagues. Not a systematic survey, just the odd snapshots.

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Posted in Agreement, Chinese, Constructions, Gender and sexuality, Grammatical categories, Language of sex, Lexicography, Linguistic theory, Sociolinguistics, Taboo language and slurs, This blogging life | 5 Comments »

F-lexicography: the guest posting

August 2, 2025

What follows is a response to my 7/26 posting “F-lexicography, in which I wrote, combatively (and, as it turns out, not entirely accurately):

I argue that the OED treatment of the semantics of the sexual verb fuck is unsatisfactory, not compatible with the actual usage of English speakers for a long time now — apparently because earlier lexicographers, embracing normative views of sexual behavior, posited a single sense of sexual fuck, centrally denoting an agentive act of penis-in-vagina intercourse but with a large penumbra of vagueness, embracing many other sorts of sexual encounters. Then this inadequate treatment was adopted without comment or critique in Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word. So that essentially all the authoritative literature on sexual fuck gets things wrong.

What follows is not the scorched-earth savagery that I would have expected from some of my colleagues, but a calm, thoughtful, and clarifying response from JS, which I reproduce here almost untouched, as a guest posting from him. I have some brief reflective words of my own afterwards.

(To properly appreciate much of what follows, you would really need to look at the (often technical) material reproduced in my 7/26 posting — admittedly, enlivened by a fair number of raunchy real-life citations, but still essays on technical syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Not, I think, impenetrable, but also not especially reader-friendly.)

I had intended to go on to celebrate JS’s character — in particular, as shown in his response, but also more generally — and to situate him in a larger academic and personal context. But recent days have been medically perilous for me, so I’m settling for the bare bones right now, with a promissory note to get on with the rest of the picture later, painting in the humanity.

JS’s response, in between the lines:

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Posted in Ambiguity, Argument structure, Language of sex, Lexicography, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs, Vagueness, Variation | Leave a Comment »

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