Now, there’s a mouthful.
— MP > AZ: Would you describe your system as intertwingular?
— AZ > MP: The short answer is yes, but I didn’t have the concept or the label for it until you asked the question. So, thank you.
(talk on bodily functions and the vocabulary for them, sometimes in street language, so not to everyone’s taste; also more than you might want to hear about Arnold’s Wonderful Whizz World)
About my current medical regimen, which involves significantly large doses of the steroid prednisone, intended to treat serious kidney problems (resulting in fluid accumulations in several parts of my body, quite visibly in my feet and legs) while staying under the dosage that, historically, makes me (to put this in the plainest terms) crazy. It’s a balancing act.
Yesterday, when I was overloaded with household revisions (including a new computer and printer) and had little time to sip my green tea pleasantly, the tide turned: I began, as we say, pissing like a racehorse, really quite remarkable amounts (also, I have to say, enormously pleasurable). For years now, I’ve lived with urinals scattered everywhere, so I can take quick whizzes without disrupting whatever I’m working on (if I’m laser-focused on what I’m doing, I can go for an hour without a whizz, but that’s pretty much my limit).
(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.)
This Chris Hallbeck cartoon came by me on Facebook this morning — a strip packed with matters of science (paleontology, specifically), lexicography and usage (the senses of the noun dinosaur, and the contexts in which they’re used), and pragmatics (the way in which the noun is used in interactions, especially in language about language; in the enforcement of language norms; and, oh alas, in the relevance of things said to the interests of those participating in the speech context):
A Maximumble cartoon from 5/24/14, whose humor turns crucially on the pragmatic foolishness of the (now deceased) professor (in the face of a ravening monster, he stops to insist, irrelevantly in the context, that his companion must use the proper terminology, while the companion flees to safety); and which is based on the usage of the noun dinosaur — for a member of a clade of prehistoric reptiles bearing the zoological taxonomical label Dinosauria; versus, in non-technical American usage, for any dinosaurid creature, resembling the prototypical dinosaurs (many people have seen a family resemblance)
Yesterday’s Zippy strip manages to combine abstract algebra (in the notion of idempotence) with linguistic behavior (in the notion of onomatomania):
(There will be mentions — in vernacular but not actually vulgar terms — of male-male sexual practices that some will find icky, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste; and it might stretch some kids’ horizons a bit, so a gentle warning)
From back on 10/30, e-mail from Gadi Niram, with a video gift for me, saying: I found this video (and the young man in it) to be quite a pleasant diversion:
(#1) Screen shot from the video, which you can view here
A shirtless young man in ripped denim shorts playing the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No.2) on a fancy grand piano (with a mirrored fallboard, as in the finest piano lounges). alongside the pool at at what looks like a tropical oceanside resort. (For a bit of extra sexiness, those shorts are down far enough in the back to expose the waistband of his black Calvins; here the girls and the gay boys swoon.)
(Very much a brief MQoS Not Dead Yet posting on my part, while I cope with a complex posting on the wonders of VPE in English)
In an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning, two of the kids — Ruthie and the neighbor boy James — undertake to go on a dinosaur hunt, expecting the creatures to be easy to find because, according to James, they’re a stink:
Ruthie’s grandfather is about to explain to James the difference between extinct and a stink
Once again, the kids are coping with unfamiliar, technical vocabulary by interpreting it, eggcornishly, as more familiar material. Something of a stretch in this case, though extinct and a stink are indeed phonologically similar. I do wonder if there have been kids who reinterpreted extinct this way, or whether Rick Detorie (the cartoonist) merely imagined a reinterpretation that might have happened. Oh, the things that might have been!
(The adjective extinct is historically a specialized variant of extinguished, so calls to mind the vivid image of these creatures having their flame of life quenched, put out.)
Two cockroaches, you have a couple of unpleasant bugs. Undulating masses of cockroaches streaming over all the surfaces in a room, you’ve got a shudder-provoking pest infestation. (I’ve had the latter experience with Argentine ants, and it was the stuff of nightmares for weeks.) But when does the former turn into the latter? This is the question asked by self-aware cockroaches in this cartoon by Lonnie Millsap in the 1/29/24 print-edition New Yorker:
(#1) Cucarachas conscientes de ellas mismas, addressing the puzzle in the sorites paradox / the paradox of the heap
Today’s Piraro-only Bizarro (it’s a Sunday; Wayno’s doing other things) —
The gargantuan chalking project is, it seems, debilitating (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 11 in this strip — see this Page)
— is comprehensible only if you recognize the huge inert creature in it as the legendary prehistoric ape of a century of film, King Kong; and you recognize the fact that cops are drawing an outline around the creature in chalk as a sign that this is a scene of suspicious death. Kong is not just sleeping in the street, he’s dead; the cops are tracing Corpse Kong.
Two questions then occurred to me, and might well have occurred to others:
Q1: What do you call that chalk outline?
Q2: Just how big is / was King Kong?
Both questions have answers. Both answers are unsatisfying, but in different ways.
