It’s Pride month, time for rainbow everything (as symbols of solidarity and resistance to oppression) and also time for defiant celebrations of same-sex desire, same-sex sexual acts, and social and personal motss-identification. All especially important in the face of explicit attempts to exterminate our community, like the monstrous wickedness in Orlando the night before last. As usual, I’ve sequestered the images of sexual body parts on AZBlogX (“The dick days of summer”, here, with three stirring photos for gay men), but I won’t be shy about talking about men’s bodies and the excellent sexual practice of masturbation, so this isn’t for kids or the sexually modest.
Archive for the ‘Truncation’ Category
Rainbows and b8r bait
June 13, 2016The snail days of summer
May 28, 2016On the Comics Kingdom blog on Tuesday, for National Escargot Day (May 24th), ten cartoons on snails, all of them new to this blog. Some turn on the snail cartoon meme (having to do with slowness), many have to do with the slowness of postal services (snail mail, in the rhyming retronym), the rest deal with other gastropodal matters.
Tastee days
April 7, 2016Today’s Zippy:
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From the annals of snowclones, commercial icons in contestation, commercial names, and advertising run amok.
The pronoun strip
February 22, 2016Today’s Calvin and Hobbes is a replay of a strip from 2/24/86:
I remember this strip (with its play on two senses of pro) with great fondness, and I was sure it had been posted (possibly by me) on Language Log or this blog, but an hour’s searching found nothing, so I’m posting it here.
Only YOU
February 1, 2016Passed around on Facebook, this entertaining combination of image and text:
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Non-Americans might not get the joke here, since the figure of Smokey might not be familiar to them: he’s very much an American thing. Even if you don’t recognize Smokey the Bear (and his signature quotation, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires”), you might recognize the central figure in the composition as a monk, or a (religious) brother, that is, a friar (NOAD2: ‘a member of any of certain religious orders of men, especially the four mendicant orders (Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, and Franciscans)’), and you might notice the vase of flowers (such as you would get from a florist shop) and suspect that they weren’t in the original painting of the friar, so that you could appreciate the composition (with its “florist friars”) as playful nonsense. But the monitory Smokey is crucial for real understanding.
fancy bottoms
November 10, 2015Passed on to me through several Facebook pages, this vintage clothing ad from the PlaidStallions.com site (providing pages from 70s catalogs; the catalog this one came from is not identified):
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These are knit trousers — bell-bottoms in fact — with fancy bottoms, where bottom is intended to refer to
(1) ‘the lowest point or part’ of something (NOAD2), in this case, the lowest part of the trousers
Entertainingly, there are three other possible senses here: one given by NOAD2 —
(2) informal ‘buttocks’
— and two not: a sexual sense (opposed to top), denoting
(3) someone who takes the receptive role in anal intercourse (or, by extension, someone who takes the receptive or submissive role in other sexual acts)
and a sense from the clothing trade, denoting
(4) a garment worn on the lower half of the body (vs. a top, a garment worn on the top half of the body)
So fancy bottoms could refer to fancy asses / butts (a number of Facebook readers were enchanted with the idea); or to sexual bottoms who are fancy, in one or another sense of fancy; or to garments for wear on the lower half of the body that are fancy (say, by being made of cloth printed with a fancy pattern, or by having extra features of one sort or another.
There is some discussion of the sexual senses, in a gay context, in postings linked to from this blog on 6/3/13. And of the clothing-trade sense in four postings on this blog:
7/11/11: “Active bottoms” (link), with both bottom and active in clothing-trade senses (active ‘for (vigorous) activities’, as in active wear vs. leisure wear)
1013/11: “More bottoms” (link), with Big and Tall Bottoms
3/29/13: “Colored bottoms” (link)
10/29/13: “More bottoms and tops” (link), with buy a bottom, get a top
These sightings are entertaining because of the potential ambiguity between the clothing-trade and the sexual senses. (Ok, itr’s cheap entertainment.)
There is yet a fifth sense that bottoms might have picked up, but apparently hasn’t — as a truncation of bell-bottoms, in which case fancy bottoms could refer to fancy bell-bottomed trousers (fancy all over, not just fancy at the bottom). Such garments certainly exist; here’s a striking number from a Burning Man:
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But it seems that among the alternatives to bell-bottoms — flares, boot-cut or boot-fit trousers, even the occasional truncation to bells — we do not find bottoms.
Going to the dogs
October 20, 2015Two dog (after a fashion) cartoons: one by Dave Coverly (from his Speed Bump strip), one by Phil Selby (from his blog):
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Muhly grass
September 30, 2015From a recent visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden, a glimpse of a very pretty ornamental grass. Photo from the web:
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This is a white variant (White Cloud) of Muhlenbergia capillaris, Muhlenbergia being the genus of muhly grasses. (Note that the common name is derived by clipping from the botanical name.)
The botanical name will take us on an adventure in U.S. history, starting in the early 18th century.
Crab feast
August 15, 2015Some time ago a tv commercial went past me in the middle of the night: a commercial for a fast-food or casual-dining restaurant advertising specials on crab, a feast of snow crab and king crab. So I wondered about the crab in these two names, suspecting that we might be in a world where the referent of one or both of these names is unclear — where there are several distinct creatures called snow crab, say — and maybe also in a world where biologists claim that some things called crabs (or X crabs, for some specific X) are not in fact crabs at all, or aren’t “true crabs”. My suspicious are justified.
Coordinate initialisms
August 6, 2015It started with an ADS-L posting by Benjamin Barrett about the initialism T&A, which (he learned) abbreviates tits and ass but can also denote (from a Wiktionary entry) “scantily-clad women, or entertainment featuring scantily clad women” (that is, a display of tits and ass).
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[The T & A Team is a classic porn film from 1984, with the slogan “Using Their T & A to Make the World a Better Place!”. It’s a take-off on the tv series The A-Team (1983-87).]