This morning, for complex reasons that shouldn’t concern you here, I did a Google search on “African American linguists”, not reckoning on what might happen with Google’s AI-guided search. This astonishing result, a page with the first 9 of 13 items retrieved:
2 historical figures, 7 living linguists; of those living linguists, 4 are women, 3 are men; of those men, two are African Americans, but the linguist in the position of greatest prominence, at the top left, Walt Wolfram, is not like the other 8 linguists: WW is a strikingly European — specifically German — American
Now, if there were a gold medal for wokeness, WW would surely have retired it for life, but he doesn’t belong in a display of African American linguists.
Thing is, Google hasn’t answered the question that I (implicitly) asked, Who are some linguists who are African American? (which might have pulled up, say, Ken Naylor, who studied the dialectology of what was then called Serbo-Croatian), but instead answered a somewhat similar question it had the answer to, Who are some linguists who have studied African American English? (which should pull up at least Bill Labov, Roger Shuy, and WW, all of whom are white).
Wokeness. From NOAD:
adj. woke: alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism … (1960s: originally in African American usage)
Expanded on in a Wikipedia article:
used since the 1930s or earlier to refer [AZ: especially by African Americans of other African Americans] to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke.
… By 2019, the term was being used sarcastically as a pejorative among many on the political right and some centrists to disparage leftist and progressive movements as superficial and insincere performative activism. [AZ: heavy sigh]
Encomia. I was sure that I had posted an encomium to WW and his remarkable career studying the language of, and supporting the communities of, African Americans (and Appalachians and Carolina Tidewater folk too), with all the passion he has devoted to sports (he played basketball, baseball, and football at Olney High School in north Philadelphia many years ago, and seems never to have met a sport he didn’t like). But I can’t find it in my files. Well, you can see the outlines of it from what I just said; he’s been a model of engagement and energy for the rest of us.
It’s probably a garrulous-codger thing, but I’ve been into encomia recently (see my previous posting, on Sonja Lanehart); well, it’s a great pleasure to write encomia for living people, rather than elegiac death notices.
One of these things. Music by Joe Raposo, lyrics by Jon Stone for Sesame Street (1968):
One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?
Of course you can.
(The title should warn you about what’s coming. There will be talk — in generally decorous language, but still — about men’s bodies as objects of sexual desire and about man-on-man sex, so not recommended for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday’s Daily Jocks e-mail sale ad:
ad copy:
The ultimate party jockstrap from Vaux! Crafted exclusively from breathable, lightweight athletic nylon/spandex material, Vaux Playa Jockstrap is guaranteed to keep you cool and looking sexy af 😈.
Now, these images are designed to focus the viewer’s gaze on the visual center of the image, the model’s amply filled jockstrap (embracing the object of the intended viewer’s sexual desire but also what’s on sale here) and then, inevitably, the model’s handsome face, because people are strongly face-oriented. Then you appreciate the model’s beautifully developed body and notice the angling of his body in what is in fact a conventional beefcake pose. Buy my clothes and you can become me, or at least fantasize about doing me.
I’ll go on to analyze how the ad drips with gay sex, but after I appreciated the promise of the model’s dick and balls in that jockstrap and the warmth of his gaze — I am, after all, a big ol’ fag, a gay man with a high sex drive and an inventive and diverse fantasy sex life — I just delighted in the beauty of the clothes, which made me smile with pleasure. Every man should wear such beautiful things. Not necessarily in a jockstrap, or of course in what looks like a shredded crop top (though those would be admirably functional as gay partywear — more on this below), but in briefs, swimsuits, shirts of all kinds, and shorts.
Now on to the sociocultural analysis …
(It’s about slang, but there are going to be buttocks, mostly men’s, some startlingly bare, so this posting will not to be everyone’s taste.)
Following up on yesterday’s posting “Buttocks III: (mainstream) art, male art, porn”, Timothy Riddle offered some recently fashionable slang for ‘buttocks’: the M(ass) noun cake, as used by (straight) pornstar Johnny Stone (who has a famously fine ass, and is proud of it, even though it’s not an especially relevant feature in his porn work); and by DC Comics on its Twitter site, showing a photo of the superhero Nightwing (the former Robin / Dick Grayson), played by Brenton Thwaites, who’s also famous for his fine ass, which is much featured on the series.
So: into still more buttocks slang, both M cake and (more commonly) PL C(ount) cakes.
Background, from my 3/12/20 posting “Higashi Day cartoon 1: grim Bliss surprise” about the series of 6 cartoon postings (of which this is the 3rd)
to celebrate March 15th: Higashi Day, formerly known in these parts as (spring) Removal Day, marking the day when, for roughly 10 years in the fabled past, Jacques and I set off to car-trek east, from Palo Alto (and Stanford) to Columbus OH (and Ohio State).
The Frazz strip of March 8th:
(#1) School custodian Edwin “Frazz” Frazier and 8-year-old bored genius Caulfield take on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”
In more or less reverse order: (a) the positive anymore of Caulfield’s
(ex1) Anymore, I just believe what rhymes
in the last panel; (b) the song and some of its most famous performances; and (c) the quote in the first panel,
(ex2) Believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear
Today’s Zippy takes us to the shore of Lake Erie, in the roadside realm of Dolly Dimples (but, startlingly, it will end with the minstrel-show character Rastus and the Cream of Wheat box; you never know where things will go these days):
(#1)
DD is actually selling chocolates, statuary, and tchotchkes, not hamburgers. Her head is indeed unrealistically gigantic, but even with this selling point she’s probably not going to leave Silver Lake NY to pursue a failed movie career in L.A. (note the whimsical tense-aspect-mood semantics of intending to pursue a failed career).
From Chris Zable on Facebook on August 3rd, a photo from her family’s holiday in Florida, with her comment:
(#1)
“Spotted this little lizard with a bright blue tail on a fence rail at the Tallahassee Museum. Much of their space is a zoo of local native species in generously-sized enclosures that are just fenced off bits of native habitat. We saw pumas, red wolves, and foxes among other critters.”
As good a photo of a blue-tailed skink as any you can find on the net. To come: on skinks; on the “Blue Tail Fly” song; and on my gay highjacking of the song, as “Blue Tailed Skink” (with skink as a portmanteau, skank + twink) — taking things far from Chris’s original child-friendly travel report.
The One Big Happy from June 6th:
— in which Joe eggcornishly re-shapes the name Tinkerbell (otherwise unfamiliar to him) into a name he knows well, that of the fast-food restaurant Taco Bell. The words tinker and taco share the consonant skeleton /t … k …/, but are not otherwise particularly close phonologically. But the following bell presumably facilitates the reanalysis.
