A Shoebox cartoon by Brian G. (in the Chuck and Beans series) from 4/30/10:
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Endless discussion on geek vs. nerd. On this blog, “Geek days” of 5/22/12. And earlier, “Venn diagramming for nerds” of 9/17/11, where I wrote:
Note that all four of the terms in this diagram — dweeb, nerd, geek, and dork — are of obscure etymology. This is a semantic domain where people are likely to just make words up.
(Another Chuck and Beans strip came by here.)
From Walt Slocombe in yesterday’s mail:
I saw (on another blog that I cannot now find again) a piece on word combinations that include a word originally in general usage that has come to be barely used except in a single combination.
(Walt recalled wend one’s way and cast aspersions.)
I suspect that there are several blogs of this sort, but one I found right away (using the two examples Walt remembered) was this one on “verbal vestigia” — about “words in English that seem to exist only in a single phrase”.
Walt then offered an example of his own:
One from modern politics, is the term “tantamount to election,” — “tantamount” in current usage is almost never encountered except in the context of political systems so dominated by one party (as in the old solid south, today’s heavily gerrymandered legislative districts, and the District of Columbia) that winning the dominant party’s primary is “tantamount to election.”
But his impression that tantamount is almost entirely restricted to tantamount to election is well off the mark.
It begins with this photo by male photographer Howard Roffman:
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(This is a scanned-in image of a postcard that I will use to make an Asterixion. It bears the marks of a rough passage through the mail, but in the Asterixion these will be covered up by a caption and stickers. [Now done: see Roffman 21 in “Asterixions 2”.])
I wanted a word to refer to the young man’s stance — a noun, or a verb referring to taking this stance. What came to me first was crouch, but I realized that there was a more specific word. Eventually, I dredged up two more words, squat and hunker. And wondered about the meaning distinctions between these words.
Today’s Zippy has Zerbina totally in the groove:
A series of slangy panels, culminating in an air glockenspiel (a percussion counterpart of the air guitar, quite possibly a simulation of playing an electric glockenspiel). A glockenspiel gets into it because so many people think the word glockenspiel is silly.
Having posted recently on bareback sex, bare sex, or raw sex, I wondered idly about the term for the opposite — for sex using condoms. In actual practice, the most commonly used term isn’t parallel to any of these, but seems to be the more inclusive safe(r) sex, though protected sex can also be found. But we could consider more imaginative alternatives.
But first, a cartoon with a dreadful pun:
Over on AZBlogX there’s a piece on gay pornstar Dale Cooper (who took this name from agent Dale Cooper in the tv series Twin Peaks). A man of many talents. He writes for the Huffington Post on (mostly) gay matters, Here’s HuffPo’s blurb on him:
Dale Cooper is a sexual health educator, a social worker for HIV/AIDS clients, a porn performer, and a fundraiser for sexual health causes and affordable housing. He continues to study how gay sexuality has been affected by the Internet, and maintains a web presence at www.daledoesporn.com.
There’s plenty of shots of Cooper genitally nude and engaging in hard-core gay sex acts on AZBlogX. For this blog, here’s a nice head, armpit, and torso shot of him, with his engaging smile:
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Today’s Zippy, featuring Griffy and Claude:
Floccillation is indeed an attested word in English, though one few people know and few have a use for.
By accident, I stumbled on this Urban Dictionary entry this morning:
758. the-Zwicky: A sexual maneuver where you are getting blown, and as you are about to cum, pull out, stick your dick in her ear and jiz. When she screams, you quickly haul back and dick slap her across the forehead to shut her up.
“Dude, I pulled the Zwicky on a chick last night, and now she’s got an ear infection (by Zwicks Aug 31, 2004)
Clearly a made-up gross-out entry by someone named Zwick or Zwicky. There are four other equally unpleasant entries contributed by this guy.
For the record, I disassociate myself from any such sexual practice, with woman, man, or beast.
Commenting on my posting on The Simpsons, Doug Wyman says in e-mail:
I just read your blog on the Simpsons and words. I notice that the 10 words in the referenced blog contain diddly. Now I *know* diddly can’t have been originated in the Simpsons since we used it as children. Often it was diddly squat as in nothing but often just used alone as an indication of nothing or non-consequence.
Now I wonder when it really got started as a word.
This issue comes up repeatedly. In an effort to avoid unnecessary technicality, I generally use the word word when the appropriate term is in fact lexeme (or lexical item). But that can sow confusion, since non-linguists generally use word to refer merely to physical substance — pronunciation and/or spelling — while a lexeme is a pairing of physical substance with meaning. There are several distinct lexemes pronounced /pɛn/ and spelled PEN; at least two distinct lexemes pronounced /tu/ and spelled TO (a preposition and the infinitive marker); and so on. So the crucial question is what /dɪdli/ DIDDLY *means* in the Simpsons context.