In the Zippy strip for Superb Owl Day, Sunday 2/13 this year, another burlesque from that treasury of the absurd, The Songs of the Toad:
(#1) “Buy Me a Balloon”, a tangled version of “Fly Me to the Moon” — which, as it happens, has been zombielesqued on Zippy, in 2018, as “Flay Me to th’ Moon”
Encountered recently in an interview, by writer I, of actor X, about X’s approach to their craft. The exchanges below are about punctuation, specifically in scripts; X reads other things, of course, but scripts are the central reading material of an actor’s life, the stuff they use to transform, through a collaboration with a director and other actors, into performances.
If you’ve read the interview, you’ll know who X is, but I’ll conceal their identity for the moment, to let their remarks on punctuation wash over you. It would be an interesting exercise to hear the views of the writers of those scripts and the directors of their performances.
From Steven Levine on Facebook yesterday, some J. Crew joke boxer shorts:
(#1) Steven on Facebook: I was looking to pick up some new boxer shorts and came across this print of wiener dogs in wiener buns, with mustard. I guess this is a standard old-school cartoon joke image, but it still seems an odd thing to put on your underwear.
There’s now a Page on this blog about AZBlog postings that comment explicitly on the potential multivalence of all sorts of symbols: these symbols are “just stuff”, being able to be deployed for a number of different purposes.
In correspondence with a former student about their career, they offered this note of thanks to me:
Please know that I divide life (in an intellectual dimension, at the least) to before and after studying X with you.
Wow. Emotional gold for a teacher: you did good things that helped change someone’s life.
(Note the title. Stud hustling and men tricking with men, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Daily Jocks ad in my e-mail on 2/7 reproduces the archetypical cruise pose, deployed in both hustling (for sale) and tricking, or hooking up (for play), by men for men:
(#1) [ad copy:]
NEW: UTILITY SHORTS
BE READY FOR ANYTHING
Everyday practicality with weekend style, your new favourite shorts have arrived at DailyJocks.
From my 1/23/22 posting “Sexy Italians”, about a Pinterest offering of a 1900 painting Italian Man with a Rope by John Singer Sargent:
meanwhile, Pinterest also offered me a Sargent portrait of a sensitive young man, the pianist and composer Léon Delafosse
(#1) Léon Delafosse by Sargent (1895); the fingers! the fingers! (on his face, see Ernest Schelling in #2 below)
Notes on “sensitive” masculinity in the arts — variously characterized as delicate, elegant, Romantic, artistic, feminine, and the like — as seen in Sargent’s works. On Delafosse specifically. On Sargent’s relationship to Isabella Stewart Gardner; and about her life and the museum she founded in Boston. And then on appropriations of the sensitivity label in current pop psychology.
Two very brief digressions from yesterday’s posting “The SIN and GUILT of a LINGUIST” that wander far afield, even for me: on what I called there “the lit(t)eral magic of anagramming”, one type of letter-based magical thinking; and on words for someone who shares some group membership with you, as John Wells (the reporter of the anagram SIN + GUILT = LINGUIST) does with me, several times over.
Revelatory anagrams and their cousins. Anagrams function primarily in our culture as language play, in various forms. But occasionally, someone sees them as revealing deeper truths (a linguist really is steeped in guilt and sin?), and occasionally anagram names are devised with this in mind: the Tales of the City character ANNA MADRIGAL, who is A MAN AND A GIRL.
On the model of numerology —
noun numerology: the branch of knowledge that deals with the occult significance of numbers. (NOAD)
you might call assigning occult significance to anagrams anagrammatology.
Meanwhile, there are several traditions of what you might call alphabetic numerology: assigning numerical values to the letters of an alphabet and so to words, names, and ideas.
Coreligionists and their cousins. John Wells and I share membership in several socioculturally significant groups: we are (at least) both (cis) men, both Anglophones, both (some brand of) white person of European ancestry, both academic linguists, both homosexual / gay / queer, and both in our 80s (so of the generation in between the generation that fought WWII and the boomers, and also of the plague generation, the generation of gay men that was devastated by AIDS). I can, of course, refer to these shared memberships by naming the specific groups we both belong to, as I have done in the previous sentence — though I note that these delineations tend to be complex and wordy.
For many purposes, it would be sufficient to note that we share a category, rather than going into the details of stipulating what that category is. For one category — religion — there is such a term: coreligionist (also spelled co-religionist). From NOAD:
noun coreligionist: an adherent of the same religion as another person: it is very sad that these people call themselves my co-religionists.
Earlier in our lives, John Wells and I were indeed coreligionists: specifically, Protestant Christians of the Anglican persuasion. I believe John has maintained this identity, but I have fallen away and am now a nonbeliever (though the church that I don’t belong to is a socially liberal Episcopal church, so John and I still share some shred of coreligionism).
It would be useful to have similar terms for people sharing race, ethnicity, nationality, occupation, sexual orientation, generation, or geographical region (and probably more categories I haven’t considered), but as far as I can see, English has none of them. Some of them you could devise on the model of coreligionist: co-occupationist, co-orientationist, cogenerationist (all applying to John and me), but others would clearly require a different model (co-racist and co-nationalist, given existing racist and nationalist).
[Added 2/8, from NOAD: noun compatriot: a fellow citizen or national of a country: Stich defeated his compatriot Boris Becker in the quarterfinals.]
The admirable John Wells has made my Sunday morning by informing us on Facebook that the Sunday Times (of London) cryptic crossword contains the anagram
LINGUIST = GUILT + SIN
Secretly, linguists have known all along that each of us bears the stain of sin and guilt. Now that hard truth has been made bare via the lit(t)eral magic of anagramming.
We cry out to be shriven, to present ourselves for confession, penance, and absolution. Give us peace.
In the words of a hymn text by Charles Cole (1791), set to the tune Gospel Trumpet in the 1991 revision of the Denson Sacred Harp:
Thy blood, dear Jesus, once was spilt
To save our souls from sin and guilt,
And sinners now may come to God
And find salvation through Thy blood
Another greeting card from Ann Burlingham, this one for the American 2/2 holiday, Groundhog Day (see my 2/2/15 posting “Back-to-back American holidays”, with a section on the groundhog; the American holiday; and the movie Groundhog Day):
(#1) The Hester & Cook greeting card “Phil’s Great Adventure” by Vicki Sawyer, celebrating Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog seer of Punxsutawney PA — here represented as wearing a bunch of scallions on his head (the headdress thing is a Sawyer feature; more below)
Wearing scallions of course evoked wearing leeks and took me to yet another holiday, 3/1 instead of 2/2: St. David’s Day, celebrating the patron saint of Wales.
And that bounced me back to the Christian feast day for 2/2: Candlemas Day (one of those Christian holidays I don’t venture to try to explain to people).
