April 4, 2022
Today’s morning name, the C[ount] noun non-profit, as in this real-life example (lifted from this very blog):
Partners of the Common Cents Lab are tech companies, banks, credit unions, non-profits, and government organizations
And in this NOAD entry:
adj. nonprofit [AZ: very frequently non-profit]: [attributive] not making or conducted primarily to make a profit: charities and other nonprofit organizations. noun mainly North American a nonprofit organization: I spent the next six years working for small nonprofits.
(With clearly C noun occurrences boldfaced)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Beheading, Derivation, Language and medicine, Morning names, Morphology, My life | 1 Comment »
April 3, 2022
(There will, as the title tells you, be riffs on squat, well, on squat. Since I’m given to finding my material in louche and faggy places, there will be brief encounters with squat — short and thick, fireplug-like — male organs and with a squatting position for receptive anal intercourse. But no visible body parts.)
I glanced at today’s incoming e-mail, which included a mailing from the New York Times with a link to a story of theirs offering life advice:
(#1)
I found it remarkable that the paper was giving pointers on how to embark on living in uninhabited buildings without the legal right to do so. But then we live in precarious times, and millions are having trouble coping.
Then I found the fine print of the mail header:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Ambiguity, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Music, Names, Parody, Phallicity, Poetry, Signs and symbols, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
April 2, 2022
(Warning: much of this is heavy in male bodies and man-on-man sex in very plain language — you know me, Al — so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday’s installment — “Bunnies with baskets”, here — only got through some amiably very dirty doggerel of mine and analysis of its poetic organization, when the draft for the rest was eaten in a computer disaster. But now I’ve re-composed the whole damn thing, and added a bonus section, so today you’ll get not only stuff about the 2001 film The Fluffer (which is not at all fluffy), but also the 2011 film Going Down in LA-LA Land (which has some joyously fluffy moments).
So today it’s about the noun fluff, the verb fluff, the agent noun fluffer, and the adjective fluffy. Inspired by entertaining vrai-gai exchanges on Facebook beginning on 3/31.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Double entendres, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Word play | 3 Comments »
April 1, 2022
🐇 🐇 🐇 Despite yesterday’s incident of gun-jumping, premature social intercourse (“April is the most Abrahamic month”, here), this is the actual April 1st posting, and it’s drenched in cunicular sexiness — this month I really really really mean those rabbits — so it’s definitely out-of-bounds for kids and the sexually modest. I begin with two images — not in themselves salacious — and then get down and fluffy with a bit of amiably very dirty doggerel.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Movies and tv, Poetic form, Poetry | 2 Comments »
March 31, 2022
🐇 🐇 🐇 It’s still April Eve, but I have a big carton of April-related things, which I will unpack for you a day in advance.
To start with, tomorrow is (as always) April Fool’s Day and also the great linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday.
Then, April this year is a festival of Abrahamic religion: Ramadan, Passover, and Easter, all coming up in the next few weeks. To recognize the last of these occasions, some words about Easter egg quotations and images. The wonderful cartoonist Ed Koren will put in an appearance here.
Finally, the April illustration from the 2022 Tom of Finland calendar, showing (among other things) the crotch plunge gesture. Warning: this material is vividly (homo)sexual, so distasteful for some readers.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language of sex | Leave a Comment »
March 30, 2022
Two ways of looking at lounge shorts (for men) in two ad campaigns. Both touting the softness of the clothing (genuinely desirable in coverings for men’s private parts), but one pushing it as a vehicle for sexual display, the other celebrating it as a vehicle for joy.
The first (from Helsinki Athletica) in a Daily Jocks ad from 3/26, marketed as homowear — the shorts are a very pale pink, whispering I Am Gay — highly sexualized (the model is sitting up on his knees, in bed, and his crotch is the visual focus of the photo); an accompanying photo has him in gray shorts (more macho, less homo), lying on his belly on a sofa with his ass humped up for sexual penetration. In both he displays an impressively muscled body (bulging biceps, massive pecs, rocky abs), a businesslike mustache, no-nonsense hair, and an impassive face with a challenging gaze (conveying: are you man enough to take this, buddy?).
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Gesture, Language in advertising, Names, Stance, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
March 29, 2022
Effeminacy in the animal world, first in yesterday’s (3/28) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) Not only elephant effeminacy, but also a cosmetic anagram, a rouge and peasant salve (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
And in one of my academic collages, with mice in the lab:
(#2) Continuing the theme of makeup for males
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Anagrams, Categorization and Labeling, Collages, Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and gender, Language and sexuality, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life | 3 Comments »
March 28, 2022
The Zippy strip from yesterday, 3/27:
(#1) Help wanted at the pit beef restaurant: a female server for their pit beef (the house entrée) and snow balls (the dessert), with the ensuing mantra that afflicts Zippy: PIT BEEF SNOW BALL GIRL (prosodically SW SW S; add a strong fourth beat — a shout YEAH!, a drum beat, cymbals, whatever — and you can conga to it)
So, the obvious stuff: Zippy’s onomatomania, his attraction to certain words and phrases; pit beef (especially associated with Baltimore); snow balls / snowballs, shaved ice confections especially associated with the Italian communities of Philadelphia and New York. Plus the gender stuff, a girl needed to serve guy-food: grilled meat, especially beef, being at the peak of masculinity in the American food world (with the gender association reinforced by serving it in a bun); not to mention that beef with balls is covertly phallic.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Headlines, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras, Masculinity, Word aversion and attraction | 1 Comment »
March 27, 2022
I had two postings in preparation about moments of great joy from yesterday: one from the music that greeted me on awakening in the morning; the other from the plants in Palo Alto’s Gamble Gardens, visited yesterday morning on my first trip out in the world for many weeks.
Then fresh posting topics rolled in alarmingly, and a search for background material led me by accident to a great surprise, a link to a tape of a public lecture (a bit over an hour long) at Iowa State University on 4/11/90, 32 years ago. Title above. The subtitle: Thinking about language theoretically.
I listened transfixed as the lecturer, speaking to a general university audience, took his listeners into the wilds of modern theoretical syntax, along the way deftly advancing some ways of thinking that guided his own research. An admirable bit of teaching, I thought. With some pride, because that lecturer was, of course, an earlier incarnation of me.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Acting, Constructions, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax, Teaching, Writing | Leave a Comment »
March 25, 2022
E-mail from a fem friend and colleague in the UK — the personal details are important — on 2/28:
I was thinking recently about the word nelly. It’s another Americanism I think. But it gets used quite a lot. Is it interchangeable with faggy? Or does it have different connotations? Interesting that your term is butch fagginess, not butch nelliness. I wonder why.
There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on what I’ve called butch fagginess, about butch queers playing flagrantly with the trappings of fagginess. So, one of the many forms of f-gayness — my friend’s effeminate presentation of self being another, and the character Emory’s pure essence of tough fag in the 1970 film Boys in the Band being still another. From my 7/28/21 posting “Today’s garment faggotry”:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Names | 6 Comments »
