Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The star boxboy

December 13, 2021

Today, December 13th, is Day 1 of the 12 Days of Commercial Christmas (Day 1 of the 12 Days of Christian Christmas is, of course, Christmas Day, December 25th). (Meanwhile, December 13th on the Christian religious calendar is St. Lucy’s Day, on which unwary Scandinavian girls set their hair on fire, as a precursor to the coming of the light of Christ on Christmas Day. Yes, people have told me that my religious education is somewhat spotty.)

In any case, the Daily Jocks people are recognizing the days of Commercial Christmas with what looks like a Man Meat of the Day for each of the 12 days, beginning with the, um, boxboy I called Joey when he turned up last year as the DJ offering for Boxing Day.

Now promoted to the inaugural position in the season of commercial excess, Joey appears again in his Santa hat, red party socks, and blindingly new basketball shoes (underwear models and gay porn stars nearly always appear in brand-new athletic shoes — or spiffy boots — whatever else they fail to be be wearing). Joey is quite free about displaying and offering his delicious body, so that some of what follows is not for the sexually naive or the sexually modest.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Poetry | 3 Comments »

Dioramas of Phallusia

December 12, 2021

More gay home decor, this time from the three penis-oriented dioramas in my bedroom, two of them incorporating recently acquired play figures with prominent dicks in places not provided in nature — see my 12/10 posting “Enhanced phallicity” — so far, doubly phallic tyrannosauruses, brontosauruses, elephants, and bananas.

Advance warning: simulacra of penises, in considerable abundance. Most of them frankly silly, but they’re indisputably phalloid, and so not to everyone’s taste. Eventually there will also be some references to sex between men.

Further warning. The photos were shot with a minimally adequate camera (in my venerable iPad), in my unsteady hands, and in the drastically poor lighting of my bedroom, so the wretched images can do no more than give you a feel for the dioramas.

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Metaphor, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Toys | 2 Comments »

Enhanced phallicity

December 10, 2021

(All about things that are phalloid — penis-like — to one degree or in one way or another — with illustrations, though no actual human penises will appear here. But it’s clearly not to everyone’s taste.)

A recent theme in my gay home decor (which is deeply playful but also flagrantly sexual, and littered with books as well): 3-D printings of things that are not merely phallic by nature, but (also) deliberately designed to resemble penises in some detail; they are doubly phallic. The neck and head of a brontosaurus, or of a giraffe; an elephant’s trunk; a banana.

In the world of double phallicity, it’s not just objects of the natural world; plenty of phallic artifacts can be similarly enhanced: salt and pepper shakers, chandeliers, lollipops, all can be — and have been — engineered to resemble male genitalia in some detail.

Meanwhile, phallic artifacts — notably, tower buildings and rockets — can have their phallicity upped to some degree, without any intention on the part of the designers to simulate a glans penis or testicles or whatever (but sometimes it happens anyway, to public amusement).

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and food, Phallicity | 3 Comments »

The photoon from Satilla Shores

December 9, 2021

On Facebook on 11/23, Charlie Fulton offered this photoon — a photograph intended as a cartoon — and provided it with a caption, in this case a brief text expressing a personal opinion of his about some event, not depicted in the photoon, without any explicit connection between the event and the photograph. So Charlie’s captioned photoon takes a ton of context and background knowledge to appreciate, but (in my opinion) it’s very cleverly bitter (measured bitterness being a CF specialty).

The photoon, with Charlie’s caption:

(#1) [CF:] Ah, the clever “toenail defense” tactic. I should have seen it coming.

The only really easy part of the comprehension exercise is recognizing the objects in #1 as the edible seeds — known in English as Brazil nuts — of the Bertholletia excelsa tree (native to South America).

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Posted in Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Race and ethnicity, Taboo language and slurs, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »

The illusion of macrophallicity

December 8, 2021

(A posting about (among other things) big penises, gay porn, the male body, and man-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

It begins with an ad for last week’s 2021 Cyber Week sale from the Falcon family of gay porn sites, reported on in my 12/2/21 XBlog posting “Johnny Torque and friends”. Illustration #1 there (JT in Naked Sword’s Frat House Cream), cropped for WordPress modesty, though what remains is nevertheless important, plus text from AZBlogX:

(#1) The photo from AZBlogX has been cropped exactly at the tip of Torque’s penis; this version is all that WordPress allows

Featuring the lean pornstar Johnny Torque in a pose engineering to make it appear that he has an extraordinarily long cock, reaching, when fully erect, almost all the way to the cleft between his pecs; actually, the shot was made from below, looking up, and his upper body was somewhat bent forward over his cock — actions that together make the tip of his cock look quite close to his chest.

This is the illusion of macrophallicity (noun macrophallicity ‘possession of a big dick’ < adj. macrophallic ‘having a big dick’ < noun macrophallus ‘big dick’; and note also the useful noun macrophallicism ‘veneration of big dicks’, denoting a characteristic preoccupation of American men).

To appreciate the illusion, consider the distance ∆g-c between your genital top (the top of your vulva if you’re a woman, the top of the base of your penis if you’re a man) and that spot on the lower border in #1 just a bit below the intermammary cleft, between your breasts / pecs. Torsos differ in length, of course, but mine is roughly the same as Johnny Torque’s, and ∆g-c for me is over a foot, which would give JT a truly world-class macrophallus. In fact, his cock is a standard porn cock, reported to be just over 7ʺ long.

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Posted in Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Names, Phallicity, Porn actors, Portmanteaus, Professional names | Leave a Comment »

What’s on the menu?

December 6, 2021

By Matt Diffee, in today’s (12/6) New Yorker:

(#1) There is a header on the menu that says Breakfast Served All Day, intended as an assertion that all the breakfast items are served all day — but understood by these diners as a label for a category of menu items, or even for a specific menu item, a label similar to Breakfast Special or (Special) Breakfast of the Day (an item whose identity is further specified on the menu or by a server)

(Yes, there is yet another reading, in which the diners are supposing that they can have their particular breakfast order served to them throughout the day, as one monumentally extended meal.)

So a rather complex kind of ambiguity, which might seem unlikely to be significant in real life, until you look at some actual menus without the knowledge that the assertion Breakfast Served All Day is a commonplace on menus at American family-style restaurants (fancy places don’t serve breakfast all day). But even if you’re firmly in possession of that knowledge, some menu designs invite the label understanding.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Signage | 1 Comment »

As butch as it gets

December 5, 2021

(Note: there will soon be a digression into the world of left-handed umliterature for gay men, with some raunchy material in it. I’ll issue a warning when it looms, so you can leave if it’s likely to affront you.)

As butch as it gets, at least in world of buzzcuts. Below, today’s silver fox job by Kim Darnell. Since it’s my head, it’s a kinder, gentler buzzcut, inviting you to run your hands over its fine silky hair — please do, it will feel great to you, and to me too — not an aggressive leatherman-syle buzzcut.

(#1) No studded leather harness for me, but instead a rainbow-colored FAGGOT t-shirt, with which I disarmingly claim the status of Big Fag for myself; it goes along with those nice eyes

No, it is not snowing here: that’s sunlight reflecting off the plant leaves on my patio. Just a trick of the light.

Otherwise, not much new in the photo, except for a book in the bookcase right behind me: William E. Jones’s 2016 True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell, the story of pornographer McDonald and his eccentric zine. And this is where the sexually modest should exit.

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Posted in Books, Gay porn, Language and the body | 4 Comments »

Lumber linguistics

December 4, 2021

Today’s Zippy strip takes exploits the giant hammer outside the Ford Lumber Co. in Fort Washington MD to skitter over language-related matters — the metaphorical character of many common idioms, the innateness of language (abilities), natural language ontology — to lodge in a fixation on food that Zippy finds intrinsically funny (in this case, egg creams and V-8 juice):

(#1) Zippy’s attributions are a bit wonky — it’s Lakoff, not Chomsky, who hammers on the centrality of metaphor, though linguistic nativism is indeed a Chomskyan preoccupation — but then Zippy’s a surrealistic Pinhead, not a pinhead professor, and anyway, you say linguist, the popular mind thinks Chomsky, so Zippy has his finger on the pulse of the people here (even if ontology pours into egg creams for him and even if he seems to be hammered on V-8)

Meanwhile, there’s the news from Fort Washington MD.

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Posted in Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Metaphor | 1 Comment »

An American tradegy

December 3, 2021

This morning, Stephanie Ruhle, reporting a Michigan school shooting on MSNBC, and confronting the word tragedy (with /ǰ … d/ ), replaced it by tradegy (with /d … ǰ/), transposing the two consonants; she noticed the error, and “corrected” it by, alas, a repetition of tradegy, which she didn’t notice, so she just went on. Then in a later report on the shooting, she again referred to it as a tradegy, this time without noticing.

As an error in spelling — TRADEGY for TRAGEDY — this transposition of consonants is common enough to have been listed in Paul Brians’s Common Errors in English Usage, p. 207 (and on the website), where Brians remarks:

Not only do people often misspell “tragedy” as “tradegy,” they mispronounce it that way too.

Here I think that Brians’s focus on errors in written English has led him astray, led him to treat what is at root an error in pronunciation — with the erroneous pronunciation then carried over to spelling — as an error in spelling that then is then carried over into pronunciation. Admittedly, the latter transfer is part of the story for some speakers, but the problems begin with inadvertent speech errors like Stephanie Ruhle’s. An inadvertent speech error that seems to be part of a larger phenomenon.

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Posted in Errors, Language acquisition, Phonetics | 9 Comments »