Hard-core gendering

September 12, 2020

Now visible on tv and on the net: Manly Bands, wedding rings and engagement rings for real guy guys: deeply masculine bands that avoid the mere prettiness of so many of the usual rings (and any possible associations with femininity) — and are advertised with over-the-top testosterone-steeped prose.

An ad from the net:

Need a wedding band that’ll make you wanna run up a flight of stairs to the Rocky soundtrack? These bestsellers’ll do the trick.

The content is about achieving great physical prowess, emulating a winning prize-fighter. The style of the text is studiously informal (that’ll, wanna, bestsellers’ll) and slangy (do the trick) — guy talk.

The copy on the company’s site is in fact much more elaborately gendered as masculine than this.

And then there’s the name Manly Bands.

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Posted in Language in advertising, Masculinity, Style and register | 2 Comments »

The croup

September 12, 2020

The One Big Happy strip from 8/21:

Ruthie, faced with the unfamiliar medical term the croup, does her best to assimilate it to what she knows, namely the ordinary-language term for a physical condition, the creeps. But this time, she guesses that croup is a portmanteau, of group and creeps.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | 2 Comments »

More presents

September 11, 2020

This time from two of the three Burlingham sisters, Kathryn and Ann. Kathryn’s was probably not intended as a birthday present, but it arrived at the right time, and it was certainly a present. Ann sent a koala surf rescue birthday card (from the La La Land company in Australia) saying nice things about me, and then separately a package of three raw milk cheeses from the East Hill Creamery in Perry NY (Ann gets around).

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Posted in Language and food, My life | 2 Comments »

diaphoretic

September 10, 2020

Today’s morning name, and for a change I was able to figure out why it was in my head.

From NOAD:

adj. diaphoretic: Medicine [a] (chiefly of a drug) inducing perspiration. [b]  (of a person) sweating heavily. ORIGIN late Middle English: via late Latin from Greek diaphorētikos, from diaphorein ‘sweat out’.

It’s the b sense I had in my head, and I got it from watching reruns of the old Emergency! tv show.

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Posted in Morning names, Movies and tv, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »

Red Löbster Cult

September 9, 2020

The band name in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, a cute play on Blue Öyster Cult (if you don’t know about Blue Öyster Cult, then the cartoon will be pretty much of a mystery to you):


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

A band of lobsters. They have an umlaut. They have cowbell.

It’s all an elaborate play on BÖC.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music | 1 Comment »

Crossed folk stories

September 9, 2020

Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro cartoon:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

The strip explicitly refers to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but also alludes to the Piper’s son as having stolen a pig. This is baffling unless you know a particular English nursery rhyme, so we have another exercise in cartoon understanding.

Ok, let’s assume you get that. Then the cartoon is a kind of conceptual portmanteau, a cross between the Piper legend and the Piper’s son nursery rhyme. Then set in a modern law-enforcement context, juxtaposing some (stereotyped) version of the real world with the world of these two folk stories. Cool.

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Posted in Folklore, Formulaic language, Inflection, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Forget the fly, go for the hole

September 8, 2020

(Penises are crucially involved in the first of these ads, though they aren’t actually mentioned, much less depicted. Still…)

It’s crude, about men’s underwear, and you probably don’t want to go there, but there it is, or at least was, at least in someone’s commercial imagination. This ad from ca. 1969 (thanks to Peter Korn):


(#1) The model is alarmingly wasp-waisted; that can’t be healthy.

So: not a fly, but a stretchy hole to push your penis through, for the exigencies of the moment. An innovation that seems not to have caught on, or even found its way into stores. A lost inspiration of the 1960s.

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Posted in Underwear | 3 Comments »

cherchez la femme

September 8, 2020

Today’s morning name, a French expression whose literal meaning is straightforward, but whose uses in context are anything but.

From Wikipedia:

Cherchez la femme is a French phrase which literally means ‘look for the woman’. It is a cliche in detective fiction, used to suggest that a mystery can be resolved by identifying a femme fatale or female love interest.

The expression comes from the novel The Mohicans of Paris (Les Mohicans de Paris) published 1854–1859 by Alexandre Dumas (père) [an adventure story, not a detective story]. The phrase is repeated several times in the novel

… The phrase embodies a cliché of detective pulp fiction: no matter what the problem, a woman is often the root cause.

The phrase has thus come to refer to explanations that automatically find the same root cause, no matter the specifics of the problem.

Two plays on the phrase (from among many), below the fold:

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Posted in Books, Clichés, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Morning names | 2 Comments »

Le Male, the men’s fragrance

September 7, 2020

(Well, it’s about perfumerie, but it’s Gaultier, he’s flagrantly homoerotic, and he’s going to take us to men’s bodies and mansex. So pieces of this posting are definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Tim Evanson on Facebook today, with an image from a pharmacy window in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland:


(#1) Poster for Jean Paul Gaultier’s men’s fragrance Le Male, featuring a decidedly homoerotic shirtless sailor (credit: FotoFling Scotland)

Tim: Goodness, what ARE they selling?!?!?

AZ: They are selling sailors. Drenched in masculine scents. At very high prices.

McDonald Jason Richard: The best cologne for men in the world.

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Posted in Books, Clothing, Fashion, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language in advertising, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness | 6 Comments »

The post-celebratory day

September 7, 2020

The fourth installment in the story of my 80th birthday. The core of the story:

The day itself was quiet but pleasant (though I refused to go out of the house for any purpose, since it was a goddamn oven out there). Kim Darnell brought me a large assortment of salmon-based sushi, plus a collection of tartlets, mostly with fruit — enough for two substantial meals, the second of which was my breakfast today. Mostly I spent yesterday responding to birthday wishes, of which there were many hundreds. I know an awful lot of people.

A surprising development was that for this birthday I got not one, but three (different) Jacquie Lawson ecards (charming brief animations developing a scene or story, accompanied by music, usually classical music). Details below.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and plants, Music, My life, Rainbow | 3 Comments »

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