The two Salome Zwickys of Zürich

November 27, 2017

Yesterday Google Alert led me to information about two women named Salome Zwicky in Zürich: the first to turn up was a soprano, performing in concerts in the Zürich area and on several recordings; the second was (Frau) Dr. med. Salome Zwicky (or Zwicky-Beck), Leiterin des SingStimmZentrums  Zürich und Spezialärztin für Hals-, Nasen-, Ohren- Heilkunde und Phoniatrie (Stimm- und Sprachstörungen) — a specialist in disorders of speech and the (singing) voice, with a clinic in Schlieren (a few miles west of Zürich).

Zwicky is a very common surname in Switzerland, especially German-speaking Switzerland, but Salome is an unusual personal name, and the chances that there are two different Salome Zwickys in Zürich, one a singer and one a doctor specializing in (among other things) disorders of the singing voice, would be minuscule.

So: only one Salome Zwicky, who has managed to combine her musical and medical lives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Music, Zwickys | 5 Comments »

Guess I’ll go eat worms

November 26, 2017

A follow-up to my posting on the 23rd, “Two Thanksgiving meals”, in which one of the meals had as its main dish vermicelli Singapore-style, with rice vermicelli as the base. So now I’m all about vermicelli.

Warming up to the pasta topic, let’s consider Zesty Anderson Davis consuming some string pasta made from wheat:

(#1) #2 in a 6/23/13 posting, showing Zesty AD sucking up worms (well, spaghetti) in a panoply of sexual imagery
(#2) Abasement, comfort food, or oral sex?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in augmentative, Derivation, Diminutive, Language and food, Names, Phallicity | Leave a Comment »

Pillowtalk

November 25, 2017

It starts with pillowcases and pillowslips, moves to pillow-beres or pillow-biers, and from there to pillow bears, and also pillow-biters — the scourge of Australia, a continent famously “swarming with raving shirt-lifters and pillow-biters”. And from there to gay pillowcases and throw pillows. And on to facial expressions during, ahem, receptive anal intercourse. Get into bed, and before you know it, you’re getting fucked, ecstatically. The scene evolves:

(#1) Gay Evolution Pillow Case (designed by Joe Monica) from Cafe Press: the evolution of mincing (color me purple, honey)

(There will be seriously racy pictures of mansex. But even without them, after the first part, this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Evolution, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Humor, Language of sex, Rainbow, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

BF pornopaloozas

November 24, 2017

(Gay porn sales for Black Friday and beyond. So: men’s bodies and mansex, in plain language, definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Most of the hard-core raunch is in a posting on AZBlogX, but here’s one BF ad (for the Lucas studios) that I can get by with here:

(#1) Some word play is evergreen

The ad is a study in lean, swimmer body types and also in rise heights for tighty-whities: from left to right, lo, mid, and hi. And it satisfies what ought to be a rigid requirement for all BF ads: a significant Black.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Language play, Race and ethnicity, Signs and symbols, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

The pun within the pun

November 24, 2017

From a chain of Facebook friends, this Dan Thompson Brevity cartoon:

(#1)

The outside (perfect) pun: Gallos’ humor / gallows humor (which depends on your knowing about the Gallo brothers and also the concept of gallows humor). The inside, Ernest and Julio, (imperfect) pun: Bordeaux (wine) / border (collie) (which depends on your knowing about both the wines and the dogs).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

The leafy N + N compounds of fall

November 24, 2017

leaf slime and leaf sludge — appearing in a NYT story on the autumnal travails of the Metro-North Railroad, “The Dirty Side to Changing Leaves: Leaf Slime on the Region’s Rails” by Jonathan Wolfe (on-line on the 22nd; in print, “On Train Tracks, a Hazard Born of Autumn’s Beauty” on the 23rd).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Compounds, Lexical semantics | Leave a Comment »

pillowslip

November 23, 2017

A little (deeply inconclusive) exercise in judging the sociocultural status of a linguistic variant, in this case pillowslip (vs. pillowcase). On ADS-L today, Wilson Gray reported hearing pillowslip spoken by an Australian from New South Wales, commenting:

Mildly surprising. Pillowslip was the ordinary term that I used as a child, in East Texas. I have no idea whether this form is used anywhere else in the U.S., bedclothes not being a particularly common topic of conversation outside of the family. IAC [if anybody cares], it seems to me that pillowcase is the preferred term, in Yankspeak.

(Further information: Wilson is black and about my age, ca. 80.)

My own recollection is that pillowslip was the usual term among the working-class rural/suburban whites I grew up with in southeastern Pennsylvania, but that it was somewhat old-fashioned and was eventually eclipsed by the preferred commercial term, pillowcase.

But these are recollections (which might be skewed), of the usages in our personal experiences (which are tiny samplings of English usage at the time), colored by our impressions of more general usage (which might be completely off-base). So who knows what the actual story is?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Two Thanksgiving meals

November 23, 2017

… both non-standard.

One continues a recent tradition at my house that involves vermicelli Singapore-style from the local Hong Kong Chinese restaurant Tai Pan (this year accompanied by hot and sour soup).

The other is a recent tradition at the Taco Bell headquarters in Irvine CA, each year featuring a menu of inventive Mexican-based (sometimes quite distantly) dishes — among them, this year, turkeritos (foodmanteau alert!), incorporating seasoned beef, rice, and cheddar cheese, but apparently no turkey; the turkey’s contribution seems to be entirely verbal, in honor of the holiday. (It’s also possible that the turkeritos were tacos — folded corn tortillas — rather than burritos — wrapped wheat tortillas.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Holidays, Language and food, My life, Portmanteaus | 1 Comment »

Skip to the important bit

November 23, 2017

From reader Joshua Bischof in e-mail on the 21st (boldface highlights the example sentence, call it (1); italics and underlining mark off important elements in (1)):

I just got this email from the superintendent of my kids’ school district:

This is Superintendent Bill Hall calling to wish everyone a very happy, healthy, and safe Thanksgiving break. I would also encourage you to go to our website at http://www.mtsd.org and watch the video regarding our District’s recently released ranking for our Pennsylvania Value Added Assessment Scores. After watching the video, I know you will be proud of your child, our teachers, and our District.

Interesting how effortlessly we retrieve you as the missing subject of the adjunct despite its position in the complement clause.

The initial phrase (italicized above) after watching the video, call it (1a), would be deprecated as a “dangling modifier” by many — but as Josh noted, it is effortlessly (and correctly) interpreted as having the addressee of (1) (and not the speaker of (1)) as the person watching the video.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Danglers, Syntax | 1 Comment »

Mens Room Sausage

November 22, 2017

Via Facebook friends, a Seattle specialty that had somehow escaped my attention:

(#1) The studiedly suggestive logo for Uli’s Mens Room Sausage: red devil, tipped tails, and of course the pig for the pork (“Men are pigs, but then we like pork”)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language of sex, Phallicity | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »