(Mostly cultural analysis, focused on gay porn. But plenty of very plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest.)

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The pizza boy archetype, as depicted by young Melbourne artist Allain de Leon in DNA Magazine, April 2013

The figure is a package of symbolic content and associations, among them: the desirable youth; the delivery figure, someone who comes to your door bearing pleasurable goods for money; pizza as an American cultural emblem of warm informal social associations; and a cluster of associations of food with sex, some more general, others specific to pizza slices and whole pizza pies

The trigger for this posting is a recent ad for C1R/Catalina Video, with a sale on a new release — Pizza Boy 4 – Slice of Pie — and the three earlier films in the series, starting with Pizza Boy: He Delivers (William Higgins, 1986). The ads, which are way XXX-rated, are available in a posting on AZBlogX (“Another slice of pizza boy”). But here: a salacious image of pizza boy Steve Henson from the first film, a classic of gay porn:

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Higgins’s 1986 pizza boy wasn’t the first guy in gay porn to come to the door with a hot pie, and a great many pizza-bearing hunks have succeeded him — some to be reported on below — but he became the classic representative of his type.

From an enthusiastic but perceptive IMDb review from 8/28/10 by Steve Farmington:

THE PIZZA BOY: HE DELIVERS. It has a great cast. While there ARE a number of rock-solid Adonis types on hand, (most notably Tony Stefano, who could never shake the expressionless “just in it for the money” vibe) there are also genuine humans such as David Ashfield and Grant Fagan. They look like everyday guys you might work or go to school with, and that makes the sex scenes feel very real.
It is not coincidence that Ashfield and Fagan headline PIZZA BOY’s two hottest scenes, which both take place in a “park” at night (read: picnic table in a dark soundstage). In the first scene Ashfield, playing the more experienced (but still boyishly innocent) role, introduces Fagan to the joys of oral gratification. Of course, Fagan responds enthusiastically (with both having nice slow-motion pop-offs shot from several angles, a Higgins trademark). In a second scene later in the film, Fagan stretches out on the picnic table as Ashfield takes it to the next level [anal intercourse].

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Ashfield prepares Fagan for chapter 2 of “Try it, you’ll like it” (and he does, a lot)

Ashfield and Fagan’s chemistry (complete with semi-realistic dialogue, at least by Pornland standards, that they actually seem to have fun with) makes their pairing the high point of the film.

Ashfield (blonder, twinkier, sort of goofy-giggly, with a visibly high sex drive) and Fagan (darker, jockier, more reserved) are indeed well paired. On Ashfield, from the Retro Studs site from August 2011:

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 One of the biggest porn stars of the 80s was David Ashfield.  David never really had the “leading man” role in porn, but still made a huge impact nonetheless.  With his slim build and impressive cut cock, David exuded a natural sexuality mixed with a little goofiness, which in my eyes only made him more sexy.  He appeared in dozens of films throughout the 80s, including such classic titles as “Pizza Boy, He Delivers”, “Spring Break”, “Below The Belt”, “Delivery Boys”, “Classmates”, and “Getting It”, just to name a few.

Fagan also appeared in dozens of films, from 1985 through the early 2000s.

The full set of scenes:

1 David Ashfield takes Grant Fagan home and comes onto him on a picnic table. They trade blow jobs.

2 Tony Stefano and Brent Woods in a lobby to a bar.

3 David Ashfield takes Grant home again. Grant sucks himself and David fucks him.

4 Tim Barnes and Art Williams in a bed.

5 Steve Henson and Troy Ramsey take turns rimming and fucking each other.

6 Mike Gere, Chad Johnson, and Art Williams are working out and work each other out while Tim Barnes and Joey Hart videotape them from across the street.

The sex is mostly even-handed, sexually democratic: men trade blow jobs and rim jobs and they flip-fuck. In the three-way in scene 6, after two men have have been fucked, the third announces, “I’m the only one who hasn’t had it yet”, so the other two take turns fucking him. Everybody wants to give it, everybody wants to take it.

Notes on the forms of gay porn. Gay porn is naturally episodic, so as to provide both variety in characters and content (and so to satisfy the varied sexual tastes of the viewers) and to provide periodic climactic moments in the story (and so to bring viewers to ejaculation along with the characters). A movie can be organized as a set of largely unrelated shorts (the counterpart to a collection of short stories) or can be loosely held together by a narrative theme (compare the Canterbury Tales or Arabian Nights); the episodes mostly involve stock characters in stock situations:

coming of age (the first time); the ritual test (gang scenes); same-sex bonding; the quest through dangerous territory; the scenic tour (the road story); the voyage of character development (Bildungsroman), the course of true love through trials, etc.

All of these have their counterparts in other genres of literature; you will recognize several from The Magic Flute and The Adventures of Robin Hood, as well as in The Pizza Boy: He Delivers.

Pizza boys in 2017. Skip forward now to the latest Catalina Pizza Boy, #4. Slice of Pie. He Delivers I own and have watched a number of times; Slice of Pie I know about only through the C1R advertising. But that gives me some occasion to talk not about thematic and narrative organization, but about visual organization. Some gay porn is well crafted as film, and most porn comes with carefully composed stills for advertising, which are created separately from the films themselves (the two are often only tangentially related). Compositions from the three scenes in Slice of Pie, with the bodies arranged in ways both visually and emotionally pleasing:

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Scene 1 Rico Romero and Timothy Rivers — Rico takes Timothy’s big dick in the bedroom

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Scene 2 Rego Bello and Alexander Garrett — watch these thick latin hunks in the locker room

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Scene 3 Xavier Huxx and Dylan Drive — when the cute pizza boy arrives, he’s bringing more than just dinner

(These scenes, all oral, have been cropped to move the focus from cocks to the alignments of the men’s bodies.)

Another gay pizza monument. Moving now from California-inflected Catalina to Joe Gage’s world of working-class mansex (both Higgins and Gage have been subjects of previous postings on this blog), we come to TitanMen’s Campus Pizza (2007), with Dean Flynn, Andrew Justice, Kai Grant, Justin Riddick, David Korben, Jason Reynolds, Damien Crosse, and Mason Wyler. From the TitanMen site:

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On the front cover, front to back: Flynn, Crosse, Justice

TitanMen exclusive Dean Flynn is the Campus Pizza delivery man bringing a steaming slice of sex door-to-door in the latest sexual epic from the dirty mind of Joe Gage.

[1] The first delivery is to Andrew Justice, the cigar-chomping campus custodian who likes to bench press in his garage in the nude. When his nephew Jason Reynolds drops by, he can’t keep his eyes off his uncle’s long cock, which is bouncing up and down with each rep. In no time, the young stud’s stuffing it into his hungry mouth and eager ass.

[2] Tyler Kane, the school’s architecture professor, is burning the midnight oil with Kai Grant, a wheelchair bound grad student. To show his Prof that his cock works just fine, he pulls it out — rock-hard — and peels back the foreskin to give him a taste. Tyler services Kai and then pins his legs back to give him a proper ass drilling with a butt plug and then his cock — fucking the cum right out of him.

[3] For his final delivery of the night, Dean brings a couple of pizzas to four buddies playing poker [the male bonding theme]: TitanMen exclusive Damien Crosse, nubile Mason Wyler [a target for gang scenes], muscular Justin Riddick, and rugged David Korben. They start a game of strip poker for Dean, but the game quickly devolves into a circle jerk as all five guys lose their clothes and can’t hide their raging boners. After they trade BJ’s and blow their wads, Damien and Justin take turns fucking the hell out of Mason, Dean and David.

Flynn and Crosse have been subjects of several previous postings — they are favorites of mine — but Andrew Justice is new to this blog. Publicity shot for the movie, with a broadly smiling cock-teasing Justice:

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From a SINema review quoted on the Joe Gage site:

A handsome delivery youth driving a car through dark streets informs us, “Ohio is the pizza capitol of the world,” thus beginning yet another moody exploration of mid-American maleness written and directed by the great Joe Gage. This time he goes a social step up from the truck-drivers and policeman he’s often concentrated on, and hits a college campus. But it’s still nitty-gritty Joe Gage land. He’s our grim poet of the prick, gay porn’s D.W. Griffith or John Ford, and he’s still going. Amazing! Three scenes are long and leisurely, filled with psychological and physical detail. There’s a duo involving a teacher with student in a wheelchair, and a post-poker five-way mixing the deliverer with two students, the landlord, and even “the handyman.” Sordid, huh?

Sordid, but then we love sordid. Especially in northern, Rust-Belt industrial Ohio, which also teems with colleges and universities, both public (Ohio Northern, Univ. of Toledo, Cleveland State, Kent State, Bowling Green State, Univ. of Akron, Youngstown State) and private (Case Western Reserve, Cleveland Institute of Art, John Carroll, Oberlin, and more).

Beyond Higgins and Gage. The amount of pizza-based porn (straight as well as gay) is mind-blogging. Five more gay examples, including ethnically / racially targeted flicks, some international (some images cropped or fuzzed over for modesty):

(#10) Pizza Boy Gangbang (Jet Set Media)

(#11) First in a Pizza Delivery series, starring Asians: spitroasted pizza boy

(#12) Fresh Hot Pizza Boy (Dragon Media), featuring Latinos

(#13) Black Topped Pizza Boy (set in Brazil)

(#14) Pizza Cazzone (German production, with international cast), wielding Italian cazzone ‘big penis’ (speak any language you want, but carry a big stick)

Gay porn is rich in many kinds of sexual pizza boys, crostini carnali you might call them (English noun crostini: ‘small pieces of toasted or fried bread served with a topping’ (NOAD2); Italian dimin. pl. < Latin crustum ‘pie. cake, bread’). Or, interleaving the two words, carnostalini. Tasty pieces. Slices of hot spicy pie.Whatever.

What is it about pizza boys? Four things about the carnostalini:

1 They are young, sexually desirable men

2 They deliver things – like prostitutes on an outcall, they come to your place, bearing desirable goods for money

3 pizza is an American cultural embodiment of informal social associations — the American food, cutting across many social lines, suitable for solitary pleasure or one-on-one occasions, but especially group gatherings

4 They plug into general associations of food and sex, but more specifically:

(a) The pizza slice is a phallic symbol: it’s a pointed thing that you put it in your mouth and eat

(b) The whole pizza, like a whole pie (sweet or savory, fruit pie or meat pie) is a sexcavital symbol (vagina or anus considered as sexual organ), round and warm and penetrable

(c) More generally, a pizza is a metonym for the whole body (take, eat, this is my body, offered for you)

To elaborate…

Note 1, on the desirability of youths, especialy carnostalini. From Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity by John Mercer (2017):

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Note 2, on delivery men. Of all types, staple figures in porn, straight as well as gay. They deliver food. Packages. Whatever you need. So long as you pay.

Note 3, on pizza slices as phallic symbols. Let me recommend to you Daveo Falaveo’s calculatedly outrageous “Gay Pizza Song”:

(#16) Watch him perform the song here

Single slice of pizza
I’m all on my own.
Sittin here on my bed
waitin by the telephone.

I know that you want to….
eat me everyday.
Just because I’m in your mouth
it doesn’t mean you’re gay.

In 2010 Falaveo was in London and posted this:

My goal is to make a healthy living from modeling. I want to use this [Model Mayhem] site to help me get exposed to the industry. I like all styles of modeling. I am a very eccentric, friendly, and outgoing person. I am eccentric with the way I live, eat, and my daily routines.

And his videos.

Note 4, an assortment of relevant entries from GDoS, with some comments:

noun pie in sexual senses: (a) the vagina. [first cite 1533, British citations through 1694; then a gap until US cites start in 1931, from an Ozark folk source; then more generally, i.e. in Jagger & Richard 1973 “Coming Down Again”: “Slip my tongue in someone else’s pie”] (b) a woman. [cites from 16th – 18th centuries] (c) a term of affection. [Norman Mailer, “Tell me why, pie”] (d) (US campus) an attractive, sexually desirable woman; also used derog. [cites from 1955 on]

(And then by the woman > gay man route, though not in GDoS: (a) ‘male anus considered as a sexual organ’ — the sexcavital move. There are probably also occurrences of (b) ‘gay man, considered as a sex object’, though I haven’t found cites.)

GDoS noun piece: 1 as an individual. (a) a woman, esp. when appraised sexually (i.e. a ‘piece of meat’) [first cite 1538] (b) a man [first cite 1797] (c) (gay) a man, in a sexual context. [first cite 1958] … 3 as a lit. or fig. weapon or tool. (a) a gun [standard for centuries, then slang from mid-19th century on] (b) (also fowling piece) the penis.[first cite 1836] … 7 an act of sexual intercourse [first cite c.1920 “She herself had met me for a quick piece on the grass”]

GDoS noun piece of meat: 1 (also hunk of meat, piece of pie-meat) anyone regarded as no more than a physical object, esp. in a sexual context [first cite c.1619] 2 (US gay) a penis. [first cite c.1925]

GDoS noun piece of ass [with many variants]: 1 a woman, not necessarily derog. but invariably from a sexual point of view and usu. dismissive; occas. a man. [first cite 1918] 2 heterosexual sexual intercourse. [first cite c.1930] 3 heter- or homosexual anal intercourse [first cite 1934] 4 (US Underworld) a passive male homosexual [1950 dictionary cites]

Or, of course, sexcavity (vagina or male anus, considered as sexual objects), though GDoS seems to have no cites for these senses.

In any case, if the pizza boy turns up at your door with a hot pie, he might be offering you a lot more than just a friendly nosh.

(By the way, the tale of David Ashfield and Grant Fagan in the Higgins Pizza Boy, scenes 1 and 3, turns sweetly into a love story. Sexual initiation of Fagan, in two stages — and then comes love. To turn a formula around: to Ashfield, Fagan’s not just a piece of meat, he’s a wonderful human being.)

Tucked inside Reid Forgrave’s story in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the Boundary Waters area of northern Minnesota was an admirable brand name, an off-color portmantriple (boldfaced below):

[Becky] Rom and her husband climbed out of the canoe. Back in [the town of Ely], they pointed out thriving enterprises. One family company makes outerwear, which nicely complements the family’s other business, a lodge that runs winter dogsledding trips. An outfit called Crapola makes cranberry-apple granola. An art gallery displayed prints from a nature photographer…

If you live in or near Ely (a town of three or four thousand people), or if you’re a serious granola maven, you’re probably familiar with Crapola, but otherwise the product isn’t widely known.

The product, in its original form; in its (sigh) Number Two variety; and in an American patriot spinoff (all packages featuring the founders, Andrea and Brian Strom):

(#1) Note: “Makes even word people regular”

Brian Strom, on the company’s website:

By June of 2007, we were living the country life on our very own off-grid homestead in northern Minnesota. That’s when a silly conversation turned into inspiration for our granola business. One day I said something like “wouldn’t it be funny if we made cranberry apple granola and called it Crapola?”. I say lots of things like that, but for some reason this idea actually became a reality. Next thing I knew, a business was born.  Be careful what you say in front of your wife.  It could change your life forever.

On the model for the product name, from NOAD2:

noun crapola: North American vulgar slang nonsense; rubbish. ORIGIN from crap [‘feces’] and -ola, a suffix used humorously to extend standard words.

The title of Forgrave’s piece, a compact summary of the story:

In Northern Minnesota, Two Economies Square Off: Mining vs. Wilderness: Proposed mines near the Boundary Waters have become the latest front in the fight over who gets to profit from America’s natural resources

A photo from the NYT, suggesting the beauties of the lakes and islands:

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The article also shows the open-strip mines in the area, but I’ll spare you that.

It’s Eva Marie Saint Lucy’s Day and, in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo, a Kurt Russell terrier bounds in:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip — see this Page.)

First, Kurt Russell and the Russell terrier. Then Eva Marie Saint and St. Lucy’s Day. In both cases, a member of what I’ve called the Acting Corps (see the Page on this blog), with a name in a POP (a phrasal overlap portmanteau; see the Page on this blog).

To come in another posting, the morning name for yesterday:  the actor name-chain POP Stephen Boyd Gaines, plus a longer name chain that gets from actor Raul Julia to actor Boyd Gaines in 9 steps, with actors Penelope Keith and Keith David in the middle.

Kurt Russell terrier. The actor, from Wikipedia:

Kurt Vogel Russell (born March 17, 1951) is an American actor. He began acting on television at the age of 12 in the western series The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1963–1964). In the late 1960s, he signed a ten-year contract with The Walt Disney Company where, according to Robert Osborne, he became the studio’s top star of the 1970s.

(#2) A shirtless young Russell as Jungle Boy in the Gilligan’s Island tv episode “Gilligan Meets Jungle Boy” (2/6/65)

Russell was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture for his performance in Silkwood (1983).

(#3) Russell, also shirtless but considerably more mature, in Silkwood (1983)

In the 1980s, he starred in several films directed by John Carpenter, including anti-hero roles such as army hero-turned-robber Snake Plissken in the futuristic action film Escape from New York (1981),

(#4) Russell as Snake Plissken in Escape from L.A. (1996) — the image you need to understand the cartoon in #1

and its sequel Escape from L.A. (1996), helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady in the remake of the horror film The Thing (1982), and truck driver Jack Burton in the dark kung-fu comedy action film Big Trouble in Little China (1986), all of which have since become cult films. He was nominated for an Emmy Award for the television film Elvis (1979), also directed by Carpenter.

And the dog. From Wikipedia:

(#5) A Russell terrier, as in #1; photo from the AKC site on the breed

The Russell Terrier is a predominantly white working terrier with an instinct to hunt prey underground. The breed was derived from Jack Russell’s working terrier strains that were used in the 19th century for fox hunting. Russell’s fox working strains were much smaller than the Show Fox Terrier and remained working terriers. The size of the Russell Terrier (10″ to 12″) combined with a small flexible, spannable chest makes it an ideal size to work efficiently underground. Their unique rectangular body shape with the body being of slightly longer length than the leg makes them distinctly different from the Parson Russell Terrier and the Jack Russell Terrier of the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America (JRTCA).

The Russell Terrier originated in England, but the country of development was Australia.

(There appears to be some variant usage in labeling the breeds, but this information will do for understanding #1.)

Eva Marie Saint Lucy’s Day. The actor, from Wikipedia:

(#6) Saint in 1990

Eva Marie Saint (born July 4, 1924) is an American actress. In a career spanning 70 years, she is known for starring in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). She received Golden Globe and BAFTA Award nominations for A Hatful of Rain (1957) and won a Primetime Emmy Award for the television miniseries People Like Us (1990). Her film career also includes roles in Raintree County (1957), Exodus (1960), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1965), Grand Prix (1966), Nothing in Common (1986), Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), Superman Returns (2006), and Winter’s Tale (2014).

Then, on my 12/13/12 posting “Lucy”, information about “Santa Lucia” (the song), St. Lucia of Syracuse, and St. Lucy’s Day (December 13th, a specifically Swedish holiday but more widely celebrated), and its seasonal candles and food. From the Munduslingua site article on St. Nicholas’ Day and St. Lucy’s Day:

(#6) A Swedish girl wearing a crown of candles in memory of St. Lucia of Syracuse; light in mid-winter

From my “Lucy” posting:

And in my little urban garden, along with St. Lucy comes the blooming season of the cymbidium orchids (a stand of patio plants that were gifts from me to Jacques over the years). This year the first appearance was of greenish-yellow flowers

Two greenish-yellow cymbidiums are blooming right now, and some clear yellow buds are opening. The first flower stalks to appear — three brownish-red cymbidiums that are clones of the original gift to Jacques in 1987 — were noticeable on October 1st, with buds that have been hovering on opening ever since but have still not actually flowered. The ways of plants are inscrutable.

In any case, they have until January 22nd, Jacques’s birthday, to burst into bloom. I watch and wait.

Two bulletins in the portmanteau news: portmanteau holiday names for combinations of holidays (especially in the December holiday season); portmanteau restaurant names for types of restaurants with something extra added. For example: the holimanteau Chrismukkah, the restaumanteau breastaurant.

Holimanteaus. My inspiration here comes from yesterday’s replay of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin devises the snowy holiday of Chris(t)moween, but without putting a name to it:

(#1) Christmas (secular Christmas, conceived of as a midwinter celebration) — and Halloween combined: unholy snowmen

But surely the most famous holiday combo — there are others — is Chrismukkah. From Wikipedia:

(#2) A Chrismukkah card from The O.C.‘s family

Chrismukkah is a pop-culture portmanteau neologism referring to the merging of the holidays of Christianity’s Christmas and Judaism’s Hanukkah. The term was popularized beginning in December 2003 by the TV drama The O.C., wherein character Seth Cohen creates the holiday to signify his upbringing in an interfaith household with a Jewish father and Protestant mother (although the holiday can also be adopted by all-Jewish households who celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday). Chrismukkah is also celebrated as an ironic, alternative holiday, much like the Seinfeld-derived “Festivus”. [My 12/21/18 posting “22-festoon!” has a section on Festivus.]

… Before “Chrismukkah” entered the popular lexicon in the early 21st century, Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations had been informally merged with one another. A Christmas celebration with a tree, songs, and gifts became a symbol of being a part of German culture for many middle-class Jewish families in the 19th century. Some Jews celebrated Christmas as a secular “festival of the world around us” without religious meaning, or they transferred Christmas customs to the Hanukkah festival. In the 1990s, the popular sitcom Friends often portrayed Jewish characters Ross and Monica celebrating Christmas with their Christian friends, signifying many contemporary American Jewish households who celebrate Christmas in the strictly secular sense [perhaps with a star on a Christmas tree, but without a nativity scene, and certainly without reading passages from the books of Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 in the Christian bible.].

On the tv show, from Wikipedia:

The O.C. is an American teen drama television series created by Josh Schwartz that originally aired on the Fox network in the United States from August 5, 2003, to February 22, 2007, running a total of four seasons. “O.C.” is an abbreviation of Orange County, the location in California in which the series is set.

The series centers on Ryan Atwood, a troubled but gifted young man from a broken home who is adopted by the wealthy and philanthropic Sandy and Kirsten Cohen. Ryan and his foster brother Seth, a socially awkward yet quick-witted teenager, deal with life as outsiders in the high-class world of Newport Beach.

(On The O.C., Seth pronounces the name of his holiday as

/ˈkrɪsmǝˌkʌ/ or /ˈkrɪsmǝkǝ/  )

Do you want a portmanteau with that? Foodmanteaus have been all the rage for some time. Some discussion in my 6/10/13 posting “Foodmanteaus” (on cronuts, tofurkey, and more), and then in other postings following it.

Then there are eating establishments of various kinds, many of which do more than just provide things to eat or drink; they sell things or provide entertainment or whatever. And then a hybrid referent sometimes cries out for a portmanteau name.

On the 21st, Victor Steinbok reported on ADS-L on two restaumanteaus he had recently come across, one in British GQ (the men’s fashion magazine), one on the CNN news site.

clubstaurant, from British GQ, in “Inside the raucous, ridiculous rise of the clubstaurant” by Kathleen Johnston on 9/6/19:

[Bagatelle, in Central London,] wasn’t the first to marry the traditional restaurant experience with a club or party atmosphere (let’s call it a “clubstaurant”), but the concept has certainly refined what steak joint STK started over ten years ago, also in Manhattan (essentially sticking a DJ into a slick restaurant-meets-lounge). Fast-forward to 2019 and a new wave of restaurants providing all-out extravaganzas has hit the capital.

… Clubstaurants are simply the loudest, brashest realisation of a wider movement towards what the industry is calling “performative dining”.

grocerant, from CNN, in “The rise of ‘grocerants’: Grocery stores that cook you dinner” by Nathaniel Meyersohn on 12/20/19:

For decades, grocery stores have included hot food and salad bars, delis and sandwich stations. But in recent years, many grocers have started adding sit-down restaurants, food halls and craft beer on tap, giving rise to the term “grocerants.”

“The grocerant game is something that almost every retailer with larger stores should be playing,” said Diana Sheehan, vice president at marketing research firm Incontext Solutions. “Restaurants have become one of the most successful ways for retailers to stand apart.”

On the 22nd, Nancy Friedman added an older coinage:

Hooters and its ilk have been known as “breastaurants” for a couple of decades.

citing the Wikipedia page on the subject:

A breastaurant is a restaurant that has skimpily-dressed female waiting staff. The term “breastaurant” dates from the early 1990s, around the time that the restaurant chain Hooters became popular in the United States. It has since been applied to other restaurants that offer similar services, such as Redneck Heaven, Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery, Twin Peaks, Bombshells, Bone Daddy’s, Ojos Locos [‘Crazy Eyes’], Chula’s [chula ‘hot woman, hottie’], Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill, Racks, Show-Me’s, Mugs & Jugs, and The WingHouse Bar & Grill.

The restaurants often have a sexual double-entendre brand name and also offer specific themes, both in decoration and menu. The restaurants offer numerous perks for customers, including alcohol and flirty servers.

… Restaurants staffed by males, with a similar focus on server appearance include Tallywackers [tallywhacker, antique slang for ‘penis, dick’], featuring scantily clad men, which opened in Dallas, Texas, in May 2015 and closed in August 2016. In Japan, there are establishments such as Macho Cafe and Macho Meat Shop, where brawny men serve food and drinks…

As Larry Horn then noted:

luckily for Hooters, the trademark for the term — highly valued as I’m sure it was — has fallen victim to genericide:

In October 2012, Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill successfully registered the term “breastaurant” as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office; as of May 24, 2019 the term was no longer trademarked under the rule of section 8, “Continued use not filed within Grace Period”. Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill had closed its last restaurant on December 23, 2018, 6 months prior. (from the Wikipedia entry)

So now Hooters, Twin Peaks, Mugs & Jugs, and all the rest can call themselves breastaurants.

Riffs on gay porn in difficult times. The penis portion of this presentation — with five stone-XXX-rated images — is in my AZBlogX posting “Humongous fucks Adonis”. This posting, further expounding on that material, is literally free of penises, but it’s extravagantly about men’s bodies and mansex, mostly in street language, so it’s entirely unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.

It all began with some moments of recreational gay porn use, focused on what I think of as “sweet sex”, which took me back to scene 2 of the 1984 Falcon flick The Bigger the Better:

(#1) Cover of the Bijou Classics re-release, featuring Rick “Humongous” Donovan from scene 1

From AZBlogX:

In [scene 2, Matt Ramsey] goes on to much more sexually democratic sex with another student [Brian Michaels, played by Bobbie Madison], in his home gym. That’s very nice, even sweet, and in fact that’s the scene I went back to Bigger Better for — when life is difficult, I want my gay porn to be full of mutual satisfaction and regard, and affection — but I was once again blown away by the raw intensity of Humongous fucking Adonis [in scene 1, involving Donovan as a student and Ramsey as his teacher], and then later [in the last scene, in the mensroom] of the Surfer Phallomnivore, the Blond Lord of the T-Room [played by Brian Hawks / Shaun McIver].)

On sexually democratic sex, from my 10/12/17 posting “The pizza boy as cultural figure”, in a section on Wm. Higgins’s gay porn classic Pizza Boy: He Delivers (1986):

The sex is mostly even-handed, sexually democratic: men trade blow jobs and rim jobs and they flip-fuck. In the three-way in scene 6, after two men have have been fucked, the third announces, “I’m the only one who hasn’t had it yet”, so the other two take turns fucking him. Everybody wants to give it, everybody wants to take it.

I use gay porn recreationally on a regular basis — more on this below — but in difficult times, I look especially for sweet sex (and also turn to old tv detective shows, westerns with morally admirable heroes, and charming sitcoms — and the old Emergency! series (1972-77), which has pretty much everything, but especially Randolph Mantooth, both the man and his character Johnny Gage).

In any case, here’s Madison as the student, anxious to learn how to get a body like his teacher’s, and Ramsey [the Adonis from scene 1] as his good-looking, and very fit, teacher, showing the boy how to do it, in his home gym:

(#1) The getting-to-know-your body stage, before the meshing of the flesh

Very satisfying, but of course I got to scene 2 through the fierce fucking of scene 1 and then went on to the last scene, which I’d written up several years ago. From the recent AZBlogX posting:

The episodic Bigger Better revolves around a high school for boys. In one scene, Rick “Humongous” Donovan (as an insolent student) fucks his English teacher (played by the good-looking and amiably athletic Matt Ramsey) three-ways senseless. In the other — which got attention on this blog in my 8/12/15 posting“Tearoom time” — when “the students are restless, and ready to walk on the wild side”, phallomnivorus surfer-type Brian Hawks takes full advantage of all the offerings of the school’s mensroom.

[Digression on my coinings: adj. phallomnivorous ‘consuming cock in all possible ways’  (from the combining form phallo– of phallus ‘a penis, especially when erect’ (NOAD) + the adj. omnivorous figuratively ‘taking in or using whatever is available’ (NOAD)) and noun phallomnivore ‘a phallomnivorous person’. In case you should need it, that gives you also the noun phallomnivory for the practice, the noun phallomnivorousness for the inclination to phallomnivory, and the adj. phallomnivoracious ‘fiercely, uncontrollably phallominivorous’. You might think of others.]

Let’s follow my recent AZBlogX posting for a little while:

Humongous fucks Adonis. From publicity notes for the film:
…..
The Bigger the Better (Falcon, 1984, directed by Matt Sterling) An all-star cast of gorgeous hunks, huge cocks, extraordinary production values, enough of a story to keep the fantasy going, and strong manly action that just doesn’t stop. You’ll find student-teacher sex, t-room action, dirty talk, classic bareback sex with cum flying everywhere, and one of the all-time great underwear sequences. This movie is also noteworthy because it’s one of the few gay flicks legendary straight porn performer Peter North (billed here as Matt Ramsey) ever made. Rick “Humongous” Donovan plays a college student [Rick] who fucks his teacher (North/Ramsey) after class [in three different positions], noisily and violently, and only after making Ramsey plead for it.
…..

The moment when Matt undoes Rick’s jeans, and the boy’s half-hard monster just flops out:

(#2) The dick reveal (here, without the dick)

Where an ordinary man might have expressed surprise at this moment — as here:

(#3) Again, without the cock, cocksucker’s size-surprise face, from the DickDorm site (“amateur videos of All-American college boys fucking”); note that the facial expressions of fear and surprise — no one expects the Spanish Inquisition! — are quite close to one another

— Matt just goes on to urgently minister to Rick’s cock. He bends over for it, he lowers himself onto it, he gets pounded with it face-to-face. He is deeply filled, and deeply fulfilled.

… Humongous — the portmanteau nickname was given to him at the beginning of his porn career (mostly from 1985-97) … — is Rick Donovan, with a  very thick 10″ dick (sometimes billed as 12″, but those are probaby porn inches). He was famously emotionless on-screen (viewers are free to project any number of emotions onto his performances), and only topped.

… Adonis (my nickname, based on his male-model good looks) is Matt Ramsey / Peter North. From Wikipedia:
…..
Peter North (born Alden Joseph Brown; May 11, 1957) is a Canadian-American pornographic actor, director and producer. He has 2,588 credits as an actor (plus 13 as director). [North is astonishingly hard-working.]

In a 1996 interview published in North’s hometown newspaper, The Chronicle Herald, he stated that he was “discovered” while modeling athletic wear at a private party in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. A man within the adult film industry, whom North did not name, attended the party, was impressed by North’s physique and gave him his business card.

North began his adult film career in 1983. Initially, North performed in gay pornography under the name Matt Ramsey. He later transitioned to straight pornography.
….

(Like many g4p performers, Ramsey seemed to be comfortable bottoming, maybe even preferred it; it’s much easier to learn to relax for getting fucked than to maintain a stiff hard-on to fuck someone whose body you don’t find arousing.)

North/Ramsey has an athlete’s body — he was a college football player and an avid hockey player, and has a lifelong devotion to fitness that played well in his home-gym scene in Bigger Better. As for his dick, it fits his body well and is big enough for porn work without being phenomenal: enhanced normal, you might say.

In my recent AZBlogX posting, #3 has a Rick Donovan full-frontal display and #4 a Matt Ramsey / Peter North full-frontal display, so enthusiasts can appreciate their cocks.

[Digression on humongous. From OED2 on the portmanteau adj. humongous:

slang (originally U.S.).  Extremely large; huge, enormous. [1st two cites:]

1970 Current Slang (Univ. S. Dakota) 4 19 Humongous, very large (a combination of huge and tremendous).

1976 New Yorker 16 Aug. 26/2 She uses expressions like ‘the whole megillah’ (meaning the whole long story) and ‘humongous’ (meaning huger than huge and more tremendous than tremendous).

The word has pieces of huge, enormous, and tremendous. It’s playful in tone, but with an ominous undercurrent that comes with the fearsomeness of extremely large things. An undercurrent brought out in the 1982 film Humongous. From Wikipedia:

(#4)

Humongous is a 1982 Canadian slasher film directed by Paul Lynch, and starring Janet Julian, John Wildman, and David Wallace. The story centers on a group of young adults who became stranded on a deserted island, where they are stalked by a monstrous assailant. ]

[Digression on Adonis. The very short story, from NOAD:

name Adonis: [a] Greek Mythology a beautiful youth loved by both Aphrodite and Persephone. He was killed by a boar, but Zeus decreed that he should spend the winter of each year in the underworld with Persephone and the summer months with Aphrodite. [b] (as noun an Adonis) an extremely handsome young man.

Some things I’ll defer until later in this posting: the representation of Adonis in (neo-)classical sculpture; which leads to King Ludwig I of Bavaria; notions of male beauty (in previous postings on this blog); and the deflection of the Adonis figure in segments of the gay male world to high-macho powerfully phallic presentations of self.]

To return to the third of the notable cocks in The Bigger the Better, in the recent AZBlogX posting:

The Surfer Phallomnivore. The Blond Lord of the T-Room. In the last scene of Bigger Better.

From my 8/12/15 posting “Tearoom time”:
…..
Two classics of gay porn — part 3 (For Men Only) of Huge 1 (Falcon, 1983); and scene 4 of The Bigger the Better (Falcon, 1984) — illustrate some of the possibilities for several men together in a stall, using the toilet as a prop.

… The final scene from The Bigger the Better tells the story of Brian Hawks’s tearoom adventures, which take him from jacking off to sucking cock through a glory hole, serious subpartition sucking, and further sex, eventually with four other guys. The man has a huge appetite.
…..

That posting describes the scene in some detail, with two shots of Hawks sucking cock.

… Hawks (also Hawkes, plus a number of other porn names) was active in the business 1982-84. He is often characterized as versatile, though I would have said versatile bottom. He has that curly blond boy-next-door surfer look, but with a totally out-for-cock persona — any way, any time, from anyone — which is why I’ve labeled him a phallomnivore. He has big pornstar dick, which you can appreciate, [10″] rock hard, in [#5 on AZBlogX, a shot from very early in the scene, with Hawks stroking his hard dick (before all the other guys join in)]; its function is to be remarkable, an object of admiration, even veneration. In the rhapsody of sexual imagination, the viewer is expected to desire it heroically, or to wield it victoriously as his own, or both.

Cheeky, golden-angel-curly, down-and-deeply-dirty Hawk(e)s / Shawn McIvan, getting a blow job from Nik Dimon (mostly off-camera) in this Falcon Studios photo:

(#5)

Humongous, Adonis, and the Surfer Slut. Joined poetically.

apotheosis

when Humongous
fucked Adonis, caverns
shuddered in envy

Adonis
engorged with
Titanic power

filled the sky
seeded the
valleys with life

blond Poseidon
swallowed it all

Here ends the tale of three big dicks at school. Now for some Adonis notes, and some notes on the recreational use of gay porn.

Adonis note: the representation of Adonis in (neo-)classical sculpture. From the Thorvaldsen Museum site, a work by Danish neoclassicist sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), with a somewhat longer version of the Adonis story:

(#6) Bertel Thorvaldsen, Adonis (1887), marble executed by August Saabye after Thorvaldsen’s orginal plaster model of 1808

Adonis is the most handsome and sought-after young man in Greek mythology, but his birth was defiled in that he was born as the son of a woman called Myrrha, who had had an incestuous relationship with her father. As a punishment, Myrrha was changed into a tree – the myrrh tree. And when the appointed time had passed, the bark of the tree burst and the infant Adonis came into the world. In a certain sense, Adonis was doomed from the start, and he was indeed only quite young when he was killed by a wild boar during a hunt. We can see the tree on which he is supporting himself and the dead hare as references to his birth and death respectively. When the model for Adonis was finished in Rome in 1808 it gave rise to great enthusiasm. The art-loving Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig [later King Ludwig I] commissioned it in marble for his Glyptotek in Munich.

Adonis note: King Ludwig I of Bavaria. From Wikipedia:

Ludwig I or Louis I (25 August 1786 – 29 February 1868) was king of Bavaria from 1825 until the 1848 revolutions in the German states.

… Ludwig’s rule was strongly affected by his enthusiasm for the arts and women and by his overreaching royal assertiveness.

(The later Ludwig II was king of Bavaria from 1864 through 1886; sometimes known as the Swan King or Fairy Tale King, he was devoted to the construction of palaces and Neuschwanstein Castle and to the work of composer Richard Wagner. It’s now known that throughout his life he struggled to suppress his strong homosexual desires. His predecessor was a dfferent kettle of fish.)

Adonis note: notions of male beauty in two previous postings on this blog. The Adonis style of beauty is the Apollonian: the ideal type of Boyish Masculinity, as opposed to the ideal type of Mature Masculinity — an opposition sometimes cast as Apollo vs. Priapus (or Dionysus / Bacchus). Apollo smells like fresh herbs, or sandalwood; Priapus smells like musky sex sweat.

(This is not a brief for Apollo or for Priapus.)

The postings:

— from 3/10/16 in “Male beauty”:

References to male beauty usually focus on beautiful male faces, and there are collections of facial photos. In these collections, the young Brad Pitt, especially smiling, is a famous beautiful man, and he also had a beautiful body and a strongly masculine physicality in motion.

— from 11/25/19 in “Revisiting 38: More male beauty”:

Among the actors depicted and discussed in these three postings as examples of facial male beauty are Brad Pitt, Robert Redford, Jensen Ackles, and Johnny Depp. I solicited opinions, in a totally unscientific fashion, from a number of women (including two teenagers) and gay men . There was broad agreement over which actors were good-looking, and broad agreement that there were several distinct subcategories of GOODLOOKING-MAN, which they referred to via the labels handsome, cute, beautiful, and hot (with an implicit acknowledgment  that the boundaries were not always clear; with some suggestion that the hot group cross-cuts the other three; and with some inclination to distinguish bad-boy dark beauties like Johnny Depp from sweeter blond beauties like Robert Redford).

It’s clear to me that there’s a rough system of categories here, but one that’s hard to get at through labels in English (and of course exhibits considerable social variability).

Adonis note: the phallicization of Adonis in the deflection of the Adonis figure in segments of the gay male world to high-macho powerfully phallic presentations of self. Priapus fucks Adonis.

Case in point: the Adonis Lounge, a gay strip club in NYC (and similar establishments elsewhere). From their website, a portrait of some of their dancers:

(#7) Note the facial expressions, all challenging stud-hustler faces — hot and hunky, but a world away from Adonis

The men are walking, dancing macho studs, distillations of butchness, embodiments of the power of the penis. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this; in fact I find this presentation edgy but arousing (after all, decades ago, when I shopped in the mansexual marketplace, it was often unapologetically, celebratorily as a cuntboy, and on those occasions these guys would have been just the ticket).

So the connotations of the name Adonis have shifted hugely, and the earlier Adonis figure has largely disappeared from view.

Some details about the club, from its website:

Adonis Lounge began in October of 2010 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn as a small once monthly event. After 6 months, only due to the support of a few loyal patrons who believed in our vision, Adonis launched a second night each month.

… [The club is now in operation Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, opening at 10pm], offering a stage show featuring 30 dancers, full bar, lap dances and champagne rooms. Adonis employs a show format, which allows us to focus on those three nights weekly, while regularly featuring the adult industry’s top porn stars, escorts, and special guests.

… In addition to the many special guests and porn stars appearing regularly, Adonis actively recruits the top dancers from all over the country and internationally as well. We maintain a steady stream of talent from places like Atlanta, Miami, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and even Montreal just to name a few. But perhaps one of our biggest assets, and we certainly have some big ones, is that we have a unique and bountiful spring of dancers representing almost every continent and ethnicity. Our diversity and range cover everything from All-American Muscle Jocks, to hot Latinos, twinks, Russians, Brown Sugar, and even Muscle Bears. Whatever your style or flavor, Adonis is guaranteed to have it in stock, and jock. Adonis Lounge also co-promotes large scale NYC events such as Rentboy’s famed Hustlaball

… Adonis’s vision has remained the same since our humble beginnings. We always aim to provide a fun and safe respite from the stresses of daily life the best way we know how…lots of HOT guys! Adonis Lounge has emerged as the #1 M4M [men for men] strip club in NYC and gained recognition nationally as one of the industry leaders in this genre of male entertainment. … With the recent move to our own larger club, the future looks bright for Adonis and we embrace our role as a permanent fixture in the gay community in NYC and beyond.

A note both linguistic and cultural. The club’s literature doesn’t call it a gay strip club; and the word gay comes up only in reference to the gay community (as above) and Gay Pride celebrations. The club isn’t gay, much less queer or homosexual; it’s a M4M club. There are no queers there, only men who enjoy sex with men. No men who desire other men, or (even more seriously) view such desire as a component of their personal identity — just men who engage in sex acts with other men. And everybody is really really macho-butch; there are no fems there, certainly no fags.

As I said, both linguistic and cultural.

On the recreational use of gay porn. Two components here: jacking off as recreation, as an action for pleasure; and gay porn as an aid to the practice.

Now, I’m on record here as advocating masturbation as a source of one of life’s satisfying minor pleasures (but of course if it doesn’t suit you, then don’t do it). It can be a welcome moment in your day, like a coffee break, a muscle-stretch, or a snack. Or it can be a more extended event. It’s naturally performed solo, so that it provides occasions for sexual pleasure in moments when a partner happens not be to available, and it requires no negotiation with another person, so it’s easy. It can be mixed in with all sorts of other sexual pleasures, or it can provide an entire sexual life (as it has done for me for 15 years now).

In addition, it can be practiced with a like-minded partner (or partners), as a sexual act on its own. Thoroughly safe, if the participants merely — merely! — provide sights and sounds to arouse one another. Or it can serve as foreplay. I recall jacking off with gay buddies very fondly.

But jacking off is (usually) not just  the physical action. For most of us, it’s driven by fantasies — in our heads, in our talking out loud (once I ended up spending a substantial amount of time living alone, I realized I could provide my own dirty sex talk, and that was very satisfying), or provided by visual or auditory porn. Gay porn films provide both sight and sound, and are engineered to appeal to a variety of tastes, but, especially, to clothe extravagant fantasies in realistic trappings, to make them more powerful.

It’s been my custom of some years’ standing to try to reserve Sunday morning as gay porn time — using only familiar porn films, so that I can work on my writing but take brief breaks to view what’s going on in the current film, get a pleasant minor hard-on, and then go back to my work. Eventually, I’ll use the film for its intended purpose and shoot my load, but that might not happen for several hours.

Since I’m an analyst of all things having to do with gay porn, I sometimes notice something worthy of analysis and comment, and drop my other work to branch off onto that topic.

And, again, recreational gay porn can be enjoyed with a like-minded partner. You can comment on the action and on one another’s responses to it, and maybe move on to man-on-man sex. You get a lot of sensory input: your own hard-on, what you’re doing and saying, his hard-on, what he’s doing and saying, and everything that’s happening on-screen. You’re floating together in this hot fog of sexual feelings. (In the long-distant past, this worked nicely for Jacques and me.)

Interestingly, gay porn is, or at least used to be, a major thing at gay sex clubs. Its function there is to help as many guys as possible maintain their hard-ons while they’re advertising themselves for whatever kind of sex they want. If you start to slide towards coming, you can just take your hand off your dick and look away from the screen, to recover your composure.

All this is about gay porn. I really don’t get straight porn at all, and not just because the women’s bodies and the sex acts totally fail to arouse me — though that’s true — but also because what I’ve seen mostly seems to be so contemptuous of women. I wonder what the straight porn films of Peter North — the Bigger Better Adonis from above — are like, but not enough to seek them out.

… that is, coronovirus portmanteaus (where the underlined n is the overlap shared by the two contributing words). A modest collection from recent days.

On the apocalypse / catastrophe front. The obvious, and clearly useful, disaster portmanteaus coronapocalypse and coronatastrophe.

Huge numbers of the first. From The Hill site on 3/18/20, in “In ‘coronapocalypse’ the worst shortages could be deadly” by Pinar Keskinocak:

Worst case, even food supplies could run low. The country needs to do something about this right now before it compounds the COVID-19 public crisis branded as #coronapocalypse on social media.

Plus a very small number of coronatastrophe hits.

Pandemic idiots. Appearing suddenly in the past few days, covidiot: covid + idiot (where covid stands for the disease name COVID-19), for someone who flouts reasonable precautions, putting themselves or those around them in danger. The portmanteau was pretty much guaranteed to be coined, probably by many people at once, in response to flagrantly stupid behaviors, especially during college spring break festivities on beaches.

But a remarkable elaboration of the covidiot idea appeared almost immediately, in a mock dictionary entry (complete with a pronunciation in a version of IPA transcription) on several Twitter sites:

(#1) Ben Zimmer has reported on ADS-L about starting to track this item down; in contrast to the portmanteau covidiot itself, it pretty clearly has a specific creator

Covidiocy came to me from Sim Aberson, who posted a Miami Herald story about a gay circuit party, “Thousands partied at this Miami Beach festival. Nine tested positive for coronavirus” by Martin Vassolo on 3/20/20:

(#2) Caption: “Amir Hamza, a volunteer from Las Vegas, dances with a large yellow smiley face balloon on a raised platform beneath a canopy of inflatable pool floats at the Winter Party Festival on Miami Beach, sponsored by the National LGBTQ Task Force, on March 1, 2009.” (Miami Herald photo)

Nine people who attended Winter Party Festival, an annual event that draws thousands of gay men to Miami Beach, have reported testing positive for COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus, according to the LGBTQ Task Force, which organized the festival.

From comments on the private Facebook group soc-motss (with commenters other than me identified only by initials):

AMZ: Just to note that only a very small slice of the partiers were tested.
M: Not to mention the fact the incubation period is up to two weeks.
H: I’m pretty sure that dude licking the smiley beach ball is dead by now…
AMZ: Surely everybody knows that smiley beach balls are coated with deadly verminous slime…

But of course the spring break partying went on all over the place, with partiers (most of them straight) defiantly, truculently, refusing to tone it down (Fight for Your Right to Party!) — until mayors and governors felt they had to shut the beaches down as a public health move.

Pandemic Magritte. In Vadim Temkin’s homage to the Belgian master’s painting Golconda, which I retitled Golcorona (Golconda + corona):

(#3) From 3/21/20,  “Golcorona”

And incidentally,… Wait for it. It starts with Steve Kleinedler on Twitter, then on FB on 3/21, posting:

(#4)

In my 30-year lexicography career I never said “this is not a word”. Until today.

(Just note that we’ve fallen into this portmanteau via the coronavirus; the portmanteau doesn’t actually involve any coronavirus words.)

That’s supposed to be Bravo + celebrities, but as Mark Staloff wrote on FB, “it needs to be Bravolebrities”, and that’s what I’ll take it to be: Bravo + celebrities (with no overlap, just abbreviation.

Then I wrote on FB

It appears to be the case that linguVlebrity / linguVlebrities (for V = o, i, a, or e) has not already been coined, so go for it, innovators. (I prefer linguilebrity, but consider the actually attested linguaphile and linguablog, so maybe it should be lingualebrity.) Then you might reflect on who would count as a linguistics celebrity / celebrity linguist / celebrity in linguistics. If there’s only one, then there’s not much use for linguilebrity etc. (By the way, who counts as a Bravo celebrity?…)

It turns out that there are plenty of Bravo celebrities. On the network, from Wikipedia:

Bravo is an American pay television network, launched on December 1, 1980. It is owned by NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. The channel originally focused on programming related to fine arts and film. It currently broadcasts several reality television series targeted at 25–54-year-old women as well as the gay community, along with acquired and original dramas, and mainstream theatrically released feature films.

… In the early 2000s, Bravo switched its format from focusing on performing arts, drama, and independent film to being focused on pop culture such as reality shows, fashion and makeover shows, and celebrities. Bravo’s “makeover” occurred in 2003 with the reality series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which garnered 3.5 million viewers. Entertainment Weekly put “Bravo reality shows” on its end-of-the-decade, “best-of” list, saying, “From Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s Fab Five to Project Runway’s fierce fashionistas to the kvetching, perma-tanned Real Housewives franchise, Bravo’s quirky reality programming mixes high culture and low scruples to create deliciously addictive television.”

Out of all of this, I watch only Queer Eye (but I have friends who are devoted to Project Runway). If you follow Bravo, though, you know that this is a weighty question:

Did Kroy Biermann Cheat on Kim Zolciak?

and you understand the genuine distress when, more recently (3/20), Watch What Happens Live host and producer Andy Cohen tested positive for coronavirus.

A new tv commercial for Naväge (sometimes just Navage) touts it as just the thing for current times:

Now is the time to make good nasal hygiene the new normal.

The commercial doesn’t seem to be available on-line yet, but here’s an earlier print ad:

“uses powered suction to relieve nasal congestion” (with a saline solution)

The brand name is, of course, a portmanteau, of nasal + lavage; on the latter, from NOAD:

noun lavage: Medicine washing out of a body cavity, such as the colon or stomach, with water or a medicated solution.

Reviews are mixed on the utility of the system for relieving chronic sinusitis and the like (though for a while as a child I had regular nasal lavage performed by a doctor, with pretty good results). But I’ve found no information about the wisdom of flushing mucus out of the nasal cavity in current times.

(Today’s posting showing that I’m Not Dead Yet. Tough day, the eve of my man Jacques’s death day, 17 years ago. Watching the funeral service for George Floyd. In a California heat wave.)

Recently in the (physical) mail, a pair of cards from Ann Burlingham from her last Australian visit. She saw them as a diptych, to be viewed in sequence. The cards are about, though she didn’t say this, the presentation of gender.

On the left:

(#1) A greeting card by Lilly Perrott, illustrator and designer for La La Land (cards and gifts)

And on the right:

(#2) Patience Hodgson of The Grates, with Straight Arrows + Pleasure Symbols, performing at the Corner Hotel, Melbourne,  August 15, 2015 (photo by Kristen Ashton) – from the Life Music Media site

In #2, Hodgson performing extravagant but aggressive Feminine. In #1, the cartoon figure of a merman (NOAD on the noun merman “the male equivalent of a mermaid”) performing sexually compliant Feminine, in the form of an odalisque (NOAD on the noun odalisque: “historical a female slave or concubine in a harem, especially one in the seraglio of the Sultan of Turkey”). With, as a lexical extra, the portmanteau mermazing, merman + amazing.

Yes, he’s amazing, for the gender cross, but there’s a lot more than that. #1 is a take-off on an extraordinary painting:

(#3) The Ingres odalisque

From Wikipedia:

Grande Odalisque, also known as Une Odalisque or La Grande Odalisque, is an oil painting of 1814 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres depicting an odalisque, or concubine. Ingres’ contemporaries considered the work to signify Ingres’ break from Neoclassicism, indicating a shift toward exotic Romanticism.

Complete with a turban in #1. But displaying his big belly rather than his buttocks.

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip (Wayno’s title: “Farm to Slab”):

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

A combination of two cartoon memes: the familiar Caveman meme, plus  a Remarkable Restaurant meme that’s a specialty of the Bizarro strips.

Plus the portmanteau word play in filet magnon (filet mignon + cro-magnon). And a subtle play on a systematic ambiguity between raw and cooked understandings in certain food names, in particular for cuts of meat. You ask for a filet at the Paleo Cafe, you get a hunk of raw meat.

Remakable Restaurants. Previous postings on this theme include two with restaurants catering to anteaters and serving ants, and one on a restaurant catering to dragons and serving knights in armor.

From my 5/29/18 posting “Chez Le Fourmilier”:

(#2)

A strenuous exercise in cartoon understanding: you need to be familiar with a certain kind of (seafood) restaurant, and to recognize both anteaters and a children’s educational toy known as an ant farm. And then to understand that the cartoon embodies a metaphorical translation from a seafood restaurant world to an anteater world.

(On such translations, see my 5/22/18 posting “I just can’t stop it”.)

Another version in my 3/27/20 posting “Chez Le Fourmilier II”:

(#3)

And then in my 5/21/20 posting “Knight bibs”. a restaurant serving knights for a clientele of dragons:

(#4)

Then in #1, a restaurant servng raw meat to cavemen. The ultimate paleo diet. From my 7/23/20 posting “Let’s go paleo”, outside another Remarkable Restaurant, the Totally Natural Foods Cafe, where “They appear to be chasing a mastodon around with rocks and clubs.”

(#5)

Implementing the Paleolitic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, Stone Age diet, or hunter-gatherer diet, right along with the appropriate hunting practices, for the appropriate prey.

From my 10/23/14 posting “Miss Florence and the Paleo diet” on the diet: “a modern nutritional diet designed to emulate, insofar as possible using modern foods, the diet of wild plants and animals eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era” (Wikipedia).

filet magnon. First the food, then the European early modern humans.

From Wikipedia:

Filet mignon (French, lit. '”tender, delicate, or fine fillet”‘) is a steak cut of beef taken from the smaller end of the tenderloin, or psoas major of the cow carcass, usually a steer or heifer. In French, this cut is always called filet de bœuf (“beef fillet”), as filet mignon refers to pork tenderloin.

The tenderloin runs along both sides of the spine, and is usually harvested as two long snake-shaped cuts of beef. The tenderloin is sometimes sold whole. When sliced along the short dimension, creating roughly round cuts, and tube cuts, the cuts (fillets) from the small forward end are considered to be filet mignon. Those from the center are tournedos; however, some butchers in the United States label all types of tenderloin steaks “filet mignon”. In fact, the shape of the true filet mignon may be a hindrance when cooking, so most restaurants sell steaks from the wider end of the tenderloin – it is both cheaper and much more presentable.

(#6) Filet mignon with mashed potato, string beans and mushrooms (Wikipedia photo)

The tenderloin is the most tender cut of beef, making it one of the more desirable cuts. This, combined with the small amount given by any one steer or heifer (no more than 500 grams), makes filet mignon generally the most expensive cut. Because the muscle is not weight-bearing, it contains less connective tissue than other cuts, and so is more tender. However, it is generally not as flavorful as some other cuts of beef (e.g. prime rib cuts). For this reason it is often wrapped in bacon to enhance flavor, and/or served with a sauce.

Then the early humans. From Wikipedia:

“European early modern humans” (EEMH) is a term for the earliest populations of anatomically modern humans in Europe, during the Upper Paleolithic. It is taken to include fossils from throughout the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), covering the period of about 48,000 to 15,000 years ago (48–15 ka), spanning the Bohunician, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian periods.

… The term EEMH is equivalent to Cro-Magnon Man, or “Cro-Magnons”, a term derived from the Cro-Magnon rock shelter in southwestern France, where the first EEMH were found in 1868. Louis Lartet (1869) proposed Homo sapiens fossilis as the systematic name for “Cro-Magnon Man”. W. K. Gregory (1921) proposed the subspecies name Homo sapiens cro-magnonensis. In literature published since the late 1990s, the term EEMH is generally preferred over the common name Cro-Magnon, which has no formal taxonomic status, as “it refers neither to a species or subspecies nor to an archaeological phase or culture”.

Still, even specialists often use the term Cro-Magnon (or Cro Magnon) in their writings, because of its familiarity. So in Marcel Otte’s book Cro Magnon (Perrin, 2008):

(#7) The cover shows an artist’s reconstruction of a Cro-Magnon man — looking very much like current humans; the caveman of cartoons is some composite of Neanderthal features and brutish fantasy

The raw and the cooked. Suppose I go into a modern restaurant and order filet mignon with new potatoes and asparagus on the side — and I am then presented with something like the filet mignon below, plus some raw potatoes and raw asparagus:

(#8) From the Kansas City Steak Company, “4 signature, butter-tender USDA Prime Filet Mignon, 6 oz each cut from the best of the best beef available” ($150) (signature, butter-tender, and best of the best, all in one short description!)

(Compare the filet magnon in #1.)

Now of course, this isn’t going to happen — well, it would be an outrage if it did — because the default for these three menu items (filet mignon, potatoes, asparagus) is that they are they are all cooked dishes, not raw material. Meanwhile, at the butcher’s shop, if you order filet mignon, you don’t expect to get something like #6.

In general, out of context, there’s a systematic (metonymy-based) ambiguity, for a large class of lexical items, which can refer to edible foodstuffs or to cooked preparations of them. As with other such ambiguities — for example, between reference to some concrete object or to a simulacrum of it — we largely negotiate these semantic spaces without appreciating the complexities in them.

We are good at using our background knowledge, information about the context we are in, and estimations of what other people are trying to achieve in our interactions, to pick out the appropriate interpretations of the words they use, and we rarely notice that all this stuff is happening off-stage.

(All I need to tell you is that this posting takes off from a line of Cumdump jockstraps offered by the Breedwell company in deliberately provocative ads, and you should see that it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest.)

A Daily Jocks ad from 11/4/19 shows us the jock in red, with a model presented faux-naturalistically as a tough working-class guy in a blue-collar setting (a railyard, shipyard, or truckyard). Ad copy for the jock:

The new Breedwell Cumdump Jock [available in white, black, red, yellow, and blue] is a take on the classic, old-school woven jock.

Features a black centre patch with the Breedwell logo and signature “Dirty By Choice” motto. The back of the jock features ‘Breedwell’ across the entire back.

(#1) The Breedwell Cumdump jockstrap, leading to notes on:

underwear ads as porn; this underwear ad as hard(core) porn; the sodomacho (sodomite + macho), or high-butch receptive (like the guy in the ad), as a brand of homomasculinity; plus linguistic reflections, on various scales with hard denoting the high end of the scale and terminology for referring to intermediate values, especially those near the high end (hard, firm).

Underwear ads as porn. Extended background from my 11/20/19 posting “A regular festival of ambiguity”:

The Regular Guy is a stock character of advertising, where he is especially devoted to selling things directed to men, like tools, sports equipment, shaving accessories, and men’s clothing, in particular swim suits and underwear (both highly gendered). This last category is of special interest to me, because such apparel can be invested with not only gender content but also carnally sexual content: the display of the nearly naked male body is available as a source of pleasurable response from suitably minded viewers (of either gender), no matter how innocently it might be intended.

In brief: underwear ads are always available for service as soft porn (for straight women and gay men) — this is not even slightly a novel observation — and models presented as regular guys have figured in such advertising for a long time …

(#2) Daily Jocks ad for Supawear from 10/27/17: Note the seductive facial expression and inviting open mouth

… Despite all this effort to present the figure of a guy in his underpants as an object of commercial but not carnal desire — you were supposed to want to buy the underwear, not do the model — these ads had a long history of functioning as soft porn for gay boys and men; after all, they showed attractive men in their underpants, their desirable genitals just a thin layer of fabric away.

… Then came the time of the Underwear Gods, as Don DeLillo labeled the giant public-display figures advertising sex-drenched underwear, especially men’s premium briefs (a label easily extended to the models and to the genre of advertising)

… the world shifted, as you can see by looking at my Page of links to underwear postings on this blog; in certain districts of the underwear universe, all the constraints on RG depictions have been thrown out the window, and we now have things like [#2], and crotch-tease shots like [#1, I dreamed I cruised for blue-collar tricks in my hot-red Breedwell Cumdump jock]

Yes, Breedwell is the brand name, “Dirty by Choice” (on the waistband) its motto, and Cumdump the model name; the intention behind the model name is that the wearer is advertising himself as an indiscriminate bottom [a mere cumdump] — for barebacking, if the brand name [with breed ‘fuck bareback’] is to be taken at face value. [more on Breedwell etc. in an appendix below]

#1 is pretty much as close to hard(core) porn as you can get. So I’ll move in a little while to the hardcore/softcore distinction.

Brands of homomasculinity. The model in #1 is presented as a high-butch anal receptive, a macho pussy-ass.

He’s located in a blue-collar environment, a conventionally macho locus, and he’s strongly macho in appearance. But his jockstrap cries out: I want, need, to be fucked, bareback, by a lot of guys, as many as possible; I want, need, my pussy filled with cum.

(This is of course a fantasy, but it pleases me to see it represented and celebrated so openly in advertising. It is, of course, something of a trope in gay porn: Real Men Want to Get Fucked. In particular, muscular body-building types beg for cocks up their asses.)

The combination of conventional masculinity with men enthusiastically taking what is conventionally viewed as the “feminine” role in fucking, and hence as acting “faggy”, is one form of what I’ve called butch fagginess. As in my 10/16/19 posting “Adventures in homomasculinity: the pink jock”, with a wider view (intersections of styles of masculinity with styles of homosexuality). The special case here is what I think of as sodomachismo — a macho presentation of self combined with a preference for the pleasures of being sodomized.

Play on hard/soft. From my 11/18/19 posting “Hard/Soft”, about a:

highly sexualized soft porn DJ ad (for CellBlock 13 Covert jockstrap), but stressing the contrast between the hard polyurethane shell of the jock pouch and the softness of  its “extra-soft fleece” lining:

(#3)

On to the hard-core lexical stuff. Wow, a really big grab-bag, illustrating sense developments of many different types. From NOAD (AHD5 has much longer list of senses):

adj. hard: 1 [a] solid, firm, and resistant to pressure; not easily broken, bent, or pierced: a hard mattress | ground frozen hard as a rock. [b] (of a person) not showing any signs of weakness; tough: the hard, tough, honest cop. [c] (of prices of stock, commodities, etc.) stable or firm in value. 2 done with a great deal of force or strength: a hard blow to the head. 3 [a] requiring a great deal of endurance or effort: stooping over all day was hard work. [b] putting a lot of energy into an activity: he’d been a hard worker all his life. [c] difficult to bear; causing suffering: times were hard at the end of the war | he’d had a hard life. [d] difficult to understand or solve: this is a really hard question | [with infinitive]: she found it hard to believe that he could be involved. [e] not showing sympathy or affection; strict: my father is no longer the hard man he once was. [f] (of a season or the weather) severe: it’s been a long, hard winter. [g] harsh or unpleasant to the senses: the hard light of morning. [h] (of wine) harsh or sharp to the taste, especially because of tannin. 4 [a] (of information) reliable, especially because based on something true or substantiated: hard facts about the underclass are maddeningly elusive.[b] (of a subject of study) dealing with precise and verifiable facts: efforts to turn psychology into hard science. [c] denoting an extreme or dogmatic faction within a political party: the hard left. [d] (of science fiction) dealing with technological advances which do not contravene currently accepted scientific laws or principles: a hard SF novel. 5 [a] (of liquor) strongly alcoholic; denoting distilled spirits rather than beer or wine. [b] US (of apple cider) having alcoholic content from fermentation. [c] (of a drug) potent and addictive. [d] (of radiation) highly penetrating. [e] (of pornography) highly obscene and explicit. 6 (of water) containing mineral salts that make lathering difficult. 7 Phonetics (of a consonant [letter]) pronounced as c in cat or g in go.

5e is the sense in hardcore (vs. softcore).

(In passing, I note that NOAD is missing the sense ‘(of a penis) erect, tumid’ (in AHD, sense 14 of 21).)

More specifically, there is, from NOAD, the:

noun hard core: [a] the most active, committed, or doctrinaire members of a group or movement: there is always a hard core of trusty stalwarts | [as modifier]: a hard core following. [b] popular music that is experimental in nature and typically characterized by high volume and aggressive presentation. [c] pornography of an explicit kind: (as modifier hard-core [or hardcore]): hard-core porn.

The world of hard vs. soft core is a graded one: there are clear examples of hard core material (in my postings, the visual stuff has to go to AZBlogX, though, at least for the moment, I can say pretty much anything on WordPress; Facebook, in contrast,  is erratically, and often extremely punitively, censorious) vs. soft core stuff (like the 1970s newspaper underwear ads), but of course the lines won’t be clear. Sociocultural categories are virtually never sharply discriminated, though for legal or administrative purposes their names might be rigidly defined.

The hard/soft scale. The list of senses of hard provides a rich source for specializations in a great many contexts, all of them conceived in scalar terms. Four examples.

Example 1. Being the person I am, I’ll start with dicks.

From my 8/14/15 posting “Annals of phallicity: the hardness score”, about the:

5-point Erection Hardness Score (developed by specialists in sexual medicine), from 0 (soft, not enlarged) through 4 (“completely hard and fully rigid”); 3 is “hard enough for penetration, but not completely hard”

With some discussion of the British tv show Cucumber, Banana, and Tofu and its 4-point scale: tofu, peeled banana, banana, cucumber.

Example 2. Memories of a scientific childhood. The 10-point Mohs hardness scale for minerals, an absolute hardness scale based on the hardness of diamonds (as #10), with talc on the soft end as #1:

(#4) Discussion in my 10/24/18 posting “Three exercises in cartoon understanding”

Example 3. Sleep comfort. In a jokey Bizarro cartoon about ascetic monasticsm, also from  the “Three exercises” posting:

(#5)

In the same posting, mattress ratings and the like, with firm as the top end of the scale, mattress companies not actually offering boards or board-like beds.

Example 4. Cake textures. Yes, even there. From a food column in the 11/3/19 NYT Magazine (in print), “The Welcome Distraction of Chocolate Cake: Inspired by the one at Landeau Chocolate, in Lisbon, this cake is as simple as it is bold” by Dorie Greenspan; on-line, 10/30/19 as “The Chocolate Cake That Saved My Vacation”:

(#6) (photo: Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times)

The crucial quote is about cake texture:

Each forkful is a complete composition: The textures go from firm to feathery, the flavors building in intensity.

The cake scale of hardness: from firm to feathery.

The Breedwell cumdump appendix. Some background postings .

— on 1/11/18 in “Electric underwear”:

(#7) Red glow shoulder harness, plain black pouch

The name of the firm (like so many of its garments) can be read as insertive or receptive: with agentive active breed (as in He breeds his boyfriend’s ass / his boyfriend well / with gusto); or with midde-voice breed (as in Joey breeds well ‘Joey is satisfying / easy to breed, Joey is a great fuck’).

— on 5/20/18 in “Blue light special”, with more on Breedwell homowear, including:

(#8) Glowing blue fetish fuckwear

— on 6/2/18 in “Annals of gangbanging: anonymous in Brooklyn”, about a Brooklyn gay sex club with reduced entry price for tops:

(#9)

The ad is intended to attract tops — all the cumdumps you can breed, for one low price — for the benefit, the pleasure, of a corps of bottoms. It’s a scheme to make the (man)sexual marketplace work for everybody.

with cumdump ‘person regarded as no more than a repository for cum (orally, vaginally, or anally)’

In recent gay usage, a cumdump appears to be a man regarded as nothing more than a bareback bottom, used as the object of a gangbang. Hence the verb breed (used for bareback anal sex) in the poster. And the blindfold, worn by gangbanged men who enthusiastically give up control to the tops who use them for sex.

Yet another Bizarro POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) — Dan Piraro is very fond of them — from 12/22/19:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 8 in this strip — see this Page.)

So: Christopher Robin + Robin Hood — plus, of course, the outrageous Robin Hood pun: he steals from the rich and gives to the Pooh.

The contributions are the Winnie-the-Pooh books, about the fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by English author A. A. Milne (and his human companion, the boy Christopher Robin); and the legend of Robin Hood, who famously stole from the rich (in Nottingham Forest) to give to the poor. Both, of course, explored in earlier postings on this blog.

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.

From NOAD:

give someone the creeps: informal induce a feeling of revulsion or fear in someone.

And then from Wikipedia:

Croup, also known as laryngotracheobronchitis [AZ: !!], is a type of respiratory infection that is usually caused by a virus. The infection leads to swelling inside the trachea, which interferes with normal breathing and produces the classic symptoms of “barking” cough, stridor, and a hoarse voice. Fever and runny nose may also be present. These symptoms may be mild, moderate, or severe. Often it starts or is worse at night and normally lasts one to two days.

… Croup is a relatively common condition that affects about 15% of children at some point. It most commonly occurs between 6 months and 5 years of age

(In my experience, scary stuff in a baby.)

A delightful Christmas present (from Kim Darnell), only recently arrived: this t-shirt (which I am wearing as I type this):

Gay Penguin Rainbow Pride Flag, from the teeherivar site

gayguin is a pretty straightforwardly a portmanteau of gay penguin. The arguable etymological components of penguin seem to have nothing to do with the matter; from NOAD:

ORIGIN late 16th century (originally denoting the great auk): possibly of Welsh origin, from pen gwyn ‘white head’. [pen ‘head’, gwyn ‘white’]

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, which can be understood only if you know about two (hugely distant) bits of popular culture:

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

That’s The Cure + Care Bear = Cure Bear: linguistically, a portmanteau; visually, a composite of Robert Smith of the band The Cure and one of the Care Bear toys.

The Cure. From Wikipedia:

The Cure are an English rock band formed in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1978. The band members have changed several times, and guitarist, lead vocalist, and songwriter Robert Smith is the only constant member. The band’s debut album was Three Imaginary Boys (1979) and this, along with several early singles, placed the band in the post-punk and new wave movements that had sprung up in the United Kingdom. Beginning with their second album, Seventeen Seconds (1980), the band adopted a new, increasingly dark and tormented style, which, together with Smith’s stage look, had a strong influence on the emerging genre of gothic rock as well as the subculture that eventually formed around the genre.

(#2) The Cure’s Robert Smith in concert (photo: Zak Hussein/PA)

Care Bears. From Wikipedia:

Care Bears are a fictional group of multi-colored bear characters, originally painted in 1981 by artist Elena Kucharik to be used on greeting cards from American Greetings but in 1983, the characters were turned into plush teddy bears.

The characters headlined their own television series called Care Bears from 1985 to 1988. They also made three feature films: The Care Bears Movie (1985), Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation (1986), and The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland (1987).

Each Care Bear is a different color and has a special “belly badge” that represents its personality. Adding to the Care Bear family are the “Care Bear Cousins”, which feature a lion, rabbit, penguin, raccoon, monkey, elephant, pig, lamb, dog, cat, and horse created in the same style as the Care Bears.

In 2002, new versions of the bears were manufactured by Play-Along Toys; these new Care Bears appeared in three computer animated films: Care Bears: Journey to Joke-a-lot (2004), The Care Bears’ Big Wish Movie (2005), and Care Bears: Oopsy Does It! (2007).

… The franchise consists mainly of the Care Bears themselves, as well as the later additions the Care Bear Cousins. Both of them live in the Kingdom of Caring, which is made up of Care-a-lot (the home of the Care Bears proper) and the Forest of Feelings (the home of the Care Bear Cousins). In 1989, Carole Ashkinaze of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution referred to them as “the whimsical, late 20th-century descendents [sic] of what we used to know as guardian angels: furry, friendly, adorable creatures whose mission is to guide small children and protect them from bogeymen”.

… The 10 original Care Bears consisted of Bedtime Bear, Birthday Bear, Cheer Bear, Friend Bear, Funshine Bear, Good Luck Bear, Grumpy Bear, Love-a-lot Bear, Tenderheart Bear, and Wish Bear. Later on, additional bears joined them, as well as the Cousins.

(#3) From the Swiss Colony site: a set of 6 24″ Care Bear characters

Yesterday’s (2/8) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with a pun on autocrat: octocrat, itself a portmanteau of octopus and autocrat:

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

To come: notes on the words involved; some facts about octopuses that make them symbolically powerful; the octopus in political cartoons; and Wayno’s title for this cartoon, “Eight Arms to Oppress You”, with its allusion to the Ring verse from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

The words. From NOAD:

noun autocrat: [a] a ruler who has absolute power. [b] someone who insists on complete obedience from others; an imperious or domineering person.

The use in #1 is certainly sense a, but with an echo of sense b as well.

From Michael Quinion’s Affixes site:

-cracy government, rule, or influence (Greek ‑kratia, power or rule)

Many terms in ‑cracy have been coined, though only a small number are at all well known; most can mean either a system of influence or rule or a society so ruled, as with democracy, rule through elected representatives; a few can also refer to the rulers as a group, as with aristocracy (Greek aristos, best), rule by members of the highest social class.

The form is active, used to create words for influential groups with characteristics in common: punditocracy, media commentators; adhocracy, a loose group of influential advisers; meritocracy, government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their educational ability.

All can have associated adjectives in -cratic (bureaucratic, meritocratic), and nouns in ‑crat for a member of the relevant class or group (aristocrat, autocrat). A few can also have adjectives in ‑cratical (aristocratical, democratical), but these are much rarer than the corresponding forms in ‑cratic.

Example: autocracy rule by one person with absolute power (Greek autos, self)

And also from NOAD:

pl. noun Octopoda: Zoology an order of cephalopod mollusks that comprises the octopuses. ORIGIN modern Latin (plural), from Greek oktōpous, oktōpod-, from oktō ‘eight’ + pous, pod- ‘foot’.

So, with the octo– of octopus + the –crat of autocrat, you get octocrat ‘octopus autocrat’.

The nature of octopuses. From Wikipedia:

The octopus (plural octopuses) is a soft-bodied, eight-limbed mollusc of the order Octopoda. Around 300 species are recognised, and the order is grouped within the class Cephalopoda with squids, cuttlefish, and nautiloids. Like other cephalopods, the octopus is bilaterally symmetric with two eyes and a beak, with its mouth at the center point of the eight limbs. The soft body can rapidly alter its shape, enabling octopuses to squeeze through small gaps. They trail their eight appendages behind them as they swim. The siphon is used both for respiration and for locomotion, by expelling a jet of water. Octopuses have a complex nervous system and excellent sight, and are among the most intelligent and behaviourally diverse of all invertebrates.

… Octopuses appear in mythology as sea monsters like the Kraken of Norway and the Akkorokamui of the Ainu, and probably the Gorgon of ancient Greece

… They are eaten and considered a delicacy by humans in many parts of the world, especially the Mediterranean and the Asian seas.

… Nearly all octopuses are predatory; bottom-dwelling octopuses eat mainly crustaceans, polychaete worms, and other molluscs such as whelks and clams; open-ocean octopuses eat mainly prawns, fish and other cephalopods. Major items in the diet of the giant Pacific octopus include bivalve molluscs such as the cockle Clinocardium nuttallii, clams and scallops and crustaceans such as crabs and spider crabs

… A benthic (bottom-dwelling) octopus typically moves among the rocks and feels through the crevices. The creature may make a jet-propelled pounce on prey and pull it towards the mouth with its arms, the suckers restraining it. Small prey may be completely trapped by the webbed structure. Octopuses usually inject crustaceans like crabs with a paralysing saliva then dismember them with their beaks. Octopuses feed on shelled molluscs either by forcing the valves apart, or by drilling a hole in the shell to inject a nerve toxin. … Once the shell is penetrated, the prey dies almost instantaneously, its muscles relax, and the soft tissues are easy for the octopus to remove. Crabs may also be treated in this way; tough-shelled species are more likely to be drilled, and soft-shelled crabs are torn apart.

… Since it has numerous arms emanating from a common centre, the octopus is often used as a symbol for a powerful and manipulative organisation, company, or country.

The octopus in political cartoons. From Never Was magazine, “The Octopus in Political Cartoons” by Nick Ottens on 8/8/17:

Octopuses are a popular trope in political art. They came in vogue in the 1870s, when Frederick W. Rose depicted Russia as a giant octopus lording over Eastern Europe. The sea monster was quickly given to Germany when it posed a bigger threat to peace in Europe. During the early Cold War, it was Russia’s turn again. The octopus was the perfect metaphor for spreading communism.

… One of the first artists to imitate Rose was Japan’s Kisaburō Ohara. [A] cartoon, from the time of the Russo-Japanese War, shows Russia’s tentacles stretching into Asia. Of note is the rightmost tentacle, which touches Port Arthur: the site of Japan’s 1904 attack on the Russian Fleet.

The map was made to persuade Britain, then the world’s premier naval power, to stay out of the war.

The late nineteenth century was also the high-water mark of British imperialism. [A] 1888 cartoon, published in Punch, shows John Bull, the personification of the United Kingdom, dabbling in Egyptian waters.

“He is a curious mixture of the lion, mule and octopus,” gobbling up territories along the route to India: Gibraltar, the Cape, Malta, Cyprus and the recently inaugurated Suez Canal.

… Prussia, and later Germany, became an octopus favorite in French propaganda.

[A] cover of the revanchist French public-affairs magazine La Revanche depicts France and Russia slaying the German octopus in 1886, fifteen years after France lost Alsace and the Moselle department of Lorraine in the War of 1870. France and Russia would formalize an anti-German alliance five years later.

The article provides many many more examples, with illustrations.

Then in the American context, the robber baron Jay Gould as a grasping octopus. Backgound from my 1/14/21 posting “Jay Gould”:

Gould’s sharp business practices made him the target of the political cartoonists of the day, who churned out wicked caricatures of him.

Two octopodal examples.

First, from The Shoeleather History Project (Stories from Hartford’s Grassroots), “Jay Gould: Octopus of the Wires” from 11/9/13:

Gould robbed working people and millionaires alike. He bought his way out of the Civil War draft, issued millions of dollars in phony  railroad stock, bribed legislators, and manipulated President Grant in an attempt to corner the gold market. Worst of all, he was a notorious union buster. Gould bought a newspaper to help his image, kept plainclothes police with him at all times, and bomb-proofed his newly-purchased New York Western Union office. With good reason, he was the industrialist the public loved to hate, the “Octopus of the Wires” as described by one of his former employees.

(#2) Populist era political cartoon. Original caption: “Corporate greed octopus gobbles up freight for Great Railroad while unemployed handlers look on.” Subtext on head: “All FOR OURSELVES, NOTHING FOR THE PUBLIC” (unknown artist 6/27/1882)

Second, from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, “Anti-corporate cartoons, ca. 1900”, this cartoon, representing Standard Oil as an octopus, wrapping its tentacles around the United States Capitol, a “State House,” and the White House:

(#3) (caption:) Udo Keppler, Next! photomechanical print, September 1904 (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

“Eight Arms to Oppress You”. Wayno’s title for #1. An alarming allusion to the Ring verse from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, reproduced in artwork as #2 in my 11/22/18 posting “A fantasy exercise in cartoon understanding”. The entire verse:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

[Correction. Allusions are tricky; you have to divine the writer’s or speaker’s intentions from what they say. In this case, I divined incorrectly; see Wayno’s comment below. I don’t think I ever knew about the working title of Help!, so of course I didn’t get the intended allusion.]

First, to announce a new Page on this blog listing my postings about men’s fragrance. Then, to continue some recent postings on notable names for men’s fragrances, a look at Fucking Fabulous and two nomenclatural celebrations of testosterone, Testosterone Original Fragrance Paris and Testostérone (from Zurich).

The new Page. On men’s fragrance, a name chosen for its ambiguity: ‘fragrance for men’ vs. ‘fragrance of men’; there’s a similar ambiguity in male fragrance. The choice is deliberate; as I say on the Page, it inventories:

postings on fragrances for men / colognes; and on the scent of the male body

Tom Ford’s Fucking Fabulous. I wrote on Facebook on 2/7:

Just to note that Tom Ford sells a cologne for men named Fucking Fabulous. From the company:

FRAGRANCE FAMILY: WARM & SPICY

SCENT TYPE: WARM & SWEET GOURMANDS

KEY NOTES: LEATHER, TONKA BEAN, SAGE

FRAGRANCE DESCRIPTION:

TOM FORD’S ICONOCLASTIC LEATHER SCENT IS SPICY, WARM AND DECADENT. A GOURMAND ALMOND AND IRIS HEART IMBUE TEXTURAL RICHNESS TO THE LUSCIOUS LEATHER, INTENSIFIED BY FLORAL ORRIS ACCORD. THE EFFECT IS SO EXQUISITELY BEAUTIFUL, NO OTHER NAME WOULD DO.

ABOUT THE FRAGRANCE:

WITH A NAME THAT SAYS IT ALL, TOM FORD FUCKING FABULOUS IS A DECADENT LEATHER SCENT THAT WIELDS AN INTOXICATING GRIP. “IT’S UNDENIABLY THE MOST STRAIGHTFORWARD NAME FOR SUCH A BEAUTIFUL SCENT. WHY MAKE IT COMPLICATED?” – TOM FORD

ABOUT THE BOTTLE: FUCKING FABULOUS IS CONTAINED IN A MATTE BLACK ICONIC BOTTLE. THE 50ML FLACON HAS THE SLEEK, ARCHITECTURAL LOOK OF A CHESS PIECE, ADDING MONUMENTAL BEAUTY TO ANY VANITY. A MATTE BLACK SET-UP BOX COMPLETES THE LUXE DESIGN.

[AZ] The price from the company: $895 for a 250 ml bottle (nobody said fabulous was cheap).

Putting aside the annoyance of the screaming all-caps, this is pretentious and boastful. It managed to make me dislike Tom Ford even more than before.

But the bottle:

(#1)

TOF Paris. Experienced first through this ad that appeared in my Facebook feed:

(#2) Yes, that’s a bull in the logo: a symbol of aggressive masculinity

One of several ads showing a hunky guy giving off powerful sex vibes, a presentation that we are to believe is intensified by the scent his TOF Paris fragrance gives off. As I regularly say in a slogan, if you’re a guy, you either want to be him or to do him (or both).

TOF Paris explicitly welcomes its gay male audience, to the point where its ads include this steamy one featuring a same-sex (and interracial!) couple:

(#3) (AZ:) Dance to the music of testosterone

Text of a TOF Paris ad. The first paragraph has all the emotional resonance stuff:

An elegant and manly perfume for men: The master perfumers from TOF Paris worked tirelessly to create a scent with elegant and manly notes. They attempted to awaken our most primal instincts through the use of pheromones. This is how, in France, a perfume for gay and straight men, at the crossroads of sensuality and sexuality, came to exist. A perfect combination that suits most men and that will agitate your senses in any situation. A perfume that makes men want to go much further.

The second paragraph has the technical stuff, with some description of the ingredients (typically including some only perfumers are familiar with — oud wood and all that) and some of the scents themselves (again drawn from a technical vocabulary of the parfumerie):

A perfume filled with pheromones to arouse your animal side: The TOF Paris perfume for men, gay or straight, is based on three key ingredients. Oud wood is a powerful and nebulous [AZ: ?? nebulous means ‘cloud-like, (literally) hazy’ or ‘(figuratively) hazy, vague, unclear’] ingredient. It has an intense, leathery, deep animal odor. Secondly, ambroxan gives off an amber scent, close to that of ambergris, of animal origin. Ambroxan is obtained from sclareol, a molecule present in [the plant clary] sage. It is also called “Lovers’ sweat” [AZ: I can find no place where lovers’ sweat is used this way; certainly, it’s not common] because of its scent akin to skin. Finally, the hyraceum, or the African stone, is produced by a small African mammal called the Cape Daman [cape daman, more generally known as the rock hyrax]. It gives off a powerful, masculine scent and is filled with powerful pheromone molecules.

Note, again: “men, gay or straight” — the idea being that a scent that will work to attract straight women to a straight man will also work to attract gay men to a gay man. An idea that seems to have at least some validity.

I’ll now go on to the other testosterone-named men’s fragrance on my program and then return to the topics from these two TOF Paris paragraphs: testosterone and pheromones, and ingredients and scents.

Testostérone by Sentifique. From the Fragrantica site:

(#4)

Sentifique is a new, luxury perfume collection from Switzerland [based in Zurich]. Although this ambitious project began in 2009, it remained a well-kept secret until the first perfumes were ready for public presentation in the autumn of 2012. „Sentifique” is a [portmanteau] name derived from a play on words: the French phrase „senteurs magnifiques“ [‘magnificent scents’] describes the new brand’s ambitions very accurately: to create fascinating, unsurpassed fragrances at the very highest level.

Sentifique has 5 perfumes in our fragrance base.

The perfumes: two for women (Daim Rouge, Dangereuse), two unisex (Cedre Sacre, Party), one for men (Testosterone).

The Parfumo site describes the scent of Testostérone as spicy-woody and says that production has apparently been discontinued.

Testosterone and pheromones. From Wikipedia:

Testosterone is the primary sex hormone and anabolic steroid in males. In male humans, testosterone plays a key role in the development of male reproductive tissues such as testes and prostate, as well as promoting secondary sexual characteristics such as increased muscle and bone mass, and the growth of body hair. In addition, testosterone is involved in health and well-being, and the prevention of osteoporosis.

… Sexual arousal:

Testosterone levels follow a [24-hour] rhythm that peaks early each day, regardless of sexual activity.

… There is no correlation between testosterone and men’s perceptions of their orgasm experience, and also no correlation between higher testosterone levels and greater sexual assertiveness in either sex.

… The plasma levels of various steroids significantly increase after masturbation in men and the testosterone levels correlate to those levels.

So the connection to sexual arousal seems to be small and indirect, but the connection to various social markers of masculinity is stronger: there are complex associations between testosterone levels, competition, dominance, and aggression, though all of these are moderated by social norms. In any case, any indicator of higher testosterone levels might then be taken as as an indicator of higher masculinity (obviously a complex matter, since aggression is in the mix), and so might conceivaby make a man more attractive to straight women and to gay men. Various steroids related to testosterone, in particular androstadienone (and also androstenol and androstenone converted from it), could then serve as human pheromones.

On the basis of these rather tenuous associations, a modern industry of pheromone-centered male fragrances has been built — on top of the gigantic traditional perfume industry based on natural substances found to have attractive — possibly, literally attractive rather than merely pleasant — scents .

Pheromones. From Wikipedia:

Androstadienone … is an endogenous steroid [found in male sweat (and saliva and semen)] that has been described as having potent pheromone-like activities in humans. [It can be converted to androstenol or androstenone.]

… Though it has been reported to significantly affect the mood of heterosexual women and homosexual men, it does not alter behavior overtly, although it may have more subtle effects on attention.

Androstadienone is commonly sold in male fragrances; it is purported to increase sexual attraction. [It has very little scent in itself, and is sometimes sold as an additive to existing fragrances.]

And then from the Social Issues Research Centre site‘s “The Smell Report”, on sexual attraction:

The attractive powers of pheromones (scented sex hormones) have often been exaggerated – not least by advertisers trying to sell pheromone-based scents and sprays which they claim will make men irresistible to women.

Widely publicised research findings on female sensitivity to male pheromones have also led some men to believe that the odour of their natural sweat is highly attractive to women.

Women are indeed highly sensitive to male pheromones, particularly around ovulation, but many popular assumptions about the effects of these pheromones are the result of misinterpretation and over-simplification of the research results.

All male pheromones are not equally attractive, and some of the myths stem from an understandable confusion over their names. The male pheromone androstenone is not the same as androstenol. Androstenol is the scent produced by fresh male sweat, and is attractive to females. Androstenone is produced by male sweat after exposure to oxygen – i.e. when less fresh – and is perceived as highly unpleasant by females (except during ovulation, when their responses change from ‘negative’ to ‘neutral’).

So, men who believe that their ‘macho’, sweaty body-odour is attractive to women are deluding themselves [AZ: though it might be that gay men find it both attractive and arousing; certainly, many gay men have reported finding male sweaty body-odor to be highly masculine, attractive, and indeed arousing], unless they are constantly producing fresh sweat and either naked or changing their clothes every 20 minutes to remove any trace of the oxidised sweat. Generally, the female-repelling androstenone is the more prominent male body odour, as the fresh-sweat odour of androstenol disappears very quickly. In terms of scent, the sweaty macho-man is therefore likely to be unattractive to most women, most of the time

A dubious view of the whole business, from Wikipedia as quoted in my 7/4/17 posting “POP go the pheromones”:

Some body spray advertisers claim that their products contain human sexual pheromones that act as an aphrodisiac. Despite these claims, no pheromonal substance has ever been demonstrated to directly influence human behavior in a peer reviewed study.

But the pheromone-centered industry rolls on. Witness this item offered on amazon.com:

(#5) ATTRACT MEN for gay men: human sex pheromones cologne from PhermaLabs ($29.95 for 1 fl oz)

THE MAGIC POWER OF PHEROMONES: It is known that the body produces different levels of pheromones during the day – however, whenever being in an extreme situation, the level of pheromones increases – that change makes you more attractive to the people that are around you. Our cologne’s revolutionary formula already contains pheromones and thus no extreme situation is required in order for your body to produce them! Get irresistible right away!

THE SECRET TO ATTRACT GAY MEN: If you are looking for a way to boost your self-esteem in order to attract more men, then this is the way to go. Wear our cologne now and get amazed by the results; many gay men talked about men that didn’t pay any attention to them and they got instantly attracted after the use of the cologne!

… LONG-LASTING SMELL: Are you afraid that you are going to wear this cologne but you won’t be able to take advantage of its miraculous effects because the smell will fade away by the time you’ll leave your apartment? Not anymore! We guarantee that this cologne is going to stay on your skin for hours – wear it at the morning and be irresistible for the rest of the day!

The presentation of this product is not as an intensely masculine fragrance but rather as a kind of medical treatment offering “Cupid in a bottle” (“A carefully designed formula will help you instantly attract men, women, gay men or lesbian women at will!”)

The PhermaLabs site is deeply uninformative about the company; it gives a US address, but that’s just an office in a Rancho Cucamonga CA office building.

Ingredients and scents. From the TOF Paris ad text above, roughly in the order of their appearance there.

— oud / oudh wood is a Western perfumers’ name for agarwood. From Wikipedia:

Agarwood, aloeswood, eaglewood or gharuwood is a fragrant dark resinous wood used in incense, perfume, and small carvings. It is formed in the heartwood of aquilaria trees when they become infected with a type of mold (Phialophora parasitica). Prior to infection, the heartwood is odourless, relatively light and pale coloured; however, as the infection progresses, the tree produces a dark aromatic resin, … in response to the attack, which results in a very dense, dark, resin-embedded heartwood. The resin-embedded wood is valued in Indian-North Eastern culture for its distinctive fragrance, and thus is used for incense and perfumes.

… First-grade agarwood is one of the most expensive natural raw materials in the world

— Ambroxan. From Wikipedia:

Ambroxide, widely known by the brand name Ambroxan, is a naturally occurring terpenoid and one of the key constituents responsible for the odor of ambergris.

… Ambroxide is synthesized from sclareol, a component of the essential oil of clary sage

— ambergris. From Wikipedia:

Ambergris …, ambergrease, or grey amber, is a solid, waxy, flammable substance of a dull grey or blackish colour produced in the digestive system of sperm whales. Freshly produced ambergris has a marine, fecal odor. It acquires a sweet, earthy scent as it ages, commonly likened to the fragrance of rubbing alcohol without the vaporous chemical astringency.

Ambergris has been highly valued by perfumers as a fixative that allows the scent to endure much longer, although it has been mostly replaced by synthetic ambroxide.

— sclareol. From Wikipedia:

Sclareol is a fragrant chemical compound found in Salvia sclarea [clary sage], from which it derives its name. … It is an amber colored solid with a sweet, balsamic scent.

On the sage, from Wikipedia:

Salvia sclarea, the clary or clary sage, is a biennial or short-lived herbaceous perennial in the genus Salvia. It is native to the northern Mediterranean Basin, along with some areas in north Africa and Central Asia. The plant has a lengthy history as an herb, and is currently grown for its essential oil.

… The distilled essential oil is used widely in perfumes and as a muscatel flavoring for vermouths, wines, and liqueurs.

— hyraceum. From Wikipedia:

Hyraceum is the petrified and rock-like excrement composed of both urine and feces excreted by the Cape hyrax (Procavia capensis, also referred to as the rock hyrax or dassie).

… The material hardens and ages until it becomes a fairly sterile, rock-like material (also referred to as “Africa Stone”) that contains compounds giving it an animalic, deeply complex fermented scent that combines the elements of musk, castoreum, civet, tobacco and agarwood. The material is harvested without disturbing the animals by digging strata of the brittle, resinous, irregular, blackish-brown stone; because animals are not harmed in its harvesting, it is often an ethical substitute for deer musk and civet, which require killing or inflicting pain on the animal.

On the rock hyrax, from Wikipedia:

The rock hyrax (Procavia capensis), also called Cape hyrax, rock rabbit, and (in the King James Bible) coney, is a medium-sized terrestrial mammal native to Africa and the Middle East. Commonly referred to in South Africa as the dassie [and elsewhere under a number of local names]

And that’s just from one men’s fragrance.

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro (Wayno’s title: “Mythical Miscreants”):

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

leprobate, a portmanteau of leprechaun + reprobate. Naughty, naughty boys.

The occasion. Looking ahead to St. Patrick’s day, 3/17, three days after Pi Day, on 3/14; two after the Ides of March and (the very local holiday) Higashi Day (on which, for years, Jacques and I would set off to drive east from Palo Alto to Columbus OH), on 3/15.

Leprechauns. The small, mischievous sprites of Irish folklore (turned into conventional figures of popular culture). Leprechauns are notorious tricksters, given to practical jokes. Here, the Dollar Bill on a String prank: attach a string to the underside of a dollar bill and hide behind a corner; when somebody reaches down for the bill, you yank it away. Also note the pot of cabbage instead of the legendary pot of gold.

Reprobates. From NOAD:

noun réprobàte: 1 an unprincipled person (often used humorously or affectionately): he had to present himself as more of a lovable reprobate than a spirit of corruption. …

Here, we see the reprobates given over to the vices of drinking and smoking, defiantly.

(I haven’t yet worked out what role the portable radio plays in all of this. But I’m open for enlightenment.)

Two recent Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strips, from the 15th and (for St. Patrick’s Day) the 17th, both of linguistic interest: among other things, the portmanteau arthropodcast in the first; and the front-clipping ‘shmallows (for marshmallows, of the psychedelic sort) in the second:

A jointed-limb portmanteau. arthropod + podcast, with shared material pod:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

The elements of the portmanteau:

— arthropod. From Wikipedia:

An arthropod (from Ancient Greek ἄρθρον (arthron) ‘joint’, and πούς (pous) ‘foot’ (gen. ποδός)) is an invertebrate animal having an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and paired jointed appendages.

The name comes from the jointed appendages.

Arthropods include spiders, crustaceans (among them, crabs, lobsters, crayfish, and shrimps), insects, millipedes, and centipedes. Arthropods differ in their number of legs: insects 6, spiders 8, crustaceans 10 (plus some number of jointed feeding appendages — 6 for shrimp, 8 for lobsters, for example); note the (apparent) differences in leg count between the three otherwise very similar arthropods in the cartoon.

— podcast. from NOAD:

noun podcast: a digital audio file made available on the internet for downloading to a computer or mobile device, typically available as a series, new installments of which can be received by subscribers automatically. ORIGIN early 21st century: from iPod + broadcast.

A note on Greek arthr-on and Latin art-us ‘joint (of the body)’. These show up in English in a variety of places, including, for the first:

— noun arthritis: from NOAD:

painful inflammation and stiffness of the joints. ORIGIN mid 16th century: via Latin from Greek, from arthron ‘joint’.

— adjective arthrous: from OED 3 Dec. 2008 (latest version published online March 2018):

(Etymology: < ancient Greek ἄρθρον joint, (in grammar) the [definite] article [a metaphorical extension of the body-part usage]) Grammar. Of a [Classical or Biblical] Greek noun: used with the article. Opposed to anarthrous. [1st cite 1832]

The adjective as grammatical term has been extended to noun usage in languages other than Greek, in particular to such usage in English: in arthrous ‘having a (definite) grammatical article (the river Rhine, the Danube River)’ and anarthrous ‘lacking one (Lake Michigan, Great Bear Lake)’. See the Page on this blog on postings about arthrousness.

Then on English items traceable back to Latin artus ‘joint (of the body)’.

— noun article: from NOAD:

1 a particular item or object: small household articles | articles of clothing. 2 a piece of writing included with others in a newspaper, magazine, or other publication: an article about middle-aged executives. 3 a separate clause or paragraph of a legal document or agreement, typically one outlining a single rule or regulation: [as modifier]:  it is an offense under Article 7 of the treaty. 4 Grammar the definite or indefinite article.

You might reasonably ask why these four senses are being treated as instances of “the same” lexical item, rather than being treated as two or more separate items; in particular, what’s sense 4 doing in there? Why isn’t it article⁴?

The answer is, of course, that dictionaries group senses into entries on the basis of shared etymology, not mental relatedness, So NOAD‘s etymological note for the entry with these four senses is crucial:

ORIGIN Middle English (denoting a separate clause of the Apostles’ Creed): from Old French, from Latin articulus ‘small connecting part’, diminutive of artus ‘joint’.

So a metaphorical extension of a presumed articulus ‘small joint (of the body)’ — a finger joint, say, versus the hip or shoulder joint — to  any small connecting part then serves as the basis for specialized senses in different contexts (including the domain of grammatical terminology).

A sugary front-clipping. In a richly textured cartoon that incorporates a wide range of allusions:

(#2) (3 Bizarro symbols in this one) The leprechaun drug dealer offers the St. Patrick’s kid some magic marshmallows — ‘shmallows — from Lucky Charms cereal (Wayno’s title: “Trippy Charms”); in the real world the high you might get from Lucky Charms is from its high sugar content, not from psychedelic marshmallows

(You might stop and reflect on how much background knowledge you have to access to understand just this much of the content of the cartoon. But wait! There’s more!)

Lucky Charms, marshmallows, and leprechauns. It’s no accident that #2 appeared on St. Patrick’s Day, the holiday celebrating the patron saint of Ireland — hence the appearance of the leprechaun, the mischievous sprite of Irish folklore, and the reference to the rainbow (leprechauns commonly represented as guarding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow).

Lucky Charms cereal ties leprechauns to marshmallows. From Wikipedia:

Lucky Charms is an American brand of breakfast cereal produced by the General Mills food company since 1964. The cereal consists of toasted oat pieces and multi-colored marshmallow shapes (or marshmallow bits). The label features a leprechaun mascot, Lucky, animated in commercials.

(#3) Lucky, ready to charm you with his marshmallows

Front-clipping and psychedelia. Clipping is an abbreviatory process in which phonological material is omitted, as when both laboratory and Labrador (the name of a dog breed) are clipped to lab. Back-clipping / final clipping (as with lab) is by far the most common type, but front-clipping / initial clipping is not unknown, as in rents / ‘rents for parents.

Which brings us to shrooms / ‘shrooms. From NOAD, which doesn’t recognize the variant spelled with an apostrophe to stand for the omitted material:

noun shroom: informal, mainly US a mushroom, especially one with hallucinogenic properties.

Psychedelic shrooms are also known as magic mushrooms or psilocybin mushrooms, with psychedelic shroom often spelled with the apostrophe of omission. In my experience, the spelling with the apostrophe virtually always refers to psychedelic fungi. Which means that a front-clipping of marshmallows, spelled with an apostrophe and the initial remnant SH plus consonant, will strongly evoke ‘shrooms; ‘shmallows are then almost surely hallucinogenic, and you would be wise to be cautious about accepting such marshmallows from a leprechaun, however much they might look like everyday Lucky Charms.

Being the rainbow. “Try one of these and you’ll BE the rainbow”, the leprechaun tempts, hoping to hook the kid on Trippy Charms (the leprechaun’s eyes suggest that he’s pretty far into a trip himself) — and so evokes a second ad theme, in the “taste the rainbow” campaign for Skittes-brand fruit-flavored candies.

(#4)

See my 8/23/13 posting “Share the rainbow”.

In today’s (4/25) Zippy strip, our Pinhead — no podophile ‘foot fetishist’ — instead celebrates the linguistic formative pod — as a word, in one of its many meanings (here, its ‘small building’ sense); as part of a fixed expression pod people (using pod referring to a plant part); and as piece of the word podcast (where it’s a piece of the proper name iPod, and that takes it back to a functional unit on an aircraft or spacecraft):

(#1) There’s more, lots more, but the pods here are all trace back.in metaphorical flourishes, to the plant parts

The plant parts. Three lexicographic approaches towards defining pod the plant part.

— the full botanical-taxonomy monty, in the Merriam-Webster online entry for pod-2:

[sense] 1 :  a dry dehiscent pericarp or fruit that is composed of one or more carpels.

Comprehensible only if you know the technical terms. By the way, in this context fruit is a technical term; from NOAD:

Botany the seed-bearing structure of a plant, e.g. an acorn.

— intended for the general user; from NOAD on the noun pod-1:

1 [a] an elongated seed vessel of a leguminous plant such as the pea, splitting open on both sides when ripe.

— intended for learners of English; from Collins COBUILD:

a seed container that grows on plants such as peas or beans.

Metaphor: seed pod to small building. From the Cambridge Dictionary online, a metaphorical pod:

a small simple building, or a small simple structure in a building, often rounded in shape

such as Zippy’s wheeled little house above. Or the “urban escape pod” reported on the upstater site (in Kingston NY), in “Handcrafted ‘Urban Escape Pod’ For Sale, $11,995”, by Kandy Harris on 11/30/17:

(#2)

This urban escape pod on wheels might be our favorite camper/portable home of the week. Not only is the exterior as cute as a button with flower boxes and wood-scrolled details, the interior has been meticulously constructed to feel more like a comfortable cottage instead of a Tiny House.

The portable home/glamper/’vardo’ caravan was built by Chris Schapdick, award-winning Tiny House builder based in New Jersey.

Terminological notes. On vardo, glamper, camper, and mobile home.

— vardo. From #2. From Wikipedia:

A vardo (also wag(g)on, living wagon, van, and caravan) is a traditional horse-drawn wagon used by British Romanichal Travellers as their home. The vehicle is typically highly decorated, intricately carved, brightly painted, and even gilded. The Romanichal Traveller (Gypsy) tradition of the vardo is seen as a high cultural point of both artistic design and a masterpiece of woodcrafter’s art. The heyday of the caravan lasted for roughly 70 years, from the mid-1800s through the first two decades of the twentieth century.

— glamper. Also from #2. From NOAD:

(#3) From the Glamping Equipment (UK) site: “3m x 4m Glamping Pod – Cumbria”

noun glamping: a form of camping involving accommodation and facilities more luxurious than those associated with traditional camping: glamping is likely to satisfy any city slicker seeking a little refuge in nature — without foregoing any of life’s luxuries. DERIVATIVES glamper noun ORIGIN early 21st century: blend [or portmanteau] of glamorous and camping.

— camper. At this point we move into the sphere of the internal combustion engine. From Wikipedia:

A caravan, travel trailer, camper, tourer or camper trailer is towed behind a road vehicle to provide a place to sleep which is more comfortable and protected than a tent (although there are fold-down trailer tents). It provides the means for people to have their own home on a journey or a vacation, without relying on a motel or hotel, and enables them to stay in places where none is available. However, in some countries campers are restricted to designated sites for which fees are payable.

Caravans vary from basic models which may be little more than a tent on wheels to those containing several rooms with all the furniture and furnishings and equipment of a home.

— mobile home . From Wikipedia:

A mobile home (also known as a park home, trailer, trailer home, house trailer, static caravan, RV, residential caravan, motorhome or simply caravan) is a prefabricated structure, built in a factory on a permanently attached chassis before being transported to site (either by being towed or on a trailer). Used as permanent homes, or for holiday or temporary accommodation, they are left often permanently or semi-permanently in one place, but can be moved, and may be required to move from time to time for legal reasons.

Mobile homes share the same historic origins as travel trailers, but today the two are very different in size and furnishings, with travel trailers being used primarily as temporary or vacation homes.

The podcast. Next up in Zippy’s pod-ophilia is podcast. From NOAD:

(#4) From the Rachel Corbett (“Podcasting Expert”) website page, “How to Design a Great Podcast Logo”

noun podcast: a digital audio file made available on the internet for downloading to a computer or mobile device, typically available as a series, new installments of which can be received by subscribers automatically. ORIGIN early 21st century: from iPod + broadcast.

That is, a broadcast that can be listened to on Apple’s iPod audio storage and playback device.

Now, the source of the name iPod is not obvious. From Wikipedia:

The name iPod was proposed by Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who (with others) was called by Apple to figure out how to introduce the new player to the public. After Chieco saw a prototype, he thought of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the phrase “Open the pod bay doors, Hal”, which refers to the white EVA Pods of the Discovery One spaceship. Chieco saw an analogy to the relationship between the spaceship and the smaller independent pods in the relationship between a personal computer and the music player.

That takes us back to pods as features of spacecraft (and aircraft). This pod is another sense of NOAD‘s noun pod-1 (metaphorically connected to seedpods):

[sense] 2 [often with modifier] a detachable or self-contained unit on an aircraft, spacecraft, vehicle, or vessel, having a particular function: the torpedo’s sensor pod contains a television camera

And the pod people. The last stop on the pod-ophilia line. From Wikipedia:

Pod People (also known as Body Snatchers) is the colloquial term for a species of plantlike aliens featured in the 1955 novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney, the 1956 film adaptation The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1978 remake of the same name and the 1993 film Body Snatchers. Although sharing themes, they are not the 2007 film Invasion of the Pod People.

My 7/5/14 posting “Bunnies run amok” has a section on Invasion of the Body Snatchers; from the Wikipedia summary of the movie there:

(#5) A poster for the 1956 movie

The story depicts an extraterrestrial invasion of a small California town. The invasion begins with plant spores that develop into large pods with each eventually producing internally a duplicate replacement of one of the town’s human citizenry. As the pods reach full development, their “seed” assimilates the physical characteristics, memories and personalities of the humans but are devoid of emotion.

So: pod the building, podcast, and pod people. As in #1.

Another pod for the pod-ophiliac. Zippy didn’t have the space to reflect on these uses of pod, but he no doubt finds them entertaining. Not historically related to seedpods at all. Instead, an animal group term (of unknown etymology) from the US in the mid 19th century; and a pandemically useful metaphorical extension of that sense.

The Merriam-Webster online entry for its noun pod-3:

1 : a number of animals (such as whales) clustered together [AZ: cf. herd, school]

2 : a usually small group of people (such as family members, friends, coworkers, or classmates) who regularly interact closely with one another but with few or no others in order to minimize exposure and reduce the transmission of infection during an outbreak of a contagious disease

Perhaps these will come along in a future Zippy strip.

The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 5/4 (which was, appropriately, Star Wars Day):

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), but here’s behavioral science + science fiction = behavioral science fiction. There’s something to be said about each of the contributing expressions.

Science fiction. The easier part. The genres of science fiction and science fantasy are often distinguished, to the detriment of science fantasy. Both the Star Trek and the Star Wars creations have sometimes been claimed to not be science fiction, but only fantasy. The reference to moon people in the cartoon above suggests that it too isn’t about science fiction, but fantasy.

Behavioral science. The history of the term begins with a 1913 address by John B. Watson advancing behaviorism as a scientific theory of psychology — taking people’s observable behavior as the only legitimate data, and excluding the positing of unobservable internal states. Giving rise to behavioral science as a term for psychology in the behaviorist mold.

The behaviorist frame of mind was then extended from the study of individual people to the study of social groups — again, avoiding the positing of unobservable properties of social groups. Giving rise to behavioral science as a term for social science in a broad sense, embracing psychology as well as more obviously social investigations (social science in a narrow sense).

Since the study in the cartoon above is going to consider societal factors (social science in a narrow sense) on the actions and decisions of moon people (a psychological study, of individuals), the behavioral science in the cartoon is social science in a broad sense, embracing all of the psychological and social sciences, as we would now say, without any commitment to behaviorist scruples. Still, the behavioral terminology persists, as a hangover from earlier days — as in the name of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (at Stanford).