In the One Big Happy strip from 4/30, Ruthie explains, impishly, that there’s a name for her grandma’s special brand of perceptiveness:

Even better, that name rhymes with the historical model for nouns in –dar, denoting ‘the ability to detect some quality’ (like having dyed gray hair)

From my 5/27/11 posting “Portmanteau spawns libfix”:

It’s an often-told story: A portmanteau word (useful or playful or both) invites other portmanteaus sharing an element (usually the second), and then these drift from the phonology and semantics of the original to such an extent that the shared element takes on a life of its own — is “liberated” as an affix. [An example:]

-dar: gaydar ‘ability to detect that [certain] people are gay’ (gay + radar, the second historically an acronym) motivated a pile of other -dar portmanteaus (Language Log discussions here, here, and here), so that eventually -dar came to be seen as a formative on its own, usable with bases other than monosyllables (from jewdar and blackdar, eventually to humordar and sarcasmdar) and conveying not just ‘ability to detect people in some social group’ but more generally ‘ability to detect some quality’.

(There’s a Page on this blog with annotated links to postings on libfixes.)

As a final entertainment, a few possible (but, so far as I know, not yet attested) words libfixed with –dar that (like graydar) rhyme with the model gaydar:

feydar ‘ability to detect vaguely unworldly people’

cafédar ‘ability to find a café, especially a good one’

clichédar ‘ability to detect banalities, especially in otherwise fresh-sounding text’

toupeedar ‘ability to discern hairpieces, even skillfully made ones’

 

(Folded into this posting there will be some discussion of male-male sexual acts, and paintings of these, so the posting isn’t suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

To greet the new month — Pride Month, though that’s no doubt an accident — my Facebook ads on 6/1, yesterday, included one new to me, for art.com, offering giclee or canvas prints of Evelyn De Morgan’s 1882 painting Phosphorus and Hesperus:

(#1)

An embodiment of complementarity: two half-brothers (sharing their mother, Eos), one (Phosphorus) lighter haired, eyes open, facing up, bearing a flaming torch aloft; one (Hesperus) darker haired, eyes closed, facing down, holding a cold torch pointing down; with their arms intertwined and their bodies aligned complementarily, in a 69, or sideways astrological Cancer, or yin-yang pattern (with Hesperus as yin, Phosphorus as yang).

The artist. From Wikipedia:

Evelyn De Morgan (30 August 1855 – 2 May 1919), née Pickering, was an English painter associated early in her career with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Her paintings are figural, foregrounding the female body through the use of spiritual, mythological, and allegorical themes. They rely on a range of metaphors (such as light and darkness, transformation, and bondage) to express what several scholars have identified as spiritualist and feminist content.

De Morgan’s family was upper-middle class, and she was educated at home, given the same instruction that a boy would have received. She had a strong independent streak, refusing to be presented to society or, later, to have anything to do with the Royal Academy; still later, she was an outspoken pacifist and suffragist. Her husband was the ceramicist and novelist William De Morgan, son of the mathematician Augustus De Morgan, famous in logic and set theory for De Morgan’s Laws :

¬ (P∨Q) ≡ (¬ P)∧(¬ Q) and ¬ (P∧Q) ≡ (¬ P)∨(¬ Q)

The De Morgans traveled in a number of the artistic, literary, and intellectual circles of the time, and also were serious spiritualists.

The painting. Phosphorus and Hesperus is unusual among De Morgan’s works in featuring two male figures. Single female figures and groups of two or three women predominate in her work, plus some couples, but paintings with only male figures seem to be rare. In this case, it appears that she wanted to paint on the theme of spiritual complementarity, or something of the sort — I’ve found nothing about her aims in this painting — and this famous instance from mythology presented itself to her.

Then there are the linked arms. These might just signify the (eternally) linked fates of the two  characters, if they’re seen merely as embodiments of spiritual principles. If they’re seen also as human beings, then the linked arms read as an intimate connection — possibly as filial affection. The young men are brothers, after all.

Looking at the painting with modern eyes, it’s easy to see the tangle of the two bodies as conveying more: a romantic affection, quite possibly carnal connection. Homoerotic understandings that are unlikely to have occurred to De Morgan. But which — in a little while —  I’ll make a good bit of, thanks to sexual associations with the numeral 69 and its visual relatives, the astrological sign of Cancer and the yin-yang symbol.

The astronomical and mythological Phosphorus and Hesperus. Plus a philosophical point about names. From Wikipedia for the morning star:

Phosphorus (Greek Φωσφόρος Phōsphoros [‘bearer of light’, often translated as Lucifer in Latin]) is the planet Venus in its appearance as the Morning Star. Another Greek name for the Morning Star is Heosphorus (Greek Ἑωσφόρος Heōsphoros) [sometimes Eosphorus in English], meaning “the dawn-bringer”. … As an adjective, the Greek word φωσφόρος is applied in the sense of “light-bringing” to, for instance, the dawn, the god Dionysus, pine torches, the day; and in the sense of “torch-bearing” as an epithet of several gods and goddesses, especially Hecate but also of Artemis/Diana and Hephaestus. Objectively, Venus is the “light bringer” as she [I would have written it; Venus the deity is female, and her name Venus in Latin is of feminine grammatical gender, but the planet named Venus is an inanimate object, and English doesn’t have grammatical gender] appears most brightly in the sky in December (optical illusion due to days being shorter); the most regular appearance of the planet signalled a beginning of “rebirth” phase where the days would get longer and winter would end.

… While at an early stage the Morning Star (called Phosphorus and other names) and the Evening Star (referred to by names such as Hesperus) were thought of as two celestial objects, the Greeks accepted that the two were the same, but they seem to have continued to treat the two mythological entities as distinct.

… In the philosophy of language, “Hesperus is Phosphorus” is a famous sentence in relation to the semantics of proper names. Gottlob Frege used the terms “the evening star” (der Abendstern) and “the morning star” (der Morgenstern) to illustrate his distinction between sense and reference, and subsequent philosophers changed the example to “Hesperus is Phosphorus” so that it utilized proper names. Saul Kripke used the sentence to posit that the knowledge of something necessary — in this case the identity of Hesperus and Phosphorus — could be discoverable rather than known a priori.

Also (but much more briefly) from Wikipedia for the evening star:

In Greek mythology, Hesperus (Ancient Greek: Ἕσπερος, romanized: Hésperos) is the Evening Star, the planet Venus in the evening. He is the son of the dawn goddess Eos (Roman Aurora) and is the half-brother of her other son, Phosphorus (also called Eosphorus; the “Morning Star”). Hesperus’ Roman equivalent is Vesper [as Phosphorus’s Roman equivalent is Lucifer]

The symbolic resources: the numeral 69.

(#2) Road sign for Rte 69

From my 3/16/18 posting “Extended 69”, about 69 ‘reciprocal oragenitalism’ (especially reciprocal fellatio), extensions of the term, and the symbolic resources for representing these acts, notably:

symbols borrowed from other contexts but usable to represent 69 because of their form. First, the astrological sign Cancer, an abstract representation of a crab (rounded shape, two big claws):

(#3) The astrological sign, easily seen as 69 with one partner lying on top of the other

(#4) The astrological sign sideways, readable as the numeral, or seen as 69 with the partners lying side by side, or as the tricky vertical, or standing, 69

And then yin and yang symbols:

(#5) The standard yin-yang, which looks like 96

(#6) The standard symbol flipped, so it looks like 69

#1 can be seen as the numeral 69 — straight as in #3, or in the astrological sign sideways (#4), or in flipped yin-yang (#6) — by viewing Phosphorus’s torch as the stroke of the 6, continuing down along Hesperus’s spine, with his buttocks as the ball of the 6; and viewing Phosphorus’s head as the ball of the 9, with the stroke of the 9 tracing down his spine to his knee on the ground.

yin-yang. From Wikipedia:

In Ancient Chinese philosophy, yin and yang … is a concept of dualism, describing how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another.

… The principle of yin and yang is represented by the Taijitu … The term is commonly used to mean the simple “divided circle” form, but may refer to any of several schematic diagrams representing these principles

… In this symbol the two tear drops swirl to represent the conversion of yin to yang and yang to yin. … The two tear drops are opposite in direction to each other to show that as one increases the other decreases. The dot of the opposite field in the tear drop shows that there is always yin within yang and always yang within yin.

yin-yang is then a high-level conceptual distinction, manifested in all aspects of life, in binary oppositions of lower-level concepts (on those binary oppositions, see my 5/3 posting “The Raw and the Cooked”). A (very long) list of some of those lower-level concepts, with the concepts for yin and yang listed in parallel:

YIN: dark, black, blue, green, old, north, west, evening, night, autumn, winter, inside, feminine, water, wood, earth, sour, sweet, the moon, cool / cold, slow, wet, soft, passive, introvert, receptive, cooperative, flexible, indirect, conservative, negative

YANG: light, white, yellow, red, young, south, east, morning, day, spring, summer, outside, masculine, fire, sky, metal, bitter, pungent, the sun, warm / hot, fast, dry, hard, active, extravert, aggressive, competitive, unyielding, direct, innovative, positive

(Hence dark – light, black – white, etc. And Hesperus – Phosphorus. And in the sex act, yin – yang and 9 – 6).

Zane Maxwell’s paintings. Searching around for visual resources on yin-yang and sex. I came across a work on the pixels site, Yin Yang 69, a painting by Zane Maxwell (who seems to market his work mostly through that site) — I am trusting that the image is sufficiently abstract that I can post it in a WordPress blog:

(#7) Some see this as a representation of interracial 69, but the title suggests that it’s to be understood more abstractly, as yin-yang 69; note that the yang cocksucker half has some yin cock in it and that the yin cocksucker half has some yang cock in it

Since it’s now Pride Month, I offer another Maxwell painting, with another abstract image of steamy mansex, this time quadruple (or more) rainbow fucking: multiple supine / missionary fucks in a rainbow haze):

(#8) As an extra, the title kaMANsutra, with a complex portmanteau in it, combining kamasutra with man

In today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s title: “The Mammal in the Mirror” (a play on the song title “Man in the Mirror”) — a manatee primps at his vanity, yielding the vanity + manatee portmanteau vanatee, and crossing genders as well as words (masculine manatee — “Man in the Mirror”, addressing himself as handsome, bristly body — at a conventionally highly feminine item of furniture, a vanity table, for applying makeup in the bedroom):

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

I’ll start with the two contributors to the portmanteau and follow them where they lead, which is many surprising places.

(On the song, from Wikipedia:

“Man in the Mirror” is a song recorded by [AZ: talking about crossing gender lines!] American singer-songwriter Michael Jackson, with lyrics and music by Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett, and produced by Jackson and Quincy Jones. It was released on February 6, 1988 as the fourth single from his seventh solo album, Bad (1987).)

Manatees. From my 3/26/15 posting “Marine mammals”, about a Sandra Boynton drawing for Manatee Appreciation Day (March 25th):

From Wikipedia:

Manatees (family Trichechidae, genus Trichechus) are large, fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous marine mammals sometimes known as sea cows. There are three accepted living species of Trichechidae, representing three of the four living species in the order Sirenia: the Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis), the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus) [AZ: the species in south Florida], and the West African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis).

[Poetic digression. The Wikipedia entry contains a lovely bit of found poetry, a double dactyl:

fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous: metrically SWW SWR SWW SWW (where R notates a rest beat)

— which I’ve worked into a doubly-dactylic, slow-moving tercet to celebrate Trichechus manatus:

Fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous —
Food for the manatee: sea grass in Florida —
Gentle and curious lover of warmth

More on poetic form later.]

Vanities. The NOAD entry for vanity, almost all of which turns out to be relevant, though sense 3a is the one in the portmanteau in #1:

noun vanity:  1 [a] excessive pride in or admiration of one’s own appearance or achievements: it flattered his vanity to think I was in love with him | the personal vanities and ambitions of politicians. [b] [as modifier] denoting a person or company that publishes works at the author’s expense: a vanity press. 2 the quality of being worthless or futile: the vanity of human wishes. 3 [a] North American a dressing table. [b] US a bathroom unit consisting of a washbasin typically set into a counter with a cabinet beneath.

In OED2 (from long ago, but with recent relevant modifications): sense 3a, the bedroom sense (furniture almost entirely used by women, plus men who put on extensive makeup, like drag queens or male dancers in stage shows) (1st cite 1937), is treated as a beheading of vanity table (itself with 1st cite 1936); and sense 3b, the (unisex) bathroom sense (1st cite 1967), is treated as a beheading of vanity unit (itself with 1st cite 1973) (vanity unit is almost surely a semi-technical commercial term and seems to be little used outside of the furniture business).

Furniture ads seem to use vanity table (or its beheaded derivative vanity) for 3a and bathroom vanity for 3b.

Cruising the furniture ads for vanity tables, as I felt obliged to do for this posting, unearths some truly wonderful vanities, including this, oh honey!, apotheosis of elegance, the Zelda Vanity Table from Devon & Devon (an Italian luxury interior-design brand):

(#2) Ad copy for this Art Deco-tinged delight: It pays homage to unconventional femininity and irresistible charisma of the author’s wife and muse of “The Great Gatsby”, this vanity table revisits the classic bedroom dresser in a contemporary vein. Being bordered with sinuous lines and rounded shapes, which culminate in the wide circumference of the large diamond mirror, it has lacquered wood doors and drawers available in three colours, brass legs and marble top. Between the two drawers there is a pull-out top covered with velvet.

Don’t leap too fast to order: this pink, gold, and white extravagance will set you back €8,948.25 (excluding tax and shipping, not to mention upgrades on some elements).

The mirror. The mirror is a crucial feature of the vanity. The mirror is also an artistic symbol of vanity, in two senses: the vanity of excessive self-regard, as in the figure of Narcissus (in love with his reflection); and the more prosaic vain woman primping before her mirror, with the mirror showing the ravages of time and conveying that “all is vanity”, life is futile, also serving as a reminder that we will all die: memento mori.

On the latter, darker, symbolism, from my 9/13/20 posting “Mid-autumn memento mori for the times”:

[Still lifes] typically feature flowers and/or foodstuffs (though the genre has been stretched wildly). Then from Wikipedia on still lifes … :

Especially popular in this period [in the 17th century] were vanitas paintings, in which sumptuous arrangements of fruit and flowers, books, statuettes, vases, coins, jewelry, paintings, musical and scientific instruments, military insignia, fine silver and crystal, were accompanied by symbolic reminders of life’s impermanence. Additionally, a skull, an hourglass or pocket watch, a candle burning down or a book with pages turning, would serve as a moralizing message on the ephemerality of sensory pleasures. [AZ: or a mirror, in which you can observe the ravages of time] Often some of the fruits and flowers themselves would be shown starting to spoil or fade to emphasize the same point.

Vanitas paintings convey the memento mori theme. From Wikipedia:

Memento mori (Latin ‘remember that you [have to] die’) is an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. The expression memento mori developed with the growth of Christianity, which emphasized Heaven, Hell, and salvation of the soul in the afterlife.

Consider this memento mori still life of a skull, a mirror, a globe, books, musical instruments and other objects on a draped table top (from the MutualArt auction site):

(#3) Painting from the circle of Pieter van Roestraten (lived c1631 – 1700)

And then, more recently and more spectacularly, this vanitas drawing with an actual vanity table (with mirror, of course), from the Illusions Index site on “All Is Vanity”:

(#4) Basic information from the site: The All Is Vanity Ambiguous Figure was created by the American illustrator Charles Allan Gilbert (1873 – 1929) in 1892. The figure can be seen as a woman looking at her reflection in a mirror, or a skull (Oliva, 2013). [It] belongs in a large class of illusions where a two-dimensional figure, or three-dimensional object can be seen in two or more sharply distinct ways

Further note on poetic form. On how manatee and vanity sometimes count as the same in poetry and sometimes count as different. It all depends on the context.

Poetic accent (notated by S and W, as in the doubly-dactylic lines above; organized into feet, notated by spacing, above) is distinct from, though obviously related to, word accent in speech (in English, with at least three distinctive levels: primary ʹ, secondary `, and unaccented ˘). In word accent, manatee and vanity have distinct patterns: ʹ ˘ ` vs. ʹ ˘ ˘. And this difference shows up in segmental phonetics: the intervocalic t of manatee is realized as a (voiceless) aspirated stop, because it precedes an accented syllable; but the intervocalic t of vanity is realized, for most American speakers, as a voiced tap (often called a “flap”), identical to the d of comedy, because it precedes an unaccented syllable.

But in poetic accent, the final syllable of manatee can count as either W (as in the dactylic verse above, in the line Food for the manatee: sea grass in Florida — SWW SWW SWW SWW), because it’s less accented than the first syllable; or as S (as in the iambic tetrameter — WS WS WS WS — lines The manatee is soft and sweet, it eats the grass that grows down South (my invention), because it has some accent).

The second in what I fear will become a continuing series: on the increasingly out-of-control software for weeding out comments spam on this blog. The first installment was my posting “Travails of blogging 6/21/21”, and I’ll start with that.

From 6/21:

Spam comments. I’ve written before about WP’s scheme for protection from spam comments [farmed out to the Akismet software]. It’s a serious issue; according to WP’s records, since this blog started in [mid-December] 2008, the spam filter has deleted over 4 million spam [now around 5 million] comments. The scheme involves two steps that are essentially out of my hands — an initial culling that happens entirely automatically (through an algorithm that is entirely mysterious), and then a file of candidates that are offered to me for examination before deletion — but since that file has on the order of 500 to 5000 comments in it each day, I can’t possibly deal with it, so it too vanishes without any judgment from me.

The scheme is supposed to weed out comments from addresses / urls that I haven’t approved (yet) and are suspicious on internal grounds. That leaves relatively innocent-looking sources that are probably just new commenters (or old commenters posting from a new address); these I get sent to me by e-mail, one by one, for my inspection. The expectation is there won’t be a lot of these, and most of them will be innocent. This expectation has held for over 12 years, but is now crumbling fairly dramatically.

In recent weeks, my moderation task has climbed from one every few days to today’s 15 (a bit later: 18), and they aren’t easy to inspect; their identity as advertising for dubious products is concealed inside complex addresses or urls, so it takes some time to detect.

An Akismet report from this morning:

(#1) The 81,589 figure is deeply misleading, because the count has been reset several times in software upgrades; the true figure is around 5 million, in comparison to 13,047 genuine comments (on 9,225 postings since the blog began on 12/17/08)

I’m now in the zone of 30 to 40 daily spomments (I recently discovered the useful portmanteau spomment = spam + comment); when I check my e-mail at the beginning of the day, there are usually 5 candidates waiting for moderation. A few of them are genuine contributions from new commenters, but most have suspicious features: they are comments on postings from long ago; they come from places known to be frequent sources of spam, like Russia, Belarus, Korea, Indonesia, and (alas) Germany, the last of which supplies many intermediate sites in transporting spam; they are very brief, supplying not actual comments but just the name of a suspicious site or a link to it (or, occasionally, the most vapid of positive comments, like “Great posting” or “Important contribution”); and the title of the candidate comment, or its URL, contains obvious advertising content (“ONLINE POKER” appears several times a day, as well as references to playing the slots on-line, and to items for sale).

Now, such advertisements should not of course be banned from the net (after all, people do search for places to play poker on-line and so on), and they are sometimes even relevant to postings of mine. postings that are, at least in part, about advertisements — but the Akismet algorithm should learn from the information I provide through my moderations. It does learn from my approvals, faultlessly, as far as I can tell, but apparently it can be tricked by the most trivial alterations in the material in spomments; I’ve marked stuff with ONLINE POKER or POKER ONLINE in it as spam hundreds of times by now, but still they come, again and again.

Consequently, the Akismet algorithm strikes me as exceptionally stupid. I have learned to suss out spomments with some accuracy, by generalizing from my own experience; why doesn’t the Akismet algorithm?
Up in my e-mail an hour or so ago, this request for moderation:

(#2)

Initial flags for suspicion: the comment is on a posting from 2012, 9 years ago; it looks like it comes from NYU computer science grad student John “Jeffrey” Westhoff, but its real source seems to be in Indonesia; the total comment is the brief (and seemingly inscrutable) “Agen MPOPelangi” (but the pelangi I recognized from earlier spomments; it’s Indonesian (and Malay) for ‘rainbow’); and then a continuation of Westhoff’s blog URL turns into garbled and incomplete advertising copy: “eat suggestions to keep you finances so as”. And of course none of this has anything to do with aphasia.

So spam it is. But it took some work for me to feel comfortable in making that judgment. I note that I had marked as spam a number of previous comments with pelangi in them (that’s when I figured out that these comments probably came from Indonesia), so that I had learned from my previous moderations).

(I have just gotten another request for moderation, at first appearing to be from a music site, commenting on a music posting of mine. But a continuation of the music URL diverts you to an MPO site — see the MPO in #2 above — which I’d seen many times before but now I discover it’s apparently the name of a family of Indonesian sites offering on-line slots. Oh lord.)

I am now spending a quite unreasonable amount of time discovering the devious ways of spomments, so I can delete them while rescuing legitimate comments. Somebody really needs to fix Akismet.

More grief. Meanwhile, my saga of trying to install Stanford’s new net security software Cardinal Key is entering its second month. So far I figure I’ve invested 30 hours of time on it. My Stanford IT guy will take another bash at it on Friday.

I note that when I started the Cardinal Key adventure, I was told that whatever the problem was, it was triggered by my using a non-Stanford computer to access features of the Stanford system. That seemed preposterous to me, and now it seems that I was merely the first Stanford faculty using their own computer to try to install Cardinal Key. (I note that the requirement to shift to Cardinal Key came during summer vacation, during a pandemic. Who could have foreseen that there would be compliance problems?)

Now there are a bunch of us. I, at least, am not actually in trouble, since I started all this in time, and the IT folks, faced with a really baffling situation, got me a lifetime waiver from having to install Cardinal Key. (But I am uncomfortable being a possible weak point in security, capable of inadvertently allowing great damage to be done. So I collaborate with the project of actually fixing things.)

Once there were a bunch of us, using a variety of different machines and operating systems, it became clear that my problem was not with my computer setup at all, but with Cardinal Key, specifically with the standard software, BigFix, for preparing computers to install Cardinal Key. There is a glitch somewhere in BigFix. So on Friday my IT guy will uninstall my defective version of BigFix and try some alternative software for the task. Think secure thoughts for me.

Even more grief. Meanwhile meanwhile, I continue  to suffer from the WordPress techies’ passion for “upgrades”, large and small, to my blog’s software — so that every few days I have to root around in the system to to discover where particular features have gone, what their names are now, and what you have to do now to get them to work. This constant churning of the software consumes a huge amount of my time and seriously undermines my ability to do my work, for reasons familiar from the psychology of action and and the psychology of learning. More on this topic to come.

All of this makes me desperate. I have so little time now, in a day and probably in my life, and so much of it goes to wrestling with computer systems that should be designed to ease my work.

A hybrid beast with a portmanteau name: Triceratops + tiramisu, that is, Tricera (tops) + (tira) misu:

(#1) A fine portrait of the beast, artist as yet unknown (it’s one of those cartoons that has been passed around on the net through many hands, with the artist’s identity suppressed; Google Images has been of no help, because it detects the tiramisu and then disregards everything else)

A fantastical creature with the body of a tiramisu and the extremities (head, tail, and four legs) of a Triceratops, the Triceramisu feeds from pools of espresso, fortified wines, and liqueurs in the fields of cocoa that abound in its native land of Portmantopolis; the creature lounges drowsily in the evenings in plate-like nests. The Triceramisu is irenic, amiable, and delicious, and has been known to offer itself as sustenance to other creatures in need of food. Because it’s inclined to spoil and to crumble, the Triceramisu is unfortunately (though gloriously) short-lived.

The contributory elements. First the dinosaur, then the dessert.

From Wikipedia (beginning in elegant dictionary register):

Triceratops is an extinct genus of herbivorous ceratopsid dinosaur that first appeared during the late Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous period, about 68 million years ago in what is now North America. It is one of the last-known non-avian dinosaur genera, and became extinct in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago. The name Triceratops, which literally means ‘three-horned face’, is derived from the Greek words trí– (τρί-) meaning ‘three’, kéras (κέρας) meaning ‘horn’, and ṓps (ὤψ) meaning ‘face’.

(#2) The Triceratops we have: skeletal mount of a T. prorsus specimen at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles

Bearing a large bony frill, three horns on the skull, and a large four-legged body resembling that of a rhinoceros, Triceratops is one of the most recognizable of all dinosaurs and the most well-known ceratopsid. It was also one of the largest, up to 9 meters (30 ft) long and 12 metric tons (13 short tons) in weight. It shared the landscape with and was possibly preyed upon by Tyrannosaurus, though it is less certain that two adults did battle in the fanciful manner often depicted in museum displays and popular images.

(#3) The Triceratops we cuddle, from Ikea: the JÄTTELIK series soft toy triceratops (27″)

(The name of the beast is accented Trìcératòps.)

Also from Wikipedia:

(#4) Ilustration: from the New York Times recipe for a classic tiramisù

Tiramisu [Italian spelling: tiramisù] … is a coffee-flavoured Italian dessert. It is made of ladyfingers … dipped in coffee, layered with a whipped mixture of eggs, sugar, and mascarpone cheese, flavoured with cocoa [an early OED cite describes it as a “coffee trifle”, referring to the British dessert trifle]

Some discussion in my 10/30/18 posting “Annals of appalling trifles”.

According to OED2, the name of the confection is accented tìramisú in BrE, as tìramísu (or, alternatively, tìramisú) in AmE. Consequently, the name of the hybrid creature is accented either Trìcéramisú or Trìcéramísu. Since I happen to have first encountered the dessert in the UK, where I learned that its name is tìramisú, my personal preference is for that accentuation, and for Trìcéramisú.

Bonus: found poetry. (Artist etc. of #1 still unidentified, but for your enjoyment meanwhile…)

The dinosaur and the dessert, the creature and the confection. Bits of free verse lifted from the two Wikipedia articles:

The Beast in Whole

(#5)

The Body of the Beast

(#6)

It was 8/30, and the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm went POP!, exploded in a phrasal overlap portmanteau, the one in the title:

(with the snow-sliding dog seen doing an airborne trick in the second panel of the strip).

Not your everyday POP, because it works straightforwardly in pronunciation but works only imperfectly in spelling:

snowboarder + border collie = snow border collie

Distinct spellings, boarder vs. border, homophones in both AmE and BrE (but see below).

The contributors to the POP. First, the compound noun and verb snowboard, and the derivative noun snowboarder, seen in my 3/23/13 posting “Snowboard Zippy”, featuring a snowboarding Zippy spouting snowboarder slang.

Then the compound noun border collie. Border collies have been mentioned many times on this blog, but have a special place here because of the utility of the name border collie in POPs. Three POPpearances:

— in my 6/13/10 posting “The commencement pun crop”:

[Simon] Drew 2003 [Spot the Author: Uninterrupted Nonsense] has herbaceous border collie (a phrasal overlap portmanteau)

— in my 4/28/17 posting “Friday word play in the comics”, a Bizarro cartoon with

Doctors Without Borders + border collies = Doctors Without Border Collies

plus discussion of border collies, with photos (note the disregard for the borders / border difference for the purposes of the joke; and for that matter, the disregard for the distinction between Borders as part of the proper name Doctors Without Boarders and the common noun border in border collie; the point is that identity for the purposes of POP formation is a flexible notion — so we might be prepared to entertain boarder and border as identical).

— in my 10/9/19 posting “Two old cartoon friends”, a Scott Hilburn cartoon with Doctors Without Border Collies (but with a different understanding of without: in the 2017 posting, the doctors lack needed dogs, to get sheep out of their office; in the 2019, the doctors lack desired dogs, to keep them company)

The homophony issue. Most Americans have border and boarder as homophones, with accented nucleus [ɔr]; British RP (Received Pronunciation) also has them as homophones, with accented nucleus [ɔ:] (though Scottish varieties generally distinguish them). So it will come as a surprise to many that in John Wells’s keyword system for classifying English vowels, they belong to two different lexical sets in GenAm (General American): NORTH, with [ɔr] (with open, lower, laxer [ɔ]), for border; but FORCE, with [or] (with close, higher, tenser [o]), for boarder.

Now, in fact, most Americans have their NORTH and FORCE vowel nuclei merged, in favor of NORTH [ɔr]. However, Southern varieties generally preserve the distinction: for, or, war, horse, morning, and border have NORTH [ɔr], while four, oar, wore, hoarse, mourning, and boarder have FORCE [or]. (In GenAm, [ɔ] is the THOUGHT vowel, as in taught / taut, gnaw, saw; while [o] is the GOAT vowel, as in tote, no / know, so / sew / sow.)

(I lived for over 20 years with a Southern speaker, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (who grew up in central Kentucky and went to school in Mississippi and southern Virginia), who certainly distinguished her NORTH and FORCE nuclei, but had to live with people like me, who had the “wrong” (from her standpoint) nuclei in FORCE words and who failed utterly to appreciate her NORTH vs. FORCE distinction. Fortunately, the functional load of the NORTH – FORCE distinction is quite small — it is rarely crucial in discriminating words in context — so it wasn’t a source of household misunderstandings.)

In any case, for those Southern speakers with NORTH and FORCE nuclei distinct, the MGG cartoon’s POP involves what is essentially an imperfect pun, with [bɔrdǝr] standing for both border and boarder. But imperfect puns are no big thing, and in fact many jokesters think they exhibit more cleverness than perfect puns (while others applaud perfect puns because they’re more subtle). So we can all smile at the POP, regardless of our dialect.

From the tv series NCIS, Season 14 Episode 6, “Shell Game”, an exchange between the NCIS-Agent characters Tim McGee (played by Sean Murray) and Nick Torres (played by Wilmer Valderrama, whose name I am forever telescoping into the portmanteau-like Wilderrama) that turns on joking with senses of the interrogative adverb how — in McGee’s question “How do you sleep at night”, intended to convey modal + means how ‘by what means is it possible?’; and Torres’s response “On my back. Naked.”, conveying truth-functional + state how ‘in what state?’.

(#1) Torres and McGee in the NCIS episode “Love Boat”, Season 14 Episode 4

Then I turn to WV the man, as a hunk with a wonderful smile (two things I post about on a fairly regular basis), and as a performer with a notable actorial persona.

The sleep exchange. (M is McGee, who tends to be earnest, bordering on humorless, and very conscientious; T is Torres, who’s easy-going and playful)

T: That mystery e-mail still driving you nuts?
M: It’s not driving me nuts, it’s just, it’s annoying.
T: Want to feel better?
M: How?
T: Take a look at this.
M: You have 98,000 unread e-mails?
T: 98 plus.
M: How? Why?
T: Well, when I was undercover I-I… I never checked them, you know? So, I could never… I could never catch up, so at some point I just quit trying, man.
M: How do you sleep at night?
T: On my back. Naked. Fresh air feels nice.

The question How do you sleep at night? (with the interrogative adverb how) that M asks is of course not the How do you sleep at night? that T so playfully answers. It’s a joke, son.

Senses of interrogative how. Dictionaries seem not to do a lot of sense differentiation for how — NOAD boils the relevant OED2 entry down to ‘in what way or manner; by what means’, all as one sense — and I don’t know anything in the semantics literature that covers this territory (but then I’m basically pig-ignorant of the semantics literature), so I’m sketching  a treatment improvisationally here. I would be happy to be illuminated.

What we have here seems to be the juxtaposition of two wildly divergent senses:

M’s modal (specifically, epistemic) + means how ‘by what means is it possible’

T’s truth-functional + state how ‘in what state’

You can appreciate something of the range of senses for interrogative how by considering four different ways of answering the question How does he sleep at night?:

truth-functional + means how in: How does he sleep at night? By taking Sominex.

truth-functional + manner how in: How does he sleep at night? Restlessly.

truth-functional + state how in: How does he sleep at night? On his back. Naked

modal + means how ‘by what means is it possible’ in: How does he sleep at night? By ceasing to care about his responsibilites.

Note 1. The modal + means how can have the modality made explicit: How can he sleep at night (after what he’s done)?

Note 2. Related to state how are two senses that are listed separately in many dictionaries, including NOAD: condition (stative) how (How do you feel? Sick.) and quality (active) how in How did they play? Very badly.)

Wilmer Valderrama. Basics from Wikipedia:

Wilmer Eduardo Valderrama (born January 30, 1980) is an American actor, producer, singer, and television personality. He is best known for the role of [the foreign exchange student] Fez in the sitcom That ’70s Show (1998–2006) and as Carlos Madrigal in From Dusk till Dawn: The Series (2014–16).

After some time on the original NCIS, WV moved to NCIS: New Orleans.

Back on That ’70s Show, it was already obvious that (if you actually looked at the whole young man) he was a hunk — and so he is, with a physique that looks “naturally” well-proportioned rather than gym-crafted:

(#2) A face and torso shot from an NCIS episode

Then concentrating on his handsome face and muscular forearms:

(#3) A Valderrama portrait (also from NCIS)

And then his smile:

(#4) He has a beautiful smile (I’m really into smiles) (Wiki Commons photo

And on the academic side, I’m interested in smiles and other facial expressions as projections of personas; and on the way smiling and neutral faces are deployed in various sorts of posed “public portraits” — from driver’s license photos through p.r. shots (by actors, businessmen, political figures, entertainers, sports figures, and the like); compare WV in #3 and #4.

Actorial personas. From my 2/3/19 posting “Edward Winter”:

I was … interested in [Winter] as a member of what I’ve called the Acting Corps (actors who get regular work and so pop up in movies or on tv, notably or inconspicuously, in various roles); also in him as a man with a conventionally good-looking face, a leading-man style of face (rather than a character-actor face); and also in him as someone with a strong and recognizable actorial persona, which runs through a number of his performances.

… As a member of the Actor Corps, Winter took on a wide variety of roles, but he seemed to be drawn to intense, even manic or deranged, and rather nasty, characters who are physically highly strung, either taut or in constant motion.

Earlier, in my 3/30/17 posting “Billy Zane”:

charming, boyish, playful, and sexy (his perennial actorial persona)

And so on. For some time I’ve had a posting in preparation — my writing life is forever a mess — on Jane Curtin, who has a notable actorial persona, on display recently in the tv series Unforgettable, where she plays the gifted but crusty medical examiner Dr. Joanne Webster: genuinely sweet but also pointedly competent.

And then we get Wilmer Valderrama: amiable and playful, but dependable, with an easy physicality and with intensity in reserve. A Good Guy.

In the mail yesterday (in transit for a month from Italy), this neon purple penguin key ring — a pengring, portmanteau of penguin + ring — a little gift of friendship in difficult times, from Anna Thornton — morphologist Anna M. Thornton, Professor of Linguistics at Università Degli Studi Dell’Aquila,  the University of L’Aquila, Italy:

(#1) A hollow key ring, with the hollow good for holding the pendant penguin and so finding and wielding the keys on the ring, though this particular design is usually intended to make the pendant usable as a bottle opener; I don’t, however, think I’d want to risk scratching that handsome purple surface on a bottle cap (but then twist caps have widely replaced pry-off caps, so we all have less call for bottle openers)

And from this, excursions in many directions.

I note at the outset that the penguin is one of my totem animals; my house is a riot of penguiniana (and mammuthiana as well). Anna’s choice of penguin as gift creature was no accident.

The N + N compounds. From NOAD:

noun key ring [punctuated with the elements separated]: a metal ring, typically with a tab or decorative object attached, on to which keys may be threaded in order to keep them together.

noun keychain [punctuated with the elements solid]: mainly North American a key ring: the bottle opener is small enough to fit on a keychain.

(I use both compounds, choosing one or the other for no reason that I can discern.)

The other available punctuation  is hyphenation (key-ring, key-chain), which seems to be rare. Instances of keyring and key chain, however, are easily found, and I discover that my own choices go both ways, even in writing up this posting. (And, for these compounds, the difference seems to be a matter of no consequence.)

Other penguin pedants. Tons of them. People find penguins not only intriguing — flightless birds surviving in hostile climates and terrain — but, well, cute. So we get things like this:

(#2) Penguin keyring — hard enamel pendant with metal detail — from Chameleon and Co.

And this Swatom item, marketed on amazon.com as a “penguin keychain and bottle opener”:

(#3) In black anodized aluminum

Little gifts from Anna. See my 4/25/20 posting “The rainbow penguin of regard”, about a hand-drawn rainbow penguin she sent me as a gift. And in e-mail, we exchanged some recollections of the 1991 Linguistic Institute at UC Santa Cruz, where she sat in on a huge lecture course I gave.

Alas, all material from that summer seems have vanished in my various moves, computer re-toolings, and merciless contractions of files and library to fit a small condo. Then, having apparently lost the audience for my work, I went through a series of shifts to new topics.

Meanwhile, I fell apart physically. Took my last plane trip in 2006, taught my last Stanford course in 2010. Retreated physically into a small world around my house and a few friends. Focused all my work on posting for this blog, three or more essays a day for a while, then down to aiming for just one (to show I’m: Not Dead Yet!), in a form of my own devising; as I said in “The rainbow penguin of regard”,

I write extremely quirky, relentlessly analytic, highly personal, and often outrageously sexually open material for a tiny coterie of readers.

One of whom is Anna, who every so often thanks me for it.

  Poetry Hour: neon purple penguin key ring! My exclamation of thanks to Anna yesterday.

Which, I realized with a jolt of pleasure, was a line of trochaic tetrameter, with a nice bit of alliteration in the middle: purple penguin, merely descriptive of #1. The line, divided into its four feet:

néon | púrple | pénguin | kéy ring

I added that the line was reminiscent, to me, of

flýing | púrple | péople | éater

(though that was probably before her time).

Anna admitted that she had no idea of what flying purple people eater means. (Well, if I calculate the years correctly, the song was a thing before she was born.) Ah, the archives to the rescue!

From my 8/11/18 posting “P-alliterative and tetrametric lines”:

purple rainbow puppy pen reminded me of a purple novelty song from my high-school years, about a one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people eater. Sheb Wooley’s 1958 song “The Purple People Eater” tells how the strange creature descends to Earth because it wants to be in a rocknroll band.

(The posting also has a Zippy strip, the Magic Flute, Madonna, Prince, and Pikotaro.)

Not done yet! In all that searching, I stumbled into the world of purple penguins, which turns out to be pretty well populated, I’m not sure why. But in the midst of all that flightless purple cuteness, there’s some that turns on the associations of penguins with cold and snow. I give you: Purple Penguin frozen yogurt (in North Carolina); and Purple Penguin snowcones (in Nevada):

— Purple Penguin Frozen Yogurt shops, a premium frozen yogurt chain in various locations throughout NC, with the logo:

(#4)

— Purple Penguin snowcone stands and shops in Henderson NV (the original) and Las Vegas, with the logo:

(#5)

Meanwhile, my neon purple penguin keychain is hanging from a magnetic peg on the side of my refrigerator, where it holds an extra housekey for visitors.

[Proviso: this posting is about, among other things, ritual insult — a kind of verbal play-fighting — but it doesn’t pretend to be an essay on the very large number of forms and functions of ritual insults (and, more generally, play-fighting), even in the modern U.S., much less in different  sociocultural contexts around the world and throughout history.]

Today, example 2 in a series of comics on masculinity for boys, a One Big Happy from the past (6/27/09):

(#1) Ruthie heaps formulaic insults on her brother Joe (including the kid insults stupid head, monkey face, and nachos for brains — poopy head, a stand-in for the stronger shit for brains, would be the classic kid insult) until she hits on something he really cares about

Background from yesterday’s posting “Masculinity comics 1”:

I’ve been accumulating comic strips having to do with boys and masculinity, in particular about what they’ve picked up about normatively masculine behavior and attitudes by the age of 8 or so: the age of the character Joe in the comic strip One Big Happy, who’s the older brother of Ruthie, age 6, who’s the central character of the strip. At the moment I have 5 strips (4 OBHs, plus a Zippy), overing a wide range of themes in normative masculinity for boys. To judge from the comics (and my recollections of boyhood), an 8-year-old has an extensive and pretty fine-grained command of the cultural norms of masculinity within his social group.

Then example 1, the OBH of 4/16/21, on attitudes towards transvestism / cross-dressing, plus introductory material on the Boy Code (and normative masculinity more generally), from my 4/12/16 posting “On the brocabulary watch: brocialist”.

Kids slinging insults. I don’t know the literature on this — and I’m in no position to do a search for it — but anecdotally it seems clear that young children in our culture learn fairly early to sling sincere insults and also to lie; I don’t know when they put the two together to hurl false accusations. Separately, they pick up certain kinds of physical play aggression, especially chase games; and, at least among boys, wrestling with one another. All this eventually knits together to allow verbal play aggression, which can be a very tricky business, easily sliding from playfulness (itself serving several possible functions) into an attack masquerading as playfulness and on to frank genuine aggression, aimed at domination, humiliation, the infliction of pain, and the like.

Kids can practice verbal play aggression, without veering into genuine hurt, if they have available some verbal formulas that are fully conventionalized as playful only: this is the beauty of expressions like poopy-head.

[Lexical note: poopy-head seems not to be in any of the serious slang dictionaries; but in Urban Dictionary, this entry:

A poopy head is something little kids call each other when they’re angry. It means they have shit for brains, therefore they are idiots. Bobby, you poopy head, u spelled CAT wrong! (by Hannah Banana 4/1/04)]

Formulaic ritual insults like poopy-head can be used without risk for the full range of functions of ritual insults: but in

— expressing affection, closeness (we’re such good friends that I can call you poopy-head and you can call me stinky-feet);

— projecting a critique of power (from the less powerful against the more powerful: younger against older, girl against boy, protected against protector, weaker against stronger; in these situations, the more powerful will often choose not to respond in kind but to deflect the critique, for example, by a display of indifference, as in #1);

— or, in accordance with the Boy Code, providing a toughening-up ordeal, in which a boy learns (in a controlled situation) to “take it like a man” and “give as good as he gets”, in preparation for a lifetime of genuinely aggressive competition with other males

Toughening-up will move boys in a male band from the formulaic to powerful (but situationally tricky) insults like bastard, fuckface, dumbass, little-dick, and even faggot — insults that are are intended to provoke the target to respond in kind (or to exhibit heroic contemptuous endurance — nothing can rattle me, you fucks), just as physical aggression is intended to provoke what amount to controlled fights, in which the winner demonstrates his power and the loser his valor, and the two become the best of friends thereafter.

Apparent actual aggression. In our culture, people engage in apparently aggressive teasing, “kidding”, “playing a joke on” others, pranking them, etc. which can be intended as playful, covertly aggressive, or frankly attacking. They also use verbal insults in all these ways. There are even lines of insult greeting cards — quite a few of them — whose actual use is very unclear to me.

For example, a few card sentiments available on Redbubble:

I noticed you’re not yourself today. I really like it.

You’re a piece of shit!

[accompanying a Christmas mistletoe illustration] Stick it up your arse.

Life is short and so is your penis. [I am a little-dicked old man nearing the end of his life, so if you value our friendship, don’t send me this one.]

And this wonderful POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):

(#2)

Classic ritual insults. The literature on ritual insults is extremely heavily focused on one set of practices and its variants. From Wikipedia:

The Dozens is a game of spoken words between two contestants, common in black communities of the United States, where participants insult each other until one gives up. It is customary for the Dozens to be played in front of an audience of bystanders, who encourage the participants to reply with increasingly egregious insults in order to heighten the tension and, consequently, make the contest more interesting to watch.

Playing the Dozens is also known [under a great variety of names] … while the insults themselves are known as “snaps”.

Comments in the game focus on the opposite player’s intelligence, appearance, competency, social status, and financial situation. Disparaging remarks about the other player’s family members are common, especially about mothers (“yo’ mama…”).

… According to sociologist Harry Lefever and journalist John Leland, the game is almost exclusive to African Americans; other ethnic groups often fail to understand how to play the game and can take remarks in the Dozens seriously. Its popularity is higher among low-income, urban communities but also found in middle class and rural settings. Both men and women participate, but the game is more commonly played among men.

Note that this is a public contestation, with an audience — quite unlike the situation in #1 and most everyday uses of ritual insults in our culture.

Labov’s  classic discussion of the Dozens maintained that it was generally easy to distinguish ritual insults from real ones, but others have disputed this. Tyrone Rivers, in Ritual Insults among Middle School Students: Causing Harm or Passing Time? (M.Sci. in Educational Psychology thesis, UIUC, 2012), studying “roasting” (the Dozens) among 6th and 7th grade African American males in a Midwestern school, concluded (p. 2) that:

The New Yorker daily cartoon for 10/11 by Navied Mahdavian and Asher Perlman commits an unusually long POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):

“We both have work in the morning.”

The ingredients: the idiomatic phrase call it an early night (also make an early night of it) ‘go home early’; and the zombie movie title Night of the Living Dead. The zombies are making an early night of it.

(See my 11/6/18 posting “Halloween detritus” on Night of the Living Dead and other pop-culture zombie works.)

What makes the cartoon wonderfully absurd is the premise that zombies have somehow become so normalized in the world of the cartoon, their hunger for human flesh or brains so controlled, that they both go to cocktail parties and hold down office jobs.

It’s that time of the year again, you can smell it in the air: Pumpkin Spice Season. For some, a keenly arousing moment, as in this e-card (#1 in my 10/26/17 posting “Three more pumpkin-spicy bits”):

(#1) A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau): verb pumpkin spice up = noun pumpkin spice + verb spice up  ‘make more interesting or exciting’

From my 10/23/17 posting “The pumpkin spice cartoon meme”:

From my 10/20/17 posting “A processed flavor”, this Kaamran Hafeez cartoon:

(#2) pumpkin spice ‘top of the line, top-grade, high-end’

The Hafeez is at the end of a series of mocking Pumpkin Spice cartoon memes, ranging from the most concrete (on pumpkin spice lattes, especially as a sign of the fall), through pumpkin spice more generally as a flavor (especially in foods that wouldn’t normally have such a flavor), and then just a scent (especially in non-food products), to the fully abstract sense in [the Hafeez].

… in recent days, covering a wide territory: in chronological order,

—  from 10/31, a Mother Goose and Grimm Psychiatrist cartoon with a Halloween theme and some puns

— from the 11/1 New Yorker, a Desert Crawl cartoon by David Sipress

— from 11/3, a Zippy strip with Zippylicious repetition (onomatomania)

— from 11/9, a Rhymes With Orange with a notable POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau)

MGG for Halloween. The cartoon:

(#1) The patient is a disarticulated skeleton — the skeleton for Halloween, a day of the dead; disarticulated to motivate the puns on therapy-talk: separation issues, pull yourself together

[Side note: the fact that the therapist is a Black is quite striking. The therapists in Psychiatrist cartoons sometimes happen to be women, but I can’t recall a cartoon in which the therapist belonged to a recognizable minority racial or ethnic group; I can imagine situations in which membership in such a group would be relevant to the joke in the cartoon, but I can’t see that in #1. My guess is that Mike Peters has just decided to show a Black therapist as a  way of broadening his readers’ perceptions of what’s possible in our society. (The actual number of Black psychiatrists is quite small; the American Psychiatric Association is reported to estimate the figure as 2% of all psychiatrists.)]

Then on separation issues. From NOAD, among the senses of the noun issues:

… personal problems or difficulties: a nice guy with a great sense of humor and not too many issues.

The separation in question is being apart from your loved ones. Having separation issues means you’re troubled by being apart from your loved ones (especially a treasured single person). That’s the pop-therapy term; the technical term for the clinical condition is separation anxiety. From the Healthline site on separation anxiety in adults (it’s most common in children):

People with adult separation anxiety disorder experience high levels of anxiety, and sometimes even panic attacks, when loved ones are out of reach.

In any case, the expression separation issues has separation ‘being apart’ used in a specialized medical context. Meanwhile, #1 depicts the separated bones of a skeleton. So, a little pun.

And then on pull yourself together. That which has come apart might then be pulled together. Literally for the bones of the skeleton in #1. Or figuratively for the emotional state of the skeletal patient, in the idiom the therapist uses. From NOAD:

phrase pull oneself together: recover control of one’s emotions: you’ve got to pull yourself together and find a job.

So, another pun.

The Desert Crawl cartoon meme. From my 5/1/16 posting “Between the desert and the couch”: a Bizarro combining Psychiatrist with another desert cartoon meme, involving a man (or, more generally, people) crawling, parched and hallucinatory, across a seemingly endless desert — call it Desert Crawl:

(#2) Either about the absurdity of a therapist sitting in the middle of a desert, or about a hallucination on the part of the desert crawler; in either case, a meta-cartoon about cartoon memes

And now, in the 11/1 New Yorker, a David Sipress Desert Crawler absurdity, with a crawler for modern term, using his cellphone to order up two bottles of water for him and his companion on the desert:

(#3) I know, I know, even if the phone works out there, how’s the delivery company going to get the order to them? And if the phone does work out there, why doesn’t he just call for rescue?

The answer to the second question is, of course, that he’s a character in a Desert Crawl cartoon, so his contract obliges him to crawl on, without rescue. What he does in the meantime is his own business.

Zippylicious repetition. The onomatomania cartoon from 11/3:

(#4) Say it, again and again: Hydro-quench body glow!

The product. If this is an actual product, I can find no evidence of it. But the name combines elements from the names of several different moisturizing preparations:

(#7) Elizabeth Arden HydraGel

(#6) GlamGlow Waterburst hydrated moisturizer

(#7) Neutrogena Hydro Boost with advanced hydrator

(#8) Bliss Drench & Quench hydrator

Then there’s Zippy’s well-documented inclination to seize on some phrase and savor it by chanting it over and over again. See my 7/18/21 posting “Between the glutes”, with an appendix on Zippylicious repetition, aka found mantras, onomatomania, phrase repetition disorder, repetitive phrase disorder.

Psychedelicate POP. In the Rhymes 11/9 strip:

(#9) A lovely POP, psychedelic + delicate cycle (with the overlap underlined)

Note the clothing, hair styles, tie-dye shirt, and peace symbol locating the strip in the hippy-psychedelic 60s of lore. And then the machines at the laundromat; my home washer and dryer both have delicate cycles (which I happen to be using right now).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background: the intermammary cleft. From Wikipedia:

(#2) The intermammary cleft on a man (Wikipedia photo), an inconspicuous anatomical feature observable on my (very) many images of shirtless men on this blog

The intermammary cleft or intermammary sulcus or sulcus intermammarius is a surface feature of males and females that marks the division of the two breasts with the sternum (breastbone) in the middle. [I’d been thinking of it as the pectoral cleft]

Background: Johnny Torque, the name. Both parts excellent in a porn name.

On his first name, from my 6/8/15 posting “Guys in heat”:

The rest [of the porn names] are not remarkable, except of course for the aggressive Johnny Thrust. The name Johnny, in fact, seems to attract inventive last names: my files from previous postings have only one colorless Johnny, Johnny Parker, but otherwise it’s:

Johnny Rapid, Johnny Venture, Johnny Torque, Johnny Hazzard

So if you’re gay and in heat, look for Johnny.

And for that last name, from NOAD:

noun torque ‘a twisting force that tends to cause rotation’ (as in the act of screwing)

Background: Johnny Torque, the man. From Porn Base Central (“the free encyclopedia of gay porn”) on Johnny Torque:

real name Adam Vigil, born 10/25/88 in Oswego NY

started his porn career in 2009 and retired in 2016

body stats: 5ʹ9ʺ, 150 lbs, 7.1ʺ cut cock, lean swimmer’s body

sexwork stats: g4p, top, performed both safe and raw; also performed in straight porn

His actual, rather than fantasy, cock can be viewed in a p.r. shot for Next Door Studios on my XBlog, in which he’s displaying his body in a full frontal standing shot. Cropped version here:

(#3) He has a nice dick for a pornstar, but if folded up against his belly, it wouldn’t reach his navel, much less come close to his chest

Then Torque in action, fucking Bobby Hart in a scene from the Hot House flick Jockhole (2013), set in a boxing gym (again, cropped here):

(#4) Notable for the matched open-mouthed expressions — ferocity on the part of the fucker, ecstasy on the part of the fuckhole

Connor Kline. Coming across an image from Jockhole, with its entertaining portmanteau name (combining  jock and fuckhole, suggesting — correctly — that the flick is about jocks who like to be fucked) led me to the cover of the DVD, which shows versatile bottom hunk Connor Kline displaying his asshole. The full image is on AZBlogX; in this WordPress blog, I can’t show cocks, balls, or assholes, but here’s as close as I can get:

(#5) Kline is a big hunky guy, also an enthusiastic bottom and (as you will note from the tribute to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” tattooed on his broad shoulders) celebratorily queer; a huge contrast (on several dimensions) to g4p top Torque, with his smaller, leaner swimmer’s body

Born this/that way. Yet another turn on this random walk that started with Torque’s apparent macrophallicity. Kline’s tattoo is in fact a Lady Gaga logo, the logo for her song “Born This Way”. From Wikipedia:

(#6) Poster for the song, with the logo

“Born This Way” is a song by American singer Lady Gaga, and the lead single from her second studio album of the same name [released in 2011]. Written by Gaga and Jeppe Laursen, who produced it along with Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow, the track was developed while Gaga was on the road with The Monster Ball Tour. Inspired by 1990s music which empowered women and the gay community, Gaga explained that “Born This Way” was her freedom song.

So Kline’s tattoo is a tribute to Lady Gaga, and also his personal affirmation that he was born this way — by nature gay (in desire, in sexual practices, in association with sexual communities, as a matter of public identity), by nature a bottom by preference. It might also be a boast that nature gave him that big, attractive body. The boast that I think is the wry intention of this t-shirt (from JT’s Original T’s):

(#7) Possibly: don’t hate me because I’m gorgeous; it’s just the way nature made me

That interpretation is suggested by the fact that the shirt itself is pretty much as un-fabulous as you can get, not projecting anything gay or even playful (this color is asphalt; it also comes in dark heather and heather blue, neither of them significantly more showy than asphalt). It contrasts with dozens and dozens of gaudy defiant t-shirts with pride rainbow themes, like this simple number from TeePublic:

(#8) Queer by nature, fabulous by design

Gaga’s anthem begins:

“There’s nothing wrong with loving who you are”
She said, “‘Cause he made you perfect, babe”
“So hold your head up girl and you’ll go far,
Listen to me when I say”

I’m beautiful in my way
‘Cause God makes no mistakes
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way

First remarks on the lexicon. The sense of born this/that way is that of sense b of congenital. From NOAD:

adj. congenital: [a] (of a disease or physical abnormality) present from birth: a congenital malformation of the heart. [b] (of a person) having a particular trait from birth or by firmly established habit: a congenital liar.

The gloss ‘having a trait from birth’ in b is far too strong, even for some physical traits. We want to say that Connor Kline’s large-boned frame is congenital, but only manifested itself as a direction of devopment (similarly for my small-boned frame), and we want to say something similar about same-sex and other-sex desire, which aren’t literally present at birth but manifest themselves during development, where they are experienced as discoveries (counterposed to cultural expectations or aligned with and supported by them, of course, but still as discoveries).

The same-sex scenario here is the classic Born Gay story, which fits a great many people, though it turns out that there are other same-sex scenarios and other experiences of same-sex sexual associations, lots of them, so that the Born This Way slogan doesn’t resonate with some people the way it does with, say, me. But this is a topic for a separate posting.

Then there are the attempts to use being Born This Way as some kind of reasoned defense of homosexuality. Perhaps God makes no mistakes (in my snarky unbelieving fashion, I ask, How could you possibly know this?), but in individual cases nature goes awry in many ways, large and small. I don’t think that it’s because I was born that way, I can’t help it, that makes it fine for me to get off on fantasies of sucking cock and taking it up the ass (or, in days long gone, for me to perform these acts enthusiastically). I think all those acts are fine for me because there’s nothing wrong with them, period. Again a topic for a separate posting, but something has to be said here.

Lady Gaga sings her anthem in defiant reaction to frameworks of theorizing, ideology, and belief that take homosexual desires and practices to be symptoms of mental disease (a derangement of “natural” sexuality) or sin (a spiritual affliction, defying God and his word, possibly in obedience to Satan) — frameworks I believe to be not only indefensible but also profoundly wicked. Because of these ideologies, people in modern advanced nations went to prison for homosexual acts until very recently. People were driven from their families, had their lives ruined, were hounded to suicide. Plenty of them still live in the closet to some degree or another, for good reason.

Born This Way is an earnest attempt to counter homohatred based on Nature and God with an appeal to, yes, Nature and God. An appeal I think is misconceived, so I won’t be buying any of those t-shirts. This despite the fact that I was once the beneficiary of BTW, advanced on my behalf (by my stepmother Ruth’s daughter, who was battling the teachings of Ruth’s church that homosexuals were both sick and sinful). I do note that BTW, intended to be a vehicle for respect and acceptance, can easily be wielded instead for contempt and rejection — consider this long-ago event from the gay baths (reported on on this blog some time ago):

Men (married to women) arrive at the baths to be serviced by gay men before trooping on to the Super Bowl. A denizen of the baths accordingly sucks off one of these men, who says to the cocksucker contemptuously: “I know you can’t help it, you were born that way, but I’m no fag.” (Yes, I was that cocksucker.)

More on all of this in another posting. We’ve gotten from Johnny Torque’s apparent macrophallicity, through several twists and turns, to homophobic contempt at the gay baths, and that should be enough for today.

Wayno/Piraro Bizarro cartoons for the 21st (Winter Solstice), 23rd (Festivus, for the airing of grievances), and 25th (Christmas Day). The first two are Christmas-related, but today’s is not (at least in any way I can see), so in a spirit of holiday orneriness, I’ll start with that one.

12/25: the Fritz Carlton:

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

Fritz Carlton: an erratic portmanteau of on the fritz ‘not functioning’ and Ritz-Carlton the luxury hotel chain. (Note: the desk clerk is a supercilious Frenchman, an imagined present-day César Ritz.)

About the Ritz. From the OED3 (June 2010) on the noun Ritz:

The Hôtel Ritz in Paris was the first of these hotels and opened in 1898; the Ritz Hotel in London opened in 1906. The name was adopted in 1927 by the Ritz-Carlton company, which opened several hotels in the United States, the first in Boston (also in 1927). [AZ: now 108 luxury hotels and resorts in 30 countries; locally, in San Francisco and Half Moon Bay]

… Wayno’s portmanteauing title for yesterday’s (12/27) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:

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

Three things: one, plays on the Shaw of George Bernard Shaw (plenty of room for silliness here); two, on the wonders of (cole) slaw; and three, a note on the exclamation by George (which of course has nothing to do with GBS, but also nothing to with kings of Great Britain, since George I (from Hanover) didn’t ascent to the throne until 1714, while exclamations calling on a George go back at least to 1616).

The world of George Bernard X. There are a few useful or decorative objects in there:

(tiger – tiger – tiger, rather than rabbit- rabbit – rabbit) anticipating by a bit the new month tomorrow (February, holding the promise that — in the Northern Hemisphere — winter will in fact come to an end) and also the (lunar) new year, the Year of the Tiger

Meanwhile, this morning’s e-mail brings me a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with the excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) portmanteau truck = portmanteau + tow truck, the truck in question being a brunch (breakfast + lunch) truck where you can get Tofurkey (tofu + turkey) with Dijonnaise (Dijon + mayonnaise) dressing and a cronut (croissant + doughnut), which you can eat with a spork (spoon + fork).

At the same time, a Daily Jocks ad that’s at once charming and raunchy, featuring a model wearing a garment I would call a moosinglet, a moose singlet, that is, a wrestling singlet in which the model is displaying a moose-knuckle, a penis (especially an erect one) that is visible though the wearer’s clothing.

And then portmanteau truck will lead us to portmanteau jam as a name for a POP chain.

The Bizarro cartoon. A feast of portmanteauing, maybe enough to give you portmanptomaine poisoning:

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

The 2/7 Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip offers the complex portmanteau Metalico Cat = Metallico + Calico Cat (plus a cute title from Wayno: “The Shredder”):

(#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 portmanteau. In pronunciation, the portmanteau is a bit complex, involving the intrusion of the first /k/ from /kǽlɪkò kǽt/ CALICO CAT into the middle of /mǝtǽlɪkò/ METALLICO, replacing the /t/ there: your standard portmanteau is of the form XYZ = XY + YZ, which would be fine for a portmanteau /mǝtǽlɪkò kǽt/ METALICO CAT, if the name of the cat variety were TALICO CAT; or for a portmanteau /mǝkǽlɪkò kǽt/  MECALICO CAT, if the name of the rock band were MECALLICO. Things are even more complex in spelling, since METALLICO has two Ls in the middle, while CALICO CAT has only one, so no matter which spelling for /mǝtǽlɪkò kǽt/ you chose — METALLICO CAT or METALICO CAT — it fails to be be faithful to the spelling of one of the ingredients of the portmanteau.

(This isn’t a quibble with the Bizarro portmanteau. Not every portmanteau is perfect, nor should it be expected to be.)

The hybrid. A satisfying cartoon portmanteau pairs a (linguistic) portmanteau with a visual hybrid, an image that represents a combination of things from two different worlds, corresponding to the linguistic expressions in the portmanteau. The central figure in #1 is, at once, a singer in the rock band Metallica and a calico cat, linking the world of heavy metal guitarists with the world of domestic pets. Consequently, that central figure is also a poor depiction of a Metallica member — where is the luxuriant long hair, the manly facial features, the show of skin on arms and chest, the hands with five (rather than four) fingers? and where do the fur, the pointed ears, the tail, and so on come from? — and a poor depiction of a domestic cat — what cat stands on its hind feet to play a guitar, wears leather vests, studded bands, jeans, and boots, and so on?

The point here is that while the figure in #1 is in some sense both a rock guitarist and a domestic cat, the hybrid is a kind of guitarist-cat pastiche and as such is decidedly imperfect, unsatisfactory, as an instance of either one.

A translation of a scene (of snack-food addiction, in the universe of tv commercials) to a parallel metaphorical world (of rampaging Godzillas, in the universe of monster movies).

… The cartoon is based on a familiar scene, two friends having some snacks from a bowl (think: potato chips or Doritos), one noting that they just can’t stop eating the snacks. This scene is realized in the cartoon as two cartoon-memic Japanese movie monsters devouring terrified people, one noting that they just can’t stop eating the people. The cartoon translates the first into the second by identifying elements of the two worlds — setting, participants, activities, and so on. The speaker on the right is just someone chomping on snacks with a friend, but is also Godzilla #2, in the midst of a shared frenzy of people-eating.

All this is on a small scale in [the Bliss cartoon]. Larger-scale translations are familiar from stagings of plays and operas in which the elements of an original are translated into other social settings, times, and places.

Today’s Piccolo/Price Rhymes With Orange, with a perfect XYZ (= XY + YZ) portmanteau:

(#1)
marzipandemic
= /ˈmartsəˌpæn/ marzipan + /ˌpænˈdɛmɪk/ pandemic

Apparently, a marzipan pandemic in a gingerbread world. The song for the occasion begins:

Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With gingerbread trees and a marzipan surprise

On the sugary almond meal confection marzipan, see my 11/19/17 posting “Three news bulletin for penguins”. in which the first bulletin is about marzipan penguins from the Niedegger shop in Lübeck, Germany (with information on marzipan).

(#2) A display of gorgeous marzipan food at the Niedegger Cafe

And then the gingerbread world. An illustration from the Betty Crocker Kitchens site, on 12/4/19, “How to Make a Gingerbread House”:

(#3)

For the 15th of March, Tim Evanson created this image (reproduced here with his permission):

(#1) Tim used a picture from a “Kittendales” calendar; a free clipart calendar page of March; and pictures of Tide products from the Target web site

Kittendales. Hot Awww, “men and the kitties they love”: beefcake — a very wide range of types of men, all displaying their attractive bodies — plus adorable kittens. And, of course, in a good cause, the proceeds going to the Hull Seaside Animal Rescue in Hull MA, a no-kill cat shelter serving the South Shore and Boston. (No actual connection to the Chippendales, dancers whose function here is to supply the beefcake reference to the portmanteau kitten + Chippendales = Kittendales. The models here do not in fact dance, but merely stand and pose, and that’s good enough for me, even if it fails to supply sweat.)

Tim’s Facebook version is just a thumbnail. Here’s the hunkitten in close-up, from the cover of the 2021 calendar:

(#2) You’re such a lovely audience / We’d like to take you home with us / We’d love to take you home

One more example, from a great many available on the net: this guy from the 2015 calendar:

(#3) I chose him for his face, believe it or not; I’m into faces

The trek East. Today is also traditionally Higashi (Removal) Day in my household, the day when (many years ago) my man Jacques and I would set off for our annual traversal of the interstates from California to Ohio (note Japanese higashi ‘east’). Day 1 aimed for Barstow, the western end of I-40; the route then followed I-40 east to Oklahoma City, I-44 northeast to St. Louis MO, and I-80 east to Columbus OH. Across the high desert, over the Rockies to the Great Plains, then across the interior lowlands from the Mississippi River to just short of the Appalachians.

Sometimes we would stay the first night in Barstow itself (a transportation center, and a town of ca. 25,000), but more often we’d press on to Needles CA, on the Colorado River at the Arizona border (just a bit south of Nevada). Needles is a tiny desert town (population ca. 5,000), but it is adjacent to the Lake Havasu recreation area — which we never got to appreciate, because we always pushed on to get to the Day 2 destination, Flagstaff AZ.

Day 1 was an ordeal of going over mountains. Consider this topographic map of California and Nevada, with cities conveniently labeled:

(#4) From the San Francisco Bay area (the label for San Francisco has been cut off the map, but you can clearly see Santa Clara and San Jose) to Needles (just under the southern tip of Nevada)

The route goes over a section of the Southern Coast Ranges (the Diablo Range on the map) down into the Central Valley, down I-5, over to Bakersfield, and then dramatically up over the Sierra Nevada Range at Tehachapi Pass (Tehachapi is marked on the map) and down onto the high desert to Barstow (also marked on the map), where you could take I-15 to Las Vegas or travel with Jacques and me to Needles (dipping down some to the Colorado, then up again on the other side to Kingman AZ).

In the early years, we divided the 5,000+ miles of the trip (east in mid-March, west in mid-December, every year) into roughly 500-mile segments, taking 5 days for the trip, so as to allow time to exercise and rest along the way, because I needed to arrive at the end ready to teach at the university there. This yielded overnight stays at some not very pleasant spots. Eventually we discovered places we really liked to stop at — Flagstaff AZ; Albuquerque NM; Oklahoma City (where there was a pleasant, and unexpectedly gay-friendly, area near the airport); the western suburbs of St. Louis — and adjusted our 5-day driving schedule to achieve that. We also set off very early, in the dark before sunrise, and then stopped for a late breakfast, at decent places we ferreted out over the years. Then a lunch at another such place.

In time the trips became familiar adventures. Also like little vacations: some stunning scenery (though really appreciable only by the guy who wasn’t driving at the time); a lot of time just to enjoy one another’s company (without the constant pulls of my professional life); small touristic pleasures, like county historical museums; and even an unexpected bonus: the opportunity, every night, to defiantly enjoy various forms of sodomy in states where it was then quite seriously illegal.

Being Other. At either end of these trips, in Ohio and California, we lived in supportive networks of our families; of linguists; of shapenote singers; and of motss-folk (with rich communities in both places). In between, on the road, we were rootless strangers, exposed, identifiable as queer to anyone who knew how to look: neither of us read superficially as gay, but everybody could see that we were Together, so — first guess — brothers or buddies, but — whoa! — brothers and buddies don’t look at each other like that. Like this:

(#5) Our 1996 wedding-equivalent photo

Jacques ordinarily left it to me to do the gay displaying (with his support and encouragement), but I toned that down on the road (no QUEER QUEER QUEER t-shirts). Still, we both felt constantly endangered, threatened, at a low level.

Now, I’d become accustomed to this ambient whiff of danger from early childhood, since I was an outlier child in so many ways and perceived as Other by so many of the people around me; but Jacques grew up mostly fitting easily and amiably into his social world, only rarely experiencing Otherness (and that happens to everyone on occasion). Now, especially in backcountry Texas and Oklahoma, he smelled the threat. And he just hated that.

Here you need to know that Jacques had keen senses of moral responsibility and moral outrage. These qualities of character were a big part of why I fell in love with him (and, he told me, similar qualities that he saw and admired in me were a big part of why he fell in love with me); yes, I know, the sexual attraction was inflammatory — I used to think that I could smell the sexiness on him, even from a distance — but sexual attraction is scarcely enough to support embarking on a life together, which is what we did.

So there was Jacques, not just hating this unaccustomed feeling of being threatened, but outraged by it. It was wrong, and he was going to fight it. In a small way, but fiercely.

It became a point with him that we insist, when we checked into a motel, on making it clear that we needed one bed big enough for two people (two guys, they always give you two beds); they could give us two amply sized beds if that was their custom, but we were using only one, and it had to be big enough for two grown men. (You can always put your suitcases on the other one, and we did.) The point being that we should made it clear that we were lovers. Not cower from the threat.

And then we were obliged to have sex in that bed. Not explosive and noisy — that would have been annoying to the neighbors — but easy and affectionate. And then we fell into sleep in each other’s arms. (Up at 5 to start the next day.)

We understood that they might call the cops and have us dragged off to jail, but supposed they’d realize that that would be bad for business. Nevertheless, we were committed to this course of action and to making a hell of a stink if we got into trouble. No shame, no hiding, that was the ticket. (A recurrent topic in our conversations: Ordinary People Don’t Have to Think About Things Like This. And then you shrug.)

I mostly took the executive role in our relationship, making final decisions about arrangements and the like (with Jacques in the advisory role), but in this case he just took the helm and I followed his lead. (In a real relationship, you pass the roles back and forth and negotiate a lot, of course.) Surprising, but quite admirable, ferocity; that was my guy.

As I said, eventually we found a good spot in Oklahoma City. And tried not to think too much about the rest.

pour le premier mai. A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “My allergic ass”, which was (mostly) about pronominal ass — possessive pronoun + ass, used of a person, to refer not to their buttocks but to that person: his ass ‘he, him’, your ass ‘you’, my ass ‘I, me’.

[Ambiguity may ensue: my ass is warm can mean either ‘my buttocks are warm’ or ‘I am warm’ (you have to figure out from context which was intended); while my ass is heart-shaped is probably about my buttocks (well, I might be Candy Man, shaped like a candy heart), and my ass is allergic is probably about me (though I might conceivably have buttocks afflicted by contact dermatitis).]

Now: through Facebook discussions, two different threads have emerged from that posting: one about material in a long citation in the 2006 Beavers and Koontz-Garboden paper on pronominal ass; the other about the source of the example — my allergic ass — that provoked my posting.

The citation in the Usenet newsgroup alt.music, from B&K-G 2006. Rife with pronominal ass, including two 1sg examples (all the 1sg pronominals are bold-faced):

their asses sure know how to fuckin’ jam. kick ass guitar, whaling keys, and fuckin’ screetching ass voices! dig it. fuckin’ a. after the fuckin’ jam was over my ass handed the old chick her ten fuckin’ bucks…. his ass claimed that his old lady gave him the fuckin’ bucks to fuckin’ buy an ice cream sandwich…. i told his ass i needed the fuckin’ money in order to fuckin’ buy some beer. shit. my ass ain’t ready to rip off texaco quite yet. [AZ: note the alternation between 1sg my ass and 1sg I; I’m not quite sure what to make of it]

Two things. screetching ass and whaling keys.

screetching ass. I’m assuming this is a spelling of screeching-ass ‘screeching like hell, screeching very loudly’ = screeching, giving ‘a harsh, piercing cry’ (NOAD) + the intensifier –ass. The canonical example of the intensifier is big-ass ‘really big, huge’; and then we have bad-ass ‘really bad’ (for several senses of bad), crazy-ass ‘crazy as a coot’, cool-ass ‘cool as hell’, weird-ass ‘totally weird’, etc.

Intensifying –ass is historically related to, but now distinct from, compounds of the form Adj + ass ‘Adj-assed, having Adj buttocks’, like huge-ass (bathers), cute-ass (twink), pimply-ass (kid), smooth-ass (boys), hot-ass (queer). (In a previous life, I had some small fame as a cute-ass, in fact hot-ass, in fact fuckable-ass, queer. Fame is fleeting, art endures.)

Yes, rooting around in English vernacular grammar will get you a lot of ass. Three different kinds in just this little subsection of the posting: pronominal ass; intensifier –ass; and ass as head in bahuvrihi, aka possessive, compounds like hot-ass (compare: graybeard, flatfoot, etc.; bare-faced, red-headed, etc.).

whaling keys. From Rod Williams on Facebook yesterday (4/30):

I’m thinking whose should be wailing keys, Cap’n Ahab?!

My response began (as usual, I’ve edited and improved it):

John and Andrew had to take the spellings they got, and this one is interesting, because it seems to indicate that the writer doesn’t distinguish (at least partially) voiceless [hw] (mostly spelled WH) from fully voiced [w] (mostly spelled W) (as most younger American speakers do not) — so you end up with an image of harpoons and seaspray (whaling) instead of dolorous howling (wailing).

For a very large portion of American speakers — call them WH-voicers — The distinction in pronunciation is neutralized to [w], across the board, but spelling practices are complex.

WH-voicers have to learn, essentially by brute memorization, which spellings go with which meanings. If they just followed their instincts, they’d spell everything with a W, since [w] is the pronunciation they have, and indeed this the most common pattern of spelling error. WACK for WHACK, WIFF for WHIFF, WIZZ for WHIZZ.

However, for some speakers the WH spellings seem to have picked up connotations of toniness, correctness, fanciness, or elevated diction, so we see some spelling errors in the other direction, but usually contrived so as to produce an actual orthographic word of English, as in the fairly common error WHOA IS ME for WOE IS ME. And, possibly, WHALING for WAILING.

In any case, having put forward neutralization of phonemic contrast — a technical term boiling down what I said above about pronunciation differences and meaning differences — as the source of Alt.Music Guy’s misspelling, I then began having alternative thoughts.

Phonemic neutralization is in fact a common source of misspelling, as in GEORGE BERNARD SHAH for GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, an error I’m particularly fond of. The question is whether that’s what’s going on with Alt.Music Guy’s WHALING. That is, the question is what was going on in Alt.Music Guy’s head when he typed in whaling. And for that, there’s no easy answer. It’s a question of plausibility in context, and we have only the tinest bit of the context (we don’t, for example, know anything about Alt.Music Guy or who he thinks he’s writing to, or why). So it’s all very suppositional.

So, some further phenomena. There are speakers who possibly have the distinction, but also use [hw] pronunciations for emphasis, to convey surprise, disbelief, extravagance, and so on. I’m on firm ground here because I am such a speaker.

A [hw]indows system? You fucking bought a [hw]indows system?

(My memory for the exact utterance is uncertain, but I recall having used [hw] and then being startled that I had, so I wrote it down on a slip of paper. Which I lost — I don’t really have a filing system, I’m an office pig — but the act of writing it down kept it in my memory.) After that, I began noticing other times when these purely expressive [hw]’s exploded from my mouth.

But of course I never spelled it WHINDOWS . I am an excellent speller, and years of reading and editing student writing has merely blunted some of the edges of my abilities.

There’s plenty to suggest that Alt.Music Guy, on the other had, is a wretched speller. So expressive WH is a real possibility.

Especially when you realize there are WH-voicers who’ve picked up expressive uses of the [hw] pronunciation; they don’t use the phonetic feature to differentiate words, but they do appreciate that it can convey a variety of emotional nuances.  You can see how that could happen: the various phonetic realizations covered by the transcription [hw] share an explosive expulsion of breath that’s quite audible (especially in contrast to the quieter voiced [w]) and so can mark salience, significance, and the like.

In my experience, such speakers are pretty common. I used to spend long lunch hours at a long-gone restaurant around the corner from my house, eating and drinking slowly and writing on a pad of paper, meanwhile attending covertly to all the social life around me and noting features of linguistic, social, or sociolinguistic interest (I am, in a weird sense, always on the job).

By these means, I caught a whole lot of expressive [hw], almost surely from WH-voicers (because that’s now almost everybody around here). Especially common with the accented question words what, where, when, and why (which standardly have WH spellings, even for WH-voicers), but also words like willow and women. As in these dimly recalled examples:

No, no, [hw]illow Road! Not Middlefield!  [local streets]

[hw]omen, [hw]omen, that’s all she ever writes about!

So these uses are a likely source of Alt.Music Guy’s WHALING. (And once he’d written the WH, he just went on with an actual spelling he knew.)

Doing drag. The my allergic ass citation appeared in a Facebook posting from Sister Hera Sees Candy — the wonderful drag name of a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, a San Francisco order of queer and trans drag nuns. (l had to add that explanation when I realized that not all of my readers would recognize the Sisters as just part of the San Francisco gay landscape. In my opinion, an especially delightful part, though they’re only one corner of a sprawling drag scene in the area.)

Here’s Sister Hera at the Pride Parade in 2015:

(#1) (photo by Alan Grinberg on Flickr)

The drag name is a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):

Hera Sees Candy =  Hera Sees (a pun on heresies) + Sees Candy

(which incorporates the name of the Greek goddess Hera (Roman Juno), the queen of heaven).

Meanwhile, Sees Candies are a local thing too. (If you live in California, or travel through major American airports a lot, you surely know Sees, but they now market pretty widely.) From Wikipedia:

(#2) [ad copy:] Assorted Chocolates: An irresistible mixture of best-selling creamy, nutty, chewy and soft center favorites wrapped in See’s rich milk and dark chocolates. Approximately 26 pieces. $26.50.

See’s Candies is an American manufacturer and distributor of candy, particularly chocolates. It was founded by Charles See, his wife Florence, and his mother Mary in Los Angeles, California in 1921. The company is now headquartered in South San Francisco, California. See’s kitchens are located at its headquarters and maintained at its original factory in Los Angeles, where there are also retail shops.

… The See’s Candy company primarily vends its products in its own stores, and those of fellow Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary Nebraska Furniture Mart. See’s candies are also available at its stores in a number of airports in the United States.

Hera Sees Candy, meet Chantal Boustier. To Gadi Niram on Facebook earlier today (again, somewhat edited):

I was pleased that the Sisters got into this posting, partly because I think it’s just wonderful that I live in a world where people I know do drag (and where some play in rock bands and some are cartoonists and some are professional classical musicians and some are stud hustlers and some are public intellectuals and some are poets and a whole hell of a lot of them are scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and techies and … ) — this is in fact the world I dreamed about living in when I was a kid and couldn’t imagine achieving, how cool-ass is that.

Oh yes, I tried to work our friend Derik Cowan and his drag persona Chantal Boustier into things, because I could then say that when he and I first met he was a fagling late-teen and I was in my 50s. (But I had to make do with Sister Hera Sees Candy, because that’s what was in my data.)

Unaccountably, I have no photos of Derik as Chantal. But I can at least explain the drag name.

Chantal is the name of a character in Jean Genet’s The Balcony, a part that Derik played in an undergraduate performance.

As for boustier, from NOAD:

noun bustier: a close-fitting strapless top worn by women.

Well, yes, customarily. But this is Drag World, and the wearers of those bustiers are, underlyingly, dudes. Or you can just dress your pecs in a bustier and show off your bare belly (adorable or with rock-hard abs, as the case may be), as in a croptop. Break out your bustiers, boys!

(#3) On eBay, listed as a men’s Gothic punk vest or t-shirt; or as a crossdressing or sissy bustier / camisole / croptop (patent leather with lace trim, in black). I must say I like the frank labeling of some clothes as for sissies (as well as crossdressers; the two categories are distinct, and only a bit overlapping), because I have some sissy — their label — friends too, including some into sissy clothing, specifically sissy panties (typically, of pink lace), which make them feel happy (and that is a very good thing, and anyway, these guys are just adorable in their sissy panties)

When I was younger (like 40 or 50 years younger), I might have considered wearing a lace-trimmed bustier as goofy party wear (well, for certain kinds of party), without any other drag accoutrements, just prettying up my seriously hairy upper body and sending entertainingly mixed gender messages (I actually considered getting a Hello Kitty jockstrap in vivid pink, for a similar purpose). Sort of like the one above, but in some much faggier color, and absolutely not in unbreathing shiny patent leather: real (padded) leather, or some slinky comfortable fabric. What would Loretto Young wear?