(There will be mentions — in vernacular but not actually vulgar terms — of male-male sexual practices that some will find icky, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste; and it might stretch some kids’ horizons a bit, so a gentle warning)
From back on 10/30, e-mail from Gadi Niram, with a video gift for me, saying: I found this video (and the young man in it) to be quite a pleasant diversion:
(#1) Screen shot from the video, which you can view here
A shirtless young man in ripped denim shorts playing the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No.2) on a fancy grand piano (with a mirrored fallboard, as in the finest piano lounges). alongside the pool at at what looks like a tropical oceanside resort. (For a bit of extra sexiness, those shorts are down far enough in the back to expose the waistband of his black Calvins; here the girls and the gay boys swoon.)
— AZ > GN:
Oh my. One of the commenters:
There are days where I dreamed of playing Beethoven on vacation at a resort with a tropical background with no shirt on. You lived my dream. Bravo!
The pianist is indeed nice to look at, and the performance is quite nice too — more percussive, and with more pedal, than I would play it, but technically excellent and full of feeling.
It did occur to me to wonder why he wasn’t sweating at all. Then I realized it would be almost impossible to get those reverbatory acoustics in an outdoor recording. So this is almost surely a studio video placed into a poolside backgound.
Of course, it’s still a sweet conceit. I mean, it’s a fantasy.
At this point, my discussion of #1 split into two separate paths, one taking the sweat route, the other the shirtless route (about the carefully tailored presentation of himself that the shirtless young man performs, along with his piano-playing, on YouTube and TikTok, for a huge audience and a considerable amount of money).
This is the sweat posting. This is also what happens when you let two gay men who are linguists as well get together and talk about language.
— GN > AZ on 10/31:
Now I’m dying to see a video where he’s sweating. You’ve put some deeply erotic, highly gay ideas in my head, Arnold. Knowing you as I do, I assume you’ll consider this a great success.
GN alludes to my occasional vivid celebrations of the smell and taste of male sweat, especially sex sweat, in both armpits and crotches. So I dived right in:
— AZ > GN:
Is there a word for sweat-licking? It might be useful in this discussion. Well, a fancy word; sweat-licking is obviously serviceable.
GN didn’t find anything in some searching, and tentatively suggested sudorlingus (sudorlinctus would be an alternative) — using Latin sudor ‘sweat’, plus the lingus element (from the Latin ling– stem ‘lick, suck’) also seen in cunnilingus and anilingus. And, more directly relevant to GN’s and my exchange, the attested (but obviously not especially frequent) axillingus ‘armpit licking as a sexual act or fetish’ and testilingus ‘licking or sucking the testicles as a sexual act or fetish’.
Here I confess to an embarrassing lapse on my part, when I remarked that sweat-licking is “obviously serviceable”, suggesting thereby that the “fancy word” axillingus is unnecessary, just showing off. That’s wrong. The choice of a classical-language construct like axillingus over a plain English construct like armpit-licking imputes an extra bit of content, which I’ve elaborated on above in the glosses as ‘as a sexual act or fetish’.
Somewhat more generally, choosing the “fancy word” suggests that it’s being used in some technical or specialized way; the fancy word is the plain word plus some further stipulation about the context of use. Compare this situation to that in my 2010 Stanford SemFest talk, “Brevity plus” on morphological conversions — in particular, zero conversions (nounings and verbings) and subtractive conversions (back-formations) –favoring semantic / pragmatic specificity and social specificity as well as brevity, so that they involve brevity plus something (variously described as a nuance, connotation, suggestion, implicature, or presupposition) (detailed handout here)
Meanwhile, back in the exchanges between Gadi and me, once we got to sudorlingus, we went on to, um, vernacular personal reminiscences of, um, axillingus and, especially, testilingus, which are probably better not rehearsed here. Though I can mention Gadi’s portmanteau verb swurp = sweat + slurp, without putting it in context.
And I can offer a small word-formational bonus: agent nouns in –lictor to go along with the lingus / linctus activity nouns: sudorlictor ‘sweat-licker (as a fetish), swurper’, axillictor ‘armpit-licker (as a fetish)’, testillictor ‘testicle-licker (as a fetish)’. You might not have much call for this vocabulary, but my household is different.
Now about the shirtless guy. To prepare you for a second posting to come from #1. It turns out that this is not Piano Boy’s first appearance on this blog. From my 7/28/17 posting “Cover me, slowly”, on covers of the song “Despacito”, about
Peter Bence (a 25-year-old Hungarian pianist and composer) doing a jazz-inflected piano version (channeling Keith Jarrett), … Remarkably, there’s another young Hungarian pianist named Peter who’s done a cover of the song: Peter Buka, 20 years old, with a more gauzy Romantic-style rendition, roughly what Louis Moreau Gottschalk might have done with it.
(#2) Photo for PB’s cover of “Despacito”, which you can view here
Different piano, different setting, Peter Buka in a tank top rather than shirtless. Then at this piano, in this setting, wearing the same tank top, he brings us a little more classical piano, just to show us that he can:
(#3) Screen shot from the video of PB playing Chopin — the Ocean Etude, Étude Op. 25 No. 12 — which you can view here
Who is Piano Boy Peter Buka?, you ask. Not, as it turns out, an easy question to answer, after you get through young, male, and Hungarian (by birth). Stay tuned.