On Pinterest recently, a board devoted to Bizarro cartoons, including a fair number relevant to this blog but not previously posted here — from which, the three below (all the work of Dan Piraro alone, without Wayno’s collaboration). Two are about parrots and crackers (the first is also an instance of the Psychiatrist cartoon meme); the third offers a groaner pun on a sexual idiom previously discussed on this blog. (I’ll start with a digression on the most common way parrots figure in cartoons, as adjuncts to pirates.)

Digression: parrots and their pirates. An illustration, from my 9/1719 posting “The amazing talking pirate”:

(#1) PirateTalk + ParrotTalk, with a cartoon reversal of roles

A classic image:

(#2) The Hostage (1911), illustration by N.C. Wyeth for Stevenson’s Treasure Island: Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver with his parrot

From he website Atlas Obscura, “The Surprising Truth About Pirates and Parrots” by Dan Nosowitz on 1/19/15:

Ever since Long John Silver clomped around on a wooden leg with a parrot on his shoulder, the literary and pop-culture conception of pirates has involved the parrot. But at this point, fact is very hard to separate from fiction. What, exactly, about a classic pirate Halloween costume … is actually real? Is any of it real?

“The parrot trope is almost certainly grounded in reality,” says Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Long John Silver, the star of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, was the first major fictional pirate character to walk around with a pet parrot, but this, according to Woodard and other experts in the field of classic piracy I spoke to, was based on real truths. And the reasons why the parrot became associated with pirates actually give us a pretty good glimpse at the real, true-life existence of a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy.

… The Golden Age of Piracy, a period lasting from, in the broadest sense, the mid-1600s through around 1730, encompassed a few different major geopolitical and economic movements that created a space for pirates.

… pirates, depending as they did on robbing ships, mostly had to go where the ships were. They followed trade routes, which means they ended up in specific places; you didn’t see pirates flocking to deep South America or anywhere in the Pacific Ocean. They stayed with the ships, and ended up largely in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian Ocean’s coasts.

On long trips, whether conducted legally or illegally, pets were desired but would need careful vetting. These long voyages, remember, could last weeks or months, and mostly, they were incredibly boring and uncomfortable. A companion animal could help ease the way. What kind?

… pirates were traveling to exotic lands, had quite a bit of free time, had disposable income, and thus had no particular reason to restrict themselves to ordinary European pets like cats and dogs. Monkeys were not uncommon, and the concept of a pet monkey made its way into fiction as well — Captain Barbossa, in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, has one. But a parrot was more sensible. They don’t eat much, compared to a dog or a monkey, and what they do eat (seeds, fruits, nuts) can be easily stored on board. They’re colorful, and intelligent, and funny, and for a pirate (or a legal sailor) wanting to show off in port, a parrot would do nicely.

I’m doing parrots and their pirates first (and parrots and their crackers afterwards), in part because the pirate artistic convention is so common, in cartoons as elsewhere; and in part because the pirate artistic convention turns out to be grounded in fact — while the cracker artistic convention (“Polly Wanna Cracker”) is something of a factual conundrum.

Parrots and their crackers. The two Bizarro cartoons, on the theme Is That All There Is?:

(#3) From 3/16/10, the parrot in psychotherapy, hoping to get beyond crackers

(#4) From 12/29/10, the parrot wants to check out the alternatives

First, a note on the name Polly for a parrot, to get some feel for dates and places. From OED3 (Sept. 2006):

noun Polly: A parrot. Chiefly as a conventional proper or pet name. Cf. Poll n.3 [1st cite 1826; all five of the OED‘s cites are from British sources, though it’s clear that the parrot name was used by Americans in the 19th century (see discussion below)]

noun Poll-3: A conventional proper or pet name for a parrot. Hence: a parrot. [1st cite 1600 Ben Jonson Every Man out of his Humor; other cites through 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, initially almost entirely from British sources]

Then from the A Way with Words site, “Polly Wanna Cracker?”, posted by Grant Barrett on 2/28/09:

A man who owns a parrot says that when people see his bird, they invariably ask the question “Polly wanna cracker?” He wonders about the origin of that psittacine phrase, meaning parrot-like. One of the earliest uses of the phrase so far found is this fake advertisement from the mock newspaper the Bunkum Flag-Staff and Independent Echo published in 1849 in The Knickerbocker magazine. It starts, “For sale, a Poll Parrot, cheap. He says a remarkable variety of words and phrases, cries, ‘Fire! fire!; and ‘You rascal!’ and ‘Polly want a cracker,’ and would not be parted with, but having been brought up with a sea-captain he is profane and swears too much.” Here is a cartoon from The John-Donkey, July 29, 1848, p. 47, via Proquest American Periodical Series. The John-Donkey was a short-lived humorous and satirical magazine edited by Thomas Dunn English.

(#5) A pun on cracker: the boy is threatening to crack the parrot’s head

Grant’s examples are from American sources, and that’s a good thing, because cracker for a kind of biscuit was originally an American usage, and still is primarily American; OED2 has the sense ‘a thin hard biscuit’ as originally (1st cite 1739) and still chiefly U.S.

But do (or did) parrots eat crackers (in this sense)? They mostly eat seeds, nuts, and fruits, though some will eat (unsalted) crackers if these are offered to them. I haven’t, however, seen any reports of parrots seeking them out.

This is a sticking-point for accounts of the development of the parrot+cracker artistic convention. At the moment, it seems to come down to two speculations (both can be found on the net): a speculation about feeding parrots on board 19th-century American vessels with crackers (stored there for the sailors), when seeds and nuts would suit the parrots much better (the parrots would have to be trained to accept crackers as regular food) and would be much more nutritious, for both parrots and sailors, than crackers; or a speculation about pet owners offering crackers as treats to their household pets and then training them to not only accept them but to seek them out.

But if we’re speculating, we might equally speculate that there is simply a fashion for teaching parrots to say “Polly Wanna Cracker”, because the expression is fairly easy for them to learn (no judgments of food quality on the parrots’ part are involved) — just as there clearly is a fashion for teaching them to say “Pretty Bird” (no judgments of beauty on the parrots’ part are involved).

The pear-tree pun.

(#6) The Bizarro of 5/2/13, in which a farmer exhorts a tree to Grow a pear!

But the preceding C’mon, man! makes the whole thing into a pun on exhortations to someone to Grow a pair! — to develop a pair of balls / testicles (with the testicles viewed as the locus of masculine power).

The Wiktionary entry for grow a pair:

(vulgar, idiomatic) To be brave; to show some courage, especially in a situation in which one has so far failed to do so. Etymology: Abbreviation of grow a pair of testicles.

And from my 3/14/19 posting “Caribou with a pair”:

The idiom grow a pair. Roughly ‘man up’, involving the truncation …  a pair ‘a pair of (literal or figurative) balls/testicles’.

Three more Bizarro cartoons from the past, from another crop on Pinterest, with: an allusion you need to catch to understand the cartoon; a complex pun; and laugh-inducing names.

From 6/9/09, the bull. An exercise in cartoon understanding.

(#1)

You need to recognize that the male figure is a toreador, a bullfighter (anomalously appearing outside the bullring in costume), and you need to know the idiom bull in a china shop). Then you will appreciate the female figure’s anxiety over whether the toreador is alone; normally you would expect a toreador in costume to appear along with a toro, a bull, and the China Shoppe is no place for a bull.

From my 8/1/19 posting “Understanding the bull”, about a John McNamee cartoon:

there’s a nod [in the McNamee] to another bit of tauriana: the idiom bull in a china shop: Fred is seen sipping tea daintily from a china tea cup, thus challenging the view that bulls can’t be trusted around breakables. From the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer:

bull in a china shop: An extremely clumsy person [in a delicate situation], as in Her living room, with its delicate furniture and knickknacks, made him feel like a bull in a china shop. The precise origin for this term has been lost; it was first recorded in Frederick Marryat’s novel, Jacob Faithful (1834) [though the image was available much earlier].

The idiom has been the inspiration for innumerable cartoons

From 9/8/12, validating. A complex pun, turning on an ambiguity in validate (my) parking, with the character on the left intending one sense of the expression (one that’s appropriate to the context), the character on the right another sense (one that’s absurd in the context).

(#2)

From NOAD:

verb validate: [with object] [a] check or prove the validity or accuracy of (something): these estimates have been validated by periodic surveys. [b] demonstrate or support the truth or value of: in a healthy family a child’s feelings are validated. [c] make or declare legally valid. [d] recognize or affirm the validity or worth of (a person or their feelings or opinions); cause (a person) to feel valued or worthwhile: without Patti to validate my feelings, they seemed not to exist | he seems to need other women’s attention to validate him as a man.

— sense 1 of validate … parking. The sense of validate here is a specialization of NOAD‘s sense a. The direct object noun parking here is a beheading of parking card/ticket. The combination is idiomatic, and the idiomatic sense occurs as well in the N + N compound parking validation — explained on the WRCBtv (Chattanooga TN) site “What is parking validation & how does it work?” from 11/11/20:

Parking validation is a solution for extending free or discounted parking to some parking lot users of a paid parking facility. It’s generally considered a perk of being a customer. When a business “validates parking”, that is a shorthand way of saying, “When you dine/shop/make an appointment with us, you’ll park for less — or for free!”

When a parking ticket is “validated,” it typically means the establishment a parking customer visited is paying for at least a portion of their customer’s parking, up to 100% of the parking price.

As a parker, getting your parking validated is a benefit of making a purchase at a business. For the business, offering validation is a way to incentivize customers to visit and purchase.

Typically, parking validations works like this: the driver of a vehicle takes a parking ticket upon entering the parking lot. The driver makes a purchase from a business that then stamps or scans the parking ticket or provides a separate printed coupon. When the vehicle driver exits the parking lot the parking is discounted or validated for a set amount or percentage.

While the above lists one of the more common scenarios, there are many variations.

— sense 2 of validate … parking. With an extension of NOAD‘s sense d of validate — something like ‘recognize or affirm the excellence of somene’s actions’. In this case, the action of parking a car (“You did a great job”).

From 10/9/16, Peter’s family. The couple in the cartoon have the family name Pumpkineater, but seem not to recognize that their name is risible, so that any child of theirs would be open to ridicule from other children.

(#3)

The basis for all this is a nursery rhyme about “Peter, Peter pumpkin eater”, with the common noun pumpkin eater (a synthetic N + N compound), while in the cartoon we have instead the remarkable proper name Pumpkineater.

On the nursery rhyme, from Wikipedia:

(#4) William Wallace Denslow’s illustration for “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater”, from a 1901 edition of Mother Goose (in Wikipedia) (Denslow is best known for his illustrations in some of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books)

“Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater” is an English language nursery rhyme. … Common modern versions include:

Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her;
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.

Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
Had another and didn’t love her;
Peter learned to read and spell,
And then he loved her very well.

The first surviving version of the rhyme was published in Infant Institutes, part the first: or a Nurserical Essay on the Poetry, Lyric and Allegorical, of the Earliest Ages, &c., in London around 1797. It also appears in Mother Goose’s Quarto: or Melodies Complete, printed in Boston, Massachusetts around 1825

Modern interpretations of the rhyme are inclined to see the first verse as referring to an unfaithful wife (maybe from an actual court case of the time), possibly murdered by her husband, with her body stuffed into some container (a pumpkin in the rhyme, presumably because pumpkin alliterates with the Peter); or merely locked up someplace by her husband.

The mildly offensive slang noun peter ‘the penis, esp.of a young boy’ seems to be somewhat later than the nursery rhyme (GDoS has a first cite of 1870), though the name Peter, Peter in the rhyme is sometimes played on as risqué in modern times.

In the New Yorker issue of 2/15&22/21, the winning caption to a drawing by Joe Dator:

(#1) ‘Twas commissions tamed the bull

Well, yes, the cartoon has the bull talking and taking orders and handling money and all that, but this is CartoonWorld, where animals routinely do such things. What’s remarkable is that the bull has given up a core aspect of his bull nature: aggressiveness (an especially troublesome characteristic in a creature of such size).

From Wikipedia:

Adult bulls may weigh between 500 and 1,000 kg (1,100 and 2,200 lb). Most are capable of aggressive behavior and require careful handling to ensure safety of humans and other animals. Those of dairy breeds may be more prone to aggression, while beef breeds are somewhat less aggressive, though beef breeds such as the Spanish Fighting Bull and related animals are also noted for aggressive tendencies, which are further encouraged by selective breeding.

An estimated 42% of all livestock-related fatalities in Canada are a result of bull attacks, and fewer than one in 20 victims of a bull attack survives. Dairy breed bulls are particularly dangerous and unpredictable; the hazards of bull handling are a significant cause of injury and death for dairy farmers in some parts of the United States. The need to move a bull in and out of its pen to cover cows exposes the handler to serious jeopardy of life and limb. Being trampled, jammed against a wall, or gored by a bull was one of the most frequent causes of death in the dairy industry before 1940.

(#2) An angry bull paws up dust in a threat display (Bart Hiddink, Creative Commons 2009)

… In many areas, placing rings in bulls’ noses to help control them is traditional. The ring is usually made of copper, and is inserted through a small hole cut in the septum of the nose. It is used by attaching a lead rope either directly to it or running through it from a head collar, or for more difficult bulls, a bull pole (or bull staff) may be used. This is a rigid pole about 1 m (3 ft) long with a clip at one end; this attaches to the ring and allows the bull both to be led and to be held away from his handler.

An aggressive bull may be kept confined in a bull pen, a robustly constructed shelter and pen, often with an arrangement to allow the bull to be fed without entering the pen. If an aggressive bull is allowed to graze outside, additional precautions may be needed to help avoid him harming people. One method is a bull mask, which either covers the bull’s eyes completely, or restricts his vision to the ground immediately in front of him, so he cannot see his potential victim. Another method is to attach a length of chain to the bull’s nose-ring, so that if he ducks his head to charge, he steps on the chain and is brought up short. Alternatively, the bull may be hobbled, or chained by his ring or by a collar to a solid object such as a ring fixed into the ground.

In larger pastures, particularly where a bull is kept with other cattle, the animals may simply be fed from a pickup truck or tractor, the vehicle itself providing some protection for the humans involved. Generally, bulls kept with cows tend to be less aggressive than those kept alone.

Some bulls of course, are specially bred and trained for aggressiveness: those groomed for the bull ring and the rodeo. Which provides the spring for my bull-cartoon posting of a week ago: my 2/7 posting “The bull validates Peter’s family”:

(#3) Just don’t bring your bull…

In the posting: a section on the idiom bull in a china shop ‘an extremely clumsy person [in a delicate situation]’.

Two cartoons in my comics feed on 2/25 (otherwise known as Yay! Pfizer1 Day! at my house) on language play: a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro playing on formulaic language (the metaphorical idiom / cliché stop and smell the roses), and a Piccolo/Price Rhymes With Orange with a play on the ambiguity of field.

Bizarro: Thor gets advice from the Hulk. Over a beer with his (sometime) buddy. About how to pull out of a down day — even superheroes get the blues:

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

[Digression: Thor (and his helmet, and his hammer for smashing things) and the Hulk. To understand cartoon in #1, you need to recognize the Norse god Thor as turned into a pop-cultural icon in the comics and superhero movies (represented here with the winged helmet he has in the comics) and also the gigantic green-skinned figure of the Hulk, originally a comic-book character, then a character in an American tv show The Incredible Hulk, and finally a character in superhero movies.

(#2) Cover of the 2017 Marvel trade paperback Thor Vs. Hulk, showing Thor’s winged helmet

Thor and the Hulk first appear together in the 1988 American made-for-television superhero film The Incredible Hulk Returns. From the tv show, Bill Bixby returned as David Banner and Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk; and Eric Kramer made his first and only appearance as Thor.

The two characters then appear together in the 2012 Marvel’s The Avengers / The Avengers, with Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner [an alternative name for the character] and the Hulk, and Chris Hemsworth as Thor.

The two continued in the succeeding Avengers movies: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015); Avengers: Infinity War (2018); and Avengers: Endgame (2019).

(#3) Thor (helmetless, wielding his hammer) together with the Hulk in Avengers: Infinity War

Hemsworth first appeared as Thor in the 2011 movie Thor, followed by Thor: The Dark World (2013) and Thor: Ragnarok (2017). Thor4, Thor: Love and Thunder, is in development, scheduled for release in 2022.

(#4) Hemsworth in an advance photo for Thor4 (with a stylized version of Thor’s winged helmet) ]

Then Wiktionary on the idiom / cliché stop and smell the roses:

(idiomatic) To relax; to take time out of one’s busy schedule to enjoy or appreciate the beauty of life.

There presumably was a time when the injunction to stop and smell the roses was a fresh metaphor, understood by seeing that in a roseless context the expression couldn’t be taken literally and must therefore be understood in some figurative fashion, the details of which had to be reasoned out. But once it became a cliché, through repeated use, the reasoning-out process could be shortcut, and the expression would automatically and thoughtlessly convey advice to relax and appreciate life — in a way that a fresh metaphor like, say, take time to rest and marvel at the beauty of flowers, would not.

At that point, it becomes available as a fixed expression that can be varied by replacing some of the parts, snowclone-fashion, as the Hulk does in #1, while preserving the gist of the conveyed meaning of the model (rather than its literal meaning). So the Hulk’s version conveys something like ‘take time out of your busy work schedule to enjoy things that are pleasurable for you (like smashing stuff with your hammer)’.

Rhymes: the scarecrow employment agency. Run by scarecrows, for scarecrows:

(#5) A scarecrow applicant’s field of dreams, balked by the agent

All turning on an ambiguity in the noun field, which has a enormous number of senses. From NOAD:

noun field: 1 [a] an area of open land, especially one planted with crops or pasture, typically bounded by hedges or fences: a wheat field | a field of corn. [b] a piece of land used for a particular purpose, especially an area marked out for a game or sport: a football field. [c] Cricket defensive play or the defensive positions collectively: he is fast in the field and on the bases. [d] a large area of land or water completely covered in a particular substance, especially snow or ice: an ice field. [e] an area rich in a natural product, typically oil or gas: an oil field. [f] (the field) a place where a subject of scientific study or of artistic representation can be observed in its natural location or context. [g] an area on which a battle is fought: a field of battle. [h] archaic a battle: many a bloody field was to be fought.

2 [a] a particular branch of study or sphere of activity or interest: we talked to professionals in various fields. [b] Computing a part of a record, representing an item of data. [c] Linguistics & Psychology a general area of meaning within which individual words make particular distinctions.

3 a space or range within which objects are visible from a particular viewpoint or through a piece of apparatus: the stars drift through this telescope’s field of view. See also field of vision.

4 (usually the field) all the participants in a contest or sport: he destroyed the rest of the field with a devastating injection of speed.

5 [a] an area on a flag with a single background color: fifty white stars on a blue field. [b] Heraldry the surface of an escutcheon or of one of its divisions.

6 Physics [a] the region in which a particular condition prevails, especially one in which a force or influence is effective regardless of the presence or absence of a material medium. [b] the force exerted or potentially exerted in a field: the variation in the strength of the field.

7 Mathematics a system subject to two binary operations analogous to those for the multiplication and addition of real numbers, and having similar commutative and distributive laws.

As a scarecrow, the applicant might easily find a job in a field of corn, but not in the field of law. The scarecrow agency specializes in sense 1a (for which area is a hypernym — this sort of field is a type of area); but in #5, in speaking to the scarecrow applicant, the agent uses sense 2a (for which area is a rough synonym).

Note that the syntax of the two senses is different: field in sense 2a is obligatorily arthrous, not only definite but requiring the definite article: the field of law / the law field (while with the indefinite article, a field of law / a law field refers not to law as a field but to a subfield of law). On the other hand, field in sense 1a is an ordinary common noun, usable in indefinite and definite NPs with a full range of determiners ( a / one / the / this / etc. field of corn / corn field).

Semantically, the field of law (2a) is roughly synonymous with law (as an area of study or work), while the field of corn (1a) has ordinary definite reference, so field in the two uses is not identical in sense, and cannot count  as such for any phenomenon that requires identity of sense (in anaphoric constructions, reduced coordination, or whatever). The following are all anomalous:

I studied the field of law, but not that of corn / the one of corn / one of corn / ∅ of corn. The fields of law and corn are both fascinating.

cf. the unproblematic:

I walked through the field of wheat, but not that of corn / the one of corn / one of corn / ∅ of corn. The fields of wheat and corn are both fascinating.

All of this arguing that 1a and 2a are in fact distinct (homophonous, and etymologically related) lexical items, not merely two different shadings of a single lexical item.

The Zippy strip from two days ago (3/9) on the roadside culture of working-class (and largely white and male) North America:

(#1) By their consumer products you shall know them: gas, energy drinks, cigarettes, lottery tickets, candy, batteries, beef jerky — “everything anyone could ever need”

The strip is dominated by the Irving gas station, with its accompanying Mainway convenience store. Irving Mainway, which looks and sounds like a man’s name, and so has taken on  lives of its own. Beyond the gasoline from Irving, Mainway can offer Red Bull, motor oil, smokes, and maybe a frozen burrito.

The companies. From Wikipedia:

Irving Oil Ltd. is a Canadian gasoline, oil, and natural gas producing and exporting company. Considered part of the Irving Group of Companies, it was founded by entrepreneur Kenneth “K.C.” Irving and is privately owned by his son, Arthur, and his family.

Irving Oil operates Canada’s largest refinery, the Irving Oil Refinery, in Saint John, New Brunswick, and Ireland’s only refinery, in Whitegate, County Cork, as well as a network of gasoline stations, fleet of oil tankers, real estate and other related assets.

… Irving Oil operates bulk furnace oil and propane outlets in most major centres across Atlantic Canada, New England and Quebec as well as select locations in eastern Ontario, almost all of which are supplied from its Saint John refinery.

Irving Oil also operates over 900 gas stations in these jurisdictions.

… Most of Irving Oil’s corporate owned-and-operated stations also contain convenience stores. These locations operated as simply “Irving” stations until the late 1990s, when the “Mainway” banner (“Marché Mainway” in Quebec) was introduced; “Mainway” being a brand appropriated from one of Irving’s U.S. acquisitions.

(#2) Irving + Mainway in Bangor ME

By the early 2000s, 56 of the company’s Quebec locations had been leased to the Couche-Tard chain and rebranded accordingly, conversely 60 of Couche-Tard’s fueling stations were supplied by Irving fuels and re-branded accordingly. By the mid 2000s, Irving began to renovate and rebrand its old “Mainway” stations under the name “Bluecanoe” as part of the company’s modernization plan. The Bluecanoe brand was first introduced in New England and was introduced to some stations in eastern Ontario and the Atlantic provinces; however, many others were not upgraded and retained the older name “Mainway”.

… Irving Oil also operates several “Big Stops”, which are truck stops featuring family restaurants, facilities for truck drivers, and convenience stores. These large stations are located at strategic locations throughout New England, the Maritimes, Quebec and Newfoundland.

On the convenience store — by no means restricted to a marriage with a gas station or to North America — from Wikipedia:

A convenience store, convenience shop, or corner store is a small retail business that stocks a range of everyday items such as coffee, groceries, snack foods, confectionery, soft drinks, tobacco products, over-the-counter drugs, toiletries, newspapers, and magazines In some jurisdictions, convenience stores are licensed to sell alcohol

… A convenience store may be part of a gas/petrol station, so customers can purchase goods conveniently while filling their vehicle with fuel. It may be located alongside a busy road, in an urban area, near a railway or railroad station, or at another transport hub. In some countries, convenience stores have long shopping hours, and some remain open 24 hours.

An earlier Zippy. “For Irving Mainway” (from 5/24/14), using the same drawing as #1, but with different text, about what makes an American — lack of interest in global warming or politics, affection for high-fructose corn syrup, tacit acceptance of bad pop music, inattention to the aspect ratio of your tv pictures:

(#3)

Irving Mainway on tv. The combination of names found its way onto American television in season 2 of Saturday Night Live, in the sketch “Consumer Probe: Irwin Mainway” (on 12/11/76):

(#4) Aykroyd and Bergen examine the Bag O’ Glass

In a review of holiday gifts [by consumer reporter Candice Bergen], toy company president Irwin Mainway (Dan Aykroyd) defends his company’s products, Bag O’ Glass and a teddy bear with a built-in chainsaw, then claims traditional toys are extremely dangerous. [from the YouTube notes]

You can watch the sketch on YouTube here.

Bonus: the title of this posting. A biblical allusion, to the Christian New Testament. From Matthew 7:15-18, in the KJV:

¹⁵ Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

¹⁶Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

¹⁷ Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

¹⁸ A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

7:16 is frequently translated with fronting of the PP: By their fruits ye shall [or: you shall / will] know them. The sense of of in 7:16 is ‘from’: grapes from thorns, figs from thistles. Otherwise the passage is a piece of poetry, a succession of metaphors (sheep and wolves in verse 15, trees and their fruits in 16-18), each verse a pairing: a contrast in verses 15, 17, and 18; a parallel in verse 16.

The sheep and wolves in 7:15 eventually became an idiom in English. From Wikipedia:

A wolf in sheep’s clothing is an idiom of Biblical origin used to describe those playing a role contrary to their real character with whom contact is dangerous, particularly false teachers. Much later, the idiom has been applied by zoologists to varying kinds of predatory behaviour. A fable based on it has been falsely credited to Aesop and is now numbered 451 in the Perry Index. The confusion has arisen from the similarity of the theme with fables of Aesop concerning wolves that are mistakenly trusted by shepherds; the moral drawn from these is that one’s basic nature eventually shows through the disguise.

and odalisques (with their erotic lumbar regions, aka lower backs) and rhyming disparagements (like tramp stamp and slag tag). It starts with the Zits comic strip of 3/26:

(#1) The rhyming (and disparaging) idiom tramp stamp had passed by in the fringes of my consciousness, but this strip foregrounds it

Tramp stamps. From Wikipedia:

A lower-back [or lumbar] tattoo (colloquially called a tramp stamp or slag tag) is a tattoo that became popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s and gained a reputation for its erotic appeal. They are sometimes accentuated by low-rise jeans and crop tops.

[History:] Although historically in the western world men have been the majority of tattoo recipients, in the early 1990s the practice gained popularity among women. Prior to the late 20th century, women with tattoos were heavily stigmatized, and were rarely found in middle-class society. Lower-back tattoos were popularized in the early 2000s, in part owing to the influence of female celebrities, including Britney Spears, Aaliyah, Christina Ricci and Pamela Anderson. The popularity of low-rise jeans and crop tops may have also spurred the increase in lower-back tattoos. Another appeal of tattooing the lower back is that there is little fat there, lessening the chance that images will become misshapen over time. Also, the lower back is often concealed, providing women the choice of when to reveal their tattoo. Although some males have lower-back tattoos, including some celebrities, they are generally not acquired by men.

(#2) SuicideGirl Papina, naked, with a lower-back tattoo, washing up (photo: SuicideGirls from Los Angeles)

[Perception:] Women’s lower backs are often viewed by people as an erotic body part, leading to the association of lower-back tattoos with sexuality. Lower-back tattoos are also perceived as an indication of promiscuity by some, possibly owing to media portrayals of women with tattoos. [AZ: In general, a woman who  freely displays her body is likely to be taken to be not only sexually active, but in fact promiscuous.] A 2011 study of media stereotypes criticized media portrayals of lower-back tattoos, arguing that they are unfairly cast as a symbol of promiscuity. There are a number of pejorative nicknames for lower-back tattoos, including “tramp stamp”, “slag tag”, “bulls-eye”, and “target”. The show Saturday Night Live seems to at least have partially played a role in bringing prejudice and shaming to the placement of the tattoo. For instance, the term “tramp stamp” started gaining widespread popularity after being used in one of their May 2004 skits.

There’s been no widespread fashion for lumbar tattoos in men, and most of ones you can find on the net are dedicated to family members or sports figures, but there are some explicitly gay ones (a triangle pointing down to the bearer’s ass cleft; a tattooed star, which often serves as a declaration of homosexuality) and this bit of body art in the middle of a three-part tattoo — a top design (covering the right half of the man’s back, from shoulder to lower back), the lumbar design, and a black panther on his right buttock:

(#3) 0n the Tattoo Ideas site from 3/2019 on “Men Ass Tattoo”; unfortunately, the site tells us nothing about the man with the tats

The erotic potential of the lower back. The lumbar region is a gentle concavity (so potentially sexually metaphorical on its own) immediately adjacent to the buttocks and so potentially metonymically  associable with the female genitals or with the anus as a sexual organ (in either sex).

The erotic potential of the lower back is exploited in a genre of female nudes in western art (in paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures). In particular, it’s one of the three central features (the others being  the face and the buttocks) in depictions of odalisques.

Etymological background, from NOAD:

noun odalisque (also odalisk): historical a female slave or concubine in a harem, especially one in the seraglio of the Sultan of Turkey.

And then the artistic development, from Wikipedia:

[quoting Joan DelPlato:] By the eighteenth century the term odalisque referred to the eroticized artistic genre in which a nominally eastern woman lies on her side on display for the spectator.

(#4) Portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy (aka The Blonde Odalisque or Resting Girl) by François Boucher (1752)

During the 19th century, odalisques became common fantasy figures in the artistic movement known as Orientalism, being featured in many erotic paintings from that era.

(#5) Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1814)

Rhyme as a vehicle of disparagement. In tramp stamp and slag tag. Rhyming in (two-word) formulaic expressions can be used to convey (or, more often, reinforce) disparagement in varying degrees, as in

fag hag, rich bitch, boy toy, blue flu, fruit loop, rom com, chick flick, peter meter, pass gas, man tan, dick pic, bed head, airy-fairy, cock-block, shit fit

The expressive uses of rhyme (and, similarly, alliteration and assonance) are many (note rhyming insults like Roses are red, violets are blue, with a face like yours, you should sit in a zoo), as are the patterns in which these uses occur (note fixed binomials, with conjunctions, like wear and tear, wine and dine, make or break); the effect is to ostentatiously call attention to the expressive nature of certain phrases.

Tom Gauld cartoons from New Scientist magazine, in a 2020 collection:

(#1)

— with three cartoons that especially caught my interest. One  on science vs. journalism over de-extinction (already posted on this blog); one on the agony of Science Hell, the scene of eternal scientific mansplaining; and one on the adverbial literally understood literally (which then provides the title for the 2020 book).

Scientist, journalist, and Jurassic Park. My 4/19/21 posting “A mammoth revival” features a Gauld cartoon on de-extincting dinosaurs as Jurassic Park-style fantasy —

(#2)

(which I contrast to a potentially realizable scheme for a sort of de-extinction of the woolly mammoth).

The agony of Science Hell. A cartoon that will strike a chord of unpleasant recognition in many a linguist:

(#3)

Literally mind-blowing theories. You don’t often experience literally being used literally; its usual function — which many usageists deplore — is to convey exaggeration or astonishment:

(#4)

to blow someone’s mind is, of course, an idiom — conventionally understood non-literally, so taking it literally is perverse (though entertaining). From Merriam-Webster on-line:

blow someone’s mind: informal to strongly affect someone with surprise, wonder, delight, etc.; to amaze or overwhelm someone | The music really blew my mind. The thought of all she’s accomplished at such a young age just blows my mind.

Read about the theory and your head explodes. Messy, very messy.

(Significantly about sex between men, often in street language, so thoroughly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

On 5/1, e-mail from HUNT magazine (which hawks gay video porn) featuring a new bareback release, Show Hard, all about t-room / tearoom sexual encounters — a recurrent theme on this blog (there’s a Page on postings about sex in public, especially focused on t-room sex). I’ll take up the flick (and its name) later in this posting.

But on viewing the still from the first scene of Show Hard in the mailing — muscle hunk Beau Butler getting pronged on a mensroom sink by equally hunky Sean Maygers — what really caught my eye wasn’t the sexual action, arousing though that is, but the expression on Butler’s face. One that is so common that we have a name for it in English: knitted / knit (eye)brows. It turns out that there’s more than one physical gesture that is so called; and also, unsurprisingly, that this family of gestures can convey a variety of affects. Also that there are a number of other closely related gestures, with a collection of vocabulary that refers to them; it’s a rich domain of meaning.

The Raging Stallion ad. As it came to me in e-mail (but with Maygers’s cock and balls fuzzed out, for WordPress modesty):

(#1) Note the playful alliteration in ANAL APRIL (although this ad didn’t come to me until Mansex May)

(Note on commerce. RS Studios has filmed a DVD with an overall theme and a series of five scenes on it, but you can’t send them money and they’ll send you the DVD. Instead, you have to become a member of their club (at $7.50 per month, which is $95.40 per year), which will give you electronic access to the content of this DVD (and others in their catalog), for as long as you continue your membership.)

knit(ted) (eye)brows: Butler’s expression in #1, blown up:

(#2)

The affect conveyed by this facial expression (the inverted-V variant of knitted eyebrows) is hard to read; many observers see the expression as worried (worry should probably be viewed as its default affect), but here it’s associated with intense emotion — in this case, sexual pleasure, even ecstasy, at being fucked, marked also by Butler’s slackly open mouth, but especially by his passionate cries of “Fuck yeah! Fuck yeah!” while Maygers fucks him (which, of course, you can’t hear from looking at the photo).

On the linguistic expression, from Merriam-Webster online:

knit one’s brow/brows: to move the eyebrows together in a way that shows that one is thinking about something or is worried, angry, etc.

(Note that M-W reports a variant with sg. brow, despite the fact that two eyebrows are involved.)

The M-W entry suggests concentration, worry, and disapproval as three affects associated with knitted eyebrows; anxiety, intense emotion (especially of pleasure, passion, or ecstasy), puzzlement, and surprise are four others. Like paralinguistic gestures (vocal qualities, loudness, pitch, etc.), kinesic gestures (including facial gestures like knitted eyebrows) are multifunctional, having a variety of associated affects in particular contexts; as a result, they are often inscrutable.

In addition, kinesic gestures come in families of variants. In particular, moving the eyebrows together can be achieved in more than one way. The knitted eyebrows family of gestures comes in at least three variants: inverted-V, V, and flat. In the inverted-V and V variants, one end of each eyebrow is raised: the inside ends in inverted-V, the outside ends in V. Raising one end of the eyebrows, or raising the whole eyebrows, almost always produces forehead furrows (or brow furrows): horizontal creases across the forehead (visible in #2).

— illustrations for the inverted-V variant: #2 above; and the photo below, from the Donders Wonders: On Brains and Science site, “Eyebrows don’t lie” by Martina Arenella on 4/19/21:

(#3) The inverted-V variant combined with an eye gesture, wide eyes (conveying surprise, intense involvement, seductiveness, queerness (think of Randy Rainbow), etc. Note the forehead furrows.

— illustration for the V variant: a Hugh Jackman photo:

(#4) Raising the outside ends of the eyebrows here isn’t enough to produce forehead furrows; but moving the eyebrows together in knitted eyebrows necessarily produces frown lines: vertical creases between the eyebrows — very pronounced above

— illustration for the flat variant: a photo (whose ultimate source I haven’t been able to track down) from several pages on forehead furrows:

(#5) Combined here with a mouth gesture I don’t quite know how to describe (much less name)

Note on the inverted-V variant. There are people for whom this facial expression is their “natural” expression, the one their face assumes at rest.  I’ve come across two such people in my life.

The first was an intro linguistics student of mine at Ohio State. I scan the facial expressions and body language of my audiences for clues about their responses to what’s going on, and this student seemed to be perpetually puzzled or worried about the first few classes. So I asked her (after class) if there was something about the material that she was concerned about, she seemed to be worried in class. Then she told me that that was just the way she looked, pretty much all the time, people kept asking her about it.

The second is a friend on Facebook who posts a great many pictures there, including selfies. When I first saw his postings, I thought that he was neurotically inclined to worry, but then I realized that the expression was his natural state; he had to work to counteract it.

Ah, now you’re wondering about Beau Butler. But no, he’s like most of us, and gets knitted eyebrows only by working for them. Since he’s now a pornstar, and was a male model before that, there are tons of photographic evidence. Just one posed face shot (and you get the huge biceps for free):

(#6) His everyday face, at least with regard to his eyebrows (but his eyes themselves are narrowed, in one kind of cruise face); #2 is his sex face (or one of them)

Vocabulary notes. In the domain of facial expressions involving the brow and the brows. The two primary bodypart names, historically related to one another, are ripe for metonymic transfers from one to the other (due to their proximity), and also for confusions, thanks to their meaning relationship and their homonymy. The NOAD entries:

noun brow-1: 1 [a] a person’s forehead: he wiped his brow. [b] (usually brows) an eyebrow: his brows lifted in surprise. … ORIGIN Old English brū ‘eyelash, eyebrow’, of Germanic origin. Current senses arose in Middle English

noun eyebrow: the strip of hair growing on the ridge above a person’s eye socket: he had eyes of blue beneath bushy eyebrows.

Then there are the horizontal facial creases. The historical sources of the primary everyday English vocabulary — noun and verb furrow —  are agricultural, metaphorically extended. The NOAD entries:

noun furrow: [a] a long narrow trench made in the ground by a plow, especially for planting seeds or for irrigation. … [c]  a line or wrinkle on a person’s face: there were deep furrows in his brow.

verb furrow: [a] [with object] make a rut, groove, or trail in (the ground or the surface of something): gorges furrowing the deep-sea floor. [b] (with reference to the forehead or face) mark or be marked with lines or wrinkles caused by frowning, anxiety, or concentration: [with object]: a look of concern furrowed his brow | [no object]: her brow furrowed. [c] (with reference to the eyebrows) tighten or be tightened and lowered in anxiety, concentration, or disapproval, so wrinkling the forehead: [no object]: his brows furrowed in concentration | [with object]: she furrowed her brows, thinking hard.

For the vertical creases, the compound frown lines seems to be current in the cosmetics industry and to be working its way into more general use, though it doesn’t (yet) appear in the OED, NOAD or AHD.

Show Hard, the gay porn video. The beginning of the Raging Stallion description:

When you’ve been out on the road for a while and need an intense release, you can find a seedy roadside rest stop, where the men inside ‘SHOW HARD’ [show their hard-ons] to signal they’re ready for some hot, raw action. Award-winning director Tony Dimarco captures the raunchy bareback chronicles of spontaneous public restroom sex with eight hung and horny men eager to bust a nut. Beau Butler stops for a bathroom break and ends up getting his ass pounded deep by Sean Maygers … [on through 4 more scenes]

[Note on the sexual slang show hard. An abbreviated imperative (written on a mensroom stall partition) to ‘show your hard-on’ (through a glory hole in the partition) if you want to engage in cocksucking; who blows who is then settled through (usually) nonverbal signals in the customary code for such things. The acts themselves are performed through a glory hole or under the partition. Through spoken exchanges or written messages passed under the partition, the men can then opt to share a stall for face-to-face sex, either sucking or fucking, as they negotiate.

I was surprised to discover that none of the slang dictionaries I consulted — even Urban Dictionary — had an entry for show hard (but then I’m long familiar with the milieu of t-room sex).]

The detailed account (on the Raging Stallion site) of the Butler-Maygers scene:

Needing a release after being on the road for a while, Beau Butler pulls over at a rest stop. While he’s in the stall, Beau hears Sean Maygers getting some action at the urinals. Sean catches Beau trying to peek and heads in the next stall to slide his cock thru the gloryhole. As soon as Sean’s thick cock emerges, Beau is on his knees eagerly tasting Sean’s meat.

(#6) Butler on his knees, sucking cock. Note the missing stall doors, so that the action is visible as in a stage production, with a transparent fourth wall

After sucking through the anonymous glory hole, Beau gets off his knees and backs his hot ass up on Sean’s cock. They decide to ditch the barrier and take the action outside the stall. Beau gets bent over the restroom sink, so Sean can lick his hairy hole. Beau begs for more, so Sean mounts up and slides his thick meat inside Beau’s hungry ass bareback. The cock sucking, ass eating, finger fucking, and pounding continues until Beau sits back on the sink and gets his ass pounded. The action hits a fevered pitch sending Sean over the edge as he pulls his cock out and shoots all over Beau’s hole before pushing it back in. With his ass loaded up, Beau strokes his cock while Sean fingers him until Beau erupts all over his stomach.

A conventional closure: top comes first, on the bottom’s body; then the bottom comes, in his own hand or on his own body.

Fucking on a urinal, mensoom sink, or toilet tank is a fairly common stunt in gay porn — the first two especially transgressive (hence hot) because they are completely visible publicly. Like fucking in the open space of a mensroom is, but with the added attraction of a challenging athletic performance. (A fair number of mensroom furnishings have been reported as being wrecked in the filming of gay porn flicks. The bottom and the facilities both take a pounding in these fuck stunts.)

Bonus: Beau Butler displays himself. A just barely WordPressable performance showing off his muscle-hunk body right down to the base of his 8ʺ cock (clearly outlined in his pants):

(#7)

Butler seems to be generally labeled as versatile, but on the evidence of the films of his that I’ve seen discussed that should probably be versatile bottom (specifically, a bottom who does flip-fuck scenes). The man does love to be fucked.

A Leigh Rubin Bears in the Woods cartoon from a few years ago:

(#1)

A follow-up to my 11/1/19 posting “Bears in the Woods”, which had 5 cartoons on the theme of bears shitting in the woods, including a Bizarro that is similar in spirit to the Rubin above.

(Hat tip to Susan Fischer, who passed the cartoon in #1 on via Facebook.)

From the earlier posting:

(#2)

According to this cartoon, bears do indeed, as the idiom has it, shit in the woods, but not indiscriminately. Instead, there are designated defecation sites, alongside those facilities — gender-marked portable toilets — specifically for people to shit in the woods; the ones for bears, however, are open-defecation sites.

As it happens, bears have often been cartooned in the woods, especially when bent on defecation; the idiom, both wry and dirty, is irresistibly attractive to humorists.

In my 5/18/19 posting “Ostentatiously playful allusions”, there’s a section on the basis for the sylvursine defecation cartoons: the conventional speech-act idiom Does a bear shit in the woods? / Do bears shit in the woods? (and their variants), conveying assent or affirmation via the fact that the answer to the idiomatic question is a blazingly obvious Yes.

What #1 and #2 share is a sign marking a bathroom for bears — but there are no actual facilities there, only a spot for open defecation. In these cartoons, bears are assumed to be human enough to understand iconic signage and follow its instructions, but not enough to use bathroom facilities designed for humans. (The bears in some of the other cartoons are more sophisticated.)

Now it turns out that Rubin has visited the sylvursine defecation theme at least three other times, with decidedly anthropomorphic bears in each case.

The Three Bears. The bears from the Goldilocks story are highly anthropomorphic: they sit in chairs, eat porridge from bowls, sleep in beds. But it turns out that in their bathroom habits, they’ve preserved a certain nostalgie pour les bois:

(#3)

Bear Scat. A bear who’s mastered the art of the jazz vocal:

(#4)

NOAD gives four nouns scat, summarized here:

scat-1 ‘go away, leave’ (usually in the imperative)

scat-2 ‘scat singing’ (see below)

scat-3 ‘droppings’ (especially of carnovorous mammals)

scat-4 ‘a small silvery fish’ (of the coastal waters of the Indo-Pacific region); a common aquarium fish; the family Scatophagidae (‘shit eaters’, so-called because the fish are often found near sewage outlets)

The first three have nothing to do with one another etymologically; and the fourth is related to the third only through their Latin name of the fourth.

On scat singing, very briefly, from Wikipedia:

In vocal jazz, scat singing is vocal improvisation with wordless vocables, nonsense syllables or without words at all. In scat singing, the singer improvises melodies and rhythms using the voice as an instrument rather than a speaking medium.

The Aging Bear. If you’re a bear, you shit in the woods;, everybody knows that. But as you age, those weary bones and painful joints make it hard to get across the room fast, and harder still to make it to the woods in time:

(#5)

… In the woods, in the woods …

The One Big Happy strip from 5/28:

We all, from time to time, come across a word we haven’t experienced before (or didn’t register having experienced it), and just guess, often tacitly, at its approximate meaning as the world goes on around us. Little kids, having had much less linguistic experience, do this all the time; they pretty much have to.

To this end, they use similarities to words or parts of words they do know, and Ruthie is an especially analytic kid, keen on finding word-parts in unfamiliar material — plenty of examples in earlier OBH postings on this blog. In this case, the word is in fact straightforwardly analyzable into two familiar parts, and Ruthie gets that.

Oh, but what are those parts? Phonologically /pruf/ (a N spelled proof) and /rid/ (a BSE-form V spelled read).  No problem with the second, but there are several Ns proof; the compound proofread is an idiom with one of those Ns in it, but not the one that Ruthie detects.

Highlights from NOAD:

[idiomatic] verb proofread: [with object] read (written or printed material) and mark any errors: they must revise and proofread their work

noun proof: 1 [a] evidence or argument establishing or helping to establish a fact or the truth of a statement: you will be asked to give proof of your identity | this is not a proof for the existence of God. … 2 [a] Printing a trial impression of a page, taken from type or film and used for making corrections before final printing. …  3 the strength of distilled alcoholic liquor, relative to proof spirit taken as a standard of 100: [in combination]:  powerful 132-proof rum. ORIGIN Middle English preve, from Old French proeve, from late Latin proba, from Latin probare ‘to test, prove’.

The proof of proofread is 2a (‘testing’ proof ), and it’s a relatively rare noun tied to a specific technical domain of vocabulary. The proof of Ruthie’s proofread is 1a (‘proving’ proof); this proof is the much more common and everyday item, after all. So she thinks the compound means something like ‘read (something) for proof, (specifically) read writing from someone purporting to be its author for proof of authorship’ — a possible literal sense, but one not attested (the idiomatic sense trumps it). (There could also be a proofread ‘examine spirits to read (i.e., determine) their strength’.)

Testing vs. proving. The ambiguity of the Latin verb then persists in small corners of modern English, where  ‘testing’ proof and prove survive — as above, and in some idioms:

First, from Merriam-Webster online on the proof is in the pudding, the proof of the pudding, the proof of the pudding is in the eating / tasting:

Generally, the [idiomatic] expressions are used to say that the real worth, success, or effectiveness of something can only be determined by putting it to the test by trying or using it, appearances and promises aside — just as the best test of a pudding is to eat it.

Similarly in the idiom: exception that proves ‘tests’ the rule.

(Warning: high fecality content, which some may find unpleasant.)

Todays Zippy strip, in which Zippy is subjected to stoner / surfer verbal abuse:

(#1) Zippy and his surf iron

As usual, there’s a lot here — I admire Beavis’s one wave shy of a wipeout (see Mark Liberman’s 7/14/05 LLog posting “A few players short of a side” on the Snowclone of Foolishness {small quantity of essential items} short / shy of a {desirable collection}) and the laundry-musician pun in the title “Bleach Boy” — but I’ve picked out the mildly abusive expression iron my shorts for full-bore scrutiny.

From Wiktionary:

Phrase eat my shorts (idiomatic, chiefly US, vulgar) An irreverent rebuke or dismissal. Quotations:
— 1977, James P. Leary, The boys from the dome: folklore of a modern American male group, page 69: Notre Dame boys greeted one another with “Eat It” to be answered by “Eat It Raw” or “Eat a Big One” or “Eat My Shorts,” sometimes “Eat My Crusty Shorts.”
— 1988, Greg Matthews, The gold flake hydrant, page 232: Her eyes are telling me, “Eat my shorts, you precocious little fart.” I definitely haven’t made a friend.
— 1996, Douglas Rushkoff, Media virus!: hidden agendas in popular culture, page 186: For instance, Bart often expresses his irreverence toward authority on “The Simpsons” by exclaiming “Eat my shorts.”

Etymology: Popularized by [the tv show] The Simpsons, where Bart Simpson says “Eat my shorts!” as a running gag. Believed [AZ: by some] to have originated from [the movie] The Breakfast Club [1985], where Bender throws the same remark at Vernon.

Note that Wikipedia merely says, correctly, that the vulgar dismissive idiom was popularized by The Simpsons, not that it originated there; actual first cites of expressions are very often not the vehicles for their spread, as here. And it says, also with appropriate care, that the expression is believed to have originated from The Breakfast Club; but it supplies a substantially earlier cite (from 1977) showing that this belief is mistaken. Finally, Wikipedia refrains, again with appropriate caution, from claiming that the Simpsons use was a quotation from The Breakfast Club; accounts from the Simpsons staff indicate that that claim too is mistaken.

As it happens, there are at least two possible sources for the vulgar idiom, and either of them could have inspired a fresh coinage at any time, so that eat my shorts might have arisen independently many times. That runs against most people’s preference, or perhaps desire, for linguistic histories that move in a single (though perhaps tortuous) story line, though actual histories are very often much messier. In fact, multiple possible sources often influence one another, straightforwardly or subtly, so that the actual histories are murkier still. Bear all that in mind as I wade into the dirty stuff.

Two fecal understandings of shorts. The shorts in eat my shorts! might be

(A, the shit story) a euphemism for shit, in the vulgar dismissive idiom family eat (my) shit! (possibly connected to the vulgar dismissive idiom family eat it / me!)

But it’s also true that shorts are undershorts ‘underpants’, garments likely to be dirtied with skid marks (NOAD on the euphemistic compound noun skid mark: informal a fecal stain on the inside of a person’s underpants), so that eat my shorts! could be a fecal reference at two removes rather than one (the fecal reference made a bit more overt in the Notre Dame boys’ eat my crusty shorts). That is, the shorts in eat my shorts! might be

(B, the skid mark story) a reference to underpants dirtied by skid marks

The Mental Floss account. Assumes story A, is cautiously inclined towards a Breakfast Club origin. From the Mental Floss site, “8 Slang Terms from The Breakfast Club, Decoded”, by Angela Tung on 3/24/17:

4. EAT MY SHORTS: While this euphemism for “eat my shit” may seem quintessential Bart Simpson, it’s uttered by Bender in The Breakfast Club two years before The Simpsons makes its premiere on The Tracey Ullman Show. Even earlier is a (pretty funny) 1984 song called “Eat My Shorts” by comedian and radio personality Rick Dees.

The phrase comes full circle when on Futurama, Bender the robot — who, by the way, was named by show creator Matt Groening for The Breakfast Club’s John Bender — finds a Bart Simpson doll which says “Eat my shorts!” Bender obliges.

A possible side association. From my 2/17/19 posting “Eat it! The oral humiliation you deserve”:

[from GDoS] excl. eat it!: (… it is the penis) a general term of dismissal, disdain [so, a variant of dismissive eat / suck (my) dick / cock!]

GDoS asserts confidently that the it of eat it is the penis, and that might indeed have been its historical source, but speakers don’t know etymologies, nor should they be expected to, and some speakers report that they think the it refers to feces — in which case the eating is literal, not metaphorical, though the idiom does involve a specialization in the interpretation of the object of eat — and many report that they think the it refers to the penis, but also calls feces to mind. [so, a variant of dismissive eat (my) shit!]

Story B — my own reading — assumes that when Bart Simpson says shorts, the word straightforwardly means ‘underpants’, but that the word comes with all those associations that make it a source of both anxiety and vulgar humor among children (from “I see London, I see France, I see X’s underpants” to the marvel of Captain Underpants; see my 6/4/20 posting “I see London, I see France, I see Batman’s underpants”). The point is that eating someone’s underpants would be not only ridiculous, but also disgusting and therefore humiliating.

For what it’s worth, Bart Simpson says the phrase a number of times, sometimes in variants, and sometimes waves his clothed butt in the face of his audience, but seems not to have actually offered his shorts; he does, however, moon various targets, displaying his bare buttocks, and the catchphrase is paired with mooning in images on t-shirts etc., as here:

(#2) On the mooning gesture, see the first section of my 11/7/18 posting “Arousing the beast”

Finally, on its appearance in  The Simpsons. From the Simpsons wiki on “Eat my shorts!”:

The real history behind the phrase is that Nancy Cartwright, Bart’s voice actor, improvised the line during a table read. She first said it as a prank when she was in her high school marching band at Fairmont High School [in Kettering OH]. The band was supposed to chant, “Fairmont West! Fairmont West!” but instead she and the entire band chanted “Eat my shorts! Eat my shorts!”.

… There has been speculation that [instead of this history] Matt Groening got this phrase from the stoner rebel John Bender in The Breakfast Club.

Speculation, I assume, from people who hope for a single story line in phrase histories.

(Largely about male prostitution, so distasteful to many, but not, I think, actually over any lines.)

A stone solid pro, a street hustling boy, plying his trade for a better grade of customers, comfortably indoors, in his sexy Water Briefs, at a pool bar:

(#1) [from the Daily Jocks e-mailing of 8/30; ad copy:] Skip through the beach club line ups and go straight to the pool bar in the new PUMP! Water Briefs. The wide waistband on this low-cut cut brief gives you comfort at the waistline. The customised multi layered leg elastic offers the ultimate support and accentuates the butt.

You don’t see an impudent cruise face like — not his real name — Joe Dallesandro’s every day. For the use of his body and his company, you pay $400 (cash) an hour (extra for a few special services), plus the cost of a hotel room at the beach club’s hotel and the expense of a background check on you (he’ll give you references from his regular clients, and, as part of the background check, he has ways of getting references from your previous escorts — JD’s an independent contractor, and a sharp businessman; don’t let that boyish face fool you).

Most high-end hustlers make contact with new johns electronically, but, having come up from working the street as a sassy teen — risky  but thrilling — JD still prefers the physicality of face-to-face negotiation. That also allows him to show his skills at figuring out your desires and fashioning himself into the man who will satisfy them. The cruise of death is just an opening gambit, a kind of best guess as to what you need; experience tells him that most men, especially successful and powerful men, want to be dominated and used.

The briefs. PUMP!’s Water Briefs come in red/navy, blue/green, coral, and black (they’re handsome indeed, though outrageously costly); their features include UPF 50+ protection (no sunburned crotches!), a drawstring (for cinching or relaxing), and white piping accentuating the cup (to draw attention to your package). The latter two features are visible in this front view of the red/navy number:

(#2) Alas, no photo seems to be available of this view with a face, much less the face of the model who plays JD (that model does, however, get a sulky-surly photo in which he’s reclining in a Water Brief)

And you can dance to it. The song for the occasion:

Street Hustling Boy

Well, what can a hot boy do
When he’s down and unemployed?
Then he’s got no other choice
But to get work as a street hustling boy

Ah yes, the strains of Richards/Jagger, “Street Fighting Man”, drastically altered for my purposes. The original, quite different in tone and message from mine:

Street Fighting Man

Well, what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band?
‘Cause in sleepy London town
There’s just no place for a street fighting man

(The music, on the other hand, just commands you to riot, or to explode into sex. You can watch a live performance of the song, at Madison Square Garden in 2003, here; notice the wonderful Charlie Watts — who died just a week ago today — in the midst of the uproar, composedly underpinning the whole business with his drumming.)

(Background from Wikipedia:

“Street Fighting Man” is a song by English rock band the Rolling Stones featured on their 1968 album Beggars Banquet. Called the band’s “most political song”)

Rent boys. There’s a Page on male prostitution on this blog, with a lot about stud hustlers as fictional figures, many of them glamorous and arousing — JD’s milieu. But from here on out it’s all actual rent boys, who lead challenging lives, coping with them with hugely varying degrees of grace and control.

From my 11/8/12 posting “Toga toga toga”, a section on

101 Rent Boys [Uncut] [produced/directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato] … a 2000 documentary film that explores the West Hollywood hustler scene [along Santa Monica Blvd.]

(#3) [AZ in 2012:] The film is, by turns, thought-provoking, funny, bleak, moving, and disturbing.

Then, two examples of the art of street photography, taking street hustlers as their subjects:

(#4) Tough street boy (photographer not identified); my title: “But It Pays the Bills”

This remarkable picture shows up in a number of Pinterest albums, where it is of course not sourced, and Google Images has been of no help.

(#5) NYC street boy photographed by William Gale Gedney (photo from Gedney’s 1955-89 repository at Duke Univ.): braving it out, but oh so vulnerable

Two sparks thrown off by these photos: from #5, on the photographer Gedney; from #4, on the idiom of which pay the bills is the central part.

Gedney. From Wikipedia:

William Gale Gedney (October 29, 1932 – June 23, 1989) was an American documentary and street photographer. It wasn’t until after his death that his work gained momentum and is now widely recognized. He is best known for his series on rural Kentucky, and series on India, San Francisco and New York shot in the 1960s and 1970s.

In his lifetime, he did get a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968, which the curator described as a study of “people living precariously, under difficulty”. In general, his work shows keen observation and great sympathy with his subjects.

However, he was inclined to be a loner and an outsider, staying to himself and not fitting easily into the social worlds around him (consequently failing to advance himself in the academic and artistic worlds of his day); instead he single-mindedly devoted himself to his work. Pretty much the picture of a neuroatypical person.

Wikipedia fails to mention that he was (secretly) gay (and apparently pretty promiscuous, as so many of us were at the time), or that he died at 56 from complications of AIDS; he was one of the lost generation of gay men, my generation (except that Jacques and I inexplicably survived).

One collection of his photos, A Time of Youth: San Francisco 1966–1967, was finally published by Duke University Press in 2021.

Paying the bills. The title “But It Pays the Bills” is the second clause, C2, of a two-clause coordination, in which the first clause, C1, describes the job that pays the bills. C1 describes the drawbacks of the job — the minuses of working, in this case, as a stud hustler: it’s illegal, highly stigmatized, physically and emotionally demanding, sometimes dangerous, sometimes distasteful. C2, introduced by concessive but, announces the major plus: you get paid for it.

(C1 can be omitted if its content can be inferred from context. Suppose I am at work, collecting elephant dung at the zoo, when you come along, observe the scene, and raise a critical eyebrow at me. To which I can respond, “But it pays the bills”.)

As you can see from this brief discussion, the VP pay the bills might be the crucial part, but the idiom is clearly much more complex than that. Somehow, nobody seems to mention the but, though it’s in everybody’s examples, as in Wiktionary:

pay the bills: (idiomatic, of a job) To provide enough income to sustain one’s lifestyle. Being a dentist isn’t so glamorous, but it pays the bills.

Two further examples, getting more and more antipathetic to the writer’s job:

(invented example set from usingenglish.com (for learners)) I don’t much enjoy my job as a coal miner/pole dancer/bear wrestler/etc., but it pays the bills.

(#6) A t-shirt from Zazzle

And then another musical interlude, in Erykah Badu’s “Otherside of the Game” (1997) (often listed as “Other Side of the Game”) — see its Wikipedia entry. With the first line “Work ain’t honest but it pays the bills”, meaning ‘the work [as a drug dealer] isn’t honest, but it pays the bills’. (You can watch the YouTube video here.)

Finally, saved for last, a Thought Catalog piece, “I Sell Sex For Money On Craigslist And I Want To Stop, But It Pays The Bills” by [male author] Anonymous on 9/25/13. Yes, a stud hustler — but a modern electronic one, not an old-fashioned street hustling boy.

(Astonishingly, this silly posting will devolve into references to male pubes (NOAD entertains both /pjúbìz/ and /pjubz/ as pronunciations, by the way, so do as thou wilt) and photos of hunky young men stripped down to them, so it’s not to everyone’s taste.)

It is once again Negation Day, a festival for semanticists, also customarily the day for the annual convention of No Joke, aka the Society for Language Play.

This year, the semanticists will gather en masse at the Square of Opposition, where a statue of Larry Horn, caught in mid-smile, will be unveiled; and in collaboration with the No Joke meeting, there will be staged performances of Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic” sketch. Then, as usual: a clinic for those suffering from overnegation and undernegation; and a bazaar where shoppers can rummage for negative polarity items and reinforcements for their everyday negatives. (Just Don’t Do It: because of ugly incidents in the past, metalinguistic negatives have been banned from the festival site.)

From my 9/10/18 posting “Negation Day”:

I let it slip past, but yesterday was Negation Day, 9/9 (a little bilingual joke), which ought to be celebrated by linguists. Certainly it should not go uncelebrated.

The catch phrase for the day is, of course, “No, No, Nanette” [digression here with material on the musical comedy and movie] … In the French chamber-music version: “Non, Non, Nonet”.

Well, the “French version” will work only if Nonet is pronounced like English nonet (or a hypothetical French nonette), and not to rhyme (in French) with the name Monet (though Claude Monet and his rhyming artistic cousin Claude Nonet will become significant later in this posting). So it’s not much of a joke; my apologies for the AMZ of 2018.

Background. The higher-number chamber ensembles got their Italian names more or less directly as technical borrowings from Latin (with some adjustments for Italian phonology): 6 sestetto, 7 settetto, 8 ottetto, 9 nonetto. Same for English (which takes its musical vocabulary largely from Italian), but without the Italian masc.sg. affix –o: 6 sextet, 7 septet, 8 octet, 9 nonet. From NOAD:

noun nonet [pronounced like the phrase no net]: [a] a group of nine people or things, especially musicians. [b] a musical composition for nine voices or instruments [a metonymical development from sense a].

French, after beginning with various masculine patterns — 2 duo, 3 trio, 4 quatuor, 5 quintette (yes, masc. le quintette) — settles into the derivational affix –uor — 6 sextuor, 7 septuor, 8 octuor — and then just grinds to a halt: no nonuor, no nonette (French does have a word nonnette, but it has to do with nuns, literally or figuratively). After that, you leave the world of chamber ensembles and enter the world of chamber orchestras; what you have then is a petite symphonie (or a serenade or whatever for 9, or more, instruments). In English and Italian, you don’t cross that line until you get to 10 instruments. But eventually there has to be a line, or we’d be talking about 25-instrument chamber ensembles and music written for them.

Two actual nonets (sense b, a kind of musical composition), by Johan Kvandal, alongside a Mozart serenade for an octet (cf. sense a, a group of players), on a Norwegian Wind Ensemble recording:

(#1)

Then, still in the world of serious uses of English nonet (but in playful fashion), this book of 9-line poems for children:

(#2)

Now come the jokes. First, the inevitable English pun playing on “No, No, Nanette”. From the Chamber Music America site, a 9/16/19 concert “No, No, Nonet!” presented by Chamber Music Hawaii, with the program:

J.S. Bach, arr. Schweitzer – Prelude & Fugue in E minor, “The Wedge”; Knudåge Riisager – Divertimento, Op. 9;  Franz Lachner – Nonet in F major

Then a potential groaner pun on “No, No, Nanette”, which depends on your knowing that there’s a composer named Nono: Luigi Nono, who’s about as far from the frivolity of “No, No, Nanette” as you can get — a fact that would make Nono nonet even more absurd than if he were a composer of operettas.

From Wikipedia:

Luigi Nono (29 January 1924 – 8 May 1990) was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music.

… The world première of Il canto sospeso [The Suspended Song] (1955–56) for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra brought Nono international recognition and acknowledgment as a successor to Webern. “Reviewers noted with amazement that Nono’s canto sospeso achieved a synthesis — to a degree hardly thought possible — between an uncompromisingly avant-garde style of composition and emotional, moral expression (in which there was an appropriate and complementary treatment of the theme and text)”.

… This work, regarded by Swiss musicologist Jürg Stenzl as one of the central masterpieces of the 1950s, is a commemoration of the victims of Fascism, incorporating farewell letters written by political prisoners before execution.

Nono did write chamber music, but I don’t believe he ever wrote a nonet. Pity. (Well, someone could invent one, with a title and backstory, if only for the sake of a joke. On the other hand, the agonized character of so much of his music makes it hard to play around with it.)

Finally, there’s a title that’s certainly a joke; it might be a (very distant) pun on “No, No, Nanette”, or — much more likely — it might merely involve the pleasure of repeating /ˌnoˈnɛt/ in no net nonet ‘(a) nonet (played) with no net’. From Travis Rogers, Jr.’s The Jazz Owl blog, “Working without a Net … Lucas Pino’s “No Net Nonet”” of  7/22/15 (a jazz nonet):

(#2) Note: ((work) with) no net, a variant of the (metaphorical) idiomatic phrase work without a net ‘to take action that’s risky or doesn’t rely on safeguards’ (from circus entertainers performing dangerous feats without benefit of safety gear)

Bonus: the anti-Nono and the anti-Nono. Not merely non-Nono (not Nono) but the polar opposite, the anti-Nono. Some composer of light-hearted music with a simple, conventional structure. Nominate your favorite.

But then there’s the anti-Nono. That presumably would be Sisi. There are several real-world candidates here, my favorite being the Empress Elisabeth of Austria. From Wikipedia:

Elisabeth (born Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria; 24 December 1837 – 10 September 1898) was Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary by marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph I. She was born into the royal Bavarian House of Wittelsbach. Nicknamed Sisi …, she enjoyed an informal upbringing before marrying Emperor Franz Joseph I at the age of sixteen.

No, no, Nonet /ˌnoˈne/. Still further afield, to the little-known photographer Claude Nonet (rhymes with Monet), whose great subject has been the male pubes. From a Facebook exchange yesterday between CN and a gay friend of his who posts under the pseudonym Gravy Noodle (originally Wavy Gravy Noodle Bar, but that was way too long). Gravy Noodle is wonderfully extravagant in manner and enthusiastic about Nonet’s borderline-pornographic work, but sometimes twits his friend by affecting to be strait-laced about the exposure of the male body. This led to an exchange I’ve titled:

No, No, Nonet

CN: “Your Memories”: I wanted to share some of my hot-guy photos from a few years ago, but the sharing page just froze up so I couldn’t do anything at all with it. Maybe routine FB weirdness, maybe FB saving you all from indecent material, who knows.

GN: Indecent material?! Oh no, no, Nonet! I may have to reevaluate our friendship based on this revelation.

CN: The photos were cropped, but one — fetch the smelling salts! — included a bit of pubic hair (meanwhile, from the gallery, loud cries of “Where are the PENISES??”). I’m sorry if destroying your pubic innocence would threaten our friendship, but an artist must respect his materials: the male pubes are my poppy field near Argenteuil, my haystacks, my waterlilies.

From my 4/2/17 posting “Corey Saucier”, an early Nonet work:

(#3) “a pubic hair cock tease (also conveying power via his muscular pecs and neck)”

From my 5/20/20 posting “Minimalist, and sometimes antibacterial”, one of Claude Nonet’s recent masterworks:

(#4) An advanced pubic hair cock tease (one-sided), plus fiercely erect nipples; winner of the 2019 Prix de Giverny charnelle

(Men’s underwear and its symbolic values, frank talk about male sexuality, but otherwise not over lines; use your judgment.)

Powerfully eruptive, yet respectful of his anatomy: the vaunted twin virtues of Krakatoa underwear for men, especially the company’s Vesuvius collection (which is, presumably, doubly volcanic in symbolic power), all with aggressively full front pouches, designed (as the ad copy has it) to respect a man’s anatomy while preparing him for life’s activities. The goods:

(#1) Krakatoa’s Vesuvius Collection: trunks, boxer briefs, and briefs in intense blue and intense red (power colors) and in black and (for the trunks) saturated gray (strongly masculine “just plain guy” colors), with those volcanic pouches all around

These two volcanos and this underwear will take us many places. But first, two shots of Krakatoa underwear (from lines other than Vesuvius) being modeled by actual men (accompanied by the ad copy “Put a volcano in your pants”).

(#3) Long boxer in intense green

(#4) Trunk in saturated gray

Not just well-filled pouches, but volcanic — eruptive — well-filled pouches, in wording that allows for the possibility that those spacious pouches would facilitate ejaculation: if you want to, go for it, man, ejaculate in your underwear, come in your pants, nothing wrong with that (and in fact, in the proper place, there isn’t). Promissory note: I’ll get to underpants eruptions in a while.

The associative neighborhood of Krakatoa underwear. On Facebook recently, I noted that I’d come across men’s underwear from a company called Krakatoa and was considering posting on it. And garnered responses that merely played on volcanic eruption (Jeff Goldberg: Sounds like a blast) or exploited the possible sexual innuendo (Chris Ambidge: Big bangs imminent!). In a sequence, Aric Olnes started with the innuendo (Your tease is erupting with possibilities), to which Ann Burlingham punned (lava it alone), leaving it to Timothy Riddle to tie the whole thing together with This whole conversation is going east of Java… — a summary that incorporates a play on the movie title Krakatoa, East of Java (more on this below) and a play on the idiom go south ((NOAD) informal, mainly North American fall in value, deteriorate, or fail).

The associations of Krakatoa are those of volcanos in general — eruption, explosion, spewing; great power; noise; fire; flows (of magma); death and destruction — clouds (of ash and debris); unpredictability — with, for Krakatoa specifically, a spectacular eruption, incredible power, a gigantic noise (literally, heard round the world), and enormous clouds (darkening the skies all over the globe and affecting the world’s weather for years). Only a couple of these associations — spectacular eruption and great power — can be easily exploited to sell underwear, and Krakatoa the underwear company works these to the fullest.

Krakatoa’s audience and how it proposes to reach it. Most of the underwear that comes by on this blog is transparently homowear, with a primary audience of gay men. I have, however, posted some on what you might call machowear, specifically communicating toughness, and also sold primarily to gay men. And in passing on the neutral family-guy underwear of mass-market Y-front white briefs and plain boxer shorts. Even, in my 9/5 posting “Masculinity messaging from Sweden”, on men’s high-end premium underwear that is explicitly and conspicuously framed like the mass-market stuff:

The [Ron Dorff] company’s main product line for men is sportswear that is absolutely, solidly masculine, but in remarkably unobtrusive, understated ways; the company offers masterpieces of conspicuous unconspicuousness. Apparently designed to offer no flash of peacock self-display — nothing macho — and no erotic appeal whatsoever.

Krakatoa sells what you might call guywear, for straight men with some swagger, men who want to feel powerful, also men who hate to buy underwear, can’t be bothered with fussy stuff like that. For such men, the company proposes to harness the symbolic values of the volcano — the eruption and the power and even the noise. From the “What’s Krakatoa?” page of the company’s website:

In 1883, volcano Krakatoa in Indonesia erupted with absolute power, pulverizing 6 cubic miles of island into the atmosphere and changing the weather patterns around the globe for almost a decade. It’s considered the most powerful blast ever heard by mankind and the biggest eruption ever recorded.

While its shockwave circled Earth 3 times and the 200 Megaton explosion created 100-foot-high waves with devastating consequences, the dust from Krakatoa’s eruption had a beautiful side-effect: It created incredible sunsets for years around the planet.

We built Krakatoa because we believe power and beauty can be translated into sensible personal garments that are powerful in their execution and beautiful in their craftsmanship.

We also think eruptions and loud noises are a typical guy thing and a perfect name for the most important garment in a man’s wardrobe.

… The Krakatoa Anti-Gravity Briefs – Vesuvius Collection combines the most modern technical fabric with a full front pouch for a comfort-focused connection between materials and fit.

Designed with your life’s activities in mind, it delivers softness and support from the first wear, so you can power through your day fearlessly with a piece of art in your pants.

… personal garments that are powerful in their execution … you can power through your day fearlessly …[and, yes] eruptions and loud noises are a typical guy thing …

So you, typical guy, can be free to erupt and make loud noises in, and through, your Krakatoa underwear. With a song in your heart and a piece of art in your pants. Let’s hear a cheer for Krakatoa!

A bit more on the volcano. From Wikipedia:

(#5) Indonesia as a whole; within it, the Sunda Strait and the island of Krakatau

Krakatoa [also transcribed Krakatau] is a caldera in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Indonesian province of Lampung. The caldera is part of a volcanic island group (Krakatoa Archipelago) comprising four islands: two of which, Lang and Verlaten, are remnants of a previous volcanic edifice destroyed in eruptions long before the famous 1883 eruption; another, Rakata, is the remnant of a much larger island destroyed in the 1883 eruption.

In 1927, a fourth island, Anak Krakatau, or “Child of Krakatoa”, emerged from the caldera formed in 1883. There has been new eruptive activity since the late 20th century, with a large collapse causing a deadly tsunami in December 2018.

… The most notable eruptions of Krakatoa culminated in a series of massive explosions over 26–27 August 1883, which were among the most violent volcanic events in recorded history.

(#6) Cover of Simon Winchester’s 2005 book

… The 1883 eruption ejected approximately 25 km3 (6 cubic miles) of rock. The cataclysmic explosion was heard 3,600 km (2,200 mi) away in Alice Springs, Australia, and on the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,780 km (2,970 mi) to the west.

According to the official records of the Dutch East Indies colony, 165 villages and towns were destroyed near Krakatoa, and 132 were seriously damaged. At least 36,417 people died, and many more thousands were injured, mostly from the tsunamis that followed the explosion. The eruption destroyed two-thirds of the island of Krakatoa

And the 1968 movie, from Wikipedia:

Krakatoa, East of Java is a 1968 American disaster film starring Maximilian Schell and Brian Keith. During the 1970s, the film was re-released under the title Volcano.

The story is loosely based on events surrounding the 1883 eruption of the volcano on the island of Krakatoa, with the characters engaged in the recovery of a cargo of pearls from a shipwreck perilously close to the volcano.

… Famously, the movie’s title is inaccurate: Krakatoa actually is west of Java, but the movie’s producers thought that “East” was a more atmospheric word, as Krakatoa is located in the Far East. [note: words chosen for their associations, rather than for accuracy]

Using the name Krakatoa. And now, for a while, we leave the world of Krakatoa the volcano and Krakatoa the underwear, to look at a broad sampling of other applications of the name (no doubt there are many more).

Hot sauce. From a HotSauce.com site review of CaJohns Fiery Foods Co.’s Krakatoa! Pure Red Savina Mash Hot Sauce:

(#7)

… be warned – it can cause an eruption of fire and flavor to rival the obliteration of Krakatoa, an Indonesian island, in 1883. From Ohio. Red Savina [a variety of hot pepper], Habanero chiles, and vinegar.

An Indonesian restaurant. Named after one of the country’s most famous features: the Krakatoa Indonesian Restaurant in Hollywood FL (in Broward County, between Miami and Fort Lauderdale):

(#8)

A bike servicing shop. Maybe an allusion to the power of racing bikes and mountain bikes.

(#9)

[ad for:] Krakatoa Bikes [in Fairfax CA (in Marin County, home of the Marin Museum of Bicycling)] was founded in 2008 by Olympian Athlete Miguel Figueroa. Whether you’re an occasional rider or a serious pro, our store brings you the collections, the knowledge, and the passion you need for your next adventure. We service all kinds of bikes from Road Bikes to Ebikes. Suspension Services on Fox, Marzocchi, Rock Shox and more. Mountain Bike specialists since 2008. Call us today to schedule your next service.

A live music bar in Aberdeen (Scotland). Maybe because the music is hot and the bar itself is steamy. A Tripadvisor review says it’s the original live music bar in Aberdeen.

A game. Probably because of the danger of death as you flee. According to the Steam site on the game:

Krakatoa is a single player Action-Adventure/Survival Horror game. Attempt to escape Siren Head by surviving its onslaught of attacks. Integrated with 3D audio you’ll need to listen closely, act quickly and be aware of your surroundings to stay alive.

Notes on coming in your pants. Postponed from the beginning of this posting. From GDoS:

verb-1 come: (abbr. [Standard English] come to a climax) to achieve orgasm; of a man, to ejaculate [1st cite 1599 Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing] [then variants in which this verb is reanalyzed as a denominal, derived from come ‘semen’: cum, jizz, cream]

come in one’s pants to behave in an exggerated, over-excited manner; the image is of extreme premature ejaculation [this is the figurative phrase; lovely cite: They had a choco-sprinkle-cream made you come in your pants.]

And then there’s the literal phrase, with head verb come ‘ejaculate’. The literal phrase is consistent with spontaneous ejaculation (in sleep, by hair-trigger response to a sexual stimulus, or by premature ejaculation during sex play); and with masturbatory ejaculation (masturbation either of oneself or by someone else). It’s also consistent with ejaculation in one’s (under)pants alone — as in a common variant of masturbation — or with ejaculation in one’s  trousers or jeans, usually (but not necessarily) through underpants.

On the health question: from the Young Men’s Health site, “Is it safe to ejaculate in my underwear?” on 5/17/19:

Thank you for your question. Many guys wonder about this, so you are not alone. The good news is there are no health risks to ejaculating in your underwear. The downside is your underwear will feel wet for a while, and then it will likely feel a bit stiff (like a starched shirt) when it dries. The stain and stiffness comes out when you wash them. Many guys find it easier and more comfortable to use a towel when they masturbate but ejaculating in your underwear is fine too.​

So: masturbate away, happily — but in private, of course. Masturbating publicly, even surreptitiously in your pants, is creepy, and against the law as well.

Note: strippers who see themselves as performers rather than sex workers warn their customers sternly against coming in their pants: facilitating ejaculation isn’t something they have on offer, and if they’re giving you a lap dance, it’s messy for them as well as you — but they’re wearing a costume that they need to protect, and they’re going on to other customers after you. In any case, you’ll probably get barred from the strip joint for life.

Finally, the lame Come-In-Pants Joke, which can be found in a number of variants. Two of them:

The annual Premature Ejaculation Society dinner will be held on Friday night. No dress code – just come in your pants!

When you don’t know what to wear to the premature ejaculation symposium, so you just come in your pants.

Notes on fleeing from a volcano. Here we shift from Krakatoa in the year 1883 — fleeing is hopeless — to Vesuvius in the year 79, where quick thinking could get you out of Pompeii or Herculaneum. From a Wired Classic (a republication of an earlier story, from September 2020), “How to Escape From an Erupting Volcano: If you had been in Pompeii in 79 AD, you might have tried to hunker down or escape by sea. This would be a mistake. But there is a way to safety.” by Cody Cassidy (a piece in which we get to see uses of the verb vitrify and the noun vitrification — not things that happen very often):

Let’s say you were visiting the Roman town of Pompeii on the morning of August 24, 79 AD. And let’s say you arrived sometime between the hours of 9 and 10 am. That should give you enough time to explore the port town and maybe even grab a loaf of bread at the local bakery … But it would also put you in Pompeii in time to experience a 5.9 magnitude earthquake, the first of many, and watch the black cloud rise from Mount Vesuvius as the mountain began to erupt 1.5 million tons of molten rock per second and release 100,000 times the thermal energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. All while you were standing a mere 6 miles away.

Your situation would seem challenging – but, surprisingly, not hopeless! When I emailed Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Naples Federico II, asking if any Pompeiians survived the eruption, he wrote back to say that many did. “But likely only those who took immediate action.”

Unfortunately, instead of immediately evacuating, some Pompeiians took shelter from the falling ash. This may seem prudent, but it is a mistake. Buy that bread. And get it to go.

… Depending on its composition, lava ranges from 10,000 to 100 million times as viscous as water. This means even the runniest molten rock has the viscosity of room temperature honey. Unless you’re on a very steep slope, you can generally outrun it. Stationary objects like houses can be flattened by these fiery rivers, but “usually people can move out of the way,” says Stephen Self, a volcanologist at UC Berkeley.

Instead, it’s the magma beneath the mountain, and its precise composition, that should deeply concern you.

… When I asked Petrone where the survivors of Pompeii went, he wrote that there’s evidence of successful escapes to both the north and south. However, he suggests you run north toward Naples – and toward the eruption. He says the road between Pompeii and Naples was well maintained, and the written records of those who survived suggest that most of the successful escapees went north – while most of the bodies of the attempted escapees (who admittedly left far too late) have been found to the south.

But if you do run north, you’ll need to move quickly, because you’ll pass through the small Roman resort town of Herculaneum on your way to Naples – and Herculaneum is hit by the first pyroclastic flow.

Herculaneum sits barely 4 miles east of the volcanic vent, but for the first few hours of the eruption the prevailing winds largely spare it from most of the ash and pumice. Unfortunately, when Vesuvius first taps into the deeper magma and develops its first pyroclastic flow, the heated gas and ash will move directly into Herculaneum and kill everyone almost instantly.

Archeologists have found scorch marks in [Herculaneum] that suggest the cloud may have been as hot as 930 degrees Fahrenheit, and because its victims were encased in negative spaces of ash, archeologists can see their final, frozen poses. These poses show almost no signs of the boxer-like defensive stance typically taken in extreme heat, which suggests to Petrone that the victims in Herculaneum may have been killed so quickly that they did not even consciously register discomfort. Petrone even found a glassy piece of brain-matter in the skull of one Herculaneum victim, suggesting the cloud heated this person’s brain so quickly it vitrified. Nevertheless, you can avoid vitrification if you follow these instructions carefully.

(In the world of turning into glass or a glass-like substance, there’s both an intransitive verb vitrify, inchoative in meaning, as in When the wave of superheated air reached Cicero, his brain vitrified instantly; and a transitive verb vitrify, causative in meaning, as in When the wave of superheated air reached Cicero, it vitrified his brain.)

… or, The Grim therapist ‘therapist for the Grim (Reaper)’: today’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon, with its compounding of two cartoon memes, Grim Reaper and Psychiatrist”

(#1) The crucial element in the joke: the (normally metaphorical) idiom skeleton in the closet — here understood literally (in a world where Grim Reapers live)

Not the first Grim Reaper + Psychiatrist meme compound on this blog: from my 4/13/17 posting “Three more reapings”, this Bizarro cartoon in #1 there:

(#2)

Somewhere, there is probably a Grim Reaper + Psychiatrist cartoon in which the Grim Reaper is the therapist, rather than the patient.

The idiom. First from OED2 (this subentry, in its entirety, from over a hundred years ago):

1. b. a skeleton in the closet, a skeleton in the cupboard, etc.: A secret source of shame or pain to a family or person. Brought into literary use by Thackeray, but known to have been current at an earlier date.
1845 W. M. Thackeray Punch in East in Wks. (1886) XXVI. 112 There is a skeleton in every house.
1855 W. M. Thackeray Newcomes II. xvii. 165 Some particulars regarding the Newcome family, which will show us that they have a skeleton or two in theirclosets, as well as their neighbours.
1859 W. Collins Queen of Hearts I. 182 Our family had a skeleton in the cupboard.
1881 E. J. Worboise Sissie ix She regretted having ever unveiled for her benefit the family skeleton.
1883 Harper’s Mag. Dec. 51/1 A household that..possessed no closeted skeleton.

The Wikipedia entry has more detail about the import of the idiom, plus an antedating:

an undisclosed fact about someone which, if revealed, would damage perceptions of the person; It evokes the idea of someone having had a human corpse concealed in their home so long that all its flesh had decomposed to the bone. … It is known to have been used as a phrase, at least as early as November 1816, in the monthly British journal The Eclectic Review, page 468.

The idiom has served as the basis for an enormous number of political cartoons, like this one:

(#3) Cartoon by L.M. Glackens, published in Puck magazine, 1/3/1912

But it’s also a favorite for gag cartoons, like this Gahan Wilson from 2003:

(#4)

(Substantial section on English syntax and semantics, but even that is about raunchy sexual vocabulary — so it’s pretty much wall to wall about sex between men, in street language, with photos: absolutely inappropriate for kids or the sexually modest)

What got me into this was the cover of a CockyBoys gay porn DVD Flipping Out (#1 below, after the fold), showing two men engaged in the variety of anal intercourse known as Asian Cowboy. More descriptively, Squatting Cowboy: the receptive man rides the insertive man’s penis roughly the way a cowboy rides his horse, by sitting on it — in this case, from a squatting position. In plain Cowboy, the receptive guy lowers himself onto his ride while kneeling, so in more descriptive terminology, that’s Kneeling Cowboy.

I was struck by the photo because the Cowboy sex positions hold a special resonance for me, and because I’d been looking for Cowboy illustrations in which the insertive guy is sitting up (in a chair or on a sofa), a position that invites the men to kiss, the way my man Jacques and I did when we enjoyed Cowboying together. The cover of Flipping Out gives me just what I was looking for, in an especially attractive and wonderfully intimate composition of bodies.

Then, as a linguistic bonus, there’s the verb to flip-fuck, played with in the DVD’s title.

Flipped Out fucking. The DVD (directed by Jake Jaxson; I haven’t been able to find a release date), with 4 flip-fuck episodes: Alex Mecum + Jack Hunter, Jacen Zhu + Jack Hunter, Josh Moore + Ricky Roman, Ashton Summers + Calvin Banks

(#1) Ricky Roman riding Josh Moore’s dick; they can smell each other’s breaths as they prepare to kiss (squatting gives the guy getting fucked the feeling of floating on his fucker’s cock, but it can be hard on the thigh and calf muscles — which is why Roman is steadying himself with one hand on the chair and resting his knee against Moore’s shoulder, while Moore is holding Roman’s ankle)

A more spontaneous moment, from the actual DVD; you can see that the men are fucking in a chair in front of a big uncurtained window:

(#2) Ecstatic faces on both of them

And then, since this is a flip-fuck flick — I’m sorry, the phrase was inevitable — a screen shot of Roman fucking Moore, but doggie-style:

(#3) Doggie and missionary seem to be the everyday fuck positions for male couples who are into fucking

Background on this blog. My 8/25/21 posting “Sexual notes from 6/5” combined a posting on my man Jacques’s death day — and my raunchy recollections of getting lovingly Cowboy-fucked by him — with a posting about Asian Cowboy and its variants. The illustration there of Asian — Squatting — Cowboy:

(#4) [from caption:] an especially intimate photo — the men, similar in body types and presentations, though contrasting in race, are about to kiss — and very nicely composed; the fuckhole appears to be floating on his fucker’s cock

The fucker here is supine (though with his head raised some), which means that his hole has to scissor his body forward to kiss him. Things are much easier when the fucker is sitting up, as in #1.

Here ends the visual portion of the program. On to the verbal portion.

The title. Titles of porn flicks make a topic all their own. Some are baldly descriptive (Bareback Hospital Orgy, which entertains me enormously, I’m not sure why), often using raw language (Cum Whores); some are clever in one way or another, often just by using a formulaic expression with a sexual pun in it (Cocked and Loaded). Flipping Out uses the idiom flip out, but just to allude to flip-fucking, which is the actual theme of the DVD. From NOAD:

verb flip out: suddenly lose control or become very angry: she would have flipped out if someone had done this to her.

The image of losing control during sex might be in there somewhere, but mostly, I think, it’s just a way to use the verb flip in the title.

Specialized vocabulary. The first thing to say about to flip-fuck ‘to alternate acting in the insertive role in anal sex between men’ is that it seems not not have appeared in any dictionary assembled by lexicographers, including GDoS, which casts a very wide net on slang, and Sheidlower’s The F Word. Sheidlower does have the adj./adv. flipping, a chiefly British euphemism for exclamatory (not sexual) fucking (this item, might, of course, contribute to enjoyment of the DVD’s title).

The second thing to say is that this lexical lacuna surely isn’t an accident. The fact is that in real life, flip-fucking is not unknown, but seems to be rare. It’s not a thing, as they say. The cocksucking counterpart to flip-fucking, on the other hand — called trading blow jobs — is a commonplace. Not universal among gay men, but certainly commonplace, a routine way to manage “you get me off, I’ll get you off” (in 69ing, the two of you manage this simultaneously, but at the cost of seriously divided attention, while in trading blow jobs, doing things sequentially, each of you is more focused).

The place where flip-fucking is a thing is gay porn. In #1, “everybody gets fucked in this one!”, and fully democratic fucking is a theme in a whole subgenre of gay porn. From my 9/15/20 posting “Tom of Finland at 100”:

It’s all extravagant fantasy, but also a celebration of gay male desire and affiliation in all of its forms, and so it has provided reassurance to untold numbers of gay men who scarcely resemble the fantasy sexually heroic figures of ToF — we are, variously, indetectable in the straight world and effeminate and dorky and little-dicked and horse-dicked and insecure and out-and-proud and full of shame — but can find in these figures validation of their desires and practices (notably, receptive anal intercourse: Real Men Take It Up the Ass).

Meanwhile, flip-fucking  shows a whole lot of fucking, a whole lot of dick for the viewers to enjoy. So you get a lot of it in gay porn, not so much in real life. And to flip-fuck ends up being part of the specialized vocabulary of gay porn.

Syntactic and semantic notes.

The central item. (a) intr. flip-fuck ‘to alternate acting in the insertive role in anal sex between men’:  Harry and Joe flip-fucked; The two boys flip-fucked; Guys were flip-fucking in the mensroom; The staff were flip-fucking right there in the office

This is a plain intransitive, with no non-SU arguments. The subject is plural and are understood to be engaging in this sexual activity in pairs.

The abbreviated item. (b) intr. flip, the clipped variant of (a): Joe and Harry flipped; The two boys flipped; Guys were flipping in the mensroom; The staff were flipping right there in the office

This variant requires sufficient context to prepare the audience for the sexual sense of the verb flip, as opposed to its many other senses.

The oblique-object intransitive. (c) intr. flip-fuck, with an OO marked by the preposition with. Joe flip-fucked with Harry. Of the two participants in the act of flip-fucking, the SU of this verb denotes one of them, the OO the other.

Semantic note: it then follows that: X flip-fucked with Y ⊃ Y flip-fucked with X

An example from text (about gay porn, of course):

Manny is Sean Cody’s most consistently great versatile star — he flip-fucked with Kurt back in January — and he’s back today in his 35th scene to flip-fuck with similarly vers[atile] and similarly hot Josh. (link)

(And this of course has an abbreviated variant, as in Joe flipped with Harry.)

The plain intransitive understood with oblique object. (d) intr. flip-fuck as in (c) with Indefinite OO Omission. He’s flip-fucked before ‘He’s flip-fucked with a guy / guys before’.

The pseudo-transitive in the WAY construction. (e) flip-fuck one’s way + goal complement. He flip-fucked his way into the elite of porn (roughly) ‘He got into the elite of porn by flip-fucking’.

An example from text (about gay porn):

a busy guy – he’s flip fucked his way across the stable of Seancody studs (link)

Finally, I suppose inevitably, a transitive (DO) variant of the intransitive OO construction. (f) trans. flip-fuck. Joe flip-fucked Harry. The SU denotes one participant in the act of flip-fucking, the DO the other.

Semantic note: it then follows that: X flip-fucked Y ⊃ Y flip-fucked  X.

An example from text (again, about gay porn):

There’s nothing like a Cocksure Man and that’s exactly where Bennett got his XXX start when he flip fucked AJ Irons in Irons’ Men. (link)

No doubt this just scratches the surface of the relevant phenomena; it’s just what I found in 3 or 4 hours of searching.

And then the important caution: this constellation of constructions (with their semantics) isn’t a random assortment of idiosyncrasies that somehow fell from the sky. By and large, there are larger  generalizations here about English syntax and semantics, of which these phenomena are instances. I have to leave the development of these ideas to other hands (I’m not coping even minimally with the projects on my desk, but I hope to spur interest in this one).

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.

From Ann Gulbrandsen (in Sweden) on Facebook today, a wonderful still life of earthy carrots:

Ann wrote (in Swedish; what follows is the Google Translate version in English, which is, um, flatfooted, with one paraphrase by me):

Thought to pick up the last small harvest of carrots when it will be minus degrees next week. I clearly underestimated what was [underground]. May be cooking with carrots [Sw. matlagning med morötter] a couple of weeks ahead.

My response:

I like the sound of “cooking with carrots”. Maybe we could use it as a figurative expression meaning ‘to do something exuberantly, in a big way, with great success’. As in “Wow, Ann is really cooking with carrots on that project!”

What I like about cooking with carrots is, first, is the sound relationships of cooking and carrots: two trochees — SW accent pattern — alliterating in /k/ (note the parallel alliteration in Swedish, even taking in the preposition). The phrase wants to be filled out in a brief poem and set to music.

And then, the echo of cooking with gas. From the Cambridge Dictionary on-line (reformatted a bit):

phrase be cooking with gas: informal to be making very good progress or doing something very well | I can see we’re really cooking with gas now. \ After a slow start to the season, the team has finally begun cooking with gas.

Where, you wonder, does this use of the phrase come from? From Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett on their radio show A Way With Words on 6/20/14:

From the 2018 cartoon collection Koren in the Wild (my copy of which arrived today), this New Yorker cartoon (published in the magazine on 9/6/99):

Working-class masculinity — the bar, pissing and moaning — meets the intellectual — verify what you’re saying with data: who verifies their pissing and moaning with data?

Then there’s the slang idiom to piss and moan.

(Background on the artist (now 86) — a  New Yorker cartoonist since 1962, the (de facto) cartoonist laureate of Vermont — in my 3/9/15 posting “Ed Koren”.)

… 4.  intransitive. Originally and chiefly U.S. To complain. Chiefly in to piss and moan.

1947 [implied in: J. H. Burns Gallery  vi. 189 The focus of all the pissing and moaning was that Captain Motes was a spineless commanding officer..][AZ: the quote has the PRP form used as a gerundive nominal rather than a verb]

1952 J. Blake Let. 1 Jan. in  Joint (1971) 38 It’s no use to piss and moan about it.

1974 E. Thompson Tattoo 237 What’s the Muskrat pissin about now?

In the 11/2 One Big Happy, Joe fails to honor a promise, which of course makes Ruthie think about hyphenating printed text:

(#1)

NOAD on the verb break (Joe: sense 3a; Ruthie: sense 1a) and the noun word (Joe: sense 3b; Ruthie: sense 1a):

verb break:

1 [a] separate or cause to separate into pieces …

… 3 [with object] [a] fail to observe (a law, regulation, or agreement)

noun word:

1 [a] a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed

… 3 (one’s word) [a] one’s account of the truth, especially when it differs from that of another person: in court it would have been his word against mine. [b] a promise or assurance: everything will be taken care of — you have my word. …

(With apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in his grief.)

to break one’s word. One of a set of idioms involving one’s word ‘one’s promise, assurance’, here:

break / go back on  one’s word and its opposite keep / keep to / stick to / honor  one’s word — also allowing the object noun promise rather than word (but not assurance): Joe broke his word / promise / *assurance; Joe kept his word / promise / *assurance

But also with the central verbs of possession HAVE (have someone’s word), coming into possession  GET (get someone’s word), and transfer of possession GIVE (give (someone) one’s word) — also allowing the object nouns promise and assurance:  I had / got Joe’s word / promise / assurance on this; Joe gave (me) his word / promise / assurance on this. (The having, getting, and giving are all metaphorical in such examples.

(Compare these verbs + one’s word with these verbs + disease names — measles, a cold, the flu etc — in another family of metaphorical usages: have measles etc., get measles, give someone measles etc.)

to break a word in print. By using a hyphen dividing syllables at the end of a line, in printed text that  is fully justified, as in the body of a newspaper story (which is printed in narrow columns). Consider the example of today’s lead story in the New York Times:

(#2) The heads, plus the first two paragraphs of the story

Heads are never hyphenated between syllables to make them fit into the available space, but bodies of stories routinely are (with “soft hyphens” that disappear when the text is quoted). Soft hyphens above:

co-ronovirus, coun-tries, in-creased, pan-demic, In-stitute, be-fore, pos-itive, offi-cials, in-fected, con-tact

Narrow columns mean short lines mean lots of soft hyphens. Fewer soft hyphens in books, which have longer lines. No soft hyphens at all in books for young children, because they constitute an impediment to reading — so the text in these books isn’t fully justified. Once kids can read smoothly, they can go on to tackle text with soft hyphens in them; reading from a newspaper is a tough task at first for the youngest readers, even the good ones.

Consequently, it’s something of a surprise that Ruthie knows about soft hyphens in printed material. But then we know that she is preternaturally sophisticated in many ways for a child of her age.

(But then there are such children. I was a very early reader, and, I am told, appeared in first grade already reading smoothy from newspaper stories — soft hyphens, advanced vocabulary, and all. And I could do it either out loud or silently.  Roughly 5th or 6th grade level. So of course I was impressed into service helping my classmates sound out words and the like. Stern advice from my parents: NEVER, EVER, show off your abilities, but use them to help your friends. And use them for yourself, quietly, in the back of the room and out of school. A route to finding an acceptable slot for myself in kidworld. And a push onto the path of becoming a teacher.)