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Lumber linguistics
Today’s Zippy strip takes exploits the giant hammer outside the Ford Lumber Co. in Fort Washington MD to skitter over language-related matters — the metaphorical character of many common idioms, the...
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Eye charts
Yet another cartoon meme, the Eye Chart, with an instance in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, set in the fictive city of Metropolis: (#1) It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s Superman (If you’re puzzled by the...
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Bizarros of the Solstice, Festivus, and Christmas
Wayno/Piraro Bizarro cartoons for the 21st (Winter Solstice), 23rd (Festivus, for the airing of grievances), and 25th (Christmas Day). The first two are Christmas-related, but today’s is not (at least...
View ArticleFour approaches to sucking someone’s socks off
(Full of linguistic expressions referring to genitals and sexual acts, but not depicting these acts or treating them as cultural practices.) A heavy-linguistics follow-up to my 11/5/21 posting “I want...
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A masculinity meze: face men
(This has turned out to be quite a large meze, but it’s only about one idiomatic slang expression. Well, men and masculinity come into the thing, and you know what can happen then.) Reflecting a couple...
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The cadenza and the coda
Morning names for today (4/29), set off by a cadenza in a Mozart piano concerto that was playing when I got up just after midnight for a brief whizz break. The word cadenza led me immediately to coda,...
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Ravioli stuffed with Italian sausage
(Some indirect and asterisked reference to man-on-man sex, but, hey, it’s from the Associated Press.) Or: Love among the mobsters. In some hot news: Chicago (AP wire story) — An odd chapter in...
View ArticleWho am I kidding?
(Note: in this posting I’m going to be unrelentingly careful about the way I frame descriptions of linguistic phenomena (not falling back on the descriptive language of school grammar, which would be...
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Singing my praises
three tigers! for ultimate May and the end of the spring months Facebook responses to my 5/24 posting “Who am I kidding?” (about this idiom) included two — very different in their focus — that were...
View Articlegoing down there
(some explorations in sexual slang, with some street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest) A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “down there”, on male-genital down there, with a...
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Two pun cartoons
Promised on 10/3 (yes, 19 days ago), in my posting “coming soon, two pun cartoons” (by Kaamran Hafeez and Tom Chitty), now realized: the puns hìp replácement (from KH, on the model híp replàcement) and...
View ArticleThe Yiddish word for shpilkes
Melinda Shore on Facebook yesterday, the wry comment “How to spot the NY newspaper”, about this passage that Ann Burlingham had posted on FB: At Lot 77062, he started to get antsy. “I’m getting...
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Fur stoles, furry boots, and f*cking like minks
(Note this posting’s title — it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest) It’s all about fucking in fur: two scenes from the MEN.com gay porn flick Norse Fuckers in which men mate wildly and...
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Packing Extreme Meat
(A lot of this posting is about the title of a Lucas gay porn movie, slated for full release in March 2024, but with its scenes being released one by one before then — the first, baldly titled “Dom...
View ArticleKissing the proverbial you know what
From the Raw Story site, “‘The stain is on you’: Ex-RNC chair slams GOP for silence on [GP]’s call for blood purity” by Matthew Chapman on 12/18/23 (in this story [GP] refers to (Helmet) Grabpussy),...
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Nobody expects a baby
A carefully composed, subtle, and surprising ambiguity-driven cartoon by Mick Stevens in the New Yorker 1/1&8/2024 issue (on-line on 12/2/23): Were we expecting a baby?, conveying not ‘Were we...
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Two cartoons on (unstated) formulaic themes
Aka: Piccolo’s bull and Rubin’s cow: cattle days in CartoonLand. A little post-eclipse diversion: cartoons that make allusion to, or illustrate a pun on, some formulaic expression, but without actually...
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The Putin-on-Ritz pun
Passed on by Susan Fischer yesterday, this item from the We Love PUNS site: (#1) Three things you need to know about or recognize to understand the pun joke here: Vladimir Putin (depicted here without...
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Six Zippy balls
Zippy is known for his enthusiasm for specific words, is given to playing with them in public. Today’s Zippy strip shows our Pinhead drifting happily through six encounters with ball, in the title (In...
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Datoro!
Two Datoro cartoons from the July 22nd New Yorker (the one with Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” — six 45s and three women — on the cover): Joe Dator offering goldfish snacks in a cat bar, Tom Toro...
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