Hyperbole – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Hyperbole’ Category
REX&M graphic art
May 8, 2026
Spurred by Max Vasilatos’s show-n-tell at the most recent (5/3) soc.motss get-together on Zoom, some material on the S&M graphic artist REX, assembled from material in his Wikipedia entry; the summary paragraph:
REX (1943 – March 2024) was an American visual artist and illustrator closely associated with gay fetish art of 1970s and 1980s New York and San Francisco. He avoided photographs and did not discuss his personal life. His drawings influenced gay culture through graphics made for nightclubs including the Mineshaft and his influence on artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Much censored, he remained a shadowy figure, saying that his drawings “defined who I became” and that there are “no other ‘truths’ out there”. REX died in Amsterdam in late March 2024.
Posted in Art, Clothing, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life | Leave a Comment »
assless (also: amply assed)
May 8, 2026
(much talk of men’s bodyparts and some of man-on-man sex, much of it in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Background: from Benjamin Dreyer on Facebook yesterday (5/7), about assless:
— BD: My gosh, I’m in the dictionary.
(#1) From Merriam-Webster online
And my comment:
— AZ: why do I find no citations (anywhere I can see) of hyperbolic bodypart assless ‘having minimal buttocks’, esp. in assless Irishman (used ruefully by some Irish American men I know)?
Posted in Clothing, Figurative language, Homosexuality, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics | 1 Comment »
Swim Meat, the video
October 30, 2024
(Publicity for a gay porn video, entertaining in its way but absolutely off-limits for kids and the sexually modest)
🎃 🎃 🎃 three jack-o’-lanterns for penultimate October, Halloween Eve (that is, the day before the day before the day of the dead) — in my house, the day when the pussyboys go out to seek their phallic prey
Into this scene comes this morning’s e-mail from the Falcon | NakedSword Store, offering:
Hot House movie download discounts — full movies $11.95 each
With, right at the top, the crudely pun-titled video Swim Meat and its cover illustration, offering four fine pieces of swim meat, one (Johnny V’s) just barely concealed by his swimwear; plus three proudly jutting tubesteaks that I’ve had to suppress for WordPress modesty (but here you can view the uncensored cover, along with the publicity text):
Posted in Compounds, Discourse organization, Gay porn, Holidays, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
In a frenzy
May 27, 2024
In begins with (the wildly hyperbolic) jockstrap frenzy (in an ad featuring notable male buttocks), followed by some playfulness that treats jockstrap frenzy as a laughable absurdity, turns to raw, terrifying frenzy, then the specialized zones of murder frenzy / frenzy murder and feeding frenzy, concluding with the ecstatic state of sexual frenzy (in a section not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; I’ll issue a warning when we get to the really raunchy stuff — though from the outset this posting is suffused with sexual matters not to the taste of some of my readers).
Posted in Facial expression, Hyperbole, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Myths, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
De Interpretatione
August 11, 2023
From the New Yorker issue of 8/14 (arrived in my mailbox yesterday), two cartoons about interpreting what we perceive — on what we see, a Stephen Raaka cartoon on the perils of pointillism; and on what’s been said, a Will McPhail drawing paired with this issue’s winner in the caption contest, with a text about literal vs. figurative understandings.
Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Figurative language, Hyperbole, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »
Mind-Blowing Theories
April 21, 2021
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).
Posted in Hyperbole, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Science, Usage attitudes | Leave a Comment »
Big sexy prime birthday gay ice cream
September 7, 2019
(References to gay male life, men’s bodies, and mansex, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday was my birthday, my 79th, 79 being, as I noted in a 8/29 posting for the day, a sexy prime. 8/29 is also, every year, National Coffee Ice Cream Day, and coffee is my favorite ice cream flavor. Put all this together and you get this birthday present, delivered by Kim Darnell yesterday:
(#1) Coffee ice cream, plus a selection of Big Gay Ice Cream flavors for Big Gay Arnold
This will take us to the pornstars of the end of summer, to Greenwich Village, and to South Park, with a final side trip to visit with the Marquis de Lafayette.
Posted in Figurative language, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, History, Holidays, Homosexuality, Hyperbole, Language and art, Language of sex, Movies and tv, My life, Names, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
Through the centuries in the morning
September 10, 2018
The morning name for the 6th: Attraverso i Secoli, the title of an elementary Italian textbook from about 60 years ago. Not mine, but Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s. No longer in my possession, after several years of the Great Library Divestment, but still I remember it, and it somehow surfaced in my dreamtime.
The title attraverso i secoli ‘(down) over / through(out) / across the centuries / ages’ is a PP with the very interesting P attraverso, which (historically) is itself a P + a N derived from a verb of motion (cf. the English V traverse).
And the expression as a whole is formulaic, a conventional way of referring to (all of) historic time.
As a bonus, there’s the book Il Quidditch Attraverso i Secoli by Kenilworthy Whisp.
Posted in Books, Figurative language, Formulaic expressions, Hyperbole, Italian | Leave a Comment »
The literalist on Fathers Day
June 9, 2016
Fathers Day comes on the 19th. For the occasion, a Tom Toro cartoon that didn’t get into my earlier posting about him:
Well, there can be literally only one greatest dad in the world, but then not all language is literal — as in this case, where the sentiment on the mug is a piece of hyperbole, exaggeration for effect.
Posted in Comparison, Figurative language, Holidays, Hyperbole, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics | Leave a Comment »
Hyperbolic metaphors
October 9, 2013
Frank Bruni in an op-ed column in the NYT yesterday, “Nazis, Lynching and Obamacare”, beginning:
You might think that the methodical extermination of millions of Jews by a brutal regime intent on world domination would resist appropriation as an all-purpose metaphor. You might think that genocide, of all things, would be safe from conversion into sloppy simile.
You’d be wrong.
Bruni catalogues an assortment of ravingly hyperbolic similes in recent times, mostly (but not entirely) associated with the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Comparisons to: Nazis and the Holocaust, lynch mobs, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, slavery, and hostage taking.
Posted in Hyperbole, Language and politics, Metaphor, Simile | 1 Comment »