Scalarity – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Scalarity’ Category
Assuming the position
April 7, 2021
(Men’s bodies as sexual objects — women’s, too — and sex between men, all of this discussed in street language, with edgy images, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
At the intersection of the pinup-girl world (AZ Page here) and the premium men’s underwear world (AZ Page here), two recent ads from the Daily Jocks people: from 3/28, under the mail header “Model of the week: Freddy”, an ad for OnlyJox subscriptions, already of interest to me for its display of male buttocks as sexual objects for a male audience and for pushing the line between softcore and hardcore porn in doing so; and from 4/2, an ad for the DJ Easter sale, already of interest to me for its display of the front surface of the model’s body as series of sexual objects for a male audience, from the framing of his penis in a jockstrap though the sexualized presentation of his armpits, pectoral muscles and nipples.
The 4/2 ad is also quite clearly the photographer’s carefully composed re-creation of a classic pinup pose using a male model. And then I realized that that the 3/8 ad was in fact a bow to yet another classic pinup pose.
Posted in Art, Facial expression, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language of sex, Male art, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Photography, Scalarity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
The three Ds: debased, degraded, and decadent
August 16, 2020
(Well, it’s about lexical semantics and the conventions of social life, but there will be, right at the outset, dips into references to mansex in very plain language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
It started with my 12/29/19 posting “The time of mildly debasing oneself”, about one of Nathan W. Pyle’s weirdly quirky Strange Planet cartoons looking forward to New Year’s Day:
(#1) “Until then I will mildly debase myself” — “To maximize contrast”
Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Homosexuality, Lexical semantics, Scalarity, Sociocultural conventions | 1 Comment »
Towards the high end of the hardness scale
August 4, 2020
(All I need to tell you is that this posting takes off from a line of Cumdump jockstraps offered by the Breedwell company in deliberately provocative ads, and you should see that it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest.)
A Daily Jocks ad from 11/4/19 shows us the jock in red, with a model presented faux-naturalistically as a tough working-class guy in a blue-collar setting (a railyard, shipyard, or truckyard). Ad copy for the jock:
The new Breedwell Cumdump Jock [available in white, black, red, yellow, and blue] is a take on the classic, old-school woven jock.
Features a black centre patch with the Breedwell logo and signature “Dirty By Choice” motto. The back of the jock features ‘Breedwell’ across the entire back.
Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Masculinity, Metaphor, Porn, Pornography, Portmanteaus, Scalarity, Semantics, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
The pumpkin spice cartoon meme
October 23, 2017
From my 10/20/17 posting “A processed flavor”, this Kaamran Hafeez cartoon:
(#1) pumpkin spice ‘top of the line, top-grade, high-end’
The Hafeez is at the end of a series of mocking Pumpkin Spice cartoon memes, ranging from the most concrete (on pumpkin spice lattes, especially as a sign of the fall), through pumpkin spice more generally as a flavor (especially in foods that wouldn’t normally have such a flavor), and then just a scent (especially in non-food products), to the fully abstract sense in #1.
Note that though premium, or high-octane, usually names the top grade of gasoline in the US, in #1 pumpkin spice is used to name an extra-premium grade, a grade above even premium. This is what we might call grade expansion, a recurrent strategy in naming grades of products for the purposes of advertisement: if grande (lit. ‘large’) is used to name the largest size of coffee available, then, pretty predictably, new, even larger, sizes will be invented to go beyond grande — at Starbucks, first venti (lit. ’20’), then trenta (lit. ’30’). Gold or golden level, once the top of the line (above silver and bronze), will be out-done by even more excellent or desirable platinum, then maybe by still-better diamond.
Posted in Language and food, Language of advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Scalarity, Semantics | Leave a Comment »
Amoeba humor
July 17, 2017
A classic Gary Larson cartoon, which came up on Pinterest this morning:
(#1)
Pun time at the protist corral, playing on Anglicized Spanish adios, amigos ‘goodbye, friends’ (perhaps better in AmE: ‘so long, buddies’).
Posted in Formulaic language, Jokes, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Scalarity | Leave a Comment »
Annals of spiciness
June 30, 2017
On my posting on the 27th, “Scalarity on the menu”, about a Korean restaurant in Berlin offering food with sauces that were: not spicy, medium spicy, German spicy, Korean spicy — this comment on Facebook from Antonia Clicquot:
Reminds me of the menu of an Indian restaurant in Erlangen [in Bavaria, not far from Nuremberg] – they do all their meals germanisch, indogermanisch and indisch scharf.
The adjective indogermanisch leaps out to a linguist’s eye, because for us it picks out not a kind of food but a kind of language, namely Indo-European.
Posted in German, Language and food, Languages, Names, Scalarity, Semantics | Leave a Comment »