What causes wind?

Today’s Calvin and Hobbes looks at scientific explanations:

Trees sneezing is a wonderful figure. And like many folk explanations of natural phenomena, it introduces an analogy to human activities.

Non-hair quiffs

Commenter John yesterday on my “whoopee cushion” posting:

So the point of intersection of “making whoopie” and “razzberry” is quiff?

Well, it turns out that in addition to quiff referring to a hair style (first discussed in this blog here), it has plenty of other senses. What I said in that first quiff posting was:

(Quiff is a word that sounds like it ought to be at least naughty, if not actually coarse slang — “his quiff in her quim”, something like that — and indeed a huge variety of slang senses have been reported. Apparently, it’s just one of those dirty-sounding words that can get pressed into service for any old off-color meaning. Including as an onomatopoetic verb meaning ‘fart’.)

A holiday I missed

Somehow May came to an end without my realizing that it was National Masturbation Month (and, in fact, without my realizing that there was such a celebration). From Wikipedia:

National Masturbation Day (NMD) is an annual event celebrated on a day in May to protect the right to masturbate. The first National Masturbation Day was observed in 1995. …  Alongside NMD, the month of May is celebrated as the National Masturbation Month.

  (#1)

The opposite of bareback

Having posted recently on bareback sex, bare sex, or raw sex, I wondered idly about the term for the opposite — for sex using condoms. In actual practice, the most commonly used term isn’t parallel to any of these, but seems to be the more inclusive safe(r) sex, though protected sex can also be found. But we could consider more imaginative alternatives.

But first, a cartoon with a dreadful pun:

spacefaring

Caught in the NYT Science Times of 4/30/13 (p. 2), in a note by Jennifer A. Kingston on “Animals Aloft”:

One alluring detail: NASA scientists will be studying sperm motiity in the spacefaring mice to try to figure out if humans could successfully procreate on a long space voyage.

It’s the adjective spacefaring: instantly understandable (based on seafaring — another case of terminology from sea travel extended metaphorically to air or space travel), but not a usage I recall having seen before. However, there’s a Wikipedia article on it, and the OED tells me that it’s been around about as long as I have.

News on the edible penis front

Following on yesterday’s edible-penguin posting (focused mostly on cookies and chocolates), I return today to phallic foodstuffs, a topic last discussed here in connection with penis-shaped breadstuffs: baguettes, brioches, and tartes. Now to cookies and chocolates, with the nice portmanteau find cockie ‘cock cookie’, plus some other deliberately phallic food.

Idiomaticity

Today’s Pearls Before Swine:

The idiom golden throat ‘a widely admired singing or speaking voice’ is both metonymic (throat for ‘voice’) and metaphorical (golden ‘like gold in value’), but it’s complex enough that someone could not see that. Rat, of course, just turns things to his own ends.

Nick Danger: an appreciation

My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed full of playfulness, silliness, and absurdity, much of it linguistic.

boss

Discussion of a brief note I posted here a couple of days ago, on boss as an address term, brings up two points; the need to clarify what kind of address term is at issue in this case; and the difficulty of gauging the sociolinguistic status of some usage, when all you have to go on is your own experience.

Body language and Lithuanians

Today’s Zippy returns to the topic of facial expression and gesture in Dingburg:

Five stances (or gestures), each with an absurdly specific meaning (some of which suggest, in snowclonish way, proverbs or quotations). Plus an appearance of Lithuanians.