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.

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.

pinnies

In my e-mail a little while ago, a Princeton University Store ad offering Princeton pinnies — one illustrated here:

The text:

The weather is finally starting to warm up and we have the perfect lightweight summer staple for Tigers everywhere – the Princeton pinnie! With a nice loose fit and 2-ply mesh these are sure to keep you cool in all senses of the word! Did we mention, they’re all REVERSIBLE and available in several different styles?!

The term pinnie for such a garment was new to me. But it’s been around for a while, though primarily in British usage.

noisette

(Mostly about art, but there’s some language in there.)

In the most recent Details magazine (April 2013), a piece on artist Urs Fischer, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition at MOCA in Los Angeles, opening April 21. Among the three “greatest hits” listed on p. 62 is the 2009 piece Noisette:

The Details text:

This wagging tongue – which protruded from a glory-hole-like opening in a gallery wall and was activated by a motion detector – was the sleeper of Fischer’s popular solo show at New York’s New Museum.

Apparently the concept of a glory hole has made its way into the larger culture.

Cyanide and Happiness roundup

Five strips from the webcomic Cyanide and Happiness, with various points of linguistic interest (some incidental to the humor of the strip).

More sexual terminology

(Very high sexual content. You have been warned.)

In e-mail yesterday, an ad for the Cocky Boys gay porn video Creampie Surprise. Creampie is a compound noun in which the first element, cream, refers to semen (a fairly common metaphor). The whole thing is an allusion to the foodstuff known as a cream pie, but with a different, and decidedy sexual, meaning. (As far as I can tell, the food compound is always spelled separated, and the sexual compound always spelled solid, so that they’re distinguished visually, though they’re pronounced the same.)

vasovagal syncope

Yesterday I suffered a fainting spell, which unfortunately sent me falling to the floor in my bathroom, doing some (superficial but dramatic) injury to my head and wiping out the toilet. (Men are currently at work fixing the property damage.) The fainting spell goes by the name vasovagal syncope in the technical terminology of medicine — an interesting term in all three of its parts.

wank

Another follow-up to my posting on gay sex toys, this time on masturbation adjuncts (lubes and condoms, in particular), with a digression on the noun and verb wank.

[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much information, as the saying goes. As a general observation, I’m willing to go almost anywhere in my postings, including some places that some readers don’t want to go.]

dong

A follow-up to my posting on gay sex toys, specifically on the dong as a replica of a penis for anal sex play. A simple metaphorical transfer — but where does dong ‘penis’ come from?

The colors of passion

(Sexually explicit in language, but it *is* about language.)

Just arrived: Gay Sex! Cards (from Kheper Games Inc.) for fantasy sex play among men, each with a crudely cartooned depiction of a sex act (hardly any are WordPressable — lots and lots of penises — and none are artistically notable, so I’ll forgo illustrations). The cards are color-coded:

The color indicates how HOT the card’s portrayed action is. Similar to heated metals, stars, etc., the first degree of hot is red, then orange, yellow, white, and finally light blue. When unleashing your fantasy, try following your fantasy cards in this order.

More or less the opposite of what you might have thought of as the progression of hotness, from neutral (white) or cool (blue) through red-hot. Different metaphors.