-licious sex

It began with the porn flick Twinkalicious (a 5-hour compilation of scenes featuring twink sex, that is, sex between twinks). The front cover of the DVD (showing a twink sucking cock) and the back cover (a montage of twinks in heat) can be viewed in the posting “Twinkalicious porn” on AZBlogX (where such images are allowed). The word twinkalicious has two parts, the twink part (with a piece of sexuality slang) and the -licious part (related in some way to delicious). I’ll comment on both parts. But first, some other combinations of these two parts.

Manwich and Beefaroni as portmanteaus

My “Grocery store semiotics” posting looked briefly at two canned-food preparations: Manwich and Beefaroni. Manwich: “a canned sloppy joe sauce … The can contains seasoned tomato sauce that is added to cooked ground beef in a skillet” to yield a filling for hamburger buns. And Beefaroni: “pasta with beef in tomato sauce”, essentially a ground beef casserole in a can. Both names are portmanteaus, and both are somewhat opaque in their meaning.

More swarmanteaus

In a recent posting, I noted the portmanteau — or, possibly, use of a libfix -mageddon — in swarmageddon, as a name for this year’s cicada infestation in the eastern US (and picked up the entertaining shawarmageddon along the way). Now, as I’ve noted before, where there’s a -mageddon, there’s usually a -pocalypse as well. The combination swarm(a)pocalypse seems not to be attested, but this morning on ADS-L David Barnhart reported cicadapocalypse (with the two parts sharing the vowel /ǝ/ in pronunciation, the letter A in spelling). And there’s cicadageddon as well.

On the -mageddon watch

Rob Partington points me to recent stories on the 17-year cicadas, under the heading swarmageddon (swarm + Armageddon) — a topical portmanteau. That led me to the preposterous shawarmageddon, involving the food shawarma.

Tacolicious

On Wednesday the Stanford QUEST group (queer staff and faculty) had our monthly happy hour, this time at Tacolicious in Palo Alto, a Mexican restaurant that not long ago replaced the Indian fusion restaurant Mantra (which succeeded the Japanese fusion restaurant Higashi West, which succeeded Old Uncle Gaylord’s Kosher Ice Cream Parlour, which I remember fondly from 30 years ago). (Restaurant turnover in Palo Alto is scandalous.)

Tacolicious is not just a taco place, but something trendier and more inventive. And crowded. And very noisy (probably by design, since the conversion from Mantra involved tearing out the entire interior of the restaurant and installing lots of reflective surfaces; noisy makes a restaurant “hot”).

This posting is going to be about the restaurant’s name. But first more on the place itself.

fag bag

From various people on Facebook, this WPA poster with the compound fag bag:

The fag here is the fag of cigarette smoking, though it turns out that there are now two notable uses of fag bag involving the sexual slur fag: for reference to a fanny pack and as a personal slur.

The news from AZBlogX: twinks, Close Up, scruff cum

Over on AZBlogX, several recent postings:

First, on “Twinkalicious porn”, X-rated images for a forthcoming posting on this blog on the word twinkalicious (and its variants) — an instance of the libfix -(V)licious.

Then, continuing the twink theme, a posting on “Two twinks” who have come into the gay porn world recently: Johnny Rapid and Hunter Page. Not much about language here, beyond Johnny Rapid’s wonderful name, but another exploration into the construction of identities (twink) and the configuration of (sexual) relationships in Gayland.

Then an account of the gay porn flick Close Up, preparing the way for a forthcoming posting on this blog about the first scene of the film, involving Trenton Ducati and Jessy Ares — in part about the use of language in this encounter and in part about the the assignment of roles — what I’ve called b vs. t — in this encounter.

Finally, “Scruff cum”, on men with scruffy or bearded faces with cum on their faces. An exercise in sexual practices, with no linguistic content I can see.

The news for libfixes

In the news this morning, an NPR Morning Edition piece by Louisa Lim, “Beijing’s ‘Airpocalypse’ Spurs Pollution Controls, Public Pressure”. Again, the disastrous libfix -pocalypse, just a few weeks after the libfixes -(po)calypse and -(ma)geddon (“hyperbolic combining forms for various catastrophes”) together won in the Most Useful category in the American Dialect Society’s 2012 Word of the Year competition, where hashtag was the overall WOTY winner and the portmanteau phablet (phone + tablet, “mid-sized electronic device between a smart phone and a tablet”) garnered the Least Likely to Succeed award.

Alpacas on the march

It begins with this slogan/image, passed on to me on Facebook by Ruth Lawrence:

Though the reference of the term Alpacalypse isn’t clear here (in 18 days?), the term is very satisfying phonologically, whether seen as a portmanteau of alpaca and Apocalypse or as the suffixing of the libfix -alypse ’(terminal) disaster’ (historically from Apocalypse) to alpaca ‘species of camelid’; Apocalypse and alpacalypse are very close indeed.

Libfix tech disasters

A story making the rounds the past few days, here from Gawker:

NYU Student Accidentally Hits Reply All to 40,000 Students, “Replyallcalypse” Ensues (link)

A familiar sort of technological annoyance that is often responded to with great alarm, hence the ‘disaster’ libfix -(po)calypse. The story excites interest in the general press because of the nature of the annoyance (it slows down an everyday operation), its source (in basic features of mail programs and human factors in their use), and the way people tend to react to it (by mailing to all the victims, by way of outraged complaint, hence compounding the problem). My interest here is mostly in the libfix and its cousin in disaster -(ma)geddon, as applying to technological woes.