Verbing garbage

A message from Ken Callicott:

In the 1986 film “Never Too Young To Die”, the hermaphroditic rock star villain, Velvet Von Ragnar (played by Gene Simmons) killed a henchman, then said something like “Garbage that” or “Garbage him”.  I don’t recall ever having heard ‘garbage’ used as a verb.

At first I thought garbage here was a euphemistic replacement for fuck (based on semantics rather than phonology), but now that I look at the actual quote, I see that we’re dealing with a simple verbing here.

(And the movie looks like a hoot.)

Briefly noted: the shalom of curse words

On an Inside the Actors Studio show I saw this morning with Billy Crystal as guest, host James Lipton asked the standard question, “What is your favorite curse word?” To which Crystal replied:

Fuck. Fuck is the shalom of cursewords.

– meaning, that, like shalom, fuck is enormously versatile, a claim that Crystal then illustrated by reeling off a long string of uses, all of which were of course bleeped.

(On the versatility of fuck, see Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word.)

More band names

Commenting on Facebook on my note about the punk band Pissed Jeans, Chris Ambidge mischievously asked about the names Manly Panda and Bitch Bovine (half-rhyming and alliterative, respectively) — mischievously, because the names are soc.motss pseudonyms for Chris and Michael Palmer, respectively. Apparently, though, the names haven’t been taken for band names.

How do I know this? Well, there’s a database.

Brief mention: punk band name news

Found by accident, the punk band Pissed Jeans:

Pissed Jeans are an American noise rock/hardcore punk band from Allentown, Pennsylvania. [AZ side note: I was born in Allentown PA.] The band claims to play “loud, heavy, noisy, punk rock” and is influenced by 1980s hardcore punk and post-hardcore bands. The band have released several 7″ singles and four albums, and are currently signed to Sub Pop.

The members of Pissed Jeans all attended Nazareth High School and initially planned to use the name Unrequited Hard-On before settling on Pissed Jeans. As [band member] Matt Kosloff explains,

The idea was to start a different kinda Punk band focused on dead ended carnal cravings, sexual depression … that sort of thing. Mainly we just wanted to bludgeon the listener will dull, monotonous droning rock music that just sucks the energy out of you, the musical equivalent to watching a toilet flush.

The attractions of vulgarity never pale.

(If you’re looking for actual pissed jeans — the are lots of images and videos on the net — you’ll need to find indirect ways to call up the stuff or be willing to wade through pages and pages of refereces to the band.)

chicano

Over on ADS-L we’ve been discussing the etymology of chicano/Chicano, and Jon Lighter introduced the question of the social status of the ethnonym; it was his recollection that in the 1960s the word was used disparagingly, and that was my recollection and Larry Horn’s as well. But on the whole it’s been reclaimed, a process that was already underway by 1970, with the rise of chicano political consciousness.

Facebook bizarreness

My posting this morning on three references to putative sex / gender differences caused Facebook to put me through a captcha test to get the thing posted — I presume because of the word sex in the text. Then people began reporting that FB had been labeling this posting (and two previous ones) as potential spam, in a bizarre use of the word spam, since the objection would have to be to the content of the postings (not to bulk mailing of unsolicited messages, especially advertising, which I certainly can’t be accused of doing: people get FB postings from me by virtue of having mutually friended me).

Liz Climo

In snail mail from Chris Ambidge on Thursday, a print of this cartoon by Liz Climo:

  (#1)

To get this cartoon, you need to know a good bit about the children’s book Charlotte’s Web — and then to appreciate how that sweet story is subverted by the taboo word asshole.

Arcane taboo avoidance

… in the NYT (again). This was one where I wasn’t entirely sure what taboo item was being concealed by the euphemized pudendum boy.

ship my pants

Passed on by Karen Chung on Facebook, a HuffPo piece (with video) about a Kmart ad with ostentatious taboo avoidance:

‘Ship My Pants’ Kmart Ad: For The 12-Year-Old In All Of Us

Looks like Kmart has finally said, “F it, we’re not Target and we’re not Walmart… we’re @#$%*! Kmart.”

Touting the fact that if you can’t find what you’re looking for in store you can find it online and then have it sent to your home, Kmart has introduced its “Ship My Pants” ad… which you will make you laugh despite your higher aspirations.

Not since Benny Bell’s immortal “Shaving Cream”, has the word shit not been said [repeatedly] with such glee.

We shall endeavor to ship our pants very soon. Thanks, Kmart!

Double entendres

Just watched a re-run of a Psych episode — I’m a fan of this silly show — on the USA network, where the program was repeatedly interrupted by an ad for the film Little Fockers, which will soon play on that network. The ad revels in repetitions of the family name, mostly to suggest fucker. Hugely unsubtle double entendres, which become wearing in even just one playing of a short ad.