That’s Zen + piñata, with a little joke on Zen. I’m especially fond of portmanteaus with diacritical marks in them; see the Rhymes With Orange with jalapiñot noir in it, here.

First, the case at hand. Then, some general discussion.

Hoping that I’m not getting myself in trouble, the Thoma photo:

  (#1)

The model’s crotch is in the shadows, and pubic hair is certainly visible — that doesn’t take us over the line into X — but, if you look closely enough, so is the barest outline of a shadowy penis. I’d put this on the good side of the X line, but it’s a close call.

I’ve been in this territory before, with respect to a Tom Bianchi  photo that has no “private parts” visible, but is clearly a photo of one naked man about to penetrate another anally. This one counted as not-X, to the point where it could appear on the cover of one of Bianchi’s books. (I find the image gorgeous and, um, moving, but if I’d had to draw the line, I’d have put it in X territory, for its interpretation and intent.)

On Thoma: I’ve done two postings with his (sumptuous) images of Bel Ami pornstars, here and here, most with frank genital nudity, plus another posting with 15 captioned photos of his, all homoerotic but all dickfree.

Now to more general issues. Male photography ranges from the merely homoerotic through what I’ve called cock tease shots (which skirt the X line as closely as possible) and on to frank genital nudity. To my mind, cock tease photos, drawings, and paintings (and there are a huge number of these) demonstrate the absurdity of the X line and the horror of the penis on which it’s based (the idea seems to be that representations of penises are intrinsically corrupting, at least to children and women). Meanwhile, huge numbers of art works celebrate the male buttocks (so long as penises aren’t involved), and exceptions are made for penises in recognized great works of art.

Now from art to clothing, and the concealing or revealing of a man’s package by various sorts of clothing. Here the range is from hung guys, men who naturally have large packages that will be discernible under clothing; to those with enhanced packages, wearing clothing designed to show off the genitals (dance belts, codpieces, and the like — more below); to men sporting moose knuckles (in trousers; in gym shorts, swim trunks, wrestling singlets, and other sports clothing; and in underwear, especially tight, abbreviated, or sheer underwear); and then to men in underwear that embraces genital nudity frankly (I’ve posted a number of times on AZBlogX about these items). For the underwear, the questions are: how tight is too tight? how abbreviated is too abbreviated? and how sheer is too sheer? And once again, the lines are hard to draw.

The UnderGear catalogs try to draw the lines, marking certain items as involving explicit nudity, but the company’s labeling strikes me as erratic, letting through some items that I would have put on the other side of the X line, while marking as X some items I’d have classified as merely risqué. As with art, so with underwear.

Now to step away from the X line and go back to enhanced packages, a topic I looked at back in 2011 with respect to a garment called JeanPants, essentially a codpiece worn as underwear. This turns out to be a crowded field. Here’s the beginning of a piece from the Fashionista site, “The (Painful) Backstory Behind New ‘Junk’ Jeans, Denim Specially Designed To Support a Man’s Package”, by Nora Crotty (8/13/12):

Men of the world: Are you suffering from scrunched junk? Is regular-old denim cramping your style–and your package? Moreover, do normal jeans fail to provide you with the comfort your goods deserve? Well, at long last, someone’s come up with the perfect solution for all your dick discomforts. Yes, Florida-based clothing brand The Hot Child is manufacturing what it’s calling the “first anatomically-designed jeans with a man’s junk in mind,” aptly dubbed ‘The Hot Child Junk.’ Really.

But these so-called ‘Junk jeans’ aren’t just an advertising ploy – and they aren’t your average penis pants, either. They’re actually constructed with what’s described as a built-in codpiece – you know, that lovely little dick decoration somebody we witnessed Tom Cruise don in Rock of Ages. Or, to put it more bluntly, there’s a pouch … for your penis. Why didn’t we think of this?

  (#2)

Note that this garment is marketed as for comfort rather than display. Yeah, sure.

No doubt there are other brands out there.

agapanthus: 1,019 views
The body and its parts: 359 views
Pub(l)ic notice: 345 views
Cock tease: 131 views
Bell pepper sex: 97 views
Annals of ejaculation: 87 views

The agapanthus posting, about a plant and the etymology of its name, has been at the top of the charts for quite some time, for no reason I can fathom. But the next five all have sexual content.

Now I do post fairly often on sex- or sexuality-related topics, though most of my postings are on other things — only one of my last twelve postings had to do with sex or sexuality — but these are the postings that attract attention.

At shapenote singing on Sunday (which was Mothers Day), we sang a fair number of songs with mother in their texts. Some are decidedly odd, but one was an old friend, Family Circle (the music is included in my posting on “Come Thou Fount”; “And rejoice, O my mother” is in the chorus).

On to two of the odd songs: the sentimental The Dying Boy (#398) and the touching The Bride’s Farewell (#359b) — two songs that are very rarely sung.

The Dying Boy:

Not a catchy tune; you can hear it sung here, in the Octagon Chapel (Unitarian) in Norwich, Norfolk, England:

The words are unattributed, but the music is by Georgian Henry Smith Reese (1828-1922). According to Baptist Biography (1920), “He was a teacher of singing, and a composer of a number of songs, both of the words and the music, in the ‘Sacred Harp’ and other song books.” He has 11 compositions in the Sacred Harp, including The Bride’s Farewell:

As I said in an earlier posting (on Murillo’s Lesson, #358, which goes on to a second page that has The Bride’s Farewell at the bottom of it), this song is “a commentary on family life in 19th-century rural America; note that the words are by a woman.” This was a time and place in which (as in many cultures in the world) a woman passed, on marriage, from being in effect the property of her father to being in effect the property of her husband; in any case, she was wrenched from the family of her birth and transferred to her husband’s family. So marriage was a parting. Its dark view of marriage (and husbands — “One to trust who may deceive me”) might have contributed to this song’s lack of popularity, though (like The Dying Boy) it’s also not especially tuneful.

Like many early shapenote songs, this one is set in three rather than four parts, with a missing alto line. (Alto lines were added later to many songs.)

A computer-generated rendition (from Sacred Harp Bremen (Germany) — shapenote singing gets around) is available here.

A Bahraini court jailed six people for a year on Wednesday for insulting King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa in messages on Twitter, the official news agency said.

The six were accused of posting remarks “undermining the values and traditions of Bahrain’s society towards the king on Twitter,” the head of the public prosecutor’s office, Nayef Youssef, said in a statement reported by the Bahrain News Agency. He said freedom of opinion and expression were guaranteed by the Constitution, law and international conventions, but should not be used in a way that contradicted the norms of society. The news agency gave no further information about the six.

Of course, the agency gave no information about what they said on Twitter, because that would be to disseminate the insult.

What struck me especially was the claim that Bahrain guaranteed freedom of opinion and expression — but only insofar as people conform to the norms of society. There is a genuine tug here between two different core values (a great many jurisdictions regulate obscenity in certain contexts, for example), but an appeal to “the norms of society” can easily be stretched to ban any unpopular or embarrassing expression of ideas. So just citing norms in a general way won’t do.

Chazz: Mind-bottling, isn’t it?

Jimmy: Did you just say mind-bottling?

Chazz: Yeah, mind-bottling. You know, when things are so crazy it gets your thoughts all trapped, like in a bottle? (link)

A lovely eggcorn for mind-boggling (noted on the Eggcorn Forum, but not yet in the database), complete with the mark of a great eggcorn find, the speaker’s rationalization for the form they use.

On the movie:

Blades of Glory is a 2007 American comedy film directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon, and starring Will Ferrell and Jon Heder. The movie was released on March 29, 2007

[the plot set-up]: At the 2002 World Winter Sport Games, rival men’s singles skaters Chazz Michael Michaels (Will Ferrell), a skillful skater but raunchy sex addict, and Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder), an equally talented but sheltered and effeminate skater, tie for gold.

Clearly aimed at a young male audience.

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.

Then there’s the sarcastic or ironic use of golden throat in the series of Golden Throats recordings:

Golden Throats is Rhino Records’ series of humorous compilations of critically lambasted cover versions of songs, performed mostly either by celebrities known for something other than musical talent or musicians not known for the genre from which the song they are covering comes. For example, William Shatner sings (or, more precisely, does a dramatic reading of the lyrics to) “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Leonard Nimoy sings “If I Had a Hammer,” and Muhammad Ali sings “Stand by Me.” Other examples include the Bing Crosby cover of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and the Mel Tormé cover of Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman,” as both were rock songs being covered by musicians of an older generation. In most cases, the songs appear to be performed sincerely, rather than in a spirit of irony or intentional goofiness. (link)

(There were four volumes, originally released in 1988, 1991, 1995, and 1997.)

Wonderful stuff, but best appreciated in small doses.

From Steven Levine on Facebook, found on eBay, a pair of

DEPRESSION GLASS SALT & PEPPER SHAKERS-PINK GLASS WITH PLASTIC TOP

  (#1)

Steven’s comment:

It must have been a more innocent era. These are described as “a peachy shade of pink”. Um, yeah sure.

Thanks to Steven, we’ve been in the phallic shaker zone before — back on 11/16/10, in “Phallicity: the salt/pepper shaker” on AZBlogX, about this shaker that Steven found and gave to me:

  (#2)

(More or less ivory in color — extraordinarily pallid for an actual penis.)

My comment at the time:

Steven and I spent a little time wondering whether this object (with a glans and foreskin) could have been innocently intended. Probably it was. It’s marked on the base “LAPIN MADE IN U.S.A.”, which enabled me to find it on the net, though in a more startling, [even] less human, color [orange] — offered on an antiques and collectibles site (here) for $9.95:

  (#3)

Two comments: all these phallic shakers are totally vertical, which gave one commenter on Facebook pause; and (#1) is a matched pair, making you wonder whether they’re a gay couple.

Verticality. Lawrence Rosenbaum (an internist at Dominican Medical Foundation, in Santa Cruz CA, so this is a considered medical opinion):

As I look at the tops very carefully, it is cleart to me that the models on which these were based must have created a very messy bathroom walls and driven their girlfriend/wife crazy with the splatter….

Well, I’m something of an expert on the public presentation of the male body, especially in gay porn, and I can tell you that the “upstanding” display of the erect penis is very common in certain contexts. In particular, when a gay porn flick is released by one of the big studios (Falcon, Titan, Lucas, etc.), the back cover of the DVD usually has a set of full-frontal displays of the actors in it, all displaying their hard dicks. Verticality — with the penis positioned in a way that no man would piss from (unless he actually intended to piss on himself, which does sometimes happen) — is all over the place. Many examples on AZBlogX. For instance, for the Titan film Close Up (posting here), all six cast members are shown with upstanding dicks; while for the Titan compilation of David Anthony scenes, four of the nine men have upstanding dicks, the others having some variety of out-jutting displays.

(Other Titan compilations I have yet to post about: for the Damien Crosse compilation, five of the eight men have upstanding dicks, two right up against their bellies, while two are doing out-jutting displays, and one is holding his dick straight down; for the Marco Blaze DVD, eight of the eleven men are straight up, two at half-mast, and one out; and for the Dean Flynn DVD, it’s four up and four out, though Flynn himself, displaying out on the back cover, is solidly up on the front cover, almost against his belly.)

So maybe we can just take the shakers in #1 to represent typical pornstars, who are up for display, but piss down like other men.

Queerness. At this point, we can wonder whether the models for the shakers in #1 did in fact have girlfriends or wives (as Rosenbaum assumed), or whether they were gay lovers, with nicely matched dicks. (This does happen, though not as often as you might think, the variability in penis properties being huge.) Hmm, those shakers do look awfully intimate. Maybe they’re up for one another.

I can deal pretty well with technical material in French, for example, but I’m easily stumped when it comes to artifacts, animals, plants, and the like. By way of illustration: my daughter gave me a big box of postcards on The Art of Instruction, with images of school materials from the 1950s, from mostly French but also some German sources. The German items have no text, but the French material (from Éditions Rossignol — the name is great; rossignol means ‘nightingale’) is heavy with text. For animals and plants, much of the vocabulary is technical teminology from zoology, anatomy, or botany, and that’s fascinating, but I can’t be expected to know these expressions. However, there are also the common names for animals and plants, and they contain many surprises.

That brings me to the tadpole.

The cover of the box, from Chronicle Books (in San Francisco):

  (#1)

And the frog card:

  (#2)

The surprise here was (le) têtard — obviously ‘tadpole’, and fairly obviously tête ‘head’ plus the suffix -ard, used for diminutives or pejoratives (I have basic French vocabulary and know a fair amount about French morphology, but I checked etymological sources just to be sure). And the name makes some sense after the fact: tadpoles are mostly head:

  (#3)

(Feel free to insert a remark about sperm here.)

The point is that I couldn’t possibly have guessed how to translate tadpole into French. Even if I knew the etymology of the English word (which I didn’t, until I looked it up this morning), I’m sure I’d never have hit on têtard. Wikipedia on tadpoles:

A tadpole (also called pollywog or porwigle) is the larval stage in the life cycle of an amphibian, particularly that of a frog or toad. They are usually wholly aquatic, though some species have tadpoles that are terrestrial.

… The name “tadpole” is from Middle English taddepol, made up of the elements tadde, “toad”, and pol, “head” (modern English “poll”). Similarly, “polliwog” is from Middle English polwygle, made up of the same pol, “head” and wiglen, “to wiggle”.

If I’d known that, I might have guessed that tête was involved, but that wouldn’t have gotten me to têtard. You just have to know the word.

Along the same lines, here’s a plant:

  (#4)

There’s a pile of botanical terminology — French for sepal, pistil, achene, and stamen, in particular — but then there’s the common name of the plant, (le) bouton d’or (or bouton-d’or), literally ‘button of gold’. Again, that makes sense after the fact, but I can’t see any way to get from the English common name, buttercup, to the French. (Photos of buttercups in this posting.)

The Art of Instruction cards are in fact a constant education in everyday French vocabulary that I didn’t know and couldn’t have predicted. I’m not sure what use there is for me to know how to talk about tadpoles or buttercups in French, but it entertains me.

NEW YORKIANS

In “Draft No. 4,” [April 29th], John McPhee writes that a copy editor sometimes provides a writer with a word like “a rare gold coin.” He recalls how Mary Norris, copy editing one of his pieces, suggested “Mancunians” for “Manchestrians.” McPhee goes on to rank it on a selective list of names for residents of specific locales. Readers wrote in with their own demonyms:

Here’s another demonym, used by Sir Steven Runciman in “A History of the Crusades”: an inhabitant of Trebizond is a Trapezuntine. Greg Vanderheiden, Hong Kong

I worked at a daily newspaper in Aspen, Colorado, where we called residents Aspenites. Citizens of nearby Basalt were Basaltines. Best of all were the people of Crested Butte, south of the Elk Mountains. They were, and are, Crested Beauticians. Hal Clifford, Boulder, Colo.

How could McPhee leave out Cantabrigian and Oxonian? The first I find much more euphonious and ingenious than the second, though I may be prejudiced. Margaret Way, M.A. Cantab., Epping, N.H.

What McPhee wrote:

The planet, of course, is covered with demonyms, and after scouring the word in conversations on this topic with Mary Norris I began a severely selective A-list, extending Mancunian and Vallisoletano [a citizen of Valladolid] through thity-five others at this writing, including Wulfrunian (Wolverhampton), Novocastrian (Newcastle), Trifluvian (Trois-Rivières), Leodensian (Leeds), Hartlepudlian (Hartlepool), Liverpudlian (you knew it), Haligonian (Halifax), Varsovian (Warsaw), Providentian (Providence), and Tridentine (Trent).

McPhee shows a decided preference for demonyms based on Latin (which are, in general, phonologically distant from the English place-names, so more “interesting”), and he gives only 10 of the 35 demonyms on his “severely selective A-list”, which for all we know included Cantabrigian and Oxonian — and maybe Exonian (Exeter), Neapolitan (Naples), and Venetian (Venice). (Margaret Way could simply have offered her favorite demonyms, without exclaiming in astonishment over what she sees as deficiencies in the list McPhee gave in the New Yorker — which was clearly labeled as a sampling of a larger list that was itself “severely selective”.)

As McPhee says, the planet is covered with demonyms. The Wikipedia article on them has an enormous list, which is nevertheless missing the wonderful Trapezuntine and, of course, very local (and often playful) demonyms, like the ones from Hal Clifford.