As we enter into the High Shopping Season, I return to the vocabulary and semiotics of men’s underwear, using material from catalogs aimed primarily at gay men (Undergear and 10Percent, on-line as undergear.com and 10percent.com). (See earlier discussions here and here, with links to earlier postings.)

These catalogs perform a double function: as enticements to buy (the men viewing the photos should want to be like the models) and as soft porn (these men should desire the models). As I sometimes put it, gay men are supposed to want to be the guy in the photo and also to want to do the guy.

Towards the second goal, the garments are designed to display the desirable features of the male body, in particular, dick, balls, and ass, and the models often appear in sexualized poses and with facial expressions that are intended to be seductive. (There will be examples.)

The basic category distinctions include the following:

boxers, or boxer shorts
briefs
trunks, or trunk briefs
jocks, or jockstraps
thongs

A number of these come in subtypes. There are fly-front briefs and bikini briefs, but for the gay-oriented underwear catalogs, briefs is essentially just a truncation of bikini briefs, fly-front briefs being extraordinarily rare in these catalogs. And briefs range from very low-rise briefs (which from the front look like thongs, but have a back panel) to full-rise briefs.

Each style has its virtues, both for the way they feel to the wearer and for the appeal they have to the viewer. Particular styles often appeal to certain men for their associations and connotations: jockstraps with athletes, athletics, and locker rooms, for instance.

In addition to these basic styles, there are hybrid styles, which are apparently intended to combine the virtues of the basic styles. You might think of trunk briefs this way, as combining the virtues of briefs and swimming trunks. Then there are boxer briefs (some looser, some tighter, and some very close to trunk briefs) and jock briefs, of two types. Your basic jockstrap has three components: an elastic waistband, a pouch in front, and two straps in the back. You can then add features of briefs by adding either a back panel or a front panel.

In another set of variants, sheer fabrics or loose mesh are used, so as to reveal as much as they conceal.

In still another set of variants, the underwear can be designed so as to exaggerate the wearer’s equipment, in “shock jocks” and “enhancement briefs” and the like (one step above stuffing a sock in your underwear, and roughly analogous to push-up bras).

Finally, all of these items can be produced in a palette of colors (pale pink briefs!) and a variety of patterns. The catalogs are very heavy in such extravagances.

Now for a few examples, chosen from many.

First, trunk briefs:

and a display of a number of styles:

and some briefs and a thong:

On to some extraordinarily hi-def briefs (in lime green):

and two images of enhancement underwear, the second heavily sexualized):

There’s a lot more, of course. This is just a sample for your weekend enjoyment.

Alessandra Stanley’s “The TV Watch” column (“Community Standard or Double Standard?”), in the November 26 New York Times Arts section, begins:

It wasn’t really the man-on-man kiss or the simulated oral sex that marked [American Idol contestant] Adam Lambert’s performance on the American Music Awards on Sunday as shocking. Mostly it was ABC’s reaction. By rescinding Mr. Lambert’s invitation to sing on “Good Morning America,” ABC self-protectively drew a line that networks usually prefer to keep blurred.

… There is a lot of very adult material on television all the time, and mostly it flows unchecked and unpunished, except when it comes as a surprise and hits a nerve. Community standards are mutable and vague; lots of people don’t know obscenity until someone else sees it. [emphasis mine]

… Mr. Lambert … startled viewers because he did things akin to what outré rappers and female pop stars have performed onstage to get attention, only he did it as a gay man.

ABC brought on “squeaky clean Donny Osmond” instead of Lambert, and Lambert went on “The Early Show” to complain about double standards. Stanley concluded:

[Lambert's singing on the American Music Awards] wasn’t the best musical performance by any means, but it wasn’t the worst display of sexual debauchery either. Mostly it was a reminder of television’s policy regarding gay men: Do tell, just don’t show.

From A. G. Sulzberger’s “City Room” column (“Sewer Alligators? A Legend’s Roots”) in the New York Times of November 24:

There was Teddy May, the colorful former superintendent of city sewers, working a mouthful of tobacco with what teeth he had left while spinning his implausible story.

And with him was Robert Daley, the writer, asking the questions that would give new life — and credibility — to one of the great city legends.

“I says to myself, ‘Them guys been drinking.’” Mr. May began.

“I’ll go down there,” he continued, “and prove to youse guys that there ain’t no alligators in my sewers.”

That conversation, on a Hell’s Kitchen stoop, about where giant reptiles patrolled the city sewers was made public 50 years ago in Mr. Daley’s 1959 book, “The World Beneath the City,” …

Daley reported May as having found “alligators averaging two feet long paddling serenely around the city’s sewers”. And so began the great Sewer Alligators urban legend. Who’dathunkit: fifty years already.

What’s linguistically interesting here is the representation of May’s demotic speech, Damon-Runyon-fashion. It sounds so New York. But in fact it’s not uniquely New Yorkish; the features represented here are almost all general demotic American, common to working-class speakers across a wide geographical and ethnic/racial expanse and enduring, at least in broad outlines, over fairly long periods of time.

[Side note: we don't, of course, have any idea what May actually said to Daley, only the record of how Daley chose to transcribe this. May might well have said something transcribable (in ordinary orthography) as "Dem guys been drinkin'", but Daley chose not to indicate these phonological features (or r-lessness) in his report. That would have no effect on my critique, though, since these features are widespread.]

Here I’m revisiting a topic of a 2004 Language Log posting, “The curious grammar of Ohio: The Local Color Illusion”, in which I looked at a reviewer’s claim that a set of short stories set mostly in eastern Ohio reflected the linguistic peculiarities of (largely working-class) speakers in the region. It turned out that the linguistic features represented in the stories, though certainly common in the speech of these people, are almost all widespread in the working class of the U.S. The reviewer was suffering from what I called

the Local Color Illusion, the impression that non-standard features, largely to be heard in the vernacular of the working class, in some area are what make the language of that area special, and colorful — this despite the fact that the non-standard features that are most likely to be noticed are those that are not particularly regional.

The features of vernacular New York City speech that Daley represented above were indeed frequent for such speakers, but they were (and still are) widespread elsewhere.

(My 2004 posting went on to speculate about the Local Color Illusion and its relationship to several bits of language ideology.)

William Haefeli in the November 9 New Yorker:

Caption: “Will Kristen, Kirsten, and Kiersten please choose new names?”

What, no Kristin?

Item 2 from Chris Laning, who came across the following in a piece of “bureaucratic prose describing the benefits of being a faculty member emeritus”. (It’s in a draft text, so I’m concealing the name of the university in question.)

As a [University X] emeriti faculty, you are eligible for …

Laning saw this, probably correctly, as an attempt to achieve a sex-neutral term, choosing neither emeritus nor emerita. But it clanged in her ear.

I’ve been in this territory before, on the English alumn- words (here), and much of what I said in the earlier posting carries over to the English emerit- words.

For indicating grammatical gender, masculine vs. feminine (which for these words is tied to sex) and number, singular vs. plural, Latin has four forms. For Latin ēmerit- (originally ‘that has served his time (said of a soldier)’) in the nominative case:

masc sg ēmeritus; masc pl ēmeritī
fem sg ēmerita; fem pl ēmeritae

That was Latin. In English, according to OED2, emeritus is an adjective meaning

Honourably discharged from service; chiefly in mod.L. phrase emeritus professor, the title given to a university professor who has retired from the office.

(with citations from 1794 on) and also a noun denoting someone who has been so discharged.

Some notes on the syntax of emeritus. OED2 has both adnominal and predicative (“be/become emeritus”) examples, and all of its adnominal cites have the adjective following the noun, reproducing the normal word order of Latin. But it’s easy to find examples of emeritus professor, with the adjective in its normal position in English.

OED2 doesn’t treat English emeritus as sex-marked, but then all its cites refer to men. In fact, you can find tons of examples of emeritus referring to women, as in

Professor Freda Adler received her BA in sociology, her MA in criminology, and her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University. (link)

and some female-referring examples of emeritus with nouns other than professor, as in

She is secretary emeritus of Oklahoma Publishing Co. and is on its board. (link)

At some point the masculine associations of  -us in English words from Latin moved some people to partially Latinize English by creating an English adjective (and noun) emerita. Emerita has made it into the OED (draft entry of March 2005, with cites from 1842 on, including instances of both Professor Emerita and Emerita Professor), NOAD2, and AHD4.

The current Wikipedia entry for emeritus notes that emerita

is often used as the female equivalent, although avoided by purists, since phrases such as professor emerita are ungrammatical in Latin.

This is because the Latin noun professor is masculine in gender. But the English noun professor has no grammatical gender. In English, the noun professor has an ordinary English plural, professors, not one taken directly from Latin, and it doesn’t vary in form according to syntactic function (as subject, direct object, and so on), the way Latin nouns do.

Apparently, some people think that professor emeritus is a Latin expression embedded in English, as a kind of quotation, rather than an expression of English, rather than an expression of English (composed of the absolutely ordinary English noun professor and an English adjective emeritus, which has the somewhat unusual, but not unprecedented, property of being able to occur after the noun it modifies).

Treating professor emeritus as an expression of English, with an English adjective emeritus in it, predicts (correctly) that the adjective can occur with nouns other than professor and allows for the option of regularizing the word order to emeritus professor. It would also allow for professor emeritus and emeritus professor to be used of women, and for plurals professors emeritus and emeritus professors, which can refer to groups with women in them; all of these possibilities are attested, in fairly large numbers.

But if you see the adjective emeritus as suggesting reference to a man, and just one man, you’ll be inclined to borrow more of the Latin paradigm. One route is to use emeriti for sex-neutral reference to groups, in professors emeriti and emeriti professors (both attested in substantial numbers). Another is to constrain the adjective emeriti to reference to groups of men, in which case some other tactic has to be used to refer to groups of mixed sex. Such a tactic will depend on borrowing the form emeritae for reference to groups of women, as in professors emeritae and emeritae professors. (Once you start Latinizing English, things get out of hand quickly.)

So then we get explicit coordinations: professors emeriti and emeritae, professors emeritae and emeriti, emeriti and emeritae professors, emeritae and emeriti professors (all attested). Or implicit coordination via “slashed” spellings: professors emeriti/emeritae, professors emeriti/ae, and so on.

How, then, do we get to an emeriti faculty (member)? Possibly by the same route that led people to singular alumni, as in “I am an alumni of Princeton” (via the complexities of pronouncing the Latin endings -i and -ae in English, as explained in my “distinguished alum” posting), or possibly by the direct influence of this use of alumni.

Emeritus and emerita also have uses as nouns, with plurals emeriti and emeritae (or emeritas), respectively. But emeriti sometimes gets used as a singular, like alumni. From the Western Michigan University Emeriti News:

The Council has been informed that WMU has received an anonymous donation by an emeriti to the Emeriti Medallion Scholar Fund. (link)

Elsewhere on this site there are straightforwardly plural uses of the noun emeriti.

Alum(n) as a sex-neutral alternative to alumnus/alumna has been around in U.S. colloquial usage since 1910 (according to the OED’s draft entry of March 2004), but a parallel emerit seems not to have emerged in modern times, so we’re pretty much stuck with the emerit- words.

Chris Laning is uncomfortable with singular emeriti, as am I. We both would prefer emeritus for all singular uses of the adjective (and noun), but I suppose that if you want to be conspicuously non-sexist, the bureaucratic prose could have been framed as

As a [University X] emerita or emeritus faculty, you are eligible for …

(Laning notes that elsewhere in the document “academic staff member emeritus” passes without comment.)

Chris Laning wrote me yesterday about some attempts to deal with reflections, in texts in English, of grammatical gender distinctions in other languages. The first of these has to do with the Latino/Latina and Chicano/Chicana distinctions in Spanish.

In working on a Chicano/Latino History website, Laning came across the usage Chican@-Latin@ — an attempt to orthographically package together the gender-marked Spanish nouns (as well as using both the Chican- and the Latin- labels). The spellings with @ were new to Laning, and in fact they seem to be a fairly recent innovation.

I have the @ spellings in the title of a 2005 essay by Immanuel Wallerstein (“Latin@s: What’s in a Name?”) and in the title of a 2007 book by Elizabeth Rodriguez Kessler and Anne Perrin (Chican@s in the Conversations). There are plenty of other hits for the @ spellings, in English (the group Latin@s Against the War [in Iraq and Afghanistan]) and Spanish (a Facebook page for Teolog@s Latin@s, that is, for “Latino/a theologians”).

Latino, for ‘a Latin-American inhabitant of the United States’ (OED2), is itself not very old; OED2’s cites start in 1946. Chicano, for ‘a person of Mexican birth or descent resident in the U.S. …; a Mexican-American’ (OED2), is of about the same age; OED2’s cites start in 1947.

These English nouns were not at first marked as to sex. For instance, Lady Bird Johnson referred in her White House diary in 1966 to “six young girls, all Latinos”. Eventually, sex-marked nouns appeared: there’s an OED draft entry of March 2006 for Latina with cites from 1972 on, and a draft entry from December 2007 for Chicana with cites from 1969 on.

At that point, Latino and Chicano will tend to be seen as referring only to men, and people began to start casting around for sex-neutral variants. Some continue to use the -o words as sex-neutral, as in Maria Hinojosa’s NPR program “Latino USA”. Then there’s the slash option, in Chicano/a or Chicana/o (both attested) and similar spellings for the Latin- words. And then there’s the @ option. Both the slash options and the @ option are visual devices, and are awkward to pronounce (though you can hear things like “Latinos slash Latinas”).

It turns out that Latin America and Latin American are not all that old, either. Wallerstein’s essay looks at the history of Latin as a geographical or ethnic designation (going back to the 19th century) and examines the cluster of social categories and labels in this domain (including Hispanic as well as the terms I’ve already mentioned). It’s pretty much a rat’s nest of variation (in several dimensions) and changing usage.

Ann Burlingham has written to report on a conversation with a co-worker who asked about sauced meaning ‘drunk’. When Ann told him that the word was soused, he maintained that he’d never heard that word (or the noun souse) in his 32 years of life.

But sauced ‘drunk’ is all over the net, though not in OED2 (which has only the sense ’seasoned, flavored’) or NOAD2 or AHD4. It is in the Random House Dictionary (2009) and at least one slang dictionary, Spears’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions (4th ed., 2007).

Given the noun sauce ‘alcoholic liquor’ (slang, originally U.S., attested in OED2 from 1940 on), occurring in idioms like on the sauce and hit the sauce, sauced meaning ‘drunk’ makes a lot of sense. In fact, it could arise in two different ways.

First, some Google hits for {“was so sauced”} (chosen to avoid most instances of sauced ’seasoned’):

We saw him perform years ago and he was drunk as a freakin skunk. He was having drinks on stage and was so sauced that he even laid down on the stage and sang for us. (link)

I helped Claire get her shirt buttoned. She was so sauced that she flirted with me. (Harry Lee Kraus, All I’ll Ever Need, p. 268)

And forget the “great father, phenomenal lawyer” crap. The guy was so sauced he couldn’t control his vehicle. (link)

In raw ghits, {“was so sauced”} (12,300) comes in just a bit short of {“was so soused”} (14,800).

One route to sauced ‘drunk’ is by direct conversion of the noun sauce ‘alcoholic liquor’ to a participial adjective. Another route is as an eggcorn for soused, created by people who found soused opaque. (For the record, the participial adjective soused is attested in the sense ’steeped in pickle, pickled’ from the 16th century — it’s derived from the verb souse ‘to pickle’, attested from the 14th century — and with reference to liquor from the 17th century. Note that pickled ‘drunk, drunken’ is itself attested from 1842 on.)

(The RHD suggests both soused and sauce ‘liquor’ as contributing to sauced ‘drunk’.)

Whatever the route to sauced ‘drunk’ — and different people might have taken different routes — that presumably happened a while ago, so that people using the word now know it simply as a piece of slang for ‘drunk’.

From Joe Clark, an insanely complex comedy routine, involving (among other things) center-embedded discourse:

stand-up comic

(This is from the National Lampoon album Gold Turkey.)

Tom Limoncelli has passed on to me a query from a friend of his:

I have found myself running syllables together in unexpected ways:

instead of “hobo beans” I might say “hobob eans”

or instead of “Jon Bon Jovi” “Jon Bonge Ovi”

or instead of “soup and sandwich” “soups and which” (which is another set of problems, perhaps)

Do you or any linguists of your acquaintance know of this phenomenon?

It happens only orally, and not in writing.

The short answer is: metanalysis, a.k.a. recutting, though the third example seems to involve omission of and followed by recutting. But there’s more to be said here.

A number of different phenomena have been treated together under these headings. First, there are cases where an expression is recut morphologically: hamburger interpreted as ham + burger, leading to the creation of  nouns like cheeseburger and to a free-standing noun burger.

Then there are phonological recuttings, resyllabifications, both between words and within words. The major tendency here is to move segments from a less accented syllable to a more accented syllable, as in these between-word examples I noted on ADS-L back in 2003:

final /s/ in this and las’ (for last) moved into the second word in some two-word time expressions, as in this morning, this evening and last night;

public radio announcer Bob Edwards pronouncing his name with the final /b/ of Bob moved to the beginning of Edwards;

public radio announcer Sandip Roy pronouncing his name with the final /p/ of Sandip moved to the beginning of Roy;

an ad for the movie Mystic River in which the final /k/ of Mystic is moved to the beginning of River.

The Bedwards, Proy, and Criver productions were particularly easy to detect, because of the allophonics involved: Bob Edwards tends to have ingressive variants for syllable-initial (but not syllable-final) /b/; and /p/ and /k/ have aspirated variants at the beginning of accented syllables (but not at the end of syllables) position.

(The resyllabifications that Limoncelli’s friend reported would not be so easy to hear, and at least two of them move a consonant from a more accented to a less accented syllable, so I’m a bit suspicious of the report.)

These resyllabifications take place in expressions that are familiar to the speaker (if only by repetition, as in the Misty Criver case) and are likely to be treated as phonological words.

The familiarity effect shows up within words as well. As Dennis Preston claimed in ADS-L, resyllabification is “how you can identify real cheeseheads: Us wis-con-sin, Them wi-scon-sin”. Again, the difference is easy to hear, because We have an aspirated variant of the /k/, while They have an unaspirated variant.

The resyllabifications I’ve looked at so far are phonetic readjustments. But sometimes they can be lexicalized; that is, they can result in changes in the phonological content of lexical items.

Consider the English indefinite article, which has two shapes, a and an, the choice between them depending on the following phonological context, and which also forms a prosodic unit with the following material. As a result, it can be unclear whether an /n/ belongs to the article or to a following noun, and English has seen phonological re-shapings of a number of nouns, going in both directions: apron has lost an initial n, while newt has picked one up.

(Some writers use the term metanalysis to refer only to historical changes.)

Ann Burlingham has written me about the headline

Mau Mauing the Flesh Eaters

on Jennifer Schuessler’s review of Jonathan Safran Froer’s Eating Animals (in the November 15 New York Times Book Review). She just didn’t get it. But Wikipedia’s article on the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s had the crucial clue, all the way at the bottom: a reference to Tom Wolfe’s 1970 article “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (combined with another Wolfe article to make the 1971 book Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers).

Cultural references are the very devil.

It turns out that allusions to the Wolfe title have been around ever since 1970, and continue to appear in considerable numbers (though most aren’t as closely patterned on Wolfe’s title as the headline on Schuessler’s review), and that the Wolfe title has gotten the verb mau-mau into dictionaries.

First, the dictionaries. The OED has an entry (March 2001 draft revision) for the transitive verb mau-mau (and for the related nouns mau-mauer and mau-mauing), marking it as colloquial and chiefly North American, glossing it ‘to use menacing or intimidating tactics against; to intimidate, harass; to terrorize’, giving Wolfe’s 1970 article as the first citation, and tracing the word back to the Mau Mau Association (a secret society in Kenya, originating among the Kikuyu, advocating armed resistance to British rule), so that mau-mau is a verbing of Mau Mau). NOAD2 and AHD4 also have entries.

The headline on Schuessler’s review is about as close to Wolfe’s title as you can get: mau mauing the N Vers, where N Vers is a synthetic compound in which the N is interpreted as the direct object of the V (no hyphen in mau mauing, but then hyphenation in written English is often a sometime thing).

A Google search on {“mau-mauing the”} yields a large number of hits, even when pages mentioning Wolfe or Schuessler are excluded: at least three in October 2009 (including “mau-mauing the legislators”), at least two in September 2009 (including “mau-mauing the Department of Education”), and then back through 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, and 1999 — just listing examples that came up in the first few pages. Almost all are from journalistic writing (including editorials, opinion pieces, and the like), in print or on-line. A few examples: “mau-mauing the mom and pops”, “mau-mauing the Marines”, “mau-mauing the judiciary”.

So it seems that the Wolfe title has served, in some quarters, as a model for playful allusions. That makes these examples look snowclone-like — except that they could just be occurrences of the verb mau-mau, as in these examples from the OED, which don’t have the verb used in a gerundive nominal:

1970 [Wolfe himself]: going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats

1971: has been mau-maued

1986: could not be mau-maued

1990: mau-maus the white coats of the medical establishment

I’m then inclined to see “mau-mauing the Marines” and the like as just involving the verb mau-mau, rather than as instances of a snowclone originating with the Wolfe title. “Mau mauing the meat eaters”, though, is pretty clearly a play on Wolfe’s title — but then a playful allusion does not a snowclone make.