Judgments have been made, and my abstract for the Stanford Semantics Festival 13 (March 16th) has been accepted (along with those from Jason Grafmiller, Ingrid Falkum, Elizabeth Traugott, Cleo Condoravdi and Sven Lauer, Marta Recasens,  Lauri Karttunen, and Eric Acton; this is a small, local, and companionable conference). Here’s my abstract, on themes some readers will recall from earlier postings of mine; remember that this is just an abstract, confined to a single page:

Parts of the Body

Is the armpit (or underarm) a part of the body? Yes and no. It’s certainly an (external) area of the body, but when you ask people to name parts of the body, the armpit rarely comes up; it’s not a basic part of the body. And if you concede that it’s a part of the body (with part ‘portion’), you might be unwilling to say that it’s a bodypart. Behind these judgments lie (a) a folk understanding of the body and its constituents, in which internal contents (in particular, organs) are distinguished from external features, and the latter include both parts proper and areas; and (b) a distinction in the way compound nouns (like bodypart) and phrasal expressions (like part of the body) tend to be interpreted.

Re (b): Compounds tend to pick up specialized senses, so that they’re not always fully compositional: bodypart can function as a “semi-technical” term in a way that part of the body usually doesn’t (bodypart / body-part / body part isn’t in standard English dictionaries, though it probably should be).

Re (a): The vocabulary of the body and its constituents provides a rich source of illustrations of semantic phenomena:

1. Covert taxonomy for conceptual domains (internal organs vs. external features; bodyparts vs. areas vs. large regions, like the lower body); some things are largely outside of this taxonomy (hair, bodily fluids)

2. A distinction between ordinary and technical language (in this case, everyday vs. anatomical terminology), according to the purposes each serves (cf. armpit and axilla); ordinary language focuses on external features, while anatomical language tends to treat these as mere “anatomical landmarks” for locating internal organs. (Elbows and knees are, to the anatomist, really the joints in question and the bones that make them up.)

3. Lexical gaps in ordinary language (e.g. for popliteal fossa), filled by phrasal expressions (inside of the knee) or slang innovations (knee pit) (cf. coordinations in head and neck, arms and legs).

4. Multiple synonyms, distinguished by pragmatics, social function, or style (umbilicus, navel, belly button).

5. Migration of technical terms into ordinary language (penis, vagina), usually to provide neutral terms in socially edgy domains.

6. Complex structure of conceptual (and lexical) domains, in particular, parts within parts:  head > face > mouth > lips.

7. A distinction between basic and non-basic categories (and vocabulary).

8. Terms understood more narrowly or more widely (eye as ‘the organ of sight’ or ‘taken as including the eyelids, or the surrounding parts; the region of the eyes’ (OED)).

9. Considerable variation (social and individual) in categorization and vocabulary.

 

After I posted my first piece on the (human) body and its parts, with four diagrams illustrating vocabulary for the external parts, Ellen Seebacher complained on Google+:

Okay, can I register my irritation at illustrations of exterior body parts which substitute “vagina” for “vulva”?

Turns out that there are several things going on here: the difference between ordinary and technical (in this case, anatomical) vocabulary; narrow vs. broad interpretation of terms; variation in ordinary language; change in ordinary language; and the problems of ostensive definition.

Ordinary and technical language. Historically, both vulva and vagina are technical terms, from the vocabulary of descriptive anatomy. The first refers to the external parts, the second to the internal tube:

The vulva … consists of the external genital organs of the female mammal…

The vulva has many major and minor anatomical structures, including the labia majora, mons pubis, labia minora, clitoris, bulb of vestibule, vulval vestibule, greater and lesser vestibular glands, and the opening of the vagina. (link to Wikipedia)

The vagina (from Latin vāgīna, literally “sheath” or “scabbard”) is a fibromuscular tubular tract leading from the uterus to the exterior of the body in female placental mammals and marsupials, or to the cloaca in female birds, monotremes, and some reptiles…

The word vagina is often used colloquially to refer to the vulva or to the female genitals in general; technically, the vagina is the specific internal structure. (link to Wikipedia)

The interface between the two is the vaginal opening, also externally visible. Three things — the opening, what surrounds it, and the internal structures it leads to — are at play here. Anatomical language distinguishes them.

(There are parallels: the mouth, the nose, the ear, the urethral opening in men, everybody’s anus — all involving an opening, surrounding external parts, and an interior conduit to other structures. I’ll come back to this point in a while.)

The comon ordinary-language terminology — cunt and pussy — doesn’t make these distinctions, but uses terms that cover the whole package, so to speak. So in:

(1) She flashed/exposed her X.

(2) She put a dildo in her X.

vulva works for (1) but not (2); for many people (but see below), vagina works for (2) but not (1); and cunt/pussy works for both. In everyday usage, the whole package (as opposed to the truly internal parts, in particular the uterus) is what’s salient; that’s what our everyday dealings with these parts of the body are concerned with. We can fall back on technical vocabulary if we need to make the anatomists’ distinctions, but ordinarily we have no reason to.

But there’s a problem with the ordinary-language terms: they’re very marked stylistically — in fact, marked not only as colloquial, but as obscene, taboo. Colloquial terms for parts of the body aren’t necessarily obscene (compare anatomical-technical umbilicus, neutral ordinary-language navel, colloquial but innocent belly-button), but in the sexual realm colloquial terms easily become tainted, as at least “naughty”, if not “dirty”. This is the case for the colloquial terms for the penis, principally dick and cock. What we’re left with in the sexual realm is euphemisms and evasions, like hoo-ha and willy and thing.

Still, people (trying to negotiate the shoals of social interactions) hope for some neutral everyday term, and anatomical terminology is a good place to look. That gives us the “ordinarization” of the originally medical term penis — moved into ordnary language as a neutral term, or at least as neutral a term as we can get for the referent, which is culturally perilous — and now vagina as well. Penis moves into the cock/dick slot, and vagina into the cunt/pussy slot. (I’ve remarked on the traffic between technical and ordinary language on several occasions, for instance here.) One result of this is that for many people vagina now has both a narrower (strictly internal) sense and a broader (whole-package) sense (though there’s variation in usage on this point).

It’s actually comon for body-part terminology to exhibit an ambiguity of this sort. Other cases (of several different sorts): mouth, nose, eye, perineum, and tits. Plus three cases involving an ambiguity between internal and external parts: stomach, throat, and the scrotum/testicle zone.

(1) Mouth. AHD5 distinguishes two senses of mouth, the opening and the whole package:

The body opening through which an animal takes in food.

The cavity lying at the upper end of the digestive tract, bounded on the outside by the lips and inside by the oropharynx and containing in humans and certain other vertebrates the tongue, gums, and teeth.

(2) Nose: the external part or the cavity or the whole package, including the openings. Similarly, nostril for an opening or for a cavity in it.

(3) Eye. OED2 on eye distinguishes:

The organ of sight.

… taken as including the eyelids, or the surrounding parts; the region of the eyes.

(4) Perineum. Wikipedia (here) distinguishes a broader and narrowed sense:

In human anatomy, the perineum (Late Latin, from Greek περίνεος – perineos) is a region of the body including the perineal body and surrounding structures. There is some variability in how the boundaries are defined, but the term generally includes the genitals and anus.

… A wide variety of slang terms are commonly used for this area of the human body, most commonly “chode,” “gooch,” or “taint,” or even “the spot where God sewed us up” but they generally refer to a smaller, less inclusive area — just the surface skin region between the anus and the scrotum or vaginal opening.

(5) Tits. Just the nipples (as in pinching someone’s — a woman’s or man’s — tits) or the entire breast (She has big tits).

(6) Stomach. The internal organ (as in sick to one’s stomach) or the abdomen, the “part of the body between the pelvis and the thorax” (link) (as in a flat stomach). Belly is similarly ambiguous.

(7) Throat. The internal cavity (as when you have a bone caught in your throat) or the front part of the neck, the external area between the head and the shoulders (as when someone strokes your throat).

(8) The scrotum/testicle zone. In anatomical usage, the scrotum (or scrotal sac) is the external part, the testicles the internal parts, and there’s no term for the whole package. In ordinary-language usage, we have coarse balls/nuts, which take in the whole package (as in kick him in the balls, my balls hurt, a rash on my balls, my balls shrink up in cold water). To get a more neutral ordinary-language term, some people have ordinarized scrotum or testicles or both to cover this range. But usage varies.

Throughout these examples, I’ve noted variation in ordinary language and change in ordinary language. Now for some words on ostensive definition, communicating the meaning of a word or other expression by pointing — literally, as with the fingers, or more indirectly, as with arrows pointing to things on drawings or diagrams, or even more subtly, by merely using the expression in the presence of some object.

Ostensive definition seems direct and helpful, but it’s fraught with complications, exposed most trenchantly in Quine’s famous gavagai discussion. From the Wikipedia entry on the indeterminacy of translation:

The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th century analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book Word and Object, which gathered together and refined much of Quine’s previous work on subjects other than formal logic and set theory. The indeterminacy of translation is also discussed at length in his Ontological Relativity (1968).

… Consider Quine’s example of the word “gavagai” uttered by a native upon seeing a rabbit. The linguist could do what seems natural and translate this as “Lo, a rabbit.” But other translations would be compatible with all the evidence he has: “Lo, food”; “Let’s go hunting”; “There will be a storm tonight” (these natives may be superstitious); “Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage”; “Lo, an undetached rabbit-part.” Some of these might become less likely – that is, become more unwieldy hypotheses – in the light of subsequent observation. Others can only be ruled out by querying the natives: An affirmative answer to “Is this the same gavagai as that earlier one?” will rule out “momentary rabbit stage,” and so forth. But these questions can only be asked once the linguist has mastered much of the natives’ grammar and abstract vocabulary; that in turn can only be done on the basis of hypotheses derived from simpler, observation-connected bits of language; and those sentences, on their own, admit of multiple interpretations, as we have seen.

In actual practice, people use a number of heuristics to divine the intention of an ostensive definition, including looking for a meaning that would be very informative in the context — neither too specific (‘German shepherd’) nor too broad (‘domestic animal’) — and steering away from meanings that are paired with already known expressions. There’s a huge and fascinating literature on the acquisition of word meaning by children (sometimes conveyed by ostension), exposing these heuristics. (Note that since they’re heuristics, they’re fallible. The meaning acquired can be different, in small details or more massively, from the meaning intended.)

Here I’m interested in the special case of pointing arrows in diagrams — in particular, diagrams of the human body. What does it mean whe an arrow points to the area of the mouth? Does the word at the other end of the arrow denote the opening, the external features (the ips), the cavity, or the whole package? The arrow doesn’t tell you.

And, to get back to Ellen Seebacher’s comment, what does it mean when an arrow points to the area of the female genitals? The opening, the external features (the vulva), the cavity (the vagina, understood narrowly), or the whole package? Or even the crotch?

Compare an arrow pointing towards the penis. What does the word at the other end of the arrow denote? The whole penis, from root to head? The shaft of the penis (or whichever other portion of the penis the tip of the arrow happens to alight upon)? If the arrow alights close to the tip of the penis: the whole penis, the head, the urethral opening, or the urethra? Or the whole male genital package, cock and balls taken together? In this case, there’s a basic level of categorization, in which PENIS is the most salient body-part category, with PENIS-SHAFT as a (mereological) subordinate category and MALE-GENITALS as a (mereological) superordinate category (on mereology, see here, or the more technical presentation here). So, without further information, we’d take PENIS to be the intended referent, not something greater or lesser.

But you won’t get that just from looking at the diagram.

A very small thing, but entertaining (to me at any rate): the verb to oxter, in this passage from Bernie McGill’s The Butterfly Cabinet (2011), p. 201:

Then you came back, the pair of you, dripping with seawater, and lay down on the grass to dry.  And you said, ‘When was the last time you felt the sea on you, Nanny Madd?’ and your gray eyes twinkled, and I smiled back, and you jumped up and shouted to Conor, and the two of you took me by the hands, laughing, down to the shore. You slipped off my shoes, peeled down my stockings. At the water’s edge you took me by one elbow, Conor took me by the other, and between the two of you, you oxtered me in over the rippled sand until the water licked my ankles…

(Hat tip to Eve Clark, who noticed the passage because I mentioned the noun oxter in my SemFest talk last Friday.)

We start with the noun, in Scotland and northern England. From OED3 (March 2005):

Chiefly Eng. regional (north.), Sc., Irish English, and Manx English.

The armpit; (also more generally) the underside of the upper arm; the fold of the arm when bent against the body. Also: the armhole of a coat, jacket, etc.

The cites begin in the 15th and 16th centuries and continue through the 20th, where we find:

1914   J. Joyce Dubliners 206   Many a good man went to the penny-a-week school with a sod of turf under his oxter.

1964   Listener 19 Mar. 494/3   Alan Whicker..stood..on that bubbling pitch lake of Trinidad..and let us hear a calypso from a man who’d fallen into it up to his oxters.

1991   R. A. Jamieson Day at Office 85   Togher came in to the kitchen..buttoning the cuffs of a shirt which was ripped at one oxter.

McGill is from Northern Ireland; Joyce was Irish; and Jamieson is Scottish. Journalist Alan Whicker had no particular connection to that part of the world, nor did the BBC’s magazine The Listener, so the Listener cite suggests that the noun has some wider currency in the U.K.

The noun was verbed within a few hundred years; the OED‘s first cite is from Robert Burns:

a1796   R. Burns in J. Johnson Scots Musical Museum (1803) VI. 585   The Priest he was oxter’d, the Clerk he was carried.

The image here is of the priest being taken out supported by one person under each of his shoulders. The OED‘s gloss and the remainder of the cites:

trans. To support by the arm, walk arm in arm with; to take or carry under the arm; to embrace, put one’s arm around.

1808   J. Mayne Siller Gun ii. 46   Lads oxter lasses without fear, Or dance like wud.

a1813   A. Wilson Poems & Lit. Prose (1876) i. 67   Some oxtering pocks o’ silken ware, Some lapfus hov’t like kechan.

a1850   R. Gilfillan Poems & Songs (1851) 21,   I couldna gang by her for shame, I couldna but speak, else be saucy, Sae I had to oxter her hame, An’ buy a silk snood to the lassie.

1894   R. O. Heslop Northumberland Words 519   When this master of minstrelsy oxtered his blether.

1932   ‘L. G. Gibbon’ Sunset Song 58   Will whispered Let’s sleep together. So then they did, oxtering one the other till they were real warm.

1988   J. Black Yellow Wednesday 39   They became so helpless they slid off their seats on to the floor and a few of us had to oxter them out to the vestibule to recover.

2000   M. Fitt But n Ben A-go-go xiii. 98   Cairried. Oxtered. Stretchered oot on the shooders o an employee.

(But n Ben A-Go-Go is a science fiction work by Scots writer Matthew Fitt, notable for being entirely in the Scots language. (link) A but n ben is a two-roomed house: living room and bedroom.)

You can be oxtered off the stage or out the door. In certain parts of the world.

(From my life, with some technical language from anatomy.)

These have been hard days. It started maybe five weeks ago, with occasional twinges in my right hip. As time went on, the twinges turned into pain, mirrored eventually by pain on the inside of my right thigh, in the groin area, and then the pain began to radiate down my leg. Walking gradually became an ordeal, and a week ago, sleeping became difficult. What was happening to me?

A week ago I began using a cane to get around and contracted the distances I could manage, eventually to just walking around the corner once a day.

The one thing that was comfortable was sitting in a chair; after a few moments I could forget that there was a problem. So working at the computer was easy, and I began posting four to six things a day, mostly fairly short postings that gave me pleasure. But then, last weekend, my sleep difficulties started to catch up with me; I was exhausted most of the time.

On Wednesday I gave up and went off — well, was driven — to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Spent much of the day there (got a flu shot while I was there), eventually getting a diagnosis of, sigh, osteoarthritis, caused by a breakdown of cartilage in a joint, so that bone rubs on bone. It’s a degenerative condition associated with aging, among other things. (There might be bursitis as well, but you can’t see inflammation on an X-ray.)

The report on the X-rays, with some brief (though still technical) explanations (in square brackets) of some of the terms:

There is no evidence of acute fracture or dislocation.  There are significant degenerative changes of the right hip with superior and medial joint space narrowing, subchondral sclerosis [increased bone formation around the joint], subchondral cyst [fluid-filled sac extruded from a joint] formation and juxta-articular [near or in the region of a joint] osteophyte [spur] formation.  Much more mild degenerative changes noted involving the left hip.  Note is also made of osteitis pubis [(noninfectious) inflammation of the (cartilaginous) joint uniting the left and right pubic bones] and degenerative spurring of the right sacroiliac joint [the L-shaped joint between the sacrum and the ileum bones] so that bone rubs on bone.

Symptomatic relief: a pain reliever (acetominophen — Tylenol — or ibuprofen, with ibuprofen recommended at first because of its anti-inflammatory effects), ice, stretching exercises as tolerated. The ibuprofen began to kick in last night, but my life is still much contracted, because of exhaustion and the difficulties of managing even the minimal responsibilities of daily life. I’ll see an orthopedic surgeon on Thursday.

The radiologist’s report is jam-packed with technical terms of anatomy, most of them necessary in talking about features of internal anatomy that we have no ordinary-language terms for. Even the semi-technical word spurring incorporates a metaphor that might not be obvious in the context of bones and joints.

(The rapid progression from mere twinges to serious pain and disability was something of a surprise. Probably I just reached a tipping point, at which everything cascaded down. And then the problems of compensating for my increasing disabilities produced other problems, like cramping.)

Meanwhile, I limp along painfully. And depend on the kindnesses of friends.

More adventures of the Woolly Mammoth and his Platinum Wonder Hip, with some anatomical technicality.

For some days, I’ve been able to rise from sitting to standing entirely from my legs, without pushing up on anything or grabbing anything for support. This is a Very Big Thing, take my word for it.

Then came expeditions with my walker, first just to the mailboxes in the back of my condo complex, then around the corner to have lunch at Gordon Biersch, then yesterday to Whole Foods (as well as back from GB). It’s like recovering the use of a lost limb, not to mention the social world outside my living room (I get to come across friends and neighbors on the street!). This involves a lot of more or less ordinary walking, one leg in front of the other, not jockeying jerkily with the walker, and increasingly I don’t use the walker for support at all, only occasional balancing.

After yesterday’s WF trip, I stood up (in my new fashion) from working at the computer — and was seized with wild complaint from little muscles I’d never appreciated before (though, from my work on anatomical and ordinary language I knew they existed, in principle anyway).

It’s like what happens on the first nice day of spring, when you go out to prune, pull weeds, etc., stop for a rest after an hour or so — and find that your hands are suddenly, ouch ouch ouch, cramping into claws. Because you haven’t really used those little muscles for months, and they’re protesting.

Well, I wasn’t really able to walk for months, so those little muscles at the backs of my knees didn’t get used. And now they object. The Platinum Wonder Hip was fine, but my popliteal muscles were unhappy. (Fortunately, this is not crippling, just damned annoying.)

Ok, kids, where have we seen popliteal before? A year ago, in a posting of mine on “Concavities” (like the back/inside of the knee, or as some have it, the knee pit):

Other pits. Analogous to the armpit are the inside of the elbow and the inside of the knee. These phrases — inside of the elbow, inside of the knee — are of course available for talking about these areas, but there are no standard lexical items for them in ordinary English. There are anatomical terms, cubital fossa and popliteal fossa, respectively, but these are even less commonly known than axilla. (Latin fossa ‘ditch, trench’. Anatomical terms are packed with metaphors.) (link)

One thing I didn’t take up in that posting was how to pronounce the word. And then I got two competing pronunciations from different medical folks — anatomical Latin-based English has its challenges — so this looks like another one of those cases where whichever pronunciation I go for, there’s a fair chance that the person I’m talking to will find it incorrect. (I’ve struggled with medullar since Jacques’s medullar blastoma in 1980.)

It turns out that the OED is even-handed about the matter: it gives two choices, in both British and American English, for popliteal, with main accent on either the second or third syllable. I like the second syllable, my physical therapist (who’s decided his work with me is done, I’m able to follow the program on my own now) is firmly in favor of the third. So it goes.

Also missing from my earlier anatomical postings (which covered a very large number of referents and terms) were the etymology and the full details of usage. The adj. popliteal in English is related to the anatomical English n. popliteus, and that‘s a kind of truncation of musculus popliteus ‘popliteal muscle’, involving the Latin adj. popliteus. Then from OED3 (Dec. 2006) on popliteal:

Anat.
Designating or relating to the space at the back of the knee; of or relating to a structure (muscle, blood vessel, etc.) located in the space. [first cite 1754]

The OED is murky on the sources of the Latin. But in any case the Romans had a word for it.

Turns out that the popliteal fossa is just packed with a variety of structures; it’s a crowded neighborhood, so much so that, my p.t. guy tells me, self-defense instructors suggest a powerful whack to the back of the knee as an effective way of temporarily immobilizing an attacker.

Today I drove my poor popliteal muscles hard by walking roughly 7 blocks — slowly, but relentlessly, on a route that took me to the post office, the pharmacy, and a barbershop where I got, oh blessed day, a shampoo, major haircut, beard and moustache trim, and shaving touch-up with a cutthroat razor, from an aging barber in a funky shop attached to the Cardinal Hotel up the street from my house. Not many of these places left, and they no longer have shoe-shine stations. But being fussed over expertly (time virtually comes to a halt for these ministrations) by a crusty old Italian barber, amid piles of the Sporting News or its equivalent, is one of those cultural rituals of masculinity that I’ve treasured since my first such experience, when I was (I think) 17.

My profound thanks to Elizabeth Traugott, who gave me three hours of her time this afternoon for these indulgences of mine. (I’m still not supposed to venture out on my own, without someone to accompany me. I’m beginning to chafe at the restriction, since it involves seriously imposing on lots of busy people.) There was rather a lot of standing in line involved, and fortunately I’m now really good at just standing (you can improve the moment by shifting your weight from foot to foot for exercise and doing other little exercises with each foot, not to mention clenching your glutes and working your abs inconspicuously), on my own two feet, treating the walker as an ornament.

Popliteal muscles loosening up, meanwhile.

A few days ago on Facebook, Leith Chu wondered, about Dude Wipes from the Dude Products people:

Why hasn’t anybody mentioned these before? (link)

The Dude Products Dude Wipes Box of 30 [$9.99] on Amazon:

The description on this site:

There is nothing like the feeling of being clean!! After a long training session wipe down with a Dudewipe for a Fresh Scent not a Baby wipe scent. DudeWipes are wallet-sized and perfect for any person who wants to keep up their hygiene no matter where they are or what they’re doing. These wipes are a great complement to toilet paper, pre or post gym clean up, or to simply keep hands, face, and other areas Fresh and Clean. FINALLY!!!!!! A hygiene product that doesn’t smell like a baby.

Is this (to some degree) a serious product, designed to appeal to men who feel the need to assert their masculinity against babies (not to mention the elderly and the infirm, giving three groups who lack manliness and probably also the smell of a man, and of course women, who are totally out of it on both fronts)? There is plenty of male paranoia out there, but the closer you look at the site, the less likely it seems to be serious.

(Earlier wiping postings on this blog: on toilet paper, here, and more on wipes, here.)

An informational paragraph, though considerably more sparing of Emphatic Capitalization than the Amazon description, doesn’t inspire confidence:

Dude Products, Inc. was originally founded by a long time group of Dudes in Chicago, IL. Together we decided to change the way guys go to the bathroom and engineered our first product, Dude Wipes®. A blunt, entertaining and practical complement to toilet paper. Our core values will always be to innovate, entertain and keep you fresh. We’re here to change the game and look forward to the long journey ahead… Saving the World One Dude at a Time.

Thing is, it seems to be their first and only product. The site offers a couple of tank tops (STAY FRESH and SHITTING FOR MYSELF, with the url on the shirts), but when you click on those, you get a “product not found” message. The Dude Wipes are it, man, and they probably sell only as gag gifts.

As Leith pointed out, there are excellent unscented flushable wipes on the market, for instance in the Cottonelle line (which I too would recommend):

Cottonelle® Fresh Care™ Flushable Moist Toilet Wipes

There’s nothing like that “clean in-between” feeling – for all-over freshness. Cottonelle® brand cares for your bottom with a shower-fresh feeling that leaves you confidently clean.

(Clean, fresh, soft — all selling points, repeated many times, with minimal reference to the body — your bottom.)

And these are considerably cheaper than Dude Wipes, especially if you get the Cottonelles in quantity.

Inspired by Leith’s find, others sought out gag personal-care products in Amazon — and found the Blue Q Hand Sanitizer lines: first, Chris Hansen with Maybe You Touched Your Genitals (here), “the #1 after-genital contact hand sanitizer”, then Emily Rizzo with I ♥ My Penis (here) — both $7.95 a bottle. These are openly billed as gag gifts.

So all of this seems to be mocking male paranoia. I was fearing I’d be stumbling into an ugly pit of bro-ism. (Remember that we live in a world in which if girls take up a computer game, boys will probably drop that game because it’s become a “girl thing” — poisoned for little bros.)

This is on the sweet side, but not as sweet as the dudeism — actually, Dudeism — of the great cult movie The Big Lebowski (which I felt obliged to watch again before writing up this posting; the sacrifices I make for my craft!). The Wikipedia article on Dudeism is good on what happened to the laid-back philosophy of the movie:

Dudeism is a philosophy and lifestyle inspired by the modern-day fictional character Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, as portrayed by Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Dudeism’s stated primary objective is to promote a modern form of Chinese Taoism, outlined in Tao Te Ching and Laozi (6th century BC), blended with concepts by the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC), and presented in a style as personified by the character of “The Dude”. Dudeism has sometimes been regarded as a mock religion, though its founder and many adherents regard it seriously.

… Although Dudeism primarily makes use of iconography and narrative from The Big Lebowski, adherents believe that the Dudeist worldview has existed since the beginnings of civilization, primarily to correct societal tendencies towards aggression and excess. They list individuals such as Laozi, Epicurus, Heraclitus, Buddha, and the pre-ecclesiastical Jesus Christ as examples of ancient Dudeist prophets. More recent antecedents include pillars of American Transcendentalism such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and humanists such as Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain.

The Dudeist belief system is essentially a modernized form of Taoism purged of all of its metaphysical and medical doctrines. Dudeism advocates and encourages the practice of “going with the flow”, “being cool headed”, and “taking it easy” in the face of life’s difficulties, believing that this is the only way to live in harmony with our inner nature and the challenges of interacting with other people. It also aims to assuage feelings of inadequacy that arise in societies which place a heavy emphasis on achievement and personal fortune. Consequently, simple everyday pleasures like bathing, bowling, and hanging out with friends are seen as far preferable to the accumulation of wealth and the spending of money as a means to achieve happiness and spiritual fulfillment.

The Dude abides. And he keeps his junk clean; he’s not a lout.

(Only a bit about language. High sexuality content.)

I’ve posted earlier, on AZBlogX, about pairings of photos of men clothed vs. unclothed: contrasts that provoke thought about clothing and the body (and about the way people hold themselves when they are clothed vs. when they are naked). I’ve also posted, several times, on penis size, most recently here (with a follow-up here); the first of these includes factual material about penis size, along with comments on the size obsession of gay male porn (and the second has comments about the vocabulary of penis size).

Now, thanks to a link by Jodie Lane on Facebook, another set of contrasts, on the site Flaccid – Erect Gallery, which pairs photos of soft and hard dicks:

In the pages of this gallery we display photos in pairs that show the penis while it is flaccid (soft) and while it is erect (hard). A number of visitors have asked for this comparison. Some have written that they are more satisfied with the appearance of their erect length than with their flaccid appearance. One visitor said that, when soft, his penis just shrinks down to a very disappointing size.

Well, let’s talk about the relationship of flaccid to erect size! First, you should know flaccid size probably has even greater variation than erect size!

The material is submitted by readers, with comments from the submitters and comments (encouraging, thoughtful, and gentle) from the webmaster. Two illustrations on AZBlogX: one from a man on the small side (soft just over 1 in., hard just under 4 in.), one from a man on the large side (soft 6.5 in., hard 9 in.). The webmaster about himself:

I started doing this work when I began to experience erectile dysfunction in 1993. (I’m age 66 now.) I’m a retired university professor and had always done research in another field — so I just applied my experience to the field of penile erections. I had also done artistic nudes as a hobby for quite a few years, and I knew many men did not mind posing with an erection. So I gathered photo data, something that no other serious academic had thought to do, as far as I can tell. The text and tables of my research are published on another site.

If it does nothing else, the site should provide comfort to men who are anxious about their dicks.

In the midst of this material came submissions from men with what look like pimples on their dickheads. Amazingly, I don’t recall having come across this phenomenon, though it’s apparently pretty common; one illustration on AZBlogX.

These are the alliteratively named pearly penile papules. A papule is a ‘small, raised solid pimple or swelling’ (NOAD2). Papules on the penis are penile papules. And ones that look like little pearls are pearly penile papules. There are less playful names:

Hirsuties coronae glandis (also known as “hirsutoid papillomas,” and “pearly penile papules”) are small saliences on the ridge of the glans of the male genital organs. It is a harmless anatomical variation. They are found significantly more often on uncircumcised men and younger men

The papules appear as one or several rows of small, pearly or flesh-colored, smooth, dome-topped bumps situated circumferentially around the corona … or sulcus of the glans penis. They range in size from less than 1 mm to 3 mm. They are common and estimated to be present in a quarter of adult men. These bumps are not transmitted through sexual activity and are not a sexually transmitted infection (STI). (link)

They can apparently be (painlessly) vaporized by CO2 laser treatment. But many men report that they disappear spontaneously with aging. Their cause seems to be unknown.

The local landscape has been brightened for some time by flowering pear trees, which are planted all over the place; there’s even a Flowering Pear Drive in Cupertino. These are mostly Callery pears. Whole trees in bloom, and some flowers close up:

The Wikipedia page on the plant leads us to bodily secretions:

The Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) is a species of pear native to China and Vietnam,[2] in the family Rosaceae. It is a deciduous tree growing to 15 to 20 m (49 to 66 ft) tall, often with a conic to rounded crown. The leaves are oval, 4 to 7 cm (1.6 to 2.8 in) long, glossy dark green above, and slightly paler below. The white, five-petaled flowers are about 2 to 3 cm (0.79 to 1.2 in) in diameter. They are produced abundantly in early spring, before the leaves expand fully. The flowers smell like smegma.

The fruits of the Callery pear are small (less than one cm in diameter), and hard (almost woody) until softened by frost, after which they are readily taken by birds, which disperse the seeds in their droppings. In summer, the foliage is dark green and very smooth, and in autumn the leaves commonly turn brilliant colors, ranging from yellow and orange to more commonly red, pink, purple, and bronze.

… The species is named after the Italian-French sinologue Joseph-Marie Callery (1810–1862) who sent specimens of the tree to Europe from China.

“Smell like smegma” is the link to bodily secretions. From OED2:

Latin smēgma, < Greek σμῆγμα a detergent, soap, or unguent, < σμήχειν

Physiol. A sebaceous secretion, esp. that found under the prepuce.

1813   Pantologia,   Smegma,..soap. Any concrete substance resembling it, as the hardened matter often found, in the morning, on the lachrymal caruncle.

[from 1877 in the genital sense]

Glosses on some of the terms in this entry:

sebaceous: ‘pertaining to, of the nature of, or resembling tallow or fat; oily, greasy’; more specifically, ‘ having the nature or characteristics of sebum; connected with the secretion of sebum’ (OED2)

sebum: ‘the fatty secretion which lubricates the hair and the skin’ (OED2)

prepuce: ‘foreskin’

lachrymal caruncle: ‘red portion of the corner of the eye that contains modified sebaceous and sweat glands’ (Wikipedia)

Note the connection here between genital smegma and the hardened matter often found, in the morning, in the corner of the eye; both are seen as resembling soap.

This hardened matter has many slang names, among them:

matter, sleep, sleepies, sleepydust, crusties, eye crust, eye boogers, eye gunk, duck butter, gound

(OED2 marks gound — ‘foul matter, esp. that secreted in the eye’ — as obsolete; it has cites from c1000 through 1671.)

Technically, sleep in the eye is a type of rheum. Rheum in OED3 (June 2010):

Watery or mucous secretions, esp. as collecting in or dripping from the eyes, nose, or mouth, originally believed to originate in the brain or head and to be capable of causing disease

My favorite of the slang terms is duck butter. Once again a connection between genital smegma and ocular rheum. Green’s Dictionary of Slang (vol. 1, p. 1784) explains the compound as combining duck (from the smell, reminiscent of duck droppings) and butter (for the color). Green’s earliest cites for the compound are for the meaning ‘semen’ (from 1933 on), with the now dominant sense ‘genital smegma’ attested from 1965 on. Sources like Urban Dictionary add other senses, in particular ‘accumulated sweat and dead skin cells underneath the genitals’ and ‘natural anal lubrication’ (ass juice).

There are also two commercial products that have been named Duck Butter (no doubt jocularly): a brand of pipe joint lubricant and a brand of hot sauce. And you can find recipes for a spread called “duck butter”, made of cream cheese and blue cheese, with Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco sauce. No duck is involved in any of these cases.

It’s not hard to imagine a spread made from ground duck meat. Maple Leaf Farms, which markets ground duck meat, offers ten suggestions for using it:

1. There’s nothing better than burgers on the grill. Duck meat burgers are even better.
2. Liven up your party dip with a little ground duck meat. Insert chip and enjoy.
3. Easy casserole: mac and cheese, plus ground duck meat. Voila!
4. Who doesn’t love pizza? Ground duck meat is the perfect topping.
5. Add your own spices and make duck sausage.
6. For a quick comfort food, substitute ground duck meat for ground beef in chili.
7. Add some ground duck meat to scrambled eggs or an omelet for additional protein.
8. Ground Duck Meat + Veggies + Broth = Duck Vegetable Soup
9. Update sloppy joes by using ground duck meat instead of beef with your favorite barbeque sauce.
10. Add a twist to traditional tacos by adding ground duck meat. Easy and tasty!

#2 is as close as they get to duck meat spread. Mostly the suggestions are simple replacements of ground beef by ground duck.

There is, of course, something called duck sauce — but it’s a (Chinese) sauce *for* duck, not one made *from* duck.

While gathering examples of Michael Reh’s male photography, I came across several sites that referred to genital nudity as present or absent in various photographer’s work (so far as I can tell, there’s none in Reh’s, though he cuts the line very close). In genital nudity, the Adj genital is nonpredicating (His nudity was genital is anomalous): genital nudity isn’t nudity that has the property of being genital, but instead it’s nudity of the genitals, that is, exposure of the genitals. The Adj genital is interpreted via the N genitals — interpretation by evoking a noun is one mark of the type of nonpredicating adjectives known as pseudo-adjectives. (Resistance to modification by degree elements — note the oddity of very genital nudity — is another.)

Putting this aside, there’s the question of how to refer to the images that are banned in certain contexts (U.S. postcards, WordPress postings, etc.). Here’s I’ll restrict myself to the male body in these contexts.

For the Latinate usage have (or show) genital nudity, what’s banned is dicks (or parts of dicks) and balls (though pubic hair gets by). My recent vernacular usage are dick shots is close to this; it doesn’t encompass balls-only shots, but these are few (usually, if you get the balls, you also get the dick). The usage show dick(s) would work similarly, and both could be made more modest by using penis(es) instead of dick(s) (or its alternative cock(s)).

You can find the euphemistic-sounding have explicit nudity and have full-frontal nudity as well. The latter is clear enough, but insufficiently restrictive, since banned images can show dicks from the side or from the rear or merely protruding from clothing in one way or another, and none of these presentations is full-frontal.

The usage have genital nudity is itself a bit short of picking out the banned images exactly, since the depiction of assholes is also banned. (Butts are fine, and acceptable male nudes very often show them, indeed focus on them, but assholes — which are not genital organs — are out).

The usage are X-rated (which I sometimes choose) would cover things perfectly, but you have to know what merits an X rating in visual images to understand it.

So there are the choices, as I see them. We do need some expression, so that people who buy books or look at websites can be informed about what they might get — though I think that it would be useful to be able to tell people that they might be getting a lot of what I’ve called cock tease shots (which might be a plus for some, a minus for others). (At the moment I have no less vernacular expression for these.)

(Not about some sexual practice you’ve never heard of before, and not about the sexual slang tap ‘fuck’, but about a kind of self-administered therapy involving tapping the body with the fingertips.)

In the June/July Details magazine, a feature (pp. 84-5) “Press for Success”, with the subhead:

Despite scientific skepticism, droves of young men are taking up tapping (known as EFT) to overcome anxiety and perform at the office. Is the secret to advancement really right at their fingertips — or is it all in their head?

EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. (I would have said these guys “are taking up EFT (known as tapping)”, rather than the reverse.) Tapping uses the traditional acupressure points to “tap away” pain, stress, destructive emotions, or self-defeating beliefs.

From Wikipedia:

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is a form of counseling intervention that draws on various theories of alternative medicine including acupuncture, neuro-linguistic programming, energy medicine, and Thought Field Therapy. It is best known through Gary Craig’s EFT Handbook, published in the late 1990s, and related books and workshops by a variety of teachers. During a typical EFT session, the person will focus on a specific issue while tapping on “end points of the body’s energy meridians”. This is thought by practitioners to treat a wide variety of physical and psychological disorders, and has the advantage of being a simple, self-administered form of therapy.

The available evidence from studies done on EFT have shown that while there may be small effects from use of this technique, they are likely due to well recognized conventional psychological techniques often used with the tapping, rather than the purported “energy” mechanisms. This technique has been characterized as pseudoscience and has not garnered significant support in clinical psychology.

No, I’m not tapping.

In the spirit of “Zesty Anderson Davis” (with the actor skirting nudity in the service of Kraft Zesty Italian salad dressing), Chris Ambidge has pointed me to two other ads that go all the way (while managing to avoid genital nudity): one for the British Heart Foundation, suggesting sex (perhaps in conjunction with swimming) as good for heart health:

  (#1)

(Buttocks, but nothing else.)

And the other in a commercial for Richmond ham, in which everyone is naked, while the central figure celebrates his ham sandwich in song:

 (#2)

In this one, everyone just barely manages to avoid crossing the X line. A print ad:

  (#3)

And two stills from the video:

  (#4)

  (#5)

The ad caused a controversy, but not the one you might have expected. From the Daily Mail, under the head “Banned, ham advert that hid the naked truth: Product claimed to be made in Britain when it was Irish (but the naked man strolling around was fine)”:

Watchdogs have ruled that a TV ad featuring a naked man strolling through the countryside wearing nothing but a cap was not offensive.

The commercial for Richmond ham was supposed to be a light-hearted attempt to present the product as natural and wholesome.

However, it drew 370 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) from shocked viewers with many arguing it was both offensive and unsuitable to be seen by children.

The TV ad showed the man standing in a field admiring a sandwich before strolling past a group of naked people who were eating a picnic.

As he walked, the man sang: ‘Oh Richmond ham, as nature intended, you’ve nothing to hide Richmond ham, to me you taste blooming splendid.’

A voice-over then added: ‘New Richmond ham. Britain’s only ham made with 100 per cent natural ingredients.’

The company said the ad demonstrated a ‘well-adjusted, comfortable, and completely non-sexual attitude to the human body’, while surveys with mums had received a positive response.

That defence has been accepted by the ASA in a ruling published today.

The watchdog said: ‘Consumers would understand that it was a light-hearted reference to the product being ‘as nature intended’.

‘Whilst we understood the ad may not appeal to everyone, we considered that it was not sexual in tone and we concluded that it was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence.’

But, while the ASA was happy with the nudity, it has decided to ban the commercial on the basis it gave a misleading impression about where the ham was made.

For while the advertisement described it has ‘Britain’s only ham made with 100 per cent natural ingredients’, the product is actually made in Ireland by Kerry Foods.

The ASA said: ‘Whilst we accepted the ad did not refer directly to the provenance of the product, we considered that describing the product as Britain’s only ham was likely to be interpreted by consumers as meaning the product was British in origin, when in fact that was not the case.

‘We therefore concluded that the claim was misleading.’

Richmond Foods makes more than ham. There are also pork sausages, seen on the left in this ad in their full phallic splendor and on the right in combination with mash and peas (in other ads, you get baked beans):

  (#6)

Sturdy British food. With a sense of humor.

The latest dance rage. From Wikipedia:

Twerking is a “dance move that involves a person shaking their upper hips and lower hips in an up and down bouncing motion, causing them to shake, ‘wobble’ and ‘jiggle.’” To “twerk” means to “dance in a sexually suggestive fashion by twisting the hips”.

The word “twerking” may be derived from one of two sources:

a contraction of “footwork”, or
a portmanteau of twist and jerk.

Ties have been made to many traditional African dances.

… Twerking was introduced into hip-hop culture by way of the New Orleans bounce music scene. In 1993 DJ Jubilee recorded the dance tune “Do The Jubilee All” in which he chanted, “Twerk baby, twerk baby, twerk, twerk, twerk.” The video for the song increased the popularity of twerking. In 1995 New Orleans-based rapper Cheeky Blakk recorded the song “Twerk Something”, a call-and-response dance song dedicated to twerking. In 1997 DJ Jubilee recorded “Get Ready, Ready” in which he encouraged listeners to “Twerk it!”.

A great amount of credit for the expansion of twerking outside of New Orleans can be given to strip clubs in Houston and Atlanta.

Twerkers were predominantly black and female for quite some time, but now a major exponent of twerking is the very white Miley Cyrus, and men (both straight and gay, of various races and ethnicities) have gotten into shaking their booties. Here’s Julian Serrano (Juju) moving his butt in the hot video Julian Serrano Pretty Gang Twerk:

  (#1)

A still from this video (Serrano twerking his way through household chores):

(#2)

Serrano is also featured in the hilarious video Twerking to Classical Part 2: High Class Male Makeover (clips of twerkmen doing their thing, set to the William Tell Overture), here (#3).

In looking at the simile piss like a horse (here), I came across references to the pizzles of male horses (from which copious piss streams, famously). Pizzle — ‘the penis of an animal, esp. a bull’ (NOAD2) — was a word familiar to me from childhood (close to the farm), but not one I see often these days, except in overheated porn writing (in gems like “gets the pizzle drizzlin’ “).

Etymological point: pizzle has nothing to do with piss, which is onomatopoetic. Cultural point: pizzles have a variety of uses, notably as chew sticks for dogs. I’m not making this up.

In pictures: a bull pizzle, at rest, and a horse pizzle, extended:

(#1)

(#2)

From Wikipedia:

Pizzle is an old English word for penis, derived from Low German pesel or Flemish Dutch pezel, diminutive of pees, meaning ‘sinew’. The word is used today to signify the penis of an animal, chiefly in Australia and New Zealand.

It is also known, at least since 1523, especially in the combination “bull pizzle”, to denote a flogging instrument made from a bull’s penis – compare bullwhip.

Animal consumption: Pizzles are almost exclusively used/produced today as chewing treats for dogs. They are a fibrous muscle, and are prepared by cleaning, stretching, twisting and then drying. Bully Sticks, as they are commonly called, can be smoked in a traditional smoker and can impart a smoked aroma if done with wood. They can also be sun dried or oven baked. The result is a very hard, 80–100 centimetres (30–40 in) long brown stick, which is then sawed into pieces appropriate for the size of the dog.

Glue: The pizzle of a bull was commonly rendered for use as glue.

Human consumption: In addition to being used as a dog treat, pizzles are also eaten by humans for their health benefits such as being low in cholesterol and high in protein, hormones, vitamins and minerals such as calcium and magnesium. Pizzles for human consumption are prepared either by freezing or by drying. Scottish deer pizzles are thought to boost stamina and were used by Chinese athletes at the 2008 Summer Olympics. Pizzles can be served in soup, and if they have been dried they can be turned into a paste. Pizzles may also be mixed with alcoholic beverages or simply thawed (if frozen) and eaten. In Jamaica, bull pizzles are referred to as “cow cods” and are eaten as cow cod soup. Like many pizzle-based foods, cow cod soup is claimed to be a male aphrodisiac.

It appears that the pizzles of commerce (from bulls, horses, sheep, deer, or pigs — whose penises have a corkscrew tip — or whatever) are harvested by penectomy. There are devices for the purpose.

Pizzle Sticks for dogs, from one supplier:

(#3)

An accumulation of miscellanea: portmanteaus, porn flick and pornstar names, (in the continuing Remarkable Underwear series) black lace skivvies, and (in the continuing News for Penises series), the smallest penis in Brooklyn.

Portmanteaus. From Victor Steinbok, malternative from the Beer Advocate site, grillebrate from Dietz & Watson ads.

Victor writes that the first refers to

non-beer products that either qualify as “malt beverages” or are similarly spiked to serve as beer substitutes (e.g., Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice)

Beer Advocate posting “Reinvasion of the Malternatives” (2/13/02) here.

That’s malt + alternative; grillebrate is grill + celebrate — celebrate (summer) by grilling franks and sausages from Dietz & Watson, purveyors of “Premium Meats and Artisan Cheeses”. One promotion here, with grillebration as well as grillebrate.

Naming in porn. Name that porn flick, name that pornstar.

Enthusiastic ad copy:

Lucas Entertainment’s latest import from Great Britain, “Bangers and Ass,” features one of the sexiest international casts yet!

Yes, Bangers and Ass (a play on the name of the British dish bangers and mash ‘mashed potatoes and sausages’), in which guys use their sausages to bang ass.

From scene 3, a cropped photo of Tony Rivera banging Paul Walker:

  (#1)

On the pornstar front, recent finds include a guy with the porn name Jack or Jake Manhole (yes, he’s a bottom). Then I’ve posted on AZBlogX — warning: nudity and man-man sex — about the nicely named Jason Adonis and Race Cooper (Cooper is black). I don’t know if Adonis has been paired with Dionisio Heiderscheid, who makes gay videos under the name Dionisio or (most often) D.O.

Black lace skivvies. From Undergear, an offering of the Extreme line of lace underwear for men. Viewable in “Hot in black lace” on AZBlogX here, along with a couple photos of underwear model James Guardino. Only one of these images skirts the X line, but I put them on my X blog because there’s not much of linguistic interest (though the ad copy is entertaining).

The smallest penis in Brooklyn. Well, the smallest one on a guy who was willing to enter a contest for the title. From Betsy Herrington, a story (by Victor Jeffries II, from today) about the event:

  (#2)

NSFW: The Delivery Man Has the Smallest Penis In Brooklyn

Saturday afternoon, King County Bar in Brooklyn hosted the first annual Smallest Penis in Brooklyn Pageant. Six contestants, only five of which made it to the final round (contestant number 6, a tourist from France, got debilitatingly inebriated with his wife and had to bow out), participated in 3 rounds of intense competition for the prized designation and $200.

… The contestants — Perry Winkle, Sugar Daddy, Rip van Dinkle, Quinette (our French friend), The Delivery Man, and Flo Rider — opened the competition with the evening wear round. Our humble competitors donned satin baby socks sewn to thongs, adorned with bow ties and buttons, and sauntered up and down the bar in front of a crowd of over 100 incredibly supportive audience members.

Round two, the talent round, brought out dance numbers, hand made farting sounds, and jokes. The third and final round featured swimwear—tulle sewn to a an elastic band.

There was confirmation by tape measure.

The story has lots of (not veery good) pictures. But it looks like the contestants, and especially the winner, were in the micropenis range. From Wikipedia:

Micropenis is an unusually small penis. A common criterion is a dorsal (measured on top) erect penile length of at least 2.5 standard deviations smaller than the mean human penis size, or smaller than about 7cm (3 inches) for an adult when compared to an average erection of 12.5cm (5 inches)… The term is most often used medically when the rest of the penis, scrotum, and perineum are without ambiguity… Micropenis occurs in about 0.6% of males.

Note that micropenis is used in the entry as the name of a condition (like cleft palate) and so lacks an article. The variant He has micropenis appears to be the most common usage on the net, but He has a micropenis occurs as well.

Yes, there are words — compound nouns — specifically for this meaning, but unless you’re into gay porn, you might not be familiar with man pussy, boy pussy, man cunt, boy cunt, man hole, or boy hole. These are terms strongly associated with gay porn (fiction, scripts of videos, and descriptions of videos) but not much used by gay men in everyday life; they are part of a specialized porn register, akin to the specialized registers in some other domains, for instance, restaurant menus (with vocabulary items like the adjective tasty that rarely occur outside the menu context).

(The compounds are variously printed separated, hyphenated, or solid. I’ll punctuate them as separated in my text, but otherwise cite them with the punctuation in my sources.)

I got into these compounds through a larger project on the porn register, especially in descriptions of gay porn films and videos. Working my way through some of these, I came across this sentence from an ad for the bluntly named flick Sleazy Gangbang (2001):

Hot bubble butt bottoms and juicy man pussy are available for fucking all day long.

Juicy man pussy is repeated on the cover of the DVD, which can be viewed, along with a number of actual man pussies, in my AZBlogX posting of 7/21/13, “Dream World, Sleazy Gangbang, man pussy”. (Man pussy can be used as a count noun, or through what I’ve called sex-part conversion (here), as a mass noun, as in the Sleazy Gangbang quote.)

Before I take up the pornesque compounds, a few words on reference to the male anus in everyday gay contexts. Most commonly, the semantic components of maleness and sexual use are not explicit in the vocabulary, but are supplied by context, linguistic or otherwise; the everyday terms are ass (with its ambiguity between ‘buttocks’ and ‘anus’), asshole, and the abbreviated hole:

I’d like to fuck his ass / asshole / hole.

Much less commonly (but still attested), shithole, with an explicit reference to excrement that many shrink from.

Sexual use (but not maleness) is explicit in the variant fuckhole, which is the first of these terms taken over by gay speakers from reference to the vagina, also the first to edge into porn territory (though it does occur some in (“dirty”) sex talk by gay men in ordinary life).

[Note: There is frequently some "leakage" of vocabulary from specialized registers into ordinary language -- a kind of quotation, in effect. People sometimes talk about food in an everyday context with vocabulary characteristic of menus, recipes, and professional food writing, for instance. So it is with gay porn vocabulary: men will sometimes spice up their sex talk by importing some of these items into it.]

On to the Big Six: man / boy + pussy / cunt / hole. The boy variants tend to connote youth, but are sometimes used of mature men; the man variants seem to lack age connotations.

Maleness (but not sexual use) is explicit in man / boy + hole. I’ll take boy hole first, since it’s less complicated. Raw ghits of 92,800, reduced to 380 when repetitions are removed. One example from porn, one from non-porn usage, both involving young men:

Landon Fucks Angel. Description: Landon and Angel are relaxing on vacation when things get a bit heated in the living room. They start kissing, and the clothes fly off. Angel discovers Landon’s huge cock, and sucks it hard. In no time at all he inserts it in his boyhole and rides Landon wild. (link)

These are the thoughts of a bottom boy, learning to be a bitch, to be submissive to men. Read my dirty thoughts below, or scroll to the bottom to read more about me.
My puckered up boyhole, an hour after abusing it with dildos and a length of steel chain, already tightened back up. (link)

Man hole is complicated because a search for it pulls up so much material that’s irrelevant here: manhole the covered opening; the Manhole Gay Hotline; gay clubs called the Manhole; and so on. (I pulled up a few hits for manhole in my rear garden, which looked like an interestingly figurative reference to the writer’s asshole, but turned out to involve British rear garden (= American back yard) and a sewage system.) Here are two straightforwardly anal occurrences, both from gay porn:

[gay porn video] I want you to hammer my hairy manhole
Bang my tight hairy manhole. Fuck yea, I want it sooo bad. I need it stuffed with your hard cock, Give it to me! (link)

[gay porn flick] Eat My Manhole: Cum Watch Us Eat Ass. These guys love the taste of sweaty dirty assholes. Stick your tongue deep inside me! (link)

The remaining four compounds involve the transfer of the slang vaginal terms pussy and cunt (which are not necessarily sexual) to the male anus (where they are). Of course, pussy and cunt are in everyday gay use in their transferred senses (you can even find some occurrences of transferred twat), but men vary considerably in their attitudes towards these uses, because of the femininity associated with the words; some men will use pussy and cunt only for effeminate or submissive men and reject the usage for themselves, while other men embrace the associations, and a few seem to treat the words as neutral in connotation.

Wiktionary has taken up man / boy + pussy / cunt, giving the same gloss for all of them:

(vulgar, gay slang) the anus of a man, usually the passive participant in gay sex

When I began these investigations, my intuitions were that the dominant combinations were man pussy and boy cunt, but Google counts don’t bear this out. Here are the counts, giving raw ghits first, then the reduced figures:

man-pussy: 562,000 > 381
man-cunt: 161,000 > 423
boy-pussy: 453,000 > 345
boy-cunt: 78,000 > 359
(cf. boy-hole: 92,800 > 380)

The reduced counts are comparable to one another.

Wiktionary provides examples from porn fiction. For man-pussy:

2010, Michael Gleich, Sarge and the Sailor Boy: With the floor cleaned and swept with the use of his ass, the men were getting horny watching the talented hole at work.”How about a little man-pussy, Sarge?” someone asked.

2006, John Patrick, Taboo!: The Lure of the Forbidden, page 90: As my lover continued to plow into my tender man-pussy, he pulled me closer to him, kissing me passionately with each violent fuck.

2005, John Butler, The Gay Utopia, page 83: On a surprisingly large number of those occasions, gentle, submissive, effeminate Danny also received a lot of blow-jobs and fucked a lot of man-pussy himself.

1995, Perry Brass, Albert, or, The Book of Man, page 93: We’re up for a little man-pussy, Albert. Me and Jake, we’re gonna get our dicks into you, you cute little shit.

For man-cunt:

2010, R. Jackson, Bears in the Wild, page 115: He spat onto his cock and watched the bubbles of his saliva disappear into Josh’s man-cunt.

2010, Eric Summers, Teammates, page 34: Ryan was moaning with pleasure, and these noises were egging him on to go deeper into the hole, to try and lick the inside of his beautiful man cunt.

2009, Mickey Erlach, Pretty Boys and Roughnecks, page 13: The smell of sex, the heat of the sun and the warm dampness of Eddie’s man-cunt had brought him to the point of no return.

2009, Mickey Erlach, Boys Caught in the Act, page 46: Dale stepped over to Toby’s beach towel and lay down. Simon joined him, squatting down on his erection, taking the whole length up his man cunt, and inviting Toby to squat down on his boyfriend’s face.

For boy-pussy:

2010, Jackman Hill, Forty-Dollar Butt Boy: I carried the lube pump with me and set it on the floor next to the bench, so I raised my legs up high, took a few big dollops, and then worked them into my boy pussy, pressing into the well-fucked, well-rimmed passage, which was already sticky from the cum of my last few customers. Then I just lay on the bench, my greased fuck hole open and ready for more.

2009, Mickey Erlach, Pretty Boys and Roughnecks, page 50: ”Put your legs up for me. That’s it bitch, show me that boy pussy,” Marco said. “You want this, whore?” he said, rubbing his wildly throbbing cock against the boy’s tight hole.

2006, John Patrick, Boys of the Night, page 144: ”Yeah, I’ll eat your little boy pussy. I need to make it nice and wet so I can fuck it long and hard.”

For boy-cunt:

2010, Bret Yerlac, Cub Boy Training, page 36:  Your butt plug is on the sink there clean it up too and put it back up your boy cunt and go upstairs and meet me in the office for your instructions.

2009, Christopher Pierce, Sex Time: Erotic Stories of Time Travel, page 120:  While the other two fucked his throbbing boy-cunt, Dirk started jerking off.

2009, John Patrick, Juniors 2, page 15: Rex slid in smoothly, relishing the enfolding heat of Corky’s slick boy-cunt as he entered him for the first delicious time. He clasped Corky firmly, holding onto him as he powered deep into his ass.

2007, John Patrick, Mad About the Boys, page 117: His tiny ass opened and I slid into the tightest boy cunt I’ve ever had. Javier’s eyes grew wide, and I thought he must be in incredible pain, but he took only a moment to slide further down on my prick, then a wide grin spread across his face.

For another occasion: porn vocabulary like pussy-boy (referring to a gay man, usually a bottom, often effeminate or submissive) and man-meat (referring to a penis).

Two portmanteaus in my mail: a hybrid animal (not new on this blog, but offered here because I now have a really adorable photo) and yet another way of referring to the male anus viewed as a sexual organ.

zonkey. This recent story, here from Good Morning America (passed on to me by Victor Steinbok yesterday): “Rare Italian-born Baby Zonkey in Good Health” by Jon M. Chang:

One part zebra, one part donkey, all parts fuzzy and adorable. Ippo, the foal of a male zebra and a female donkey, was reported to be in good health, just a few days after it was born at an animal reserve in Florence, Italy.

The story of Ippo’s birth reads like the equine equivalent of a romance novel. The father is a zebra that was adopted by the animal reserve after he was rescued from a failing zoo. The mother is a Donkey of Amiata, an endangered animal species.

Even though a fence separated the two animals at the animal reserve, the zebra climbed over and mated with the donkey, producing Ippo. Serena Aglietti, one of the employees at the reserve, said in a statement, “Ippo is the only one of her kind in Italy.”

Zonkeys made a brief appearance in this blog earlier this year, in connection with the portmanteau Marabomber:

Marabomber is a telescoping portmanteau, abbreviating the compound N Marathon bomber. Other portmanteaus are related to copulative compounds;

In some cases, the combination of referents is akin to chemical compounding: a nectaplum ['nectarine plum'] (here) isn’t both a nectarine and a plum, but a hybrid of the two (similarly, tigons and ligers, etc. here). (link)

The second link is to a posting by Ben Zimmer on animal hybrids:

In modern times, when new animal hybrids are engineered by interbreeding, they are often given name-blends: the offspring of a male lion and female tiger is a liger, the offspring of a male tiger and female lion is a tigon, the offspring of a male zebra and female donkey is a zedonk or zonkey, and so forth. The earliest such interbred name-blend that I’m aware of is cattalo, a cattle-buffalo hybrid dating to 1888 (now [superseded] by beefalo). (link)

mangina. Commenting on my man pussy posting, Mike Thomas noted the portmanteau mangina (man + vagina) as yet another alternative to the ones I listed in that posting for the meaning, ‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ’. (I thought I’d posted on mangina already, but apparently not.)

Occurrences of mangina in this sense seem to be few, even in gay porn, and mostly jocular, and there are competing uses of the word — in particular, two senses in which a man can have a vagina. First, there’s the case of Buck Angel, “the man with a pussy”, shown in a photo (#8) in an AZBlogX posting:

Angel is a FTM transsexual who chose not to have genital surgery, so has an intact vagina (while being otherwise highly masculine in appearance and behavior). Angel’s man pussy really is a pussy.

Put in other words, Angel’s mangina really is a vagina.

Then there’s the Mangina Man, who underwent penile inversion. In his own words:

Did you ever fantasize about a real bio man (not an Female To Male transsexual) having a vagina?  I was born male with a 9 inch cock that I had surgically inverted to create a “Mangina” in 1988. I am not a female with a vagina who is disguising her true sex to appear male, but I am a real natal/genetic man with a totally UNREAL FAKE pussy.  My tight, wet, juicy, self-lubricating pussy tastes like cock and balls, because in reality it IS cock and balls, just rearranged.  And I still cum like any other dude — the internal ejaculatory plumbing is all the same.  Also, for those who are wondering, it still smells like male genitalia and not like female. (link)

(I hope very much that he wasn’t born with a 9-inch cock. That’s a sentence that cries out for rewriting.)

An image sent to me by Chris Ambidge:

(#1)

The sheer fun of showering together! The illustration shows one style of gang shower, with shower heads arranged around a central pillar. In the other main style, the heads are located side by side along one, two, or three sides of a communal shower room, as in this elegant (but unpeopled) installation:

(#2)

Some further illustrations, with cultural comment, then some discussion of the compound gang shower.

Pillar-style. Here’s a color version of the Bradley item in #1, with ad text, plus some more recent commentary from the company:

(#3)

From the Washfountain, the Bradley Corporation Blog

What can you really say about this? It was the 60’s, things were different then.

You’ve probably seen this picture before… We definitely wouldn’t run this ad now, but back then I bet nobody thought it was strange at all. The same picture and tagline actually got used in a few different places, so it must have been fairly successful. You can see another example below.

We’ve been selling group shower fixtures since the 30’s,  and the fact is it always makes sense to install fixtures that use space and water economically in larger facilities. The thing that changes is our sense of modesty. Maybe try out one of our showers that include privacy stalls?

(Gang showers are traditionally a male thing; women’s communal shower rooms have usually had privacy stalls or at least curtains between the shower heads.)

Here’s Zac Efron using a pillar-style shower (but alone), in a couple of shots that didn’t make it into High School Musical 3:

(#3)

In-line-style. Very much the dominant style, in school gyms, health clubs, and the like. Here’s a version with two guys showering:

(#4)

and one with a whole gang:

(#5)

plus one from photographer Luke Smalley (“Untitled (Group Shower)” of 2008, with two guys but a very different tone from #4:

(#6)

(#6 presents many of the interpretive problems I mentioned in this posting: what are we to make of it?)

More group bathing in “Recruiting men”.

Cultural context. Guys being naked together (especially in showers or locker rooms) sets up a potential context for men to cruise men — a potential that’s sometimes realized in life and is massively realized in gay visual materials. It’s easy to see #4 as a cruise, or at least a scoping-out, of the guy on the left by the guy on the right, And #5 is a cropped version of an explicitly (and celebratorily) homoerotic painting by artist Rick Chris (the full painting, plus four others of naked hunks in communal settings, can be viewed on AZBlogX, in “Gang paintings”).

The number of gay porn flicks set in shower rooms and/or locker rooms is enormous.

(More discussion in “The triad” jockstrap, locker room, shower room” on AZBlogX and, with a shower room fantasy of French rugby players, in “Keeping clean” on this blog.)

The compound gang shower. This is a reasonably straightforward N + N compound, with a FOR interpretation of the relationship between the two referents (‘shower (place) for a gang (of men)’, with gang understood merely as referring to a group, with no criminal associations.

There are few really parallel compounds with first N gang: gang bang and gang shag (and the innovations gang suck and gang piss, discussed in other postings on this blog) are probably the closest, but they have the the BY interpretation rather than the FOR interpretation, they refer to events rather than locales or objects, and their head nouns are not usually used on their own to refer to events (note the marginal character of I took part in a bang and similar things).

Over on AZBlogX, three recent postings: “Three couples”, with three images of male couples (all with genital nudity, one with man-man sex); and “Rear views” and “Assclefts”, with images of men’s buttocks (no genital nudity in the first, but the second has some and has two images of anal intercourse).

Here, some words on the compound noun asscleft / ass-cleft / ass cleft ‘depression or groove between the buttocks’.

The word isn’t in any of the reputable dictionaries I consulted (from the OED to slang dictionaries), nor is arse cleft or butt cleft. (Nor, to my surprise, is ass / butt cheek). Of course, asshole, arsehole, and butthole are in the dictionaries, and Green’s Dictionary of Slang has a couple surprises in the domain of the body: assbone ‘buttocks, coccyx’ and arse-cabbage and arse-grapes, both ‘h(a)emorrhoids’.

But on buttock cleavage, Wikipedia provides some genuinely useful information:

Buttock cleavage [or butt cleavage or ass cleavage] is minor exposure of the buttocks and the intergluteal cleft between them, often because of low-slung or loose trousers. The crena is another formal term for the cleft between the buttocks.

… The terms plumber butt (Canadian, Australian and American English) and builder’s bum (British English) refer to the exposure of male buttock cleavage, especially on occasions of careless bending over. The expression “builder’s bum” was first recorded in 1988. The terms are based on the popular impression that these professions are particularly prone to this kind of mishap

The finds here are the technical terms intergluteal cleft and crena (pronounced /ˈkrinə/) for the asscleft. For crina in OED2, with the relevant part bold-faced:

The history of this word is very obscure
Bot., Zool., etc.
1. An indentation, a notch; spec. in Bot. one of the notches on a toothed or crenated leaf; Anat. the depression or groove between the buttocks; the longitudinal groove on the anterior and posterior surface of the heart (New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon).

2. A crenated tooth, a scallop; spec. in Bot. a round or convex tooth on the margin of a leaf, etc., = crenature n., crenel n.; Entomol. a rounded raised mark resembling a wrinkle on a surface or margin; Anat. each of the serrations on the edge of the external table of the cranial bones by which these fit together in the sutures (New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon).

The asscleft has a sexual function: it’s one effective site for frottage (aka rubbing), since the asscheeks will provide friction for a thrusting penis. Asscleft rubbing isn’t as intense as penetration, but it can provide considerable pleasure, and it’s safe sex. Intercrural (aka interfemoral) frottage — with the partner’s thighs, rather than asscheeks, serving as the location for the thrusting of the penis — does have the advantage over intergluteal frottage that it can be done face-to-face. But intergluteal frottage has the advantage that the “passive” partner can in fact “hump back” — thrust against the penis.

It begins with this photo by male photographer Howard Roffman:

(#1)

(This is a scanned-in image of a postcard that I will use to make an Asterixion. It bears the marks of a rough passage through the mail, but in the Asterixion these will be covered up by a caption and stickers. [Now done: see  Roffman 21 in "Asterixions 2".])

I wanted a word to refer to the young man’s stance — a noun, or a verb referring to taking this stance. What came to me first was crouch, but I realized that there was a more specific word. Eventually, I dredged up two more words, squat and hunker. And wondered about the meaning distinctions between these words.

I’ll start with crouch. From NOAD2:

verb [no obj.]     adopt a position where the knees are bent and the upper body is brought forward and down, sometimes to avoid detection or to defend oneself: we crouched down in the trench | (be crouched) : Leo was crouched before the fire.

• (crouch over) bend over in this way so as to be close to (someone or something): she was crouching over some flower bed.

noun [in sing.]     a crouching stance or posture.

Crouches can go from very shallow to very deep. A very shallow crouch, in a baseball player’s batting stance:

(#2)

A deeper crouch, from football:

(#3)

The other two words, squat and hunker, are defined as types of crouches, deeper than those in #2 and #3. For squat, the relevant entries from NOAD2:

verb [no obj.]    crouch or sit with one’s knees bent and one’s heels close to or touching one’s buttocks or the back of one’s thighs: I squatted down in front of him.

• [with obj.]    Weightlifting crouch down in such a way and rise again while holding (a specified weight) at one’s shoulders: he can squat 850 pounds.

noun [in sing.]    a position in which one’s knees are bent and one’s heels are close to or touching one’s buttocks or the back of one’s thighs.

• Weightlifting an exercise in which a person squats down and rises again while holding a barbell at shoulder level.

• (in gymnastics) an exercise involving a squatting movement or action.

(There are also senses of squat referring to unlawfully occupying an uninhabited building or settling on a piece of land; a noun squat, short for diddly-squat; and an adjective squat ‘short and thickset; disproportionately broad or wide’ (NOAD2).)

More detail, from Wikipedia:

Squatting is a posture where the weight of the body is on the feet (as with standing) but the knees are bent either fully (full or deep squat) or partially (partial, half, semi, parallel or monkey squat). In contrast, sitting, involves taking the weight of the body, at least in part, on the buttocks against the ground or a horizontal object such as a chair seat.

Roffman’s guy in #1 is squatting. The stance is regularly adopted by small children, as here:

(#4)

And it’s the stance adopted by people using a squat toilet. A Chinese squat toilet:

(#5)

From Wikipedia:

A squat toilet (also known as an Arabic, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Iranian, Indian, Pakistani, Turkish or Natural-Position toilet; or Nile pan) is a toilet used by squatting, rather than sitting. There are several types of squat toilets, but they all consist essentially of a hole in the ground. The only exception is a “pedestal” squat toilet, which is of the same height as a sitting toilet. It is also possible to squat over sitting toilets, but this requires extra care as they are not specifically designed for squatting.

[Digression on the compound squat toilet. It's not clear whether squat in this compound is a verb ('a toilet used by squatting') or a noun ('a toilet used via a squat'). The contrast with toilets used by sitting suggests that either analysis is possible: such a toilet is called either a sit toilet (with the verb sit) or a sitting toilet (with the noun sitting).]

Now to hunker. From NOAD2:

verb   squat or crouch down low: he hunkered down beside her.

• hunch; bend: burly workers hunkered over the menu of the day.

• take shelter in a defensive position: the best way to deal with your father is to hunker down and let it blow over.

A cultural note from Wikipedia:

Hunkerin’ (hunkering) is where a person sits on the balls of their feet in a squatting position. It is common worldwide, but briefly became an American fad in the late 1950s.

Hunkerin’ had been in use in many cultures, particularly in Asia, for centuries when it suddenly became a fad in the United States in 1959.

A hunkering man:

(#6)

To summarize: crouch is the neutral verb in this set; squat refers to a deep crouch; and hunker refers to squatting on the balls of the feet (that is, hunkering is the deepest possible squatting). Roffman’s guy in #1 is squatting but not hunkering.

(Only a little bit about language.)

In assembling material about shirtlessness, I came across this arresting photo:

  (#1)

This from a site that has a lot on knitting and men’s bodies, among other things. The poster’s caption:

I have a thing for hairy forearms, calves, and thighs. And a beautiful face. Call me gay if you want.

He is definitely gay. And I share his tastes.

On the fore- of forearm, from Michael Quinion’s affixes site:

Before, beforehand, going before, in front of, leading. [Old English fore.]

Verbs, adjectives, and nouns containing this [combining] form have a general sense of being in front of something else, either in time or place. It can indicate a front part of the body: forehead, forearm, forebrain, foreleg, forelock. Several refer to parts of a sailing ship near the bows, such as foremast, foresail, forecastle (abbreviated to fo’c'sle), and forestay. Examples relating to time include forecast, foretell, foresee, forebear, forefather, and forestall. A foreword is a short introduction to a book; a forecourt is an open area in front of a building; a foreman or forewoman is a person in charge of others or one who presides over a jury; someone or something that is foremost is the most prominent in rank, importance, or position.

A few of these have counterpart expressions: hindbrain for forebrain, hind leg for foreleg, afterword for foreword — and upper arm for forerm.

Now back to the bodies. Seen shirtless in earlier postings, now with a focus on their forearms: actor Dean Cain and tennis player Roger Federer:

  (#2)

  (#3)

In finding these, I came across this photo of actor Ryan Reynolds:

  (#4)

Face and forearm, plus a tattoo. On Reynolds, from Wikipedia:

Ryan Rodney Reynolds (born October 23, 1976) is a Canadian film and television actor. Reynolds is known for playing Michael Bergen on the ABC sitcom Two Guys and a Girl (1998–2001), Billy Simpson in the YTV Canadian teen soap opera Hillside (1991-1993), as well as Marvel Comics characters Hannibal King in Blade: Trinity (2004) and Wade Wilson/Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)…

As a bonus, here’s a shirtless Reynolds:

  (#5)

A further bonus: a racy, but not X-rated, photo of my man Jacques in his youth:

  (#6)

Nice light fur.