A story that’s been making the rounds; I first saw it in “News of the Weird” in Funny Times; here’s a version from Yahoo! Lifestyle on June 11th, “Does your tackle need tightening? How George Clooney is inspiring men to go nuts and take pride in polishing their Crown Jewels” (someone at the site just couldn’t resist the language play) by Penny Newton, beginning:

If you ever hear a bloke talk about tightening the tackle, you could be forgiven for thinking that he’s off on a fishing trip with his buddies.

But chances are, his talking about something very different – and we’ve got George Clooney to thank.

The Hollywood hunk, who has constantly joked about getting his testicles “ironed out”, has sparked a new craze with one beauty spa saying they’ve been “inundated” with requests, reports the Daily Mail.

More details from Yahoo!:

Santa Monica spa Beauty Park referrs to the non-surgical treatment as a ‘Male Laser Lift’, where lasers are used to remove hair, erase wrinkles, correct discoloration on the scrotum, and generally improve “tone and texture in the area.”

The process takes a little over an hour. Results usually last four weeks and around six sessions are needed for lasting results.

Clooney, who gave an interview with [Italy’s] Max magazine this year admitted that while he never fixed his eyes, he “spent more money to stretch the skin of my testicles.

“I did not like the wrinkles. It’s a new technique, many people in Hollywood have done it. It’s called ‘ball ironing.’”

Jamie [Sherrill, co-owner of the spa], who has treated many celebrities, decided to investigate tackle tightening after being swamped with requests.

“Men are becoming more comfortable with their grooming habits,” she said.

From the spa’s site (with links to other media coverage):

Male Bikini Laser Treatment

The popular male laser treatment has recently been extensively talked about in the news and by celebrities, and is often referred to by  the media as “ball ironing”, “tighten the tackle” and “scrotal lift”.

This non-invasive, non-surgical treatment is applied to male scrotal area to help regain a more youthful look.

$575

So: the technical-sounding male (bikini) laser treatment and male laser lift (parallel to bust lift), neither naming the body-part in question. And then the more direct scrotal lift and the playful tackle-tightening and (my favorite) ball ironing.

Still, it hadn’t occurred to me to strive for more youthful balls. But then my balls have never been tight; that’s just the way I hang.

(My searches for good before and after photos to put on AZBlogX have so far been unsuccessful.)

In a set of notecards, a reproduction of a sensuous painting, The Soul of the Rose (1908) by John William Waterhouse:

(#1)

The woman is smelling the rose, but she’s close to kissing it, close to treating it as a romantic partner (in which case the rose is a  symbol of the lover’s mouth). Other, more carnal, interpretations are available to modern audiences, for whom the rose can serve as a symbol of either the vagina or the anus.

But first, on Waterhouse and this work. From Wikipedia:

John William Waterhouse (born between January and April 1849; died 10 February 1917) was an English painter known for working in the Pre-Raphaelite style. He worked several decades after the breakup of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which had seen its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century, leading him to have gained the moniker of “the modern Pre-Raphaelite”. Borrowing stylistic influences not only from the earlier Pre-Raphaelites but also from his contemporaries, the Impressionists, his artworks were known for their depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend.

And from the beginning of an extended analysis of the painting:

Unlike a large proportion of Waterhouse’s other work, The Soul of the Rose is not a scene taken from a famous or ancient tale of love. Instead it is a study of a woman in a garden thought to be based on the work of Alfred Lord Tennyson. It’s important to keep in mind the themes of many of Waterhouse’s other works though, as similar themes of lost or unrequited love resonate in this picture.

Romance and Sensuality: Waterhouse often incorporated a great sense of sensuality in his women, whether in the form of naked flesh or simply a delicate look. Restrained sexuality and longing for an invisible love are key themes in The Soul of the Rose and the artist portrays the woman in the picture without any obvious sexuality, but her position against the wall and her delicate hand indicate subtle sensuality.

Victorian Values: Many of Waterhouse’s paintings are very telling of the place women had in society during his time. Victorian Britain was, for women, a place where for the first time, they started to be politically active and were able to vote and had other political rights that they had previously been denied.

Many of Waterhouse’s women are trapped or imprisoned and he seems fascinated by the idea of a woman who is powerful yet restrained. This may have been what he observed with women with high public profiles during his lifetime. The Soul of the Rose is no exception to this, as the woman is shown against a brick wall, her pleasure is nature and her thoughts of a love that was.

The rose — in particular, in the form of a rosette — appears frequently as a carnal symbol in pornographic writing, sometimes standing for the vagina but very frequently for the anus. On the rosette:

A rosette is a round, stylized flower design, used extensively in sculptural objects from antiquity. Appearing in Mesopotamia and used to decorate the funeral stele in Ancient Greece. Adopted later in Romaneseque and Renaissance, and also common in the art of Central Asia, spreading as far as India where it is used as a decorative motif in Greco-Buddhist art.

The rosette derives from the natural shape of a rosette in botany, formed by leaves radiating out from the stem of a plant and visible even after the flowers have withered. The formalised flower motif is often in carved in stone or wood to create decorative ornaments for architecture and furniture. A common motif in metalworking, jewelry design and the applied arts at the intersection of two materials, or to form a decorative border. (Wikipedia link)

Rosettes are commonly used for awards, ribbons, and recognitions. Here’s an elaborate architectural example:

(#2)

On to anal rosettes. Many examples, from both straight and gay porn writing. One of each:

His finger fucked back and forth for a few more moments before he pulled it out and positioned his cock at her rosette. She pushed back as best she could as he pressed forward, and she winced as his cock popped past her sphincter and into her ass. (link)

I pulled a condom from my pocket and slipped it over my cock. Kneeling behind him, I positioned the tip of my cock against his rosette. The condom was lubricated; Rafe wasn’t. (link)

And from AZBlogX, on image #6 in this posting:

from the Michael Lucas raunch/kink archives, this ad for a feature on assholes as a fetish or paraphilia (most gay men appreciate butts, but only some are deeply moved by contemplating assholes), with hard-working pornstar Adam Killian showing off (on a hunky buddy) the object of this specific desire [photo here, with the caption:]

THE EXEMPLARY ASSHOLE
Ed’s perfect
Rosette wins gold
Medals at the
State Fair.

A very careful composition. Note especially the cleft just above the asshole paired with the one in the lower back, and the role Killian’s face and spread hand play in the organization of the picture. (The star within the O of ASSHOLES matching the anal rosette is crude, but then how much subtlety could you ask for in a flick about fuckholes?)

This brings me, of course, to Jean Genet’s The Miracle of the Rose, in which anal intercourse figures prominently:

The Miracle of the Rose (in French: Miracle de la rose) is a 1946 book by Jean Genet about experiences as a detainee in Mettray Penal Colony and Fontevrault prison – although there is no direct evidence of Genet ever having been imprisoned in the latter establishment. This autobiographical work has a non-linear structure: stories from Genet’s adolescence are mixed in with his experiences as a thirty-year-old man at Fontevrault prison. At Mettray, Genet describes homosexual erotic desires for his fellow adolescent detainees. There is also a fantastical dimension to the narrative, particularly in Fontevrault passages concerning a prisoner called Harcamone who is condemned to death for murder. Genet idolises Harcamone and writes poetically about the rare occasions on which he catches a glimpse of this character. Genet was detained in Mettray Penal Colony between 2 September 1926 and 1 March 1929, after which, at the age of 18, he joined the Foreign Legion. (Wikipedia link)

And from there to Querelle de Brest:

Querelle of Brest (French: Querelle de Brest) is a novel by the French writer Jean Genet. It was first published anonymously in 1947 and limited to 460 numbered copies. It is set in the midst of the port town of Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder, and its protagonist is Georges Querelle. The novel formed the basis for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle (1982).

The notorious poster for the film:

(#3)

Outrageously phallic. There are other sexy posters for the film, but none this extreme. The most famous, though, is Andy Warhol’s:

(#4)

From John Wells this morning, this advertisement (“currently to be seen on suburban commuter trains in the London area”) for a pharmacy that supplies medication for erectile dysfunction:

(Not a great image, but I haven’t been able to find a better one on-line.)

To appreciate the ad, you need to know some BrE slang, which John has been kind enough to explicate:

As you see, the copy cleverly incorporates two ambiguities (double entendres). One is ‘tackle’, which as well as the sports term for “attack” is also BrE slang for male genitalia [seen recently on this blog from an Australian source, here]; the epithet ‘harder’ is applicable to both. The other is ‘keepy-uppy’ (also keepie-uppie), “the activity of making a football go up and down in the air many times without touching the ground, using short light kicks to control the ball’s movements” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English), but obviously also interpretable as the maintenance of penile erection.

Cute.

Via Ellen Seebacher, a link to a HuffPo piece on

Cliteracy 101: Artist Sophia Wallace Wants You To Know The Truth About The Clitoris

Yes: clitoris + literacy.

Sophia Wallace isn’t the first to coin the word, but she’s made it into a big campaign.

Some time ago on Facebook, several posters ended up chatting about the vocabulary for talking about a gay man’s anal virginity. The term cherry plays a central role in this vocabulary domain — taken over, like some other sexual vocabulary, from reference to women and their sexuality.

We start with women. In Green’s Dictionary of Slang, it begins with the cherry as an image of ripeness, with two related subsenses (both originally U.S.), with the second as an extension of the first:

(a) (i) the hymen; (ii) one’s viriginity [antecedent cites in Green from 1641 and 1700, clear cites from 1918]

Subsense (ii) has the syntax of virginity, normally with an obligatory possessor, as in the collocations

save, keep one’s cherry; lose one’s cherry (to someone), give (up) one’s cherry (to someone); have, get, take, steal someone’s cherry

plus the very common pop and bust someone’s cherry, with a vivid allusion to breaking the hymen.

Now the anus has no real analogue to the hymen, but the ‘viriginity’ subsense can be transferred to anal intercourse, giving the full range of possessive collocations as above, but now used of gay men rather than women.

Back to vaginal intercourse, with another sense of the noun cherry, referring to a person rather than virginity:

(b) (orig. US) a female virgin [antecedent cites from 1881 and1889; clear cites from 1942 on] (c) a male [vaginal] virgin [from 1948 on]

These uses have the syntax of count nouns — Kim’s a cherry, Kim and Sandy are cherries — but there’s also an adjectival predicative use, as in Kim is cherry,

Finally, we get the gay analogue of (b) and (c):

(gay) an anal [receptive] virgin [also 'anal virginity', together with cites from 1941 on]

In the Facebook discussion, I recalled that the man I lost my anal virginity to, many years ago, didn’t use any of the cherry expressions, but instead referred to what he did as breaking me in.

Scrolled past in the avalanche of spam this morning, a penis enlargement ad that promised to give me Cockzilla. Surprisingly, I hadn’t noticed this use of the libfix -zilla (from Godzilla) before — but it’s all over porn, straight and gay. And it’s spawned Blackzilla and Whitezilla, in which the cock is silent (but understood).

On -zilla in this blog:

– 12/22/08, Portmansnow words (link): snowtastrophe, snowpocalypse, snowmageddon, snowzilla

– 5/22/11, Portmanteau to libfix (link): beginning with Glennzilla, a reference to Glenn Greenwald; and then:

The libfix -zilla (connoting size, significance, awesomeness, or fearsomeness) hasn’t made it into Michael Quinion’s affixes site yet, but instances have been chronicled elsewhere:

mumzilla (here) and planzilla (here) in the Double-Tongued Dictionary
promzilla (here) and bridezilla (here) in Word Spy
panty-hose-zilla (here), beardzilla (here), and godcomplexzilla (here) in Wordlustitude

No doubt there are many more impressive -zillas to be found.

– 4/17/12, Flymanteaus (link): including Flyzilla

Then on to Cockzilla (with variants CockZilla and Cock-Zilla). Two videos featuring women: Cockzilla in My Pussy (link) and Ricki White Cockzilla in My Ass (link). (An astonishing amount of ass-fucking goes on in straight porn.) Then a jack-off video entitled CockZilla. And another jack-off video on the Cockenstein blog (that’s a portmanteau with Frankenstein, of course; the blog specializes in monster cocks), with this text:

Well well well, let me introduce you to Cockzilla. I have to say, I’m kinda digging the name. and of course his giant 12 inch piece of uncut meat.
Cockenstein vs Cockzilla??
You know I’d be down for the contest! Damm, how do you warm your ass up for a cock that big?

Then there a fair number of sites with Blackzilla, referring to a huge black cock, for instance

Nichole Heiress sucking a blackzilla clean (link)

And then big-dicked porn actor Rod Spunkel (how’s that for a porn name?), who sometimes acts under the name Whitezilla (link); teaser trailer here for:

Whitezilla, The Big Dick Honkey: This White Boy Knows How to Fill Up That Ass

(This is straight porn, but Spunkel also does gay porn.)

Yesterday’s Zippy:

Neurology is different in Dingburg.

Then there’s the name Pons Varoli.

From Wikipedia:

The pons … is part of the brainstem that links the medulla oblongata and the thalamus. In full it is pons Varolii named using the Latin word for “bridge” and after the Italian anatomist and surgeon Costanzo Varolio (1543–75). It is cranial to the medulla oblongata, caudal to the midbrain, and ventral to the cerebellum. In humans and other bipeds, this means it is above the medulla, below the midbrain, and anterior to the cerebellum. This white matter includes tracts that conduct signals from the cerebrum down to the cerebellum and medulla, and tracts that carry the sensory signals up into the thalamus.

… The pons contains nuclei that relay signals from the forebrain to the cerebellum, along with nuclei that deal primarily with sleep, respiration, swallowing, bladder control, hearing, equilibrium, taste, eye movement, facial expressions, facial sensation, and posture.

Treasure your pons.

From Chris Ambidge yesterday, an Ivy League nude posture photo — an image from an odd moment in American collegiate history. Here’s the photo with the naughty bits fuzzed over:

From Wikipedia:

The Ivy League nude posture photos were taken in the 1940s through the 1970s of all incoming freshmen at certain Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges (as well as Swarthmore), ostensibly to gauge the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population. Harvard had its own such program by the 1980s. The larger project was run by William Herbert Sheldon and Earnest Albert Hooton, who may have been using the data to support their theory on body types and social hierarchy. What remained of the images were transferred to the Smithsonian and most were destroyed between 1995 and 2001.

The NYT Magazine of 1/15/95 had a nice piece on these events: “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal” by Ron Rosenbaum. Some excerpts:

One afternoon in the late 1970′s, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.

Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.

The employee who found them was mystified. The athletic director at the time, Frank Ryan, a former Cleveland Browns quarterback new to Yale, was mystified. But after making some discreet inquiries, he found out what they were — and took swift action to burn them.

… When I first embarked on my quest for the lost nude “posture photos,” I could not decide whether to think of the phenomenon as a scandal or as an extreme example of academic folly — of what happens when well-intentioned institutions allow their reverence for the reigning conjectures of scientific orthodoxy to persuade them to do things that seem silly or scandalous in retrospect. And now that I’ve found them, I’m still not sure whether outrage or laughter is the more appropriate reaction.

… While the popular conception of Sheldonism has it that he divided human beings into three types — skinny, nervous “ectomorphs”; fat and jolly “endomorphs”; confident, buffed “mesomorphs” — what he actually did was somewhat more complex. He believed that every individual harbored within him different degrees of each of the three character components. By using body measurements and ratios derived from nude photographs, Sheldon believed he could assign every individual a three-digit number representing the three components, components that Sheldon believed were inborn — genetic — and remained unwavering determinants of character regardless of transitory weight change. In other words, physique equals destiny.

I was at Princeton during the relevant period, but I don’t recall physique photos.

From Ellen Seebacher on Facebook, this puzzling ad:

  (#1)

Cod loins?

Loin is an unusual body-part term. AHD2 on the word:

the part of the body on both sides of the spine between the lowest (false) ribs and the hipbones.

• (loins) chiefly literary the region of the sexual organs, esp. when regarded as the source of erotic or procreative power: he felt a stirring in his loins at the thought.

• (loin) a large cut of meat that includes the vertebrae of the loins: loin of pork with potatoes.

The trick is to figure out what the counterpart of the loin(s) is on a fish. For comparison, here are graphics of cuts of beef in US and British usage:

(#2, US)

(#3, Brit)

(The title provides a warning for the sensitive.)

On the 11th on Facebook, Greg Parkinson commented on steroid-induced gynecomastia, with this image:

Tom Kirkland followed up with:

What surprises me is … how large the fan base for bitchtits [is].

(introducing the slang bitchtits for gynecomastia; bitchtits would be doubly unsuitable for the New York Times, which treats both parts of the compound as taboo, unacceptable in print; also note the syntax).

From Wikipedia:

Gynecomastia [BrE gynaecomastia] … is the benign enlargement of breast tissue in males. It may occur transiently in newborns. Half or more of adolescent boys have some breast development during puberty. Gynecomastia may arise as an abnormal condition associated with disease, such as Klinefelter syndrome, metabolic disorders, as a side-effect of medication, or as a result of the natural decrease of testosterone production in older males. In adolescent boys, the condition is often a source of psychological distress; however, 75% of pubertal gynecomastia cases resolve within two years of onset without treatment.

The OED2′s etymology: Greek γυναικο-, comb. form of γυνή woman, female + Greek μαζός var. μαστός breast.

Both parts of the compound are socioculturally complex. I’m c comfortable with each in some contexts, not at all in others, and it’s clear that usage differs according to who’s using it, in what contexts and for what purposes, to whom.

In a bizarre response to the winning of the Eurovision Song Contest by a bearded drag queen, Conchita Wurst singing “Rise Like a Phoenix” (reported in almost every media outlet), some Russian men have taken to shaving off their beards (if they had them). The position seems to be that Wurst’s beard so poisons beards as a symbol of masculinity that real men have no way to protest except by going beardless. (The idea here seems to some degree to be similar to the position that same-sex marriage diminishes and debases opposite-sex marriage — except that in the Wurst case, the threat comes from a single case: just one, though admittedly very visible, bearded man in a dress.)

The result is paradoxical.

But first, a couple shots of Conchita. One showing off her winning smile:

(#1)

And one with a more serious expression, showing her gown:

(#2)

The story from Gay Star News, May 13th, by Joe Morgan (hat tip to Michael Nieuwenhuizen):

Russians shave off beards to protest against Conchita Wurst

As Russians say beards are ‘no longer proof you are manly’, the Eurovision Song Contest winner is inspiring facial hair removal across Eastern European countries

Russian men are shaving off their beards in some sort of protest against Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst [singing “Rise Like a Phoenix” – a YouTube video is included with this story].

Prior to the Austrian drag queen’s winning moment, several countries launched campaigns to boycott the competition if she took part.

The Russian petition attracted over 23,000 signatures, and social media groups calling for the bearded lady to be barred from the competition gained over 40,000 fans. [This campaign was unsuccessful.]

And after Wurst’s victory on Saturday (10 May), a backlash spread on Russian social media.

What’s odd about the backlash is that it veers entirely in the opposite direction from conventional displays of masculinity, towards the epicene ideal. An epicene person (a) has the characteristics of both sexes or else (b) is of indeterminate sex, lacking the identifying characteristics of both sexes; the adjective has been extended to (c) convey ‘effeminate, unmanly’, and for some speakers it’s picked up (d) the connotation of hairlessness. In any case, as far from hirsute as possible.

How this makes a protest against an epicene figure of type (a), like a bearded drag queen, totally eludes me.

Onomastic bonus: From various sources, I learn that Conchita  (clipped version Chita) is a variant of the common Spanish women’s name Concepción, referring to the Immaculate Conception, but it can also be understood literally as ‘little conch, little seashell’ and so is available for a metaphorical slang sense ‘little cunt’. Meanwhile, German Wurst has a phallic referent (again metaphorical). So Conchita Wurst as a name alludes to both the female and the male genitals.

I discover that I never posted the handout for my 2012 Stanford Semantics Festival talk, “Parts of the Body”. Here it is, somewhat belatedly (and with somewhat awkward formatting):

Parts of the Body
Arnold M. Zwicky — Stanford Semantics Festival 13 – March 16, 2012

1. 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.

1.1. 10 web sources on body parts / parts of the body. One example:

Group A, comprising parts with 5 or more mentions out of a possible 10:

10: knee, leg
9: ear, elbow, head, mouth
8: arm, eye, foot, hand, neck, shoulder
7: finger(s), nose, toe(s)
6: abdomen / belly / stomach, ankle, chin, wrist
5: bottom / bum / buttocks, breast, calf, cheek, forehead, thigh, thumb

Group B, the dividing line between high frequency and low-frequency items, with only Adam’s apple (4 mentions) in it;

Group C, with 1-3 mentions (3: 7 items; 2: 11 items; 1: 21 items); among the items:

sexual parts: penis, vagina, scrotum, clitoris
regions (larger areas): face, chest, back, groin
parts of parts: heel, teeth, forearm, jaw, nostril, tongue, eyebrow, finger nail, knuckle, lip

armpit: only one mention; no mentions for underarm, or of course for axilla

1.2. 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, with regions (as above) distinguished from smaller areas

On concavities:

“English vocabulary [is] poor in words for concavities (though usually there are technical terms in anatomy for these areas), while being rich in words for areas of the body that project (nose, ears, lips, fingers, toes, elbows, knees, nipples, and so on).”

ex.: the area (or web) between the thumb and forefinger, which has a label [roughly ‘tiger’s maw’] in everyday Chinese (Victor Mair). Phrasal expressions in English, like area between the thumb and forefinger; anatomical (and phrasal) first interdigital space; semi-technical (and metaphorical) term ditch used by tattoo artists; note “the significance of this area in martial arts and acupuncture: it’s the site of an important pressure/acupuncture point. So it would make sense for Chinese to have a label for it.” (from “Concavities”)

exx.: inside of the elbow (cubital fossa, elbow pit), inside of the knee (popliteal fossa, knee pit): no everyday, widely used, non-slang, non-phrasal expressions

similarly, perineum, with various slang alternatives (like taint), and with an ambiguity between the broad sense of perineum (taking in the genitals and the anus) and a narrow sense (“the surface skin region between the anus and the scrotum or vaginal opening” – Wikipedia entry)

But there is armpit:

– Wikipedia: “The axilla (or armpit, underarm, or oxter) is the area on the human body directly under the joint where the arm connects to the shoulder.” [oxter is N. English or Scots]

– OED2: The hollow under the arm where it is jointed to the trunk.

– AHD5: The hollow under the upper part of the arm at the shoulder.

Note: “area” and “hollow”.

2. Even if you concede that the armpit’s a part of the body (with part ‘portion’), you might be unwilling to say that it’s a bodypart.

2.1. A distinction in the way compound nouns (like bodypart) and phrasal expressions (like part of the body) tend to be interpreted.

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 – OED, NOAD, AHD, for example — though it probably should be, along with the many other body- compounds these dictionaries list).

2.2. A related case: the OED’s Word of the Year for 2011, squeezed middle:

“a UK Labour Party politician’s feeble phrase for denoting an allegedly squeezed and put-upon class trapped in between the welfare riff-raff below (well taken care of with luxury soup kitchens and lavish handouts of cash, as is well known) and the fat-cat billionaires above.” (Geoff Pullum)

GKP continues:

“But my real objection is not to the feebleness and blatantly political origin of this phrase (which ordinary people are simply not using), but to the fact that it is fully compositional: squeezed just means “squeezed”, and middle just means “middle”, and if you put the two together you have the literal meaning. It is ridiculous to think of putting this in a dictionary — as opposed to a collection of political phraseology and cliché.

Oxford University Press has defended itself against such charges by issuing this FAQ response: “From a dictionary-maker’s point of view, a two-word expression is called a ‘compound’ and is treated as one word [a 'headword'] in the dictionary.” Nonsense. This is not a compound. It is an ordinary nominal with a participle functioning as attributive modifier of a noun. OUP needs a competent in-house grammarian.”

Four issues here: (1) squeezed middle as word or phrase; (2) its status as a compound; (3) its compositionality; (4) hence, its suitability for listing in a dictionary. Subsequent discussion argues: (1) a phrase; (2) not a N + N compound, but an Adj + N composite; (3) not necessarily fully compositional; (4) hence, a candidate for listing in a dictionary. The run-down: Ben Zimmer, “WOTY need not be a word”:

“I agree with Geoff that the press release from Oxford Dictionaries erred in explaining squeezed middle as a compound. Nonetheless, I think that a compositional phrase can be sufficiently lexicalized for consideration as Word of the Year — especially when a dictionary is making the selection. Though Geoff argues that it’s “ridiculous to think of putting this in a dictionary,” dictionaries from the OED on down are in fact full of such phrases. Sometimes they are lemmatized separately, and sometimes they appear in so-called “run-on entries” — so that an ADJ-N phrase can be found under the head noun.”

Mark Liberman weighs in:

“Like Geoff and Ben, I was puzzled by choice of “squeezed middle” as the OED’s WOTY. But I agree with Ben that it’s reasonable as well as traditional for dictionaries to include semi-compositional compounds and phrases among their entries. In such cases, a word-combination X Y has a common meaning that’s an unpredictable specialization of its compositional meaning, so that you may not be able to figure out what X Y means, even in context, and you’re even less likely to be able to guess that X Y is the term that you should use to convey the concept in question.”

Note “semi-compositional” and “unpredictable specialization of its compositional meaning”. As with Adj + N squeezed middle, so with N + N bodypart.

And then Mark suggests a playful resolution of the dispute, POTY in addition to WOTY:

“Why can’t we all get along? Let’s end the argument about whether the Word Of The Year should sometimes be a phrase by having a separate competition for Phrase Of The Year.

And we can divide the POTY prize further into two categories: one category for phrases that remain entirely compositional in meaning, but are newly-common terms for newly-popular concepts; and another category for newly-popular phrases whose common usage is an opaque metaphorical or metonymic extension of its basic compositional meaning.

This doesn’t end all possible arguments — the boundary between words and phrases is historically as contested as the boundary between Germany and Poland or Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

Mark then offers texting glove as a candidate for POTY.

2.3. Bodypart as a semi-technical term. In addition to clearly technical terminology (used in some conceptual domain, among an expert community of users, for some explicit purpose) and clearly ordinary language (expressing folk categorizations, for everyday purposes), there’s a middle zone of semi-technical terminology, which arises from at least two motives: lexical enhancement (creating expressions, using existing resources of the language, for categories that have no ordinary-language label) and lexical refinement (specializing some existing variant, so as to restrict its sense for particular purposes or to convey associations with particular contexts of use or communities of users).

2.4. Some examples of lexical enhancement.

2.4.1. personal pleasures (anal beads, bondage gear, buttplugs, cockrings, condoms, dildos and vibrators, lubrication) and other terms for commercial categories (like cookware), discussed here:

“… The point is that for a significant part of 10 Per Cent’s readership, the items listed above make a kind of natural — well, actually, cultural — category, of items that can be used in sexual encounters (in particular, gay sexual encounters), especially to enhance the sexual experience. The problem is that ordinary English doesn’t have an expression devoted to covering this territory. So people proposing to sell these items create one — an expression that will serve as a kind of “semi-technical term”, not as rigidly tied to its referents as scientific and legal and other sorts of specialized vocabulary, but also not just everyday language.

… like entirely ordinary terms with social or cultural content, these semi-technical terms are subject to considerable fuzziness around the edges — it’s as absurd to spend time trying to decide what REALLY counts as cookware as it is to decide what REALLY counts as a cup (on cups, see Labov’s “The boundaries of words and their meanings”, in Bailey & Shuy, New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English (1973)) — and to considerable variation: different people have somewhat different semi-technical terms, even for the same referents, and even when they have the same terms, they don’t use them in quite the same ways (what counts as cookware for you might not be quite the same as what counts as cookware for me).

… like indubitably technical terms, semi-technical terms have a way of insinuating themselves, on occasion, into ordinary language.

… Commercial categories, and their associated labels, can also slip over the line. Normally, you might say, “I bought some beautiful flatware at Crate and Barrel” (evoking the specifically commercial context) and would not say, to a family member, “Sandy, it’s time to set the table; please put out the flatware” (instead, you’d say, “knives, forks, and spoons”), but there are situations where you might use the semi-technical term: “We have 500 people coming to the reception; Terry, would you take care of the flatware?”.”

Follow-up here, stressing variability in usage and the traffic between ordinary and technical usage:

“The comments on my posting “Commercial categories” struck me as useful, and also fascinating. They illustrated my observation that though technical, semi-technical, and everyday uses of expressions can be distinguished, these uses aren’t fixed in stone, but can vary from person to person and time to time; and that both what’s included in a category and also the label that’s used for that category can vary in the same way.”

On the two-way traffic, note the “technicalization” of ordinary vocabulary in some domains –- mass in physics, group in mathematics, bug in entomology — and the “ordinarization” of technical vocabulary in others (as when penis and vagina have been taken from anatomical language to serve as neutral terms in everyday language).

2.4.2. bodily / personal hygiene, here:

“Some of the variation in usage no doubt arises from the fact that bodily hygiene and personal hygiene are “semi-technical terms”, not really part of everyday English, which are pressed into service, essentially by stipulation, to refer to categories that have no simple everyday labels.”

2.4.3. A-shirts and I-shirts, here:

http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/define-scrimmage-t-shirt/

“There are A-shirts (this seems to be a semi-technical term), which have neither sleeves nor a neckband and encompass both tank tops and garments variously called wife-beaters, singlets, vests, or some offensive things like Guinea tees and Dago tees (from their presumed Italian origins); your classic (full) T-shirts; and I-shirts (another semi-technical term), T-shirts with their sleeves missing.”

2.4.4. (action) figure, here:

“Both have figure used as at least a commercial term for a species of toy, covering both dolls and action figures; it’s not clear whether this commercial, semi-technical, usage is limited to those that have movable parts (where do toy soldiers, Indians, etc. stand?), though it does seem clear that it’s limited to human or humanoid representations (teddy bears, etc. are out, even if they’re in military costume).

We can see here some hint of a folk taxonomy in the domain of playthings, with toys, games, figures, and stuffed animals as subcategories (where do those trading cards in the 2002 cite above come in?), and with dolls and action figures as subcategories under figures. Not all of the taxa have established ordinary-language labels, the folk taxonomy might not align entirely with the semi-technical taxonomy adopted in commercial contexts — in some contexts in commercial law, action figures are a species of doll (see the passage below from the OED draft addition of 1993 under Action Man), though most speakers would, I think, reject that use of doll in everyday language), and there is probably considerable variation in the taxonomies and the vocabulary, variation being the norm in such matters.”

2.4.5. Labels in the SIP domain (sexuality, sexual identity, sexual practices), here:

“In domains of sociocultural significance – foodstuffs and clothing are two others I’ve looked at – we see several common themes:
(1) There are folk categories and any number of more technical or specialized categorizations,
(1a) each serving some purpose (the categories serve a role in, for instance, welcoming people to Pride events, speaking to them for social-service purposes like AIDS prevention, creating groups for political action or socialization, etc.),
(1b) and each grounded in some set of beliefs and attitudes (in this case, medical, legal, religious, psychological, etc.).
(2) The lines between these are permeable, with categorizations moving back and forth between contexts of use and changing in time.
(3) The categories don’t cover the domain fully and aren’t always mutually exclusive.
(4) Though some of these categories are labeled, in ordinary or (semi)technical language, many taxons (especially the larger taxons, like SIP) are unlabeled.
(5) Ordinary speakers (and, usually, “scientific” or other specialized analysts) have access to the categories only through the labels, and are likely to assume that the labels are the categories (gay “means” so-and-so), to analytic and social confusion.
(6) The categorizations (and accompanying labels, as in the putative basic vocabulary in the initialism above) compete with one another and are often at cross purposes.
(7) The categorizations, especially at the higher levels, may be in dispute: do they represent (socioculturally or psychologically) real groupings?
(8) The labels pick up associations (or connotations) from their contexts of use, at least as individual speakers experience these, and so are promoted or disfavored.”

2.4.6. erection enhancer, here:

“Out has opted for a category in between classic cock rings and sex toys in general: the category of things designed to increase erections, for which the magazine uses the semi-technical term erection enhancer, a synthetic compound in –er”

2.5. Lexical refinement. In bodypart, we see a tendency towards specialization of the N1 + N2 compound (otherwise just an alternative to the fully compositional N2 + PP variant part of the body). Both N + N compounds and Adj + N composites – especially those, like conjugal visit, that involve pseudo-Adjs – are inclined to develop specialized senses. (On conjugal visit, see here.)

3. Parts of the body as a resource in semantics and pragmatics. The vocabulary of the body and its constituents provides a rich source of illustrations of semantic and pragmatic phenomena. Many of these were mentioned above and are discussed in more detail in my posting on vulva and vagina, here.

3.1. A 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).

3.2. 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.)

3.3. Lexical gaps in ordinary language (e.g. for popliteal fossa), filled by phrasal expressions (inside of the knee) or slang innovations (knee pit) (another phrasal strategy is coordination, as in head and neck, arms and legs – cf. aunts and uncles).

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

3.5. Ordinarization: migration of technical terms into ordinary language (penis, vagina), usually to provide neutral terms in socially edgy domains.

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

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

3.8. 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)).

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

… plus a kilt and an implied (sort of) apology:

(Hat tip to Paul Armstrong.)

It’s been a while since I posted images of shirtless men with astounding abs (and pecs, delts, traps, and biceps, but oh, those abs!), but this one comes with an offer that folds in (in if my kilt offends you)  a muted sort-of apology: ‘I’m sorry if my kilt offends you, but …’

The form

(1) I’m sorry if my X offends you

is somewhat more muted than the classic non-apology apology form

(2) I’m sorry that you are offended by my X

(both put the burden on the person who takes offense),

and the free-standing

(3) if my X offends you, …

(with no formal expression of sorrow) is still more muted than (1). But as it turns out, the form in (3) (or the longer form in (1)) is only very rarely apologetic; Kilt Boy’s bantering, seductive offer is unusually good-spirited, but most occurrences of these forms are at best deflections of the claim of offense, or quite commonly nakedly aggressive attacks on the addressee.

In the first ten pages of a Google search on “if my X offends you”, we find the following instances of X:

reply, atheism, flag, patriotism, comment, breastfeeding, opinion, humor, post, facebook, language, poppy, body, name, avatar, blog, sarcasm, speech, profile, presence, honesty, question, username, eating meat, spelling, black skin, page, shirt, laughter, confidence, grammar/spelling, ass, hair, story, style, art, ambition, faith, decision, belly, taste, freedom, testimony, passion

On rare occasions, these uses are in fact apologetic, as in this query submitted to Yahoo! Answers:

I’m sorry if my question offends you, but are any Dominican men circumsized?

I’m an American woman (age 28) and I heard that Dominican men are not circumsized, is this true?

Most men are circumsized in America so I was surprised to hear this

(Only a tiny percentage of Dominican men are in fact circumsized.)

More commonly we see deflection:

If my speech offends you, I don’t care, that is your problem.

If my website offends you, then don’t look at it.

And, very often, aggression or outright insult:

If my flag offends you, I will help you pack. [That is, get out of my country.]

If my humor offends you, fuck you.

If my post offends you blame your parents because they raised a pussy.

The last two are about as far from an actual apology as you can get.

My most recent posting had a cartoon pun on abdominal (muscles), muscles that have been featured prominently in huge numbers of my postings on shirtless men, under the name abs, for abdominals. The muscles come in sets, hence the plural; and then the base noun abdominal has been clipped to ab. There are plenty more of these clippings, most of them involving muscles that come in pairs.

So from a 8/19/14 posting “Abs of the week”:

It’s been a while since I posted images of shirtless men with astounding abs (and pecs, delts, traps, and biceps, but oh, those abs!) …

And there’s more on fitness sites, for example, from msn health and fitness, on Wall Ball exercises:

MUSCLES INVOLVED: Quads, Glutes, Abs, Traps, Pecs, Delts, Triceps, Total Body

EQUIPMENT: Medicine Ball

The muscles involved, beside the abs, are:

pecs: pectorals (the pectoralis major muscles, of the chest) (link)

delts: deltoids (the deltoid muscles, making the rounded corners of the shoulders) (link)

traps: the trapezius muscles (moving the shoulder blades and supporting the arms) (link)

glutes: the gluteus maximus muscles (the buttocks) (link)

triceps (brachii) muscles — not clipped — of the back of the upper arm (link)

biceps (brachii) muscles — not clipped — of the front of the upper arm (link)

There are plenty of other muscles that are developed in bodybuilding — the muscles of the forearm, thigh muscles, and calf muscles, in particular — but these aren’t usually referred to by their Latin names, whether in full or clipped.

Yesterday I looked at the informal names for muscles abs, pecs, glutes, delts, and traps. The last two of these might not be as familiar to most people (who aren’t in the fitness / bodybuilding world) as the others; here I’m interested in traps (the trapezius muscles) — for their name, initially, and then for their appearance on one man, the pornstar Ken Ryker.

From Wikipedia:

The trapezius muscle resembles a trapezium (trapezoid in American English), or diamond-shaped quadrilateral.

The traps, or shoulder muscles (along with neighboring muscles), in a rear view:

(#1)

Wikipedia on trapeziums / trapezoids:

In Euclidean geometry, a convex quadrilateral with at least one pair of parallel sides is referred to as a trapezoid … in American and Canadian English but as a trapezium in English outside North America.

with an illustration:

(#2)

Yes, the name of the geometric figure is the source of the word trapeze. The shape of a trapeze is that of an isosceles trapezoid, in which the legs (the non-parallel sides) are equal in length and the base angles are equal as well.

On to the hunky guy: Ken Ryker, with the traps of death. Previously on this blog, in “Today’s hunk” of 3/13/14. And on AZBlogX, in “The Ken Ryker files” of 1/10/13, in a full-frontal shot “showing off his 11 or so fat inches, his hunky body, and his handsome face”. Two more shots, not actually X-rated, showing his powerful traps (and his pecs and more):

(#3)

(#4)

Somatotypes. In my posting on somatotypes (or body types), “More television hunks: NCIS: Los Angeles” of 10/6/14, I looked at a popular typology of these types (into three ideal types — ectomorph, mesomorph, and endomorph), illustrating the three types with male actors from the television show, but arguing that as a scientific scheme of categorization, this typology fails, though it serves

to provide a feeling (however illusory) of understanding. Popular advice literature abounds in such attractive but unsatisfactory categorization schemes, usually involving ideal types.

For the purposes of providing a feeling of understanding, the three ideal types can be replaced by a continuum from slim / slender at one end to beefy / bulky at the other, and we can ask where a man falls on this continuum. Ken Ryker is clearly towards the beefy end of the spectrum, but not at the far end.

Several other physical characteristics (besides overall body type) are relevant here: height and degree of muscular development. Ryker is tall (at least 6′ 4″), with a long torso and long legs as well, and he’s certainly well-developed; some discussion in “A matter of size” of 1/12/13, with a photo of the man from the flick The Matinee Idol.

Personas and sociotypes. Now turn from the physical to the social, on variation in how people present themselves in social interactions or as classified by others.

The presentation of self (or selves) in social interaction has been especially pursued by Rob Podesva, concentrating on the personas presented by gay men in different contexts: a “diva” persona, a “caring doctor” persona, a “partier” persona. People are typically unaware of how much they shift in different contexts and have no vocabulary for talking about their behavior (so that the suggestive labels are supplied by an analyst). A crucial source:

Robert J. Podesva, Phonetic Detail in Sociolinguistic Variation: Its Linguistic Significance and Role in the Construction of Social Meaning. Stanford Ph.D. dissertation, 2006.

On Ryker’s presentation, from “Hammond organs” of 12/24/12 on AZBlogX (warning: very plain sexual language coming here):

The ubermanly gay pornstars [gay pornstars meaning 'stars in gay porn'] — Mike Branson, Ken Ryker, Steve Hammond, Ryan Idol, Jeff Stryker, Rex Chandler — are hyper-masculine in appearance and demeanor, strict tops as far as fucking is concerned, and dominant in their sexual encounters. They cultivate the image of being basically straight, though they usually list themselves as bisexual, to make it clear that they do have sex with men — but only because they’re strictly gay for pay or because they’re fuck-any-hole-available omnisexuals. Their attitude towards the men who desire them is of superiority (because those guys are faggots, not real men), colored with pity (because of the faggots’ need for dick; poor bitches, they can’t help it) or even contempt (very clear in Ken Ryker and Jeff Stryker), though they can be generously appreciative of the services faggots provide for them (Jeff Stryker often thanks his bottom for the ride).

Note that this discussion is about the characters these actors portray in their films, which might align well or poorly with their real-world presentations.

On to sociotypes. The easiest examples here are types of people (specific to some social group, place, and time) recognized and explicitly named by those in the group, for instance the jocks and burnouts (and similar types) studied by Penny Eckert and the various gay types — twinks, bears, and so on — current in the gay community. Sociotypes are terrible systems of categorization, since a great many, even most, people in the group are not members of one of the types, and some of the types overlap. What the types do is pick out a small number of socially highly salient subgroups.

Not all the sociotypes have recognized names, though they are still socially real: MSMs (men who have sex with men — the term is from social work and sociology, but is not in general non-academic use), one of three classes of men who have sex with men but do not identify as gay (the others are the named types trade and gay for pay (G4P)); discussion in “What’s the word for this?” of 1/15/11.

When he was still in the business, Ryker was certainly G4P.

From Victor Steinbok, a link to the Hunks & Horses charity calendar, showing off naked guys and their horses. For June 2014:

(#1)

Tons of naked hunk charity calendars are available, especially from the U.K. (as here), working for various worthy causes. In this case:

Hunks & Horses charity calendars are filled with, well, hunks and beautiful horses! All proceeds from every calendar, and associated events, are donated equally between World Horse Welfare and Testicular Cancer Research UK.

On to a note about the title of this posting, which plays on the song title “Calendar Girl”, and then back to the hunks.

On the song, from Wikipedia:

“Calendar Girl” is a song written by Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield. It was a hit single for Sedaka in 1961.

In the lyrics, the singer recites the months and explains how events throughout the year give him reasons to celebrate the love he has for his girlfriend. The events primarily relate to Western and American holidays.

A YouTube video is here. Crucial lyrics:

I love, I love, I love my calendar girl
Yeah, sweet calendar girl
I love, I love, I love my calendar girl
Each and every day of the year

From a 10/21/13 posting on a naked Swiss farmers calendar:

An item in the huge genre of Hunk Calendars — firemen, farmers, bodybuilders, male hustlers, what have you, in several languages and social contexts. Affording the pleasures of contemplating the male body. Some of them purport to present genuine members of the category in question, others (like the Boys Next Door) are obviously fantasy fodder using male models.

Some are carefully G-rated (but steamy), many are blatantly X-rated, focused on the penis as the center of the male body.

Digression: Why calendars? If you like to view attractive male bodies in the privacy of your own home, and want to change the image you display every so often, you could get any number of photographic portfolios that will suit your tastes, and change the image when you fancy a fresh one. You don’t really need a calendar: in these computer days, hardly anyone looks at printed calendars check out dates. On the other hand, a calendar gives you an excuse to display the images, and obliges you to pull up a fresh one on a regular basis. So calendars have advantages over plain pin-up boys (or pin-up girls or cute cats or whatever), and there’s a market for them.

The charity connection. Apparently, at some point (fairly recently) some women’s groups, largely in the U.K., conceived of the idea of playfully exposing themselves (within careful limits) on calendars to raise money for charities, and men’s groups quickly followed. Perhaps the high point so far of these charitable hunk calendars are those from the Warwick Rowers: young, in great shape physically, seriously athletic, and wonderfully playful (they horse around a lot). From their website:

Warwick Rowers: Proudly getting naked for club and community

Thanks for coming to visit our little boathouse on the internet. We are probably best known around the world for our naked calendars, but we’re also a real sports team, and have produced Olympic and world class competitive rowers.

Our calendars help us to fund our sport, and enable us to do our own outreach programme to young people called Sport Allies.

The Rowers of course provide rear views, which almost never count as X-rated:

(#2)

and work hard to manage acceptable (and entertaining) cock-tease shots from the front:

(#3)

Further afield. Charitable calendars come in many varieties. Here’s a project from Minneapolis:

(#4)

And there’s a calendar, with a drawing in it of my friend Steven Levine playing an “adult baby”:

(#5)

The adult-baby fetish is not one of Steven’s things, but he’s been happy to play the role for fun and charity.

On the fetish, from Wikipedia:

Paraphilic infantilism, also known as autonepiophilia and adult baby syndrome can be a sexual fetish for some that involves role-playing a regression to an infant-like state. Behaviors may include drinking from a bottle or wearing diapers. Individuals may engage in gentle and nurturing experiences (an adult who only engages in infantilistic play is known as an adult baby) or be attracted to masochistic, coercive, punishing or humiliating experiences. Diaper fetishism involves “diaper lovers” wearing diapers for sexual or erotic reasons but may not involve infant-like behavior. Individuals who experience both of these things are referred to as adult baby/diaper lovers (AB/DL). When wearing diapers, infantilists may urinate or defecate in them.

… A variety of organizations exist to promote infantilism or meet with other practitioners throughout the world.

Adult babies are of both sexes.

A Clive Goddard cartoon from the January 2015 Funny Times:

On the left, a woman shopping for products to use during menstruation, euphemistically called sanitary products. On the right, an unsavory guy shopping for god-knows-what — but whatever it is, it’s unsanitary ‘unclean’.

Start with sanitary. From OED2, the root sense referring to health (Latin sanus ‘healthy’), later extended to cleanliness:

Of or pertaining to the conditions affecting health, esp. with reference to cleanliness and precautions against infection and other deleterious influences; pertaining to or concerned with sanitation.

At some point in the 19th century, the word was euphemistically extended to the menstrual context, presumably through the view that menstrual blood is unclean. The OED‘s first cite in this sense (from 1881, probably late) is for sanitary towel. Then came sanitary belt ‘a belt to which a sanitary towel is attached’ (1908), the specifically U.S. sanitary napkin (1917), sanitary pad (1926), and in 1936, sanitary protection ‘a collective term for the products (as tampons, sanitary towels, etc.) used by women during menstruation’. From Wikipedia:

A sanitary napkin, sanitary towel, sanitary pad, menstrual pad, maxi pad, or pad is an absorbent item worn by a woman or girl while she is menstruating, while she is recovering from vaginal surgery, for lochia (post birth bleeding), after an abortion, or in any other situation where it is necessary to absorb a flow of blood from her vagina.

I’m suffering with one at the moment. And for (almost) everything, there’s a cartoon, in this case a Perk at Work strip by Jason Salas:

From OED3 (November 2010) on crick:

Sudden stiffness or immobility of the neck, back, or other part of the body, typically resulting from spasm of one or more muscles; an instance of this. [attested from the 15th century on]

The cartoon shows the characteristic immobility of someone with a serious crick: their neck is “frozen” in one position — in this case, hooked to one side. (In other cases, the neck is frozen in such a way that the sufferer appears to be looking upwards.)

A sampling from the OED‘s lengthy (but inconclusive) etymology:

Origin uncertain; probably imitative, expressing a clicking sound made by the neck as the spasm occurs; … Alternatively perhaps compare crick [‘device for lifting heavy weights from below, a jack’] or stitch [‘thrust, stab; a sharp sudden local pain, like that produced by the thrust of a pointed weapon; esp. (now only) an acute spasmodic pain in the intercostal muscles, called more fully a stitch in the side’]. Compare also crook [‘An instrument, weapon, or tool of hooked form’] … and also Scots cleek [‘a large hook or crook for catching hold of and pulling something’] …

On the strip, from Salas’s website for it:

Perk at Work is a comic strip about a cafe worker, Perk, and his interactions with his boss, his cook, and his regular customers.

The cafe is located on the ground floor of a downtown multi-story office building. Mr. Argyle owns the building and the cafe. Workers from the varied businesses in and around the building patronize the cafe when they need to grab a bite to eat, take a coffee break, or simply just want to step away from the desk and hang out.

So when you’re getting a little burnt out and the corners of your mouth need a lift, visit Perk at Work. He’ll get the job done!

A crop of three comics for today, on three very different topics: a One Big Happy with an inventive reinterpretation of an expression; a Zits on the evolution of writing systems; and a Zippy with another Xmas parody:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

One by one:

One Big Happy. Busy Doctor Ruthie and her grandfather. Her grandfather suggests that she’s on call, and Ruthie invents the medical specialty on-callogist, suggesting (to readers of the comic) oncologist. Two possible scenarios here, neither very likely if the Ruthie of the strip is seen as a real child. In one, Ruthie has heard the medical term oncologist, without understanding what it refers to (the unlikelihood here is that she’d have heard the term and understood that it was the name of a medical specialty), and then her grandfather provides her the basis for an interpretation by giving her on call as a medical term. In the other, learning on call as a medical term leads Ruthie to invent on-callogist as the name of a specialty, without realizing that oncologist is in fact an existing specialty (here, the unlikelihood is her creating this fortuitous pun). But I suppose it could have happened.

Zits. Jeremy summarizes to Pierce the history of writing, with pictographs succeeded by alphabetic writing systems and the flourishing of written communication. But now it appears that icons are taking us back to pictographs. (The message is presumably from Jeremy’s girlfriend, Sara.)

Zippy. Our Pinhead tackles holiday music, this time producing a burlesque of “Jingle Bells” (yesterday he gave us a non-musical parody, of “A Visit from St. Nicholas”). (Because it is over-learned and repeated many times, Christmas music tends to invite burlesque; see, for example, the Pogo versions of “Deck the Halls” and “Good King Wenceslas” in this 7/21/12 posting.)

Then there’s the Gustave Courbet connection. On Courbet, from Wikipedia:

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (… 10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work.

… Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, painted in 1856, provoked a scandal. Art critics accustomed to conventional, “timeless” nude women in landscapes were shocked by Courbet’s depiction of modern women casually displaying their undergarments.

By exhibiting sensational works alongside hunting scenes, of the sort that had brought popular success to the English painter Edwin Landseer, Courbet guaranteed himself “both notoriety and sales”. During the 1860s, Courbet painted a series of increasingly erotic works such as Femme nue couchée.

This culminated in The Origin of the World (L’Origine du monde) (1866), which depicts female genitalia and was not publicly exhibited until 1988, and Sleep (1866), featuring two women in bed. The latter painting became the subject of a police report when it was exhibited by a picture dealer in 1872.

Specifically on L’Origine, again from Wikipedia:

L’Origine du monde (“The Origin of the World”) is an oil-on-canvas painted by French artist Gustave Courbet in 1866. It is a close-up view of the genitals and abdomen of a naked woman, lying on a bed with legs spread. The framing of the nude body, with head, arms and lower legs outside of view, emphasizes the eroticism of the work.

… In 1989, French artist Orlan created the cibachrome L’origine de la guerre (The Origin of War), a male version of L’origine du monde showing a penile erection.

The two artworks can be viewed (away from the sexual strictures of WordPress and Facebook) on AZBlogX, as #1 and #2, here.

On Orlan, from Wikipedia:

Orlan (born Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte) is a French artist, born May 30, 1947 in Saint-Étienne, Loire. She adopted the name Orlan in 1971, which she always writes in capital letters: “ORLAN”. She lives and works in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris.

On her L’Origine, from a notice of an exihibition from last year:

As part of the exhibition Masculin / Masculin at the Musée d’Orsay through January 2, 2014, is Orlan’s work “L’origine de la Guerre.” An interpretation of the famous 1866 painting by Gustave Courbet, “L’origine du monde,” Orlan’s 1989 version shows a man with his legs spread and an erection, reversing the iconographic roles found in the Courbet.

The function of Courbet in the Zippy strip is merely to provide a rhyme for all the way. But then Bill Griffith is often artistically mischievous.

[Bluntly sexual language here, though the images are elsewhere.]

On AZBlogX, a posting “For the new year”, with two displays of penises. From that posting:

All about the cocks, but in different ways. The guy in #1 [an ad for a Channel 1 Releasing New Year’s Eve sale] is gearing up to double his fun by taking on two diverse cocks, but he’s not yet into the act; instead, he’s gazing directly and intently at us (the viewers).

The man in #2 [a New Year’s gift from Mike McKinley] is displaying his dripping dick, in a drawing (“Resting After Work”) that conveys intense physicality and urgent sexuality.

The drawing is a 1987 work by Roger Payne, using the pseudonym Mark, from the Tom of Finland site. More examples of his work on the Adonis Art site, with the write-up:

Artist and illustrator Roger Payne has made his regular living by illustrating books and magazines for schools and universities, companies and local authorities. But always he had a secret sideline in illustrating stories in American gay magazines. At first he signed his drawings with a pseudonym, then with his first name, and now quite openly signs them with his full name if he wants to. His drawings are openly pornographic, depicting the action in the stories he is illustrating. But the high standard and consistency of his drawing style have created a cult following amongst afficianados of ‘under the counter’ art. Drawing out of his prodigious imagination, he creates powerful images, presenting the inner emotions of his subjects to full view. Still drawing into his eighth decade, Payne is artist with collectors all over the world.