A Mick Stevens Caveman cartoon in the 9/30/19 New Yorker (about to arrive in the mail), memorializing a signal moment in the cartoon Stone Age:

(#1) The weaponization of sarcasm in prehistoric times

The later history of weaponized sarcasm is vast, but certainly reaches one of its high points in 1970 in the career of British gangster Doug Piranha. During a period of perhaps 70 years sarcasm has spread to become, in the view of some cultural critics, absolutely pervasive in modern society, at least in the Anglophone world.

Meanwhile, the idea that elements of culture can be weaponized — used like bludgeons not just against individuals, but also to aggressively serve social or political purposes — has recently become fashionable.

(And then, of course, there’s the question of the semantic work that the derivational suffix –ize does in converting various groups of lexical items to verbs (as in N weapon > V weaponize).)

As mocking insincerity, expressing contempt and intended to be painful, sarcasm has presumably been with us ever since human beings began exchanging emotional attitudes, by speech or whatever means. An effective literary device — “For Brutus is an honorable man” — sarcasm is deployed to great effect by vernacular speakers as well.

Doug. Which brings us to … shudder … Doug. The Piranha Brothers, Doug and Dinsdale; the small-time crook Luigi Vercotti; and interviewers on the BBC1 show ‘Ethel the Frog’, as reported by the Monty Python crew in 1970:

(#2) The crime lords Doug (who flayed his opponents with words) and Dinsdale (who preferred nailing people’s heads to the floor)

2nd Interviewer [to Vercotti]: Why didn’t you call the police?

Vercotti: Well I had noticed that the lad with the thermonuclear device was the chief constable for the area [a Piranha collaborator]. So a week later they called again and told me the cheque had bounced and said… I had to see… Doug.

2nd Interviewer: Doug?

Vercotti: Doug (takes a drink) Well, I was terrified. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I’ve seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug.

2nd Interviewer: What did he do?

Vercotti: He used… sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and… satire. He was vicious.

Unspeakable viciousness. From the brutish beast’s cabinet of figurative horrors.

Weaponize this!  From NOAD:

verb weaponize: [with object] 1 convert to use as a weapon: a list of pathogens that terrorists might weaponize. 2 supply or equip with weapons: an active program to weaponize smallpox.

Sense 1 has been much in fashion recently with abstract rather than concrete direct objects. A few examples:

Trump is weaponizing the EPA against California (link)

Australia’s Gladys Liu scandal shows how the Chinese Communist Party is weaponizing race (link)

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger accused President Trump of weaponizing the term “fake news” as part of what the Gray Lady boss calls a “worldwide assault” on journalism. (link)

Jason Chaffetz: Activists are weaponizing charitable giving — And that means big trouble for every American (link)

Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in particular, have long been accused of weaponizing social media platforms to promote their increasingly aggressive foreign policy agenda. In 2017, hundreds of thousands of bots were used to launch attacks on Qatar as part of a blockade. (link)

This rush to weaponization hasn’t gone unnoticed by cultural critics. It got a NYT Magazine column, on-line on 3/14/2017 (print version on 3/18/17), by John Herrman: “If Everything Can Be ‘Weaponized,’ What Should We Fear?:

(#3) Derek Brahney illustration for the NYT

Politics is something like an art, if you ask those who practice it, and it’s something like a science, if you ask those who study it. But to the journalists who cover it, it has always been something like something else: a sport. Writing in 1968, Milton Rokeach, the social psychologist, articulated what would become a perennial complaint. “The kinds of data obtained by public-opinion research and disseminated in the mass media seem designed more to entertain than to inform,” he wrote. “The quality of the information conveyed seems not much different from that conveyed in the sports pages or, better yet, the daily racing form.” The press, especially during election years, frequently failed to exercise “journalistic conscience”; it had internalized a “racehorse philosophy.”

Nearly half a century later, Rokeach’s assessment still echoes in our gripes about political news. His chosen metaphor, however, has been beaten to death. Coverage is now turning away from a language of sports and toward a language of war. The horse race has given way to an arms race, in which everything, and everyone, have the potential to be “weaponized.”

According to the past year in headlines, [REDACTED] has amassed a particularly enormous arsenal. Since the beginning of the election, he has been credited with improvising (or trying to improvise) weapons out of everything within reach: Twitter, “the dollar,” conspiracy theories, “fake news,” harassment, Bill Clinton, emails, the media, “merry Christmas,” federal funding, unintelligibility and chaos — to name just a few. … The left has been accused of weaponizing political correctness, weaponizing “safe spaces” and weaponizing racism — meaning accusations of racial hatred, not racial hatred itself.

… “Weaponize” was born in the 1950s as military jargon. It was an instantly comprehensible neologism, useful and compact and inflected with the managerial style then in vogue. “To turn into a weapon” sounds clumsy and crude, bringing to mind early man gripping a fist-size rock or a prisoner sharpening a toothbrush. “Weaponize,” on the other hand, conjures thick-rimmed glasses and pomade, official reports and secret plans. It’s a contemporary of “collateral damage,” another term emblematic of what had not yet been termed the military-industrial complex.

Its first documented appearance in front of a wide audience came in 1957, in an Associated Press interview with Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi engineer who would become an integral figure in the American space program. Von Braun explained to the unnamed reporter that his work had been to “weaponize” the military’s ballistic-missile technology. Army rocketry was, of course, always destined for war, so von Braun’s use of the word suggested the fulfillment of a plan, more than a conversion. Over the decades that followed, “weaponization” proliferated alongside nuclear warheads, describing their constantly multiplying delivery systems, and lingered through the late stages of the Cold War. But it has periodically re-entered the lexicon to address fresh fears: anxiety about new infectious diseases being put to sinister ends; weapons of mass destruction, during the run-up to the first and second American wars in Iraq; and of course, 21st-century terror attacks, in which horrifying and surprising things — passenger planes, trucks — were converted into instruments of slaughter.

Snark on this! During the time that weaponization-talk has spread in political talk in American English, a variety of sarcasm has apparently been elevated to a commonplace feature of everyday English talk: snark. This too has caught the attention of cultural critics. (The spread of weaponization-talk is easily documented, but the claim about the apparent spread of sarcasm is harder to verify, though a number of people have a strong subjective impression that this is also a real — though almost surely unrelated — trend.)

From NOAD:

adj. snarky: informal, chiefly North American (of a person, words, or a mood) [a] sharply critical; cutting; snide: the kid who makes snarky remarks in class. [b] cranky; irritable: Bobby’s always a bit snarky before his nap. [hence a noun snark ‘snarkiness’ and a verb snark]

Briefly, from a Smithsonian Magazine article “The Science of Sarcasm? Yeah, Right: How do humans separate sarcasm from sincerity? Research on the subject is leading to insights about how the mind works. Really” by Richard Chin on 11/14/11:

Sarcasm so saturates 21st-century America that according to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase “yeah, right” was used, it was uttered sarcastically. Entire phrases have almost lost their literal meanings because they are so frequently said with a sneer. “Big deal,” for example. When’s the last time someone said that to you and meant it sincerely? “My heart bleeds for you” almost always equals “Tell it to someone who cares,” and “Aren’t you special” means you aren’t.

“It’s practically the primary language” in modern society, says John Haiman, a linguist at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the author of Talk is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation and the Evolution of Language.

So: undeniably common, in certain expressions. But has there been an increase in sarcasm overall? Were the common folk of the 18th century less given to sarcasm than the common folk today? Hard to say.

The –ize of weaponize. Back on the weaponization front, there’s the extremely popular derivational suffix –ize / -ise, used productively to churn out neologistic verbs from a wide assortment of adjectives and nouns. From Michael Quinion’s affixes site:

Forming verbs. [French -iser, via late Latin -izare from Greek verbs ending in -izein.]

Verbs in this ending are a large and diverse set. Very broadly, one group is of verbs that take a direct object, which describe acting on something or treating it in a given way, so causing it to change its state (baptize, computerize, dramatize, fossilize, oxidize, pasteurise, privatize, sterilize, terrorize). A second set, of verbs that do not take a direct object, refers to following some line of behaviour, action, practice, or policy (agonize, apologize, extemporize, moralize, realize, theorize).

… The ending is commonly used to make new verbs from adjectives or (especially) nouns and has done for centuries. In the twentieth century some people have objected to new forms such as finalize, prioritize, or hospitalize. However, such formations are now widely accepted, and new ones appear as needed (incentivize, medicalize, strategize, technologize), though not always with hopes of long-term survival (angularize, flexibilize, graffitize, radarize). Many apparently new forms, such as ceremonialize and novelize, actually have a long history.

There’s a phonological condition on the eligibility of bases for suffixation with –ize — briefly, bases with final accent are very poor candidates: Manháttanize, but ??New Yórkize; Toróntoize, but ??Montreálize; pérfumize, but ??perfúmize; etc. (In some cases, the accent on the base is shifted forward one syllable to satisfy the condition: Carmél (CA), but Cármelize.)

Beyond that, the semantics of neologisms is all over the map; it might be that the best we can say is that the bulk of them are simply causatives (change-of-state transitives) with Adj or N bases, with the details of the semantic relationships involved as contextually specific to each base. Consider this sample of sightings from my files:

‘The movement’s conflicts…remained ecclesiastical, conducted almost exclusively by clergymen and clericized (or at least theologically engaged) laymen.’

‘But in the 1860s there were dissenting voices.  More typical was the London Quarterly Review, which denounced “the plot for Romanizing the Church of England…”’

‘We specialize and interpret the general outline of the theory given above in the context of science careers.’  [seems to mean ‘apply to a special context’]

‘With the Latinoization of Texas and…’

‘White then seeks to “sinisterize” the rest of my father’s life, offering malign reinterpretations of ordinary events…’

‘Collins casts his book with rip-roaring characters, then sizes them up with practiced ease.’

‘Ailes is a needy, talented raconteur, [Ted] Turner is a visionary who wackily rages against being “clitorized” by Time Warner, and…’ [‘feminized’, presumably.]

‘”They are what I call the Wal-Mart-ization of American religion,” Dr. Leonard said, referring to a tendency he sees toward a consumerist approach to religion on their part.’

‘Of course, some see the rise in second-home buying as the Carmel-ization of San Francisco.  (In Carmel, only 42 percent of homes are primary residences, according to a 2000 census.)’

‘And particularly in the middle of so wrenching a tragedy, tone matters as much as content. Hurricane Katrina, even more than 9/11, emboldened television newscasters to fold themselves and their feelings into the story, and that has led to the Anderson Cooperization of the evening news.’

‘”What we see today is the pentecostalisation of Latin American Christianity,” says Mr Chestnut.’

The grim tale of the shoe elves who got wasted on ale and were baked into a bro pie by the evil shoemaker’s wife — I embroider a bit here — as condensed by Wayno and Piraro in their 11/7 Bizarro strip:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page. Two of these, the Pie of Opportunity and the Lost Loafer, figure in the actual content of the cartoon and will be duly attended to in a moment.)

The Bizarro Bros have folded a fair number of things into this cartoon, starting with the bro mindset and the slang nouns dude and bro, going on to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, in particular the tale of the elves and the shoemaker, and incorporating shoes from both Grimm and Bizarro, plus Greek pie, and I don’t mean spanakopita.

dude and bro. As address terms, both function as markers of solidarity between young men (in American English). As referential terms, dude often approximates guy, while bro can merely be short for brother, or can be used specifically for reference to African American men, or can be used to refer to young men in closely bonded groups (fraternity brothers being the model). Both tend to take on connotations of “coolness”, but bro is especially inclined to pick up connotations of exclusion complementary to its solidarity content (in contrast to dude, which continues t expand its range of reference).

Some notes on these two items.

First, the abstract for Scott Kiesling’s article “Dude” in American Speech 79.3.281-305 (2004):

The patterns of use for the address term dude are outlined, as are its functions and meanings in interaction. Explanations are provided for its rise in use, particularly among young men, in the early 1980s, and for its continued popularity since then. Dude is used mostly by young men to address other young men; however, its use has expanded so that it is now used as a general address term for a group (same or mixed gender), and by and to women. Dude is developing into a discourse marker that need not identify an addressee, and more generally encodes the speaker’s stance to his or her current addressee(s). Dude indexes a stance of cool solidarity, a stance which is especially valuable for young men as they navigate cultural Discourses of young masculinity, which simultaneously demand masculine solidarity, strict heterosexuality, and nonconformity.

(On this blog, something of a dude digression, in my 12/21/12 posting “Dude Wipes”, with a section on Dudeism in The Great Lebowski.)

As for bro, there’s a substantial Page on this blog about brocabulary, with annotated links to a series of postings on bro and bro-words, including my 4/12/16 posting “On the brocabulary watch: brocialist”, drawing a distinction between

“bad”, negative bro, with misogynist connotations, as opposed to “good”, positive bro, [merely] connoting male bonding

The bros in the cartoon are good bros, and they’re bros in several senses: they’re buddies; they’re writing partners, churning out cool fables for modern times; they’re fraternity brothers, in Rho Phi Sigma; and they’re actual brothers, Jake and Willy Grimm. (And in fact there are rumors — you know how these things get around, dudes gossip like crazy — that after a bit of lager they get into giving each other bro-jobs.)

Symbols: pie. The cartoon is overloaded with content of all kinds. For instance, there’s Piraro’s Pie of Opportunity, in the lower right corner. Dan says of this:

The Pie of Opportunity: Opportunity is like a piece of pie underfoot. We must watch for it, for if we do not see it we may step in it and get sticky fruit and crust between our toes. If we search for it wisely, however, open to the possibility that it may be hiding anywhere, we may enjoy the delicious sweetness. But we must not jump hastily at found pie; what at first looks like a scrumptious dessert on the floor may actually be something the cat coughed up.

The message of the pie is scarcely hidden in the cartoon, since PIE is blazoned on one bro’s sweater and on the other bro’s ballcap. (They are, of course, both wearing ballcaps turned backwards; that’s part of the whole awesome bro presentation of self, along with the hipster goatees, or brotees.)

In a little symbolic joke, PIE is actually RFS, that is, (in Greek letters) Rho Phi Sigma, the fable-bros’ frat:

(#2)

The bro-tale. Jake and Willy are updating a traditional tale. From Wikipedia:

(#3) Cover of the Paragon Books picture book version of 2013, a typically “cute” modern presentation of the story; Jake and Willy’s version has a bit more or an edge to it, since their elf dudes are into sucking up the shoemaker’s lager

“The Elves and the Shoemaker” is an often copied and re-made 1806 story about a poor shoemaker who receives much-needed help from three young helpful elves.

The original story is the first of three fairy tales, contained as entry 39 in the German Grimm’s Fairy Tales under the common title “Die Wichtelmänner”. In her translation of 1884 Margaret Hunt chose The Elves as title for these three stories.

There are many variants of the story in popular culture: in animated cartoons, tv shows, comic books, and children’s books.

Symbols: the shoe. An obsession with shoes and the making of shoes comes with the fairly-tale territory, but it plugs right into another of Piraro’s symbolic attachments:

The Lost Loafer: In life, all of us understand what it is to be lost — literally lost in the lingerie department of a store, or figuratively lost not knowing which way to turn in life, which job to take, which country’s customs officials are easiest to sneak past with recreational drugs. The lost loafer exists in recognition of that feeling we all have at some time in all our lives: useless, outcast, purposeless, smelly, without a mate.

The framed image of a gigantic shoe, radiating light like a beacon, is a central feature of the cartoon, along with the two bros’ faces (faces always catch our attention). Not at all a hidden symbol.

Notes on Jacob and Wilhelm and their fairy tales. As filtered through the movies and tv. From a 8/27/05 Language Log posting of mine, “Disowning The Brothers Grimm“:

(#4)

No, I don’t want to disown Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the first of whom is something of a hero of historical linguistics. I want to disown the movie The Brothers Grimm, and I’m doing this on behalf of linguists everywhere.

What the movie has in common with the real world is: two brothers named Grimm, early-19th-century Germans who were involved with fairy tales. As far as I can tell, that’s it. Imagine a Life of Noam in which, through the miracle of miniaturization, the heroic Chomsky (played by Brad Pitt in a revealing latex bodysuit) takes a band of brawling adventurers into the deepest recesses of the human brain, to recover bits of the language organ for sale through his start-up company — a sort of cerebral 21st-century Fantastic Voyage. Appalling.

In any case, not a movie to put on the recommended viewing list for students in your intro linguistics classes.

A more recent visit of mine to the movie and the original brothers: in the 6/29/19 posting “A bit more reaping”:

the actual Grimms and the movie Grimms are still open for reaperish play. A quirky note on the former, from Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips site, by Mignon Fogarty on 11/19/14:

(#5)

Honored with a 1985 stamp: The next time you watch Snow White, remember that Grimm’s Fairy Tales may be what made the Grimm name famous in popular culture, but Jacob Grimm was also one of the giants of early linguistics.

(There are plenty of other Grimm-oriented German stamps. They are national culture heroes.)

And the movie, which has Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, and the slightest of connections to history. From Wikipedia:

The Brothers Grimm is a 2005 adventure fantasy film directed by Terry Gilliam. The film stars Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, and Lena Headey in an exaggerated and fictitious portrait of the Brothers Grimm as traveling con-artists in French-occupied Germany, during the early 19th century. However, the brothers eventually encounter a genuine fairy tale curse which requires real courage instead of their usual bogus exorcisms.

Along the way, my 11/12/15 posting “Movies and tv: Grimm”, about the very enjoyable tv show Grimm, set in Portland OR,  in a world populated by characters from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, with a note on Jacob and Wilhem Grimm.

(#6)

A generic penguin ban sign (sold on Amazon, a CD Visionary no-penguins button):

(#1) What’s banned? Spheniscid birds. Why? Who knows. (They smell. They steal fish. They get underfoot. Whatever.)

and a ban — in a list of prohibitions against public vice or indecency — on the door of Loretta’s Authentic Pralines on N. Rampart St. in New Orleans (photo from the TripAdvisor South Africa site):

(#2) What’s banned? Who knows. Why? Because they’re a vice (like drinking or smoking) or are indecent (like profanity or nudity), presumably the latter.

From Loretta’s Facebook page:

(#3)

Celebrated as the “Queen of Pralines,” boasting a menu full of delicious creole sweets and treats — pralines, stuffed beignets, king cake, cookies, pies, sauces, and soul food. First Black female chef to own and operate a (successful) praline shop.

(Both pralines and beignets are serious matters in New Orleans.)

Item #2 appeared on Facebook yesterday, with this query from Chris Ambidge to me:

Arnold — you’re our resident penguin expert. Do you have any idea what they [penguins] got up to that this sign had to be posted?

The birds come into it on the metaphor train. What’s being banned is this clothing:

(#4)

And guys like these are said to be wearing penguin pants, or penguins for short (or to themselves be penguins), because of the visual figure illustrated here:

(#5) Dick Van Dyck’s penguin dance from the movie Mary Poppins; you can watch the full routine here (#6)

The use of penguin as a slang term for ‘sagging / saggy pants’ (or for someone wearing such pants) seems to be recent enough that it hasn’t made it into GDoS or even Urban Dictionary.

The sag chronicles. From “Sagging Pants Butt Up Against the Law: Yet the droopy trousers trend lives on”, by Emily Spivack in Smithsonian Magazine on 4/1/13:

Wearing one’s pants really low makes the wearer walk penguin-like.  The person waddles around, maintaining a stilted gait so that the pants stay in place. Cinched with a belt, in extreme cases underneath the backside with boxers visible, the pants make legs look overly short. Oversized shirts elongate the torso leading to skewed, caricature-like proportions.

This passage comes after Spivack’s lead-in:

A campaign in Massachusetts is determined to put an end to wearing saggy pants by enforcing a law enacted back in 1784 and amended in 1987. According to Section 16, “Open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior,” under the “Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency, and Good Order”:

A man or woman, married or unmarried, who is guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than three years or in jail for not more than two years or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars.

Up to three years in jail and a few hundred dollar fine just for wearing your pants low?!

… While the Massachusetts campaign may seem straight out of an Onion article, sagging pants have been a hot topic since the early 2000s, particularly because states, cities and local communities around the United States have tried to enact laws that would provide fines, penalties, potential jail time for those who sag. Memphis, Tennessee, Delcambre, Louisiana, and Fort Worth, Texas are just a few of the cities to try to enforce anti-sagging laws to mixed results, including a successful “Urkeling” enforcement strategy derived from the character Steve Urkel from the television show “Family Matters.”

The enforcement of these laws is controversial because the majority of people who choose to make this fashion statement are young African American males. As a result, prosecution is generally equated with racial profiling, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to write the blog post, “Why does the ACLU care about saggy pants?”

Note that Loretta’s (in #2) is definitely a Black establishment, but it’s also one with an explicit commitment to what it sees as Christian principles, and that’s where the anti-penguin stance comes from. Loretta doesn’t want nasty dudes in her place.

Some historical background from the Wikipedia article:

Sagging is a manner of wearing trousers or jeans that sag so that the top of the trousers or jeans are significantly below the waist, sometimes revealing much of the underwear.

Sagging is predominantly a male fashion.

… Sagging first peaked in popularity during the 1990s and remained popular into the mid 2000s, but it has recently made a comeback in the 2010s, with celebrities like Justin Bieber, Liam Payne, Ross Lynch, Zac Efron and more bringing back the fashion trend. Sagging in the 1990s usually focused on baggy trousers with plaid boxers, but in the 2010s sagging has become popular with skinny jeans and branded boxer-briefs.

The style was popularized by skaters and hip-hop artists in the 1990s. It later became a symbol of freedom and cultural awareness among some youths or a symbol of their rejection of the values of mainstream society.

It is often claimed the style originated from the United States prison system where belts are sometimes prohibited and there can be a lack of appropriately sized clothing

During the 2000s, many North American local governments, school systems, transit agencies, and even airlines passed laws and regulations against the practice of wearing sagging pants, although no state or federal laws have been enacted banning the practice. US presidential candidate Barack Obama, speaking just before the 2008 US Presidential Election, appeared on MTV and said that laws banning the practice of wearing low-slung pants that expose one’s underwear were “a waste of time … Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What’s wrong with that? Come on. Some people might not want to see your underwear. I’m one of them.”

(Don’t be crude, dude.)

Sports note. In a Facebook posting, Pittsburgh resident Ann Burlingham was concerned that the prohibition in #2 was aimed at the Pittsburgh NHL team the Penguins. But once you realize that the establishment in #2 is in New Orleans (a city that doesn’t have a NHL team and isn’t particularly devoted to ice hockey), you can see that sports rivalry is an unlikely source of the penguin ban at Loretta’s.

It’s all a matter of context. Ya gotta know the territory.

Contextual semantics. In a related vein: searching electronically on “NO PENGUINS” led me almost immediately to things like:

True or false? There are no penguins in Alaska.

Of course, the “right” answer is True, and sites go on to explain that penguins are Antarctic creatures, not Arctic ones, and that anyway, penguins wouldn’t survive in Alaska because bears would eat them there. But there’s a trickiness to the question (and its expected answer).

In fact, it seems to be something of a historical accident that at the moment there are not known to be any penguins in Alaska — the accident being that the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage has exotic creatures like tigers and Bactrian camels, but no penguins. To see the problem, try these questions on for size:

True or false? There are no penguins in San Francisco.

True or false? There are no snakes in Ireland.

Oh dear, it turns out to turn on what the meaning of are is. Everything depends on what question is being asked in context.

There are certainly penguins in San Francisco. Two colonies of them, in fact: on Penguin Island at the San Francisco Zoo; and in the Steinhart Aquarium of the California Academy of Sciences. And there are certainly snakes in Ireland: the Dublin Zoo has some large and dramatic pythons, in particular.

Ok, the penguins are in San Francisco, but not of it; and similarly for the pythons in Dublin. There are no naturally occurring penguins in San Francisco, no wild penguins in San Francisco; and similarly for snakes in Ireland. And that’s what the true-or-false questions are asking about; that’s what forms of the verb BE convey in the quiz-question context. Even if your kid has viewed a memorable Burmese python at the Dublin Zoo, if they get the true/false question on a quiz in school, the only “right” answer to it is True; there are no snakes in Ireland.

It gets worse. Suppose the quiz question is:

True or false? There are no penguins in Arnold’s house in Palo Alto.

Well, now, the “right” answer is False; Arnold’s house has penguins all over the place. Granted, they aren’t literal penguins, capable of swimming like bullets through icy waters in search of fish to eat, but are instead various kinds of penguin-simulacra (so that you could have a potentially explosive penguin on top of your telly) or penguin-representations (drawings, for example).

So now it depends on what the noun PENGUIN means. Any noun denoting a concrete object can also be used to denote a simulacrum or representation of that object. In some contexts (as in a discussion of the contents of my house), the concrete-object avian understanding of PENGUIN will obviously be out of the question, so if you assume we are talking cooperatively, you’ll look for an alternative understanding of PENGUIN that makes the noun relevant in the context, and that will bring you to the simulacum/representation understanding. And the “right” answer, False.

There’s more, of course. There are no Penguins in Arnold’s house in Palo Alto (with Penguin ‘pro hockey player for the Pittsburgh team’) is True; and There is no penguin in Arnold’s house in Palo Alto (with penguin ‘penguin meat’) is also True. And so on. But these understandings require heavy doses of special context.

It remains that There are no penguins in San Francisco posed in a quiz is True; but the same sentence advanced as a claim about the contents of the city is False; and There are no penguins in Arnold’s house in Palo Alto is also False. Context, context.

Recently posted on Facebook, this melding of the traditions of Judaism with the traditions of Jedi-ism for the holiday season, in French:

(#1) ‘May the light be with you’: the Jedi Master Yoda wields a lightsword menorah for Hanukkah (Fr. Hanoucca) — Happy Hanukkah! (Joyeuse fête de Hanoucca!)

Background 1: Crif. The composition is credited (lower right corner) to Crif, the Conseil Representatif des Institutions Juives de France, which (according to its Facebook page) was founded on 5/22/43 (the dating is signficant) and fights for the Jewish people, in France and around the world, acting more generally against against racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. Not at all a frivolous group, but they have a sense of humor — and the image of a Jedi knight fighting for the Jews with light (combining two elements of the Hanukkah story, military action and miraculous light).

Background 2: Hanukkah. Hanukkah 2019 begins the evening of Sunday Dec. 22nd and ends the evening of Monday Dec. 30th. About the holiday, from Wikipedia:

Hanukkah … is a Jewish festival commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire. It is also known as the Festival of Lights …

Hanukkah is observed for eight nights and days, starting on the 25th day of Kislev according to the Hebrew calendar, which may occur at any time from late November to late December in the Gregorian calendar. The festival is observed by lighting the candles of a candelabrum with nine branches, called a menorah (or hanukkiah). One branch is typically placed above or below the others and its candle is used to light the other eight candles. This unique candle is called the shamash … Each night, one additional candle is lit by the shamash until all eight candles are lit together on the final night of the festival.

(#2) On Amazon, a  rainbow Pride flag menorah t-shirt (maker not identified) — available in white, asphalt, slate, and baby blue

Other Hanukkah festivities include playing the game of dreidel and eating oil-based foods, such as latkes and sufganiyot, and dairy foods.

[the traditional origin story:] When the Second Temple in Jerusalem was looted and services stopped, Judaism was outlawed. In 167 BCE, Antiochus ordered an altar to Zeus erected in the Temple. He banned brit milah (circumcision) and ordered pigs to be sacrificed at the altar of the temple.

Antiochus’s actions provoked a large-scale revolt. Mattathias (Mattityahu), a Jewish priest, and his five sons Jochanan, Simeon, Eleazar, Jonathan, and Judah led a rebellion against Antiochus. It started with Mattathias killing first a Jew who wanted to comply with Antiochus’s order to sacrifice to Zeus, and then a Greek official who was to enforce the government’s behest (1 Mac. 2, 24–25[34]). Judah became known as Yehuda HaMakabi (“Judah the Hammer”). By 166 BCE Mattathias had died, and Judah took his place as leader. By 165 BCE the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid monarchy was successful. The Temple was liberated and rededicated. The festival of Hanukkah was instituted to celebrate this event. Judah ordered the Temple to be cleansed, a new altar to be built in place of the polluted one and new holy vessels to be made. According to the Talmud, unadulterated and undefiled pure olive oil with the seal of the kohen gadol (high priest) was needed for the menorah in the Temple, which was required to burn throughout the night every night. The story goes that one flask was found with only enough oil to burn for one day, yet it burned for eight days, the time needed to prepare a fresh supply of kosher oil for the menorah. An eight-day festival was declared by the Jewish sages to commemorate this miracle.

Background 3: the Jedi knights. From Wikipedia:

The Jedi are the main protagonists in the Star Wars universe. The Jedi Order are depicted as an ancient monastic, academic, meritocratic and quasi-militaristic organization whose origin dates back approximately 25,000 years before the events of the first film released in the franchise.

Jedi were powerful Force-wielders and adjudicators tasked by the Galactic Republic to be the guardians of peace and order in the Star Wars galaxy; they defend and protect all sapient life, never attack. The Order consisted of polymaths; teachers, philosophers, scientists, engineers, physicians, diplomats, and warriors. The Jedi moral value system viewed purity of thought and detachment of emotions as essential to enlightenment. Jedi philosophy emphasized self-improvement through knowledge and wisdom, adherence to slave morality, and selfless service through acts of charity, citizenship, and volunteerism; this ideology is a recurring theme in the Star Wars universe. The Jedi denounce emotions as the root cause of mortal suffering; they believe fear, anger and love cause sentient beings to lash out in conflict and impede rational action to do what is objectively correct action. Their traditional weapon is the lightsaber, a device which generates a blade-like plasma powered by a Kyber crystal or other focusing item …

The fictional organization has inspired a real-world new religious movement, Jediism.

Background 4: Yoda specifically. Although Yoda has come up in many postings on Language Log and this blog, mostly in connection with his unusual syntax (in English), I seem not to have posted about him as a character. From Wikipedia:

Yoda is a fictional character in the Star Wars universe, first appearing in the 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back. He is a small, green humanoid alien. In his first appearance in the original trilogy, the force ghost of Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi describes Yoda as the Jedi master who trained him and asks Luke Skywalker to seek Jedi training from Yoda, which Luke does and later uses to fight against the Galactic Empire. The character reappears in Return of the Jedi where he reveals his age to be 900, making him the oldest living character in the Star Wars franchise.

… Two other members of Yoda’s unnamed alien species are known … Very little is known about Yoda’s alien species, though all three are powerful in The Force

Background 5: The Force. From Wikipedia:

The Force is a metaphysical and ubiquitous power in the Star Wars universe. It is wielded by “Force-sensitive” characters throughout the franchise: heroes like the Jedi who seek to become one with the Force, while the Sith and other villains exploit the Force and try to bend it toward their will. The Force has been compared to aspects of several world religions, and the phrase “May the Force be with you” has become part of the popular-culture vernacular.

The greeting. “May the Force be with you” is the all-purpose Star Wars greeting, expressing a generalized wish for good luck or good will. It’s George Lucas’s variation on the Arabic greeting salaam ‘may the peace be upon you’ / Fr. ‘Que la paix soit sur toi’ (or its Hebrew counterpart shalom).

From Wikipedia:

As-salāmu ʿalaykum … is a greeting in Arabic that means “Peace be upon you”. The salaam is a religious salutation among Muslims when greeting, though it is also used by Arabic speakers of other religions, such as Arab Christians. The typical response to the greeting is wa ʿalaykumu s-salām … “And peace be upon you, too.”

This greeting appears in greatly abbreviated forms in many languages from Malagasy to Urdu as some variant of salām …

And see NOAD‘s note:

excl. shalom: used as salutation by Jews at meeting or parting, meaning “peace.”. Compare with salaam. ORIGIN from Hebrew šālōm [‘peace, harmony, wholeness’].

Now Yoda does it in French. First in English, Elizabeth Dowsett and Shari Last’s 2011 Mysteries of the Jedi:

(#3) Publisher’s note: Mysteries of the Jedi is a dynamic visual guide that brings the Star Wars galaxy to life for a new generation of Star Wars fans. In it, younger readers will meet all the Jedi heroes from Anakin to Yoda, understand what it takes to become a Jedi, find out how to wield a lightsaber, discover the secrets of the Force, examine the tools of the Jedi trade, and more!

Here you see the original image for the lightsaber menorah version in #1.

The 2013 French translation didn’t just translate the title, as Mystères des Jedi, but instead substituted a French version of “May the Force be with you”:

(#5) Engl. May the Force be with you! > Fr. Que la Force soit avec toi!

Pretty straightforward, given the use of complementizer que ‘that’ + a subjunctive clause to convey wishes. The other linguistic point is the choice of 2sg pronoun, (a form of) tu vs. (a form of) vous. Usually labeled as familiar tu vs. polite vous in textbooks, though these labels come very far from describing the actual uses. (A reminder here that Labels Are Not Definitions.) For discussion, see my 2/10/19 posting “French 2sg pronouns”, about the choice of T vs. V pronouns and the choice of address terms.

In the case at hand, the choice of the T pronoun toi (over the V pronoun vous) aligns with the generally egalitarian ethos of the Star Wars world; avec vous would suggest an inappropriate degree of social distance between Yoda and his addressees.

In #1, the people at Crif have taken us from the Star Wars world, plain and simple, to the world of Jewish cultural practices, to wish us a happy Hanukkah. There’s a Star Wars joke in there — we still have one foot in the Star Wars world — but mostly we have an organization wishing the Jews of the world (and others as well) a happy Hanukkah, which might reasonably be seen as a situation is which a pronoun that was respectful towards the addressees would be called for. La Force ‘the Force’ has been replaced by la lumière ‘the light’ (alluding to the light of the olive oil burning in the Temple vessels and to their modern symbolic substitute, the light of the menorah’s candles); and the pronoun has been upgraded to the respectful vous. Though toi would not have been out of the question, the Crif staff had to choose; there’s no 2sg pronoun neutral between the T pronoun and the V pronoun.

Which brings us to Joyeuse fête de Hanoucca: Que la lumière soit avec vous.

The name of a business establishment in this cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson in the January 13th New Yorker:

A wry, and potentially ominous, play on the central ambiguity in the noun nail; and implicitly a reflection on how business establishments are named: what products or services are provided at a place called NAILS?

The ambiguity, from NOAD:

noun nail: 1 a small metal spike with a broadened flat head, driven typically into wood with a hammer to join things together or to serve as a peg or hook. 2 [a] a horny covering on the upper surface of the tip of the finger and toe in humans and other primates…

An establishment with the name NAILS merely has to be associated with, or in some way evoke, instances of one or the other of these things. No doubt the first such business that would come to the mind of a modern American is the nail salon. From Wikipedia:

A nail salon or nail bar is a specialty beauty salon establishment that primarily offers nail care services such as manicures, pedicures, and nail enhancements.

(The whole business is fabulously complex and culture-specific; imagine trying to explain what nail salons are to people in an isolated indigenous group in the Amazon rainforest.)

Or, using the other sense, NAILS might be a hardware store.

But much more is possible. NAILS might offer drag shows — love those fluorescent nails, honey — or it might be a rough biker bar — alluding to the idiom tough as nails. It might offer hard-core industrial rock, as a tribute to Trent Reznor. Or provide a place for toolshop projects. Or, omigod, provide a space where a masochist can be nailed to a cross. Or serve as a backroom to a gay bar, a place where a guy can go to get nailed. The possibilities are endless.

(ADT is new to this blog, and relatively new to the magazine; his first print cartoon in the New Yorker (“Selfie Spring Flowers”) was the daily cartoon for April 8th, 2019.)

(Queer linguistic playfulness, but with plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so probably not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

From the latest avalanche of comments spam on my blog this morning (thousands a day at the moment, traceable to Russia, though knowing a bit about the source is not at all useful), what happens when programs randomly paste together personal names, family names, and small chunks of text all assembled from truly gigantic databases: sometimes you get goofy gay porn scenarios.

So it was that my morning was improved by the appearance in this gigantic spam queue of the obviously massively queer Amado Spears, the bearer of a wonderfully two-barreled porn name, with the following eccentric message from him about his racy adventures with his husband and a phallic friend:

My husband and i have been absolutely fulfilled when Peter managed to finish up his investigations from the precious recommendations he had from your own weblog.

Yes, the text is not especially coherent as a whole, but each phrase on its own is ok. You can wrench a tale from its wanderings, but that’s mostly a tribute to the powerful human drive to make sense of things, in combination with an equally powerful inclination to attribute cooperative communicative intentions to the sources of speech and writing. We seek meaningful patterns in the world, and we think the best of others.

Unfortunately, sometimes these expectations are foolish.

But then we get found poetry — a Coney Island posting to come — and found mantras (see my 11/27/19 posting “At the onomatomania dinette”) and other fortuitous genres (not to mention Jesus in a piece of toast and other instances of pareidolia — see my 12/23/19 posting “Pareidolia, they control ya”). Including found porn, as here.

The names. In particular, the name Amador Spears. Plus of course Peter, whose name is sometimes good for a quick snicker. Thanks to the imperfect coherence of the text, it’s not clear whether Peter is (as I assumed above) a buddy of Amador and his husband’s or actually Amador’s husband, but I’ll let that pass.

The phallic slang term peter is quite mild, more like kid slang than real street talk (like the canonical dick and cock).

Spears. And though the spear is certainly a visual phallic symbol, indeed a powerful one, the noun spear hasn’t been conventionalized as a slang term for the penis, though of course spears are always available as the basis for fresh metaphorical images (overwrought porn: “I offered my body to him, and he plunged his throbbing spear into me, as I moaned with ungovernable pleasure”)

But it is a powerful phallic symbol, and so Spears the family name is available as a porn name. In my 2005 handout on “How to name a pornstar”, it turns up in the subtype

(j) tough, aggressive, insertive names (FN Butch; LNs Brawn/Braun, Lightning, Spears, Stryker, Mallett, Panther, Saber; versatile Wolf/Wolfe/Wolff, Hunter – Hunter Scott and 22 guys with LN Hunter, from Adam to Zack – and Cougar, both Cougar Cash and Nick Cougar)

It’s a reasonably common name of English and Scots origin — consider pop singer Britney Spears, comic book author Rick Spears, and linguist Arthur Spears — and also a well-known gay pornstar name, thanks to Zak Spears.

From Wikipedia:

(#1) The bulkier Spears at the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco

Zak Spears, (born January 15, 1965 [note: he is now 55, and he still looks pretty much like this; this might not be your taste in male bodies, but it’s undeniably an accomplishment]) is an American gay pornographic film actor. Spears appeared in the feature film The Doom Generation (1995) using his real name, Khristofor Rossianov. He also appeared in the black comedy feature film Forgiving the Franklins (2006) under the name Khris Scaramanga. Initially retiring from the industry in 1996, he made a return in 2004, sporting a dramatic image change which included a shaved head and a much bulkier build. [And he’s tall as well as bulky: 6 ft 2 in.]

Spears made a huge splash in gay porn from 1993 through 1996. (His impressive public displays of mansexuality and his equally impressive physique are his responses to a long period of merciless harassment after he came out as gay in middle school — his counterhomophobic revenge career, so to speak. He found a place in the world of gay porn and made it his own.)

Amado. A Spanish and Portuguese masculine personal name Amado < Latin amatus ‘beloved (by God)’; also used as a family name. Though the original use was specifically ‘beloved by God’, it naturally takes on affectionate and sexual connotations in the appropriate context.

Among the many everyday FN Amados: a villain and a muscular jock.

From Wikipedia, the villain (not illustrated here):

Amado Carrillo Fuentes (December 17, 1956 – July 4, 1997) was a Mexican drug lord who seized control of the Juárez Cartel after assassinating his boss Rafael Aguilar Guajardo. Amado Carrillo became known as “El Señor de Los Cielos” (“The Lord of the Skies”), because of the large fleet of jets he used to transport drugs. He was also known for laundering money via Colombia, to finance this fleet.

He died in July 1997, in a Mexican hospital, after undergoing extensive plastic surgery to change his appearance.

And from his own website, Amado Vrieswijk (born 1/23/96), a Dutch professional windsurfer living in Bonaire, in this photo:

(#2) Amado V., admirably hunky, but not a pornstar

And one everyday LN Amado: José Amado, a minor league baseball player (born 7/2/75 in Venezuela), from the Baseball Reference site:

(#3) José Amado’s 1998 baseball card

And then into the bedroom with young men who have adopted Amado as their pornnames, for its sexy connotations. One each FN and LN.

From the LatinBoyz site (“100% exclusive naked Latino amateurs”), an Amado advertised as a hot gay Mexican thug with cholo tattoos and a big uncut cock:

(#3) Amado grabbing his dick to advertise his videos

And then from the “Tony Amado Busts A Nut” video for sale on the CollegeDudes.com site:

(#4) “Tony Amado is a sexy 19 year old Latin-Italian football player. We were really happy that he decided to show up and jerk off for everyone in this hot vid.” [He has a cut cock, advertised as 9 inches, also satisfyingly thick; in the still above, he is ferociously attentive on stroking off his hard dick (not shown in this photo).]

Amado, Amado, they love you!

(A posting on gay porn for Presidents Day in the US (yesterday, February 17th, this year), so awash in male genitals and mansex, described in raunchy street language — so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. The actual male genitals are vividly depicted in my posting yesterday on AZBlogX, “Hail to the chief”, but this posting is scarcely decorous.)

It starts with the main Falcon ad for its 2020 Presidents Day (#1 on AZBlogX), featuring a carefully composed image of pornstar Paddy O’Brian with his dick at full salute, that is, hard (O’Brian, meanwhile has his right hand over his heart, as during playings of the national anthem). A cropped version of this ad:

(#1)

In this case, unusually, the dick is actually important. O’Brian (Irish-born, but now saluting the symbols of America), billed as a versatile top with a PSD (Porn Standard Dick) of 7″, is looking earnest while performing what has gone beyond cock-tease to cock-reveal, with the hard dick neatly following the line of the waistband on his pulled-down briefs. It’s that bit of visual play that makes O’Brian’s dick in the ad not just your ordinary sturdy pornstar object of queer desire.

Ultimately, this posting is about O’Brian himself and two other pornstars, Sebastian Kross and Rex Cameron, and how they project (perhaps fictive) personas through displays of their naked bodies —  performances in which their cocks, however impressive, play surprising small roles.

The obvious reading of the ad is that the hard dick is part of a salute to the Presidents (accompanying the hand over the heart): I stand stiff to revere you and show that I am ready to defend you. But it could also be taken as an exhortation to revere O’Brian’s dick (or to revere whoever it is that is offering these 100+ titles on sale). Hail to O’Brian’s boner, greatest among us! I’m certainly ready to revere notable cocks, so long as they come with the rest of their man attached, and preferably with his face visible (all true of the image in #1 on AZBlogX). Disembodied and characterless, not so much.

Background: “Hail to the Chief”. The presidential anthem. Notes on it in a section of my 4/6/17 posting “Hail to the hyena-in-chief”.

Saluting,  literal and metaphorical. From NOAD:

noun salute: [a] a gesture of respect, homage, or polite recognition or acknowledgment, especially one made to or by a person when arriving or departing: he raises his arms in a triumphant salute. [b] a prescribed or specified movement, typically a raising of a hand to the head, made by a member of a military or similar force as a formal sign of respect or recognition. [c] [often with modifier] the discharge of a gun or guns as a formal or ceremonial sign of respect or celebration: a twenty-one-gun salute.

Illustrated here:

(#2) It’s saluting men (U.S. Dept. of Defense site: “Soldier Salutes: Soldiers stand in formation during a welcome home ceremony at Fort Drum, N.Y., July 23, 2019, following a nine-month deployment to Kosovo and Afghanistan”)

The literal raised hand, a hand raised (to head or heart), in respect to some object of reverence, easily extends metaphorically to a boner, a dick raised in arousal, by or for some object of sexual desire.

(I note in passing that sense c in the NOAD entry could similarly be extended metaphorically, from the discharge of weapons, to ejaculation. I had hopes for the XTube porn video “All-American Heroes: A 21 Dick Salute 2010” (which you can watch here (#3)), set of course to the 1812 Overture, but it turned out to provide about 21 brief scenes of hard dicks being energetically ministered to by male hands, mouths, or assholes, but without the release of even a single blast of cum. There are tons of cumshot compilations, of course, but, so far as I can see, none labeled as exhibiting salutes, by any number of guns.)

In any case, full salute has some small purchase as slang for a hard-on. There’s one Urban Dictionary entry (but then UD is full of inventions rather than reports), plus a few appearances in lists of slang terms for erections (hard-on, boner, wood, and beyond). Notably, on the Women’s Health site, “19 Slang Terms for Erections, Ranked in Order of Genius: Having a hard time getting excited about the word “boner”? Here are plenty of alternatives” (I see no reason to take the rankings seriously) by Tess Barker on 3/12/15:

(#4)

11. Full Salute. Some boners do inspire a sort of reverence.

Presidential pornstars 1 VERS: Paddy O’Brian. Projecting sturdy, very amiable, muscular high masculinity. Listed as versatile top in some places, just versatile in others, and presenting himself as sweet and athletically fuckable in some p.r. photos —

(#5) (photo from the BoyFriendly site)

and as ready to fuck in others, like this cock-tease shot from the Hotsnapz site:

(#6) He’s going to fuck you, boy, but as both master and guide, gauging exactly how to satisfy your pussy; afterwards, he’ll kiss you lovingly and suck your cock just the way you like it

He has a porn persona (whether as bottom or top) that just wipes me out; these photos give me pleasant twinges in my dick and asshole, even make my mouth water a bit (the way it does when you think of sucking on a sour candy). The dick is implied by the rest, doesn’t have to be explicit. You can see it in plenty of other photos, and in action in the videos, and it’s a big pornstar dick, which would be somewhat alarming in real life, but it’s just perfect in Gayland, and that’s where Paddy and I go to fuck.

(Hotsnapz is a London-based site offering professional-photographer images (sometimes fantastical, often comic) of young naked hunks.)

Presidential pornstars 2 TOP: Sebastian Kross. It turns out that the Falcon Presidents Day mailing came with two ads: O’Brian as above, and also Sebastian Kross, billed as a top (period) with a PSD+ of 7.5″: #2 in the AZBlogX posting, cropped here:

(#7) His dick is remarkably big, fairly thick, with a bit of a flare below the head. Probably hard and thick enough that you could club a baby seal to death with it.

In this image, rather than saluting American symbols, Kross is showing us his (presumably tasty) right armpit (largely concealed in this photo).

But wait, there’s more. Looking for another photo of Kross — I found the persona he projects in [#7] unpleasant — I came across a bit of giggle-inducing stunt porn sex, a gymnastic / acrobatic mid-air 69 involving Kross and Rex Cameron, which you can view in #3 on AXBlogX (I couldn’t see any way to de-dick it for WordPress). In it, Cameron hangs by his hands, upside-down, from the rings in a gym, with his tight gym shorts pulled down to expose a hard-on for Kross to suck on. Kross is standing on the gym floor, with his jeans pulled down just far enough to free his hard dick, for Cameron to suck.

Cameron’s doing all the real work here, including serving as a balance point for Kross (via Kross’s hand on Cameron’s head)

Part of the trick here is that the two men have to have very similar bodies, at least with respect to the their cock-to-mouth distances. These two aren’t perfectly aligned: Cameron’s body is a bit longer than Kross’s on this dimension.

Presidential pornstars 3 BTM: Rex Cameron. Cameron has a PSD, 7″, but not notably fat (as you can see on AZBlogX). He’s a total bottom, has been fucked by lots of big names in the business, and is (to my mind) really hot-cute. A cock-tease photo from Lucas Entertainment, with their bio:

(#7) always ask your bottomboy / if he’d like a blow job
lube his cunt before you fuck / and kiss him when you’re over*

Rex Cameron is an aspiring writer and LGBTQ columnist that always had his eye on the gay porn industry: “Gay porn models have always inspired me — I always felt a kinship to them. I always wanted to do gay porn so I said why not… and Rex Cameron was born.” Rex loves getting fucked on his back; there is more intimacy when two guys make eye contact during a sweaty fuck session. And while we’re on that topic, Rex loves bottoming for an aggressive top. Giving over total control to a top is Rex’s greatest sexual fetish. The craziest place Rex Cameron has had sex was on Lucas Entertainment’s Greek set overlooking the Adriatic Sea. “My first golden shower on film was part of the scene!”

I have played the aggressive top on a few occasions, to satisfy men who deeply needed to be taken this way. So I could certainly fantasize about pile-driving Rex Cameron in Gayland. It’s what he wants, after all. Meanwhile, I would of course suck his cock — in my fantasy, I’d be able to take all of it, which I couldn’t come near doing in real life.

*Mirror for Princes, Quatrain 41. From the Commentaries, on 41: Sucking cock and getting sucked are the base states of nature for most men of our sort; it is only common politeness to offer both your mouth and your dick to a companion, just as you would share lunch with him.

Note on semantics/pragmatics. About

My first golden shower on film was part of the scene.

Note the limiting modifier on film. Implicating that Cameron had enjoyed golden showers / watersports / piss play off-camera, elsewhere, before the Lucas staff had men piss on him in Greece. And that was a big thing, because it was really really in public. Not in his bathroom. Not in a secluded spot on the beach. Not even at a watersports party at a sex club for men. But before the whole world. And captured in an enduring medium.

In the gay porn world, this particular implicature most commonly appears in writing about bottoming. A fair number of gay pornstars present themselves as total tops — in this world, that makes them stone masculine (they don’t take dick like a woman; but note that everybody in this world sucks cock) and hence more desirable. (I’m a full-bore pussy, so I think these attitudes are nasty horseshit, but there they are.)

The studios will then push men who’ve presented as total tops to flip for the cameras. This is a generally canny move of marketing by social leveling, since it’s designed to reassure fags like me about our masculinity: if super-butch NN takes it up the ass, then maybe I’m not so bad. And I’ll buy the DVD with proof on it.

So we get a whole genre of top-to-bottom videos, in which NN gets screwed on camera for the first time. These events are generally announced with great fanfare, and with careful language:

NN gets fucked for the first time on film.

Implicating that he has been fucked off-camera.

Well, he’s probably gotten fucked by a lover or a trick, and if he has, in the relatively small and incredibly gossipy world of gay porn, news of that will have gotten around. Nobody wants him to be branded a liar.

In any case, he damn well should have been fucked a fair number of times, especially since it’s not just any dick he’s going to be taking up his ass, but pornstar dick — unusually long, yes, but also probably unusually thick (something like Sebastian Kross’s firehose) — and you need to work up to taking a dick like that, in stages. It takes practice. You can, in fact, learn how to be a really good fuck. It’s a skill. (And, on the other side, how to be a really good fucker, which is also a skill. A fair number of g4p (gay-for-pay) porn actors believe that fuckhole skills are easier to learn than fucker skills — this might just be a reflection of the fact that least at the outset, men fucking anything are inclined to be extraordinarily selfish sexually; the notion of considerate lover doesn’t come naturally.)

(On facial expression and gaze in sexual negotiations between men, definitely mansexually raunchy, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Yesterday’s ad from Next Door Studios (specializing in regular-guy boy-next-door types — twinks and swimmer-body young men — enthusiastically engaged sexually with each other, covering a range of acts from vanilla mansex on out to moderately kinky stuff). In it, Dakota Payne is preparing to slip his cock (fuzzed out here) into a deliciously sling-bound Alex Tanner. But these next-door boys aren’t focused on each other; they are instead staring penetratingly into the eyes of their audience, who are pantingly stroking their dicks in appreciation of their performance. This particular image now exploited to illustrate a dialogue for learners of the Spanish language; the by-ways of kink are strange indeed.

(#1) Alex y Dakota, Diálogo 17: ¿Dónde está el pescadero?

Alex: ¡Ay caramba! / Dakota: No lo creo.
Alex: ¡Que desastre! / Dakota: No importa.
Alex: Pero te deseo, mi querido. / Dakota: ¡Vete a la mierda!

The dialogue. A fairly clunky English translation, for the Hispanophonically deprived:

A: Oh no! / D: I don’t believe it.
A: What a mess!. / D: It doesn’t matter.
A: But I want you, darling/buddy. / D: Fuck off!

(I hope to post some on the complexities of Sp. queridx soon.)

Note how you struggle to get the content of the conversational exchange to fit the context depicted in the photo. People labor, sometimes heroically, to find coherence in discourse. (You can almost hear Alex continuing the exchanges with some equivalent of the passionate plea, “No, no, fuck on! Please, please, fuck on, baby!”)

A side note. On Buy One Get One Free. NDS intends to be offering a free video for each one (from those on sale) you buy. I preferred to read it as offering a two-for-one sale on Alex and Dakota as male escorts (that is, rent boys / stud hustlers). Look, gay porn is a tough business to make a living in, and plenty of the actors / models also work as escorts. Alex Tanner certainly does; I can’t be sure about Dakota Payne.

It all turns on the ambiguity in context of the indefinite pronoun one. One of the videos offered in the sale associated with Buy One Get One Free; or one of the men in the photo associated with Buy One Get One Free.

Facial expression and gaze in mansexual negotiations. From earlier essays on this blog.

from 7/19/18, in “Get your cruise face on”, about sexual offers with accompanying facial expressions, in a variety of settings:

The facial expression for classic cruising-for-sex between strangers in public is impassive, betraying no emotion; what’s important is the exchange of gaze, held for much longer than would normally be polite in the circumstances.

from 7/27/19, in “Wary”, about a Lucas Studios Dog Days of 2019 sale offer, featuring two pornstars I treated as characters with the names Bongo and Pongo:

(#2) Head and torso shot of Bongo and Pongo together (full photo in “Wary”), showing their gazes fixed on their audience

For a change, this is not about men’s bodies, pleasing though these are; nor about pink/purple men’s bikini briefs, though there’s a fabulous array of them on display on the net; but about facial expressions.

I’m far from an expert on gesture, facial expression, stance, and gait, but I know a bit of the literature, and try to observe carefully. I’ve specialized in two cases from the world of gay men, using examples from real life and from gay porn: facial expressions during mansex (there’s a Page on this blog about postings on the topic) and cruise faces (facial expressions as part of the rituals of cruising for mansex).

My first reading of Bongo’s and Pongo’s expressions above was: suspicion; wariness; distrust; maybe even fear. Not any cruise faces I’d seen before. But both their mouths are somewhat open, in some contexts a sign of arousal.

Bongo looks especially intense, but Pongo might possibly be entertaining a trace of amusement.

And they seem to be conferring. Maybe contemplating a prospective trick. (For you? For me? Let’s do him together?)

Without more context, facial expressions are hard to read. They are seriously indeterminate: they can convey many things, indeed more than one thing at a time, they are highly variable, they are only partly under conscious control, and so on. Like intonations in conversation, vocal qualities, and other paralinguistic features. All impossible to read accurately out of context, and not fully determinate even in context.

Alex and Dakota, in #1, seem to be easier to read: they’re doing some kind of buddy cruise, together inviting the viewer to engage (imaginatively) with them sexually — as a voyeur of their couple sex; in a three-way; or in a pairing with one of them (while the other one engages with a fourth man). Maybe Bongo and Pongo are doing the same thing, but with an overlay of other emotions.

In #1, Alex is, not however, impassive; his eyebrows are arched upwards, in a facial expression that could be read many ways. Or it could just be the customary setting for his eyebrows; I have a friend with perpetually  raised eyebrows, and I’ve had to learn that he’s not expressing surprise at anything, that’s just his look.

But, no, that’s not Alex’s default expression in repose. Here he is in a p.r. photo, a head and torso shot:

(#3) He’s described as “a cute blond” in several places; his hair is sometimes strawberry blond (as here), sometimes sandy brown, but never, so far as I can tell, blond blond (I do not dispute the cute)

So the question is what he’s conveying with his markedly arched eyebrows in #1. Almost surely not dismay at getting fucked, which he appears to enjoy quite a lot.

End note on NDS. From the studio’s site, about their 15th anniversary:

The Next Door Studios story began in 2004 with the launch of our very first site, NextDoorMale.com, that introduced fresh new faces and hot amateur guys next door in intimate solo videos. The site helped launch the careers of many popular pornstars who are still performing today!

NextDoorBuddies.com soon followed to pair these fledgling stars in with hardcore videos of the guy next door with the guy next door. The site has evolved from amateur videos to a polished production with a wide range of performers from fresh newcomers to experienced exclusives.

Over time, the Next Door Studios expanded to include a stable of exclusive performers including Cody Cummings, Austin Wilde, Marcus Mojo (now performing as Landon Mycles), Rod Daily and more.

While Next Door Studios has continued to evolve, one thing remains the same, our committment to providing our members with the best quality content, fresh new faces, and exciting action!

Interesting evolution to the current relatively high degree of professionalism.

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo is also a cartoon meme combo: Desert Island + Psychiatrist:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)

You notice the empty clinical couch, with its colorful pillow, because it’s the biggest thing in the drawing, and it’s right in the middle of it. You notice the psychiatrist, because he’s a human figure, of some size, with a significant face (our attention is drawn powerfully to faces).

Only then do you follow the therapist’s gaze and take in the little figure in the lower righthand corner: the tiny castaway under a miniature palm tree, on a desert island — charmingly presented as being in a colorful planter, so that it’s also one of the plants in routine office decor, matched by the ornamental foliage in the planter in the opposite corner.

We are both in a Desert Island cartoon and also in a Psychiatrist cartoon (where the therapist is doing shrink-talk), set in a stereotypical psychiatrist’s office (notably medical, down to the framed diplomas on the wall).

Another take on Desert Island + Psychiatrist. On this blog on 6/11/18, in “In case of cartoons, see therapist”, a John Deering Strange Brew cartoon:

(#2) This time the whole physical setting of the desert island, palm tree and all, has been transported onto the therapist’s couch

Talk therapy is popularly presented as having the psychiatrist proceed entirely by drawing the patient out through questions, which are often covertly highly directive, not merely exploratory at all. In #1 the therapist’s question indirectly conveys an order to him to stop waiting to be rescued (and face up to his plight); in #2 the therapist’s question indirectly conveys his judgment that the patient is suffering from survivor’s guilt (by asking, “Ted, are you familiar with a syndrome called survivor’s guilt?”).

Another desert therapist combo: Desert Crawl + Psychiatrist. In my 5/1/16 posting “Between the desert and the couch”, a Bizarro combining Psychiatrist with another desert cartoon meme, involving a man (or, more generally, people) crawling, parched and hallucinatory, across a seemingly endless desert — call it Desert Crawl:

(#3)

From that posting, this passage from Dan Piraro’s Bizarro blog:

Crawling Through Cliches: As I’ve said before on this blog, I enjoy doing cartoons within the canon of popular cartoon tropes like the desert island, the shrink’s couch, the man crawling through a desert, etc. Here I combine two of them and use another trope: the self-referential cartoon. Self-referential cartoons can be dangerous because if they’re too easy –– a character simply noticing he is in a cartoon without anything more substantial to say about it –– it can elicit a groan. I hope not too many people groaned at this one. I thought it was fun.

Although Desert Crawl is a very popular cartoon meme, the New Yorker seems to be especially fond of it. Four examples from New Yorker artists I’ve written about earlier on this blog, in chronological order:

(#4) Jack Ziegler, 7/11/11

(#5) Joe Dator, 2/2/15

(#6) Liana Finck, 3/14/16

(#7) JAK (Jason Adam Katzenstein), 4/4/16

The following cartoon, in French and unattributed, has been making its way around Facebook in the last few days:

(#1) “How do you [polite] feel this week?” – “Much better.”

Therapist and patient, both cowering in the anxiety of persecution. But this week is better. Much better.

Presumably, it’s being passed around as a pointed commentary on the fix we are all in currently. Even better is appalling.

It doesn’t take a keen eye to see that #1 is a rip-off of a Bizarro cartoon: the drawing style, the content (the Psychiatrist meme is a Bizarro evergreen favorite), the two odd Dan Piraro symbols. And so it is, from 2/15/11, almost a decade ago.

The original, in English, from which some thief has carefully excised all the evidences of its source to produce #1:

(#2) Still paranoid before all those years

The two cartoons are interestingly different sociolinguistically. The original, #2, has the therapist and patient using asymmetric address: the therapist uses the familiar FN (in fact, nickname) vocative Rob to the patient, who responds with the polite T (title) vocative Doctor. The French pirated version, #1, in contrast, has the therapist using the polite pronoun vous to his patient; the (unnamed) patient would presumably use the polite vous back to his doctor, in symmetric pronominal usage: formal usage all around, signifying social distance rather than social hierarchy.

I have no idea why the French pirated version is in sans serif (while the Piraro original has serifs); transnational serifing is inscrutable to me.

By JAK (Jason Adam Katzenstein), the New Yorker daily cartoon from yesterday:

“Personally, I worry that, with everyone wearing masks, readers won’t be able to tell who in the cartoon is speaking.”

The masks are part of daily life in plague time, and they conceal the wearers’ mouths. So in a cartoon you can’t tell who’s speaking. (In real life, there might be other clues, like vocal timbre.)

The characters in the cartoon have absolutely identical facial expressions, so no clue there. But one’s a man and one’s a woman, and the man is in the foreground of the cartoon. So some people might assume that the man is the speaker, because male characters are, ceteris paribus, more salient or significant than female characters; or because a character in the foreground is there because they’re the speaker. Or some people might assume that the woman is the speaker because she’s expressing concern for the readers and that such empathy is, conventionally, more characteristic of women than of men.

But such reasoning proceeds on the slimmest of support. We really don’t know.

Now, the subtle point. If the speaker had said readers won’t be able to tell who in a cartoon is speaking (with sg. indefinite a cartoon) or readers won’t be able to tell who in  cartoons is speaking (with pl. indefinite cartoons), then we’d just have someone talking about how people read and understand cartoons.

But instead JAK chose to have his speaker say:

readers won’t be able to tell who in the cartoon is speaking (with sg. definite the cartoon)

conveying that the referent of this NP is given in the context. The context of this utterance is in fact the cartoon it appears in, so this utterance is subtly, but significantly, meta: the characters are aware that they are in fact characters in a cartoon and they’re talking about that.

JAK could have gone for sledgehammer meta, with

readers won’t be able to tell who in this cartoon is speaking (with sg. demonstrative this cartoon)

but he did it with a much lighter hand.

On the dangler watch, a report by Ben Zimmer on 4/29 about this Reddit posting, which seems to have appeared without any preceding context:

TIL [Today I Learned] Due to their reclusive nature, scientists are unsure how long a pangolin lives in the wild.

(now entry Z4.87, coded SUB(due to)-I-EMB-3P, in my collection of examples)

The writer of Z4.87 was no doubt intending to write about the endangered animal the scaly anteater, or pangolin, and the creatures were paramount in their consciousness; and they also wanted to introduce an observation on scientists’ knowledge about pangolins. All of that is fine. But we can’t be mind-readers, and what they wrote fell afoul of a general strategy in sentence comprehension that leads even well-intentioned readers to understand, at least for a perceptible moment, the claim to be that scientists, not pangolins, are reclusive.

This is what Geoff Pullum once characterized nicely as inconsiderate behavior. Avoiding the impression of reclusive pangolinists involves setting aside what you’re thinking and assuming and then, considerately, taking on the viewpoint of other people (who don’t necessarily share these) — to see things as others are likely to see them. This is a genuinely difficult task, and it’s a messy one, because it involves assessing fuzzy likelihoods. It can’t be done perfectly; but we should try to do our best.

Guffaws. Also reported by Ben. From a commenter on Tumblr:

maybe they [the scientists] should leave their laboratories and go find one in the wild then

And in a tweet, Gretchen McCulloch was delighted with the referential ambiguity. In a reply to Gretchen, Evan Kirshenbaum then picked up on another feature of Z4.87:

And it seems to lobby for the wrong reading by having ‘pangolin’ in the singular.

Evan is referring to the three crucial referential NPs in Z2.87, which are boldfaced and assigned numbers below:

due to their [1] reclusive nature, scientists [2] are unsure how long a pangolin [3] …

[1] is a 3pl definite pronominal determiner NP, and the question is which of the following NPs it is cataphoric to: [2] the 3pl indefinite scientists or [3] the 3sg indefinite a pangolin. The fact is that generic indefinites differing in number often can stand in for one another (the facts are complicated), so [3] isn’t entirely out of the question, but in general, a pl is an easier match for the pl cataphor their than a sg would be.

But [2] is not only closer to [1] than [3] is, it’s also the subject of the main clause, and that’s truly crucial to the way Z2.87 would be understood by default. It massively favors the reclusve-pangolinists reading over the reclusive-pangolins reading

Digression. A note on pangolins, which I’m fond of — because they’re unaggressive creatures that protect themselves from predators by their thick scales; because they’re now seriously endangered; and because I have a soft spot for anteaters in general, the anteater in Johnny Hart’s BC comic strip having given me the college nickname Zot (Z is for Zot, and Zot! goes its tongue).

Previous pangolin postings on this blog:

— on 3/31/15, in “Two, nocturnal and dactylic”, on the morning names pangolin and kinkajou, with this image:

(#1)

— on 4/1/15, in “Pangolins part 2”

— on 2/14/17, in “VDay pangolins”

The BC anteater in action:

(#2) The BC strip for 6/5/08, by Mason Mastroianni, who succeeded Hart as the strip’s artist

And the evolution of the anteater into UC Irvine’s mascot Peter the Anteater:

(#3)

Mais revenons à nos moutons. Background on danglers, from among the many postings on the subject on Language Log and this blog, catalogued on this Page:

— on 6/2/12, in “as a SPAR”, about:

a SPAR (a Subjectless Predicative Adjunct Requiring a referent for the missing subject) that’s non-canonical, in that the adjunct doesn’t obey the Subject Rule (doesn’t pick up its referent from the subject of the main clause); such non-canonical SPARs, or X-SPARS, are popularly known as “dangling modifiers”, a condemnatory label. But some types of X-SPARs are in fact acceptable (except to those who have internalized the teaching that X-SPARs are necessarily ungrammatical)

— on 3/18/15, in “The speaker is (almost) always topical”:

one observation I have made again and again in my postings on danglers is that when the referent of the missing subject is highly topical at this point in the discourse, many examples that seem unacceptable in isolation are improved enormously when they are seen in their linguistic context.

Back to Z4.87, which seems to have appeared on Reddit without any preceding context:

TIL [Today I Learned] Due to their reclusive nature, scientists are unsure how long a pangolin lives in the wild.

No context, you have to fall back on the default Subject Rule, and that gives you reclusive pangolinists, solidly.

But suppose Z4.87 is in a news report headed something like “New Evidence About the Endangered Pangolin”; then the pangolins would be discourse-topical and the scientists would be backgrounded, and, whizzo, Z4.87 gets a whole lot better (even with the difference in grammatical number between their and a pangolin).

It’s the miracle of context.

Yesterday on FB a query from my friend P (exchanges edited to remove personal chitchat):

A company is creating an outgoing voice message and they have come to blows over sentence structure. My suggestion to them is to fight bigger battles — but, alas, here we are.

They are going to the mat on “how can I” vs “how I can.”

Given your expertise, which is better?

“Thanks for calling COMPANY. Please tell me, in detail, how CAN I help you?
OR
“Thanks for calling COMPANY. Please tell me, in detail, how I CAN help you.”

Interlude. Telephone service from Ernestine, the Lily Tomlin character from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In:

Ernestine was a brash, tough and uncompromising telephone operator who generally treated customers with little sympathy. Ernestine often snorted when she let loose a barbed response or heard something salacious; she also wore her hair in a 1940s hairstyle with a hairnet, although the character was contemporary. Her opening lines were often the comical “one ringy dingy… two ringy dingy”, and, “is this the party to whom I am speaking?” In the sketches, Ernestine was usually at her switchboard taking calls. She occasionally called her boyfriend, Vito, a telephone repair man, or her pal Phoenicia, another operator. (from Wikipedia)

P’s suggestion as to a meaning difference. P continued:

My take from a professional communication POV was “How can I…” is a question looking for an answer with the understanding that the COMPANY is looking for both permission and direction.

Whereas “how I can” conveys a sense that the company knows it has permission to help and is seeking direction for exact action to be taken.

This is such a small piece, but the egos are big. What is your ruling?

My response.

The two constructions are, broadly, just alternatives, but they differ in the (in)directness of the quotational complements to a speech verb in them; the result is that they are subtly different in tone but also in conveyed meaning.

The first cut is between direct and indirect quotation: the first reproduces the wording of the original speech, and is customarily punctuated in English with quotation marks (They asked, “How do we get to San Jose?” — since the quotation is an actual question, it has the inverted word order of subject and auxiliary characteristic of such questions); the second reproduces the gist of the question but not its form (They asked how they get to San Jose).

But there’s an intermediate construction, often called free indirect style (a translation of the French technical term): They asked how do they get to San Jose. The effect is reporting the question as if it were the speaker’s internal thoughts. And that provides a subtle difference in effect — almost surely way too subtle to figure in choosing between phone messages. Both constructions are grammatical, and they are crude paraphrases, and for many purposes either would do just fine. There is truly no point in fretting over subtle differences in conveyed meaning. But you might have a hard time of convincing the people in the company of that.

The resolution. To my astonishment, P reported:

Your brilliance comforted the powers that be. Thank you for being the definitive voice on this.

I noted:

Ordinarily, questions like yours are tough for me, because to answer them I’d have to do some fresh research, but in this case you stumbled on something I’ve actually written about, though oh 45 years ago, but keep up an interest in, so I can do the technical stuff off the top of my head. And I can speak with authority. Probably as important, I have a practical no-nonsense attitude towards usage matters (in part, from almost 60 years of guiding and critiquing student writing and doing a lot of editing myself); I’m incredibly pleased that your colleagues appreciated that.

In fact, most of the time, I have trouble convincing people that I’m not just some mook off the street mouthing off about language. Or, if I cite my credentials and experience, that I’m not just a pointy-headed intellectual who thinks I’m better than they are. (Well, I do know a great deal more than they do about these particular things.)

My old stuff. Two things:

On reported speech. Studies in Linguistic Semantics, ed. by D. Terence Langendoen & C. J. Fillmore. Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1971) 73-77.

[bibliography] Direct and indirect discourse. OSU WPL 17.198-205 (1974).

Alas, I didn’t make a pdf of either of these, so my own hard copies were destroyed in the great clearing-out of my books and papers.

Ali Velshi, on MSNBC on 2/23 (yes, yes, I am absurdly far behind in my posting, maybe irretrievably; life has been very hard), talking about:

(a) … the African American vote, and what is motivating them in the coming elections [in South Carolina]

African American vote is understood here as ‘the vote of/by African Americans’, and African Americans is what the later anaphoric personal pronoun them refers to, though the noun African American(s) doesn’t occur in the example, only the adjective African American. So the example would once have been seen as a violation of a purported condition on grammatical well-formedness, the Anaphoric Island Constraint (AIC) — but in fact, in the context, it seems scarcely problematic, if at all.

A political (but not linguistic) note, in a map

There’s an Anaphoric Islands Page on this blog. From its first entry, about my 10/20/07 LLog posting “More fun with VPE”:

Another topic from roughly forty years ago, when it was first suggested that lexical items are “islands” for anaphora, that parts of lexical items or referents merely evoked by lexical items cannot serve as antecedents for anaphoric elements (of several different kinds)

Originally formulated as a constraint on grammar, the AIC has come to be seen as a (highly contextual) dispreference for certain antecedent-anaphor pairings. See the material on my Page.

People differ in their tolerance for AIC violations. And judgments can be sensitive to small differences in content. Compare (a), which has an ethnic/racial adjective, with (b), which has a religious-affiliation adjective:

(b) … the Catholic / Lutheran vote, and what is motivating them in the coming elections [with them referring to Catholics / Lutherans]

I find Velshi’s (a) example unproblematic; I noticed it only because I’m a linguist who collects apparent AIC violations. On the other hand, I initially balked at (b); it takes a bit of work to figure out who them refers to. (Note: these are my reactions; I don’t expect everyone to share them.)

My speculation is that I am accustomed to thinking of African Americans as a political bloc, but of Catholics and Lutherans primarily as aggregations of individual believers (though they can bond together on occasion for political action). So the noun African American is salient in (a) in a way that the nouns Catholic and Lutheran are not in (b). But this is just a speculation.

(Adapted and expanded from a Facebook comment of mine a while back. Some coarse sexual language, notably from American newsmakers, but also enough about sexual bodies and mansex from me to make the posting dubious for kids and the sexually modest.)

Every so often, MSNBC commentator Ali Velshi tartly notes — alluding to the Imperator Grabpussy’s smears of President Barack Obama as a Muslim born in Kenya — that he is a Muslim who was born in Kenya (though he grew up in Canada).

There’s a linguistic point here, having to do with relevance and implicature. Why does Velshi say this? Yes, it’s true, but then “The freezing point of water is 32F” is true, but if Velshi had said that it would have been bizarre, because it would have been irrelevant in the context. So Velshi’s religion and nativity are relevant in the context. Cutting through a whole lot of stuff, I would claim that Velshi is implicating something like “Being one myself, I know from Muslims born in Kenya, and I know that Barack Obama is no Muslim born in Kenya”. And THAT brings me to a piece I’ve been wrestling with some time, about Grabpussy Jr. jeering at Mitt Romney, taunting him by calling him a pussy. (I have a Velshian response of my own to that.)

Hang on; this will go in several directions.

Note: smearing and taunting. Grabpussy’s fabrication about Obama and Grabpussy Jr.’s jeer at Romney. From NOAD:

verb smear: … 2 damage the reputation of (someone) by false accusations; slander: someone was trying to smear her by faking letters.

verb taunt: [a] [with object] provoke or challenge (someone) with insulting remarks: students began taunting her about her weight…

The way the taunt definition characterizes the purpose of the insult — provocation or challenge — seems too mild to me. The Wikipedia entry captures harsher purposes:

A taunt is a battle cry, sarcastic remark, gesture, or insult intended to demoralize the recipient, or to anger them and encourage reactionary behaviors

Grabpussy Jr.’s intent in “Mom Jeans. Because you’re a pussy” was pretty clearly to demoralize Romney and to degrade him in the eyes of others. The 2/5 Instagram posting:

(#1)

Pussies. The rest of my FB comment:

(Yes, schoolyard bullying, insulting a boy by indirectly calling him a fag, a mere receptacle for anal penetration, doing that by referring to him as a girl, and doing that indirectly as well, by treating her as merely a projection of her vagina, her pussy.) To which I want to say, Velshi-style, “Why, I am a pussy”. (This is fact.) Implicating something like “Being one myself, I know from [male] pussies, and I know that Mitt Romney is not one”. It’s also true that by mentioning it explicitly, Ali Velshi is conveying that he’s not ashamed of his identity. And I do the same.

In my 8/19/12 posting “The pussy patrol”, there’s a digression on on the tangled semantic web of the word pussy. A summary of material in OED3 (Dec. 2007):

— “colloquial” senses including ‘a girl or woman exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat, esp. sweetness or amiability’

— “slang” senses (chiefly North American) including ‘a sweet or effeminate male’;  ‘a weakling, a coward, a sissy’;  ‘a male homosexual’ (OED takes these to be historical developments from the feline sense, but current usage suggests that they are now primarily viewed as related to the genital senses (Note that historical sense developments do not necessarily align well with the sense clusters of the contemporary language; knowing the etymology doesn’t necessarily tell you a lot about current usage.)

— “coarse slang” senses including ‘the female genitals’; ‘a woman, or women collectively, regarded as a source of sexual intercourse’; in male homosexual usage: ‘the anus … of a man, as an object of sexual penetration’; also: ‘a man or boy viewed in this way’

The last two of these bring me to my own usages.

First, in the vocabulary of the anus, I distinguish my asshole, which is the anus viewed as an organ of defecation; and my pussy (or sometimes cunt), which is the anus viewed as an organ of receptive intercourse, an organ of sexual pleasure. Pussy is just a metaphor, not an assertion of identity; you want a word for the anus as a male sexual organ, you look for parallels, and vaginas are obvious analogues. That doesn’t mean you think your anus is a vagina, or that by using such language you are identifying as a woman.

(Bit of a digression. There are alternatives to metaphorizing. For instance, the N + N compound fuckhole lit. ‘hole for fucking’ — which has the advantage of being usable for both sexes, and having the powerful noun fuck in it.)

Second, in the vocabulary of reference to persons as sexual beings, there’s the part-for-whole metonymy, or synecdoche, in referring to someone via a term for their sexual parts, specifically in referring to a man who takes the receptive role in anal intercourse via a lexical item for his anus viewed as a sexual organ: pussy, cunt, or fuckhole. See my “Why, I am a pussy” above.

From my 2/17/20 posting “Preference labels and little pockets”

(#2) “the shameless effrontery of CERTIFIED PUSSY BOY [on a t-shirt], which I truly admire”

(On occasion, I have described myself as a full-bore pussy.)

And then, from my 5/17/18 posting “Deshagged and pedicured”, a note on the basis for this self-identification:

I’ve been long out of the fuck market, but not because I’ve renounced it as wickedness; in fact, getting fucked is the central event of my very rich fantasy sexual life. (Insert paean to masturbation here.)

“I know from X”. An idiom I used above twice, the second time in: “Being one myself, I know from [male] pussies, and I know that Mitt Romney is not one”. Heidi Harley admired my FB comment, adding that she loved my deployment of to know from. Indeed, it was carefully chosen; what I said to Heidi:

One of many gifts of Yiddish to English. The first time I heard it (long ago, when velociraptors scrunched up smaller creatures) I saw that it had a wonderful subtlety to it, a meaning component of great utility.

The history is wonderful. From HDAS:

[not] know from nothing [Yid tsu visn fun gornisht ‘to be ignorant’; lit., ‘to know from nothing’] to know absolutely nothing. Hence know from to know about. [1st positive know from example from 1977 (the film The Boys in Company C) He knows from baseball like I know from polo; later 1992 (in The New Yorker) Mr. Perkoff knows from bar-mitzvah parties … He has played at over a thousand bar mitzvahs

So, from the negative idiom to know from nothing, a syntactically back-formed positive to know from, loosely glossed ‘to know about’, but as you can see from the examples above, it conveys ‘to know about from personal experience’, and that accords exactly with the way I use the idiom: I don’t just know about male pussies (say, from having read the literature on male homosexuality), I know about them from my own experience.

More taunting. Around the same time as Grabpussy Jr.’s Instagram taunt, the folks on ADS-L were discussing a childhood game and its many names. From Wikipedia:

Keep Away, also called Monkey in the Middle, Piggy in the Middle, Pickle in a Dish, or Pickle in the Middle, or Monkey, is a children’s game in which two or more players must pass a ball to one another, while a player in the middle attempts to intercept it. The game could be considered a reverse form of dodgeball, because instead of trying to hit people in the middle with the ball, players attempt to keep the ball away from him or her. The game is played worldwide.

I suppose this game must have been played on the grounds of the West Lawn Elementary School when I was a student there, but I don’t recall it. What I do recall is the taunting variant of it, in which a pack of boys abuse a boy they perceive as inferior to them — geeky, artsy, unathletic, insufficiently masculine (probably a fairy), friendly with girls, small, unmuscular, funny-looking, wrong race or ethnicity, the list is endless, so many ways to be inadequate — surround him, grab some belonging of his (classically, a cap), passing it from one to another while he tries to snatch it back, all the time abusing him verbally. The immediate aim is to make him beg, if possible reduce him to tears. The long-range goal is to prove that he is worthless and contemptible in comparison to them, who are lords of their world.

Rarely does the target get his object back undamaged; sometimes it’s literally destroyed. And then the kid has to try to explain that away.

There are lots of good things in the world of boys in packs: cooperation in sports teams, all sorts of friendly but tough competitions, buddies doing all sorts of things in groups for companionship (and protection from the world). And then there’s the world of bully boys.

(These days I have trouble enduring any appearance by Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who strikes me as a hateful grown-up version of a bully boy, with political power to boot.)

The coincidental juxtaposition of two things: yesterday’s Zippy strip about the drink Yoo-hoo; and the annual occasion, today, of Teddy Bear’s Picnic Day. Yes, one thing leads to the other, and the crucial link is the American baseball player Yogi Berra.

(#1) Zippy goes to his Kelvinator, and it calls “Yoo-hoo” to him

Background: Kelvinator. From Wikipedia:

Kelvinator was a United States home appliance manufacturer and the namesake of the company, although as a company it is now defunct, the name still exists as a brand name owned by Electrolux AB. It takes its name from William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, who developed the concept of absolute zero and for whom the Kelvin temperature scale is named. The name was thought appropriate for a company that manufactured ice-boxes and domestic refrigerators.

(#2) A 1940s Kelvinator

Kelvinator was founded on September 18, 1914, in Detroit, Michigan, United States, by engineer Nathaniel B. Wales who introduced his idea for a practical electric refrigeration unit for the home to Edmund Copeland and Arnold Goss.

The Kelvinator brand joins such other colorfully named American refrigerator brands as Crosley Shelvador (shelves in the door!) and Frigidaire.

Yoo-hoo. In my 12/15/18 posting “Yoo-hoo, Aargau!”, material on the bottled American chocolate drink Yoo-hoo, the exclamation yoo-hoo!, and more:

(#3)

Yogi Berra. In the fourth panel, the chocolatey Yoo-hoo calls to Zippy and connects him to the American baseball player Yogi Berra — because of Berra’s 1950s ads for the drink, like this one:

(#4)

About Berra, and his famous malapropisms: in my 10/3/15 posting “Yogi-isms”.

Yogi Bear. The baseball player’s name was then riffed on for the name of a bear in a Hanna-Barbera animated cartoon: Yogi Bear. From my 8/1/17 posting “Zippy and Griffy on the Hanna-Barbera diner tour”:

(#5) Yogi and his crew

The plot of most of Yogi’s cartoons centered on his antics in the fictional Jellystone Park, a variant of the real Yellowstone National Park. Yogi, accompanied by his constant companion Boo-Boo Bear, would often try to steal picnic baskets from campers in the park, much to the displeasure of Park Ranger Smith. Yogi’s girlfriend, Cindy Bear, sometimes appeared and usually disapproved of Yogi’s antics. (from Wikipedia)

Teddy bears. And then from one kind of fictional bear to another — to the stuffed bear as a toy, and the musical enshrinement of teddy bears in the song “The Teddy Bears Picnic”. From my 7/25/10 posting “Bear music”:

On my iTunes, there’s “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” …, which is older than you might think, with a melody from 1907 and words [by Irish songwriter Jimmy Kennedy] from 1932.

Then from my 11/17/18 posting “Teddy Bears’ Picnic Day”, we get a gay connection:

(#6) “[Thanks to the bear as a gay male type, the] song has been used as a theme for … gay-tinged performances [– for example] the “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” (adult comedy) performance piece at the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.”

(Yes, he’s a naked bear.) Now, there‘s a performance for today.

In the 9/14/19 One Big Happy, Ruthie wrestles with a workbook question, apparently something along the lines of “Does 4th Street come before 6th Street or after it?”:

(#1)

There’s a lot packed in here. Crudely. the strip is about what before conveys, and that turns out to be dependent on the context. Ruthie takes before to refer to the ordering of a particular 4th and 6th Street in her own actual neighborhood, taking herself to provide the point of view for the spatial ordering (every spatial ordering via before rests on some point of view). But what’s the point of view of a workbook exercise? Who’s asking the question? For what purpose?

Now we’re out in the pragmatic weeds. Crucially, Ruthie has to understand that the workbook question is not an attempt to elicit useful information from her, but instead aims to get her to perform in a test of her sociocultural knowledge.

Previously on this blog:

— on 7/31/19 in “Locatives, inalienability, and determiner choices”

(#2)

The question in the second panel [Where was the Declaration of Independence signed?] is ambiguous, as between two understandings of locative where: where within the document is the signature located? vs. where did the event of document-signing take place? What I’ll call, faute de mieux, position location (within some domain) vs. event location

(featuring Ruthie’s brother Joe), about asking questions / giving answers, quoting  this earlier posting:

— on 8/21/18 in “Asking questions and giving commands”, about Ezra Beavers, age 3 and his question, to his mother, Do boy and toy rhyme?; and the question, from his mother, Do “boy” and “man” rhyme?: about

a significant ambiguity in the use of interrogative sentences: between information-seeking interrogatives (infoseek questions, I’ll call them), … and examination interrogatives (test questions, I’ll call them; they’re also known as quiz questions).

… Infoseek questions are the pragmatically prototypical interrogatives, acquired first and statistically dominant in conversation and texts. In its simplest variant, the speaker lacks some piece of information I (or is unsure about it), wants to acquire I, believes the addressee might be able to supply I, and is requesting the addressee to do so. Infoseek questions are a basic tool in coping with ignorance about things in the world; we are all ignorant of a great many things, small children especially so — so once they have the linguistic resources, they ask an enormous number of infoseek questions.

In test questions, the speaker has the relevant knowledge about I and is asking the addressee to perform by displaying the extent of theirknowledge. This performance might be intended as part of a learning routine (the assumption being that the addressee should have I and so needs practice and correction), as an evaluation exercise (about the addressee’s knowledge), as part of a competition, whatever.

Infoseek questions can be directed at a wide range of addressees, but test questions are heavily loaded socioculturally: only certain speakers can direct them at only certain addressees, and only in certain contexts. One of the burdens of being a child in our culture is that all sorts of adults subject you to barrages of test questions, to which you are expected to respond cooperatively. (Similarly for people in an assortment of interview circumstances — for jobs, for school admission, to receive awards, in medical evaluations, etc. — where infoseek questions and test questions are likely to be mixed together.) Ezra has (apparently) not yet twigged to this fact: he asks infoseek questions and expects that others are doing the same. So if his mother asks if boy and man rhyme, that must be because she doesn’t know whether they do, which means that there’s a lot about rhyming that she doesn’t know.

In #1, Ruthie is confronted with a classic test question, but doesn’t treat it as such: she takes it to be an infoseek question, and answers in terms of her personal experience. In so doing, she’s failed to appreciate that a workbook question requires her to view things as without personal context, but to respond only in terms of the larger, impersonal, sociocultural context. This is how she’s supposed to be acculturated.

Most of this posting is in effect a guest column by Ben Yagoda: a re-posting of a thoughtful column of his from, omigod, 2017, from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog on language and writing in academe, Lingua Franca, which was discontinued in (apparently) December 2018, and is currently inaccessible.

I’d saved Ben’s column because it dealt with one of my long-term interests, address terms — there’s a Page on this blog with an annotated inventory of my postings on address terms — but now that you can’t get to it on-line, I think it’s important to give it an audience, even without further commentary from me.

From 11/13/17, Yagoda on Last-Naming Professors:

In her recent Lingua Franca post “Do Courtesy Titles Matter?” Lucy Ferriss discusses two alternatives in addressing people — by first name, and by honorific (Dr./Mr./Ms./Professor X). I will add to her cogent analysis a working hypothesis on such customs in academe that I developed a few years back: “Significant factors leading to calling professors by their first names appear to be: smallness of college and class size, location in California or the Northeast, nearness to the humanities of the subject taught, and youth and maleness of the professor.”

Lucy doesn’t mention a couple of other one-word salutations I’ve often come across in student-emails: “Professor” and “Hey.” Nor does she discuss another form of address that just now seems to be having a moment. My wife, Gigi Simeone, an academic adviser at a small liberal-arts college, encountered it just last week. She was meeting with a student and asked him if he had decided on his schedule for next semester. “Not yet,” he said. “I’m meeting with Richardson to talk about it this afternoon” — Richardson being a professor. This was the first time in several decades in the profession, Gigi told me, that she had heard a student refer to a professor by his or her last name.

It rang true for me: I feel that for the past two or three years, I’ve been overhearing students refer to me and other professors in this way. And once or twice — the horror! — I’ve been addressed as “Yagoda.”

Curious as to how common the custom is, I posed the question on Facebook. The answers confirmed that last-naming is indeed a thing. Some responses from professors:

“This tic took over UCLA. My guess is that some dean somewhere said, in orientation, ‘Never address a professor by their first name,’ so they opted for the last, and it stuck and spread.”

“Yep. It makes me feel like a gym teacher.”

“That was not uncommon at South Carolina. I asked a student why, and the response, essentially, was ‘’cause.’”

“Happens at HBCUs [Historically black colleges and universities] all the time based on my experiences.”

“One does it to me. I am puzzled by it but just enjoy it.”

“That’s the default.”

One professor said that at her institution, there had actually been talk at a department faculty meeting of banning the practice.

I tried to think back to my own college days in the 1970s. We certainly didn’t call the professors by their last names; in my recollection, we didn’t address them much at all. In talking about them, I seem to recall that the most common thing was to use both first and last name, often choosing the familiar form of the first — “Dick” or “Marge” — as a kind of backdoor way of claiming familiarity. I suppose we did sometimes refer to them by last name as well. “Who do you have for English 25?” “Sewall.” Saying “Professor Sewall” would have been too obsequious even for us.

There is of course a long history of people (usually males) addressing each other by their surname; I’ll call this VLN, for Vocative Last Name. In A Dictionary of Epithets and Terms of Address, Leslie Dunkling writes that in England, public schoolboys “would at one time have been horrified to use hear their first names used.” This jibes with the dialogue in Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), such as this exchange after a rugby game:

“Who is he?” says Brooke. “Oh, it’s Brown; he’s a new boy; I know him,” says East, coming up.

“Well, he is a plucky youngster, and will make a player,” says Brooke.

In Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time novels, Widmerpool is almost always just Widmerpool, at school and through life. I don’t even remember his first name. VLN apparently extended to American prep schools, judging from the way Holden Caulfield refers to his schoomates “Stradlater” and “Ackley.” He says of the latter, “… nobody ever called him anything except ‘Ackley.’ Not even Herb Gale, his own roommate, ever called him ‘Bob’ or even ‘Ack.’ If he ever gets married, his own wife’ll probably call him ‘Ackley.’”

This custom was possibly at the bottom of the odd way Rogers E. M. Whitaker, who covered college football for The New Yorker from 1937 to 1968s under the byline “J.W.L.,” referred to players (on first reference). From a 1959 column: “Army managed one touchdown … on Anderson’s superb running and Caldwell’s pass to Carpenter.”

Speaking of Salinger, in “Franny” (1955), the title character’s obnoxious undergraduate boyfriend, Lane Coutell, prefigures the current trend in his assessment of the faculty at Franny’s college:

You’ve got two of the best men in the county in your goddamn English Department. Manlius. Esposito.

Adult to adult, there was a time — 19th century, early 20th — when VLN was common among friends. It didn’t occur to Holmes and Watson to call each other “John” and “Sherlock.” I spent a good deal of time reading memos and correspondence among editors and writers for The New Yorker in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, and one of the first things that struck me was the frequency of friendly last-name salutations. Opening up the collected letters of the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, I find on successive pages “Dear O’Hara” (John), “Dear Marx” (Harpo), “Dear Knopf” (Alfred A.), and “Dear Nash” (Ogden).

VLN mostly faded away in the 20th century. A notable exception is male-centered, hierarchic workplaces such as newsrooms, police stations, and military barracks, with power status an important factor: subordinates are addressed by last name, never superiors, and (I sense) rarely equals. Otherwise, VLN is deployed to communicate mild aggression or comedy — as in the characters Doberman (Sgt. Bilko), Schneider (One Day at a Time), and Kramer, whose first name we didn’t learn till the sixth season of Seinfeld.

And the current campus trend? I surmise that students, in conversations among themselves, more and more commonly referred to professors by last name over the past few decades. Eventually, the practice became so natural that it spilled over into VLN. Although I wouldn’t want it to become the default, it doesn’t really bother me, especially as in the instances I’ve experienced, the appellation seems to spring from affection.

(Appreciate the range of cultural references here.)

(Tons of abusive and offensive language; some sex talk, but only in passing.)

Another posting from the back files, which somehow got disregarded. Investigating the slang candy-ass, I was taken back to this tale of invective from Peter Cavanaugh’s WordPress blog entry “Rocket to Stardom” from 3/26/09 about radio station WNDR in Syracuse NY (the crucial bit is boldfaced):

WNDR’s News Director was Bud Stapleton, a good “friend of the Judge”. He was tough and mean, a former Marine. Bud was a World War Two vet who spent several serious years “island hopping” in the South Pacific and to whom a peaceful return to civilian life was “a fucking pain in the ass”. He was a certified American hero.

… Syracuse, New York is also the home of Syracuse University and the celebrated Newhouse School of Communications.

The Newhouse faculty regarded “WNDR Action Central News” as professionally falling somewhere in between pig semen and rat vomit. They went out of their way expounding with exhausted exasperation upon the degrading, disgusting, depraving journalistic waste product available every hour on the hour at good old 1260 on their AM dial.

It was a classic case of unbridled mutual contempt.

Bud Stapleton characteristically categorized the Newhouse professors as “Candy-ass faggots who can suck my cock on the 6-0-Clock News”. He made frequent reference to “shoving their fucking ivory tower right up their baby-boy butts”.

And then from USMessage Board on 6/30/11 in a discussion about Glenn Beck’s last day at Fox News:

First observation. the slang term candy-ass. From NOAD:

noun candy-ass: North American informal a timid, cowardly, or despicable person: I’m too much of a candy-ass to be a crab fisherman. adj. candy-ass:  timid, cowardly, or despicable: candy-ass sellouts.

The (metaphorical) idea is that candy-asses are soft people, like chocolate candies, so these lexical items contrast with:

noun hard-ass: a tough, uncompromising person: he had a reputation as a hard-ass. adj. hard-ass: North American informal tough and uncompromising: I just can’t take her seriously as a hard-ass cop.

(The “adjective” senses above are really just the nouns used as modifiers.)

Second observation. A complication. The faggot of candy-ass faggot is itself potentially ambiguous, between its use to refer to a male homosexual and its use as a generic insult; cocksucker is subject to a parallel ambiguity, between a sexual reading and an insult reading. But the insult readings get their power from offense of the sexual readings, so it’s not always easy to tell which one you’re looking at.

However, the two examples I started with are basically pure invective, so I’ll take the faggots to be the insult. With the power of something like scum(bag), with some sexual offensiveness on the side.

Third observation. The compound candy-ass faggots could in principle be understood as having either an intersective or an appositive modifier candy-ass. From my LLog posting of 2/8/07 “Droning on”, about the expression pilotless drones and contrasting:

Intersective modification: the denotation of an Adj N combination is the intersection of the denotations of the Adj and the N. That is, Adj N has the same denotation as N plus a restrictive relative clause containing Adj: N that/who is/are Adj.

Appositive modification: the denotation of an Adj N combination is the same as that of N plus a non-restrictive (a.k.a. appositive) relative clause containing Adj: N, which/who is/are Adj.

Just extend this distinction to N1 + N2 compounds. The compound pinko Communists (with some history in American poltics) is appositive, conveying something like ‘Communists, who are (after all) pinkos’. While the compound rebel Communists is intersective, conveying something like ‘those Communists who are (also) rebels’.

On an appositive reading, the insult compound candy-ass faggots would convey something like ‘scumbags, who are (by the way) candy-asses’ — but they are not. So it’s intersective, referring to those scumbags who are also candy-asses, thereby conveying a double insult.

More ass items. Beyond candy-ass and hard-ass, from NOAD:

noun badass: North American informal [a] a tough, uncompromising, or intimidating person: one of them is a real badass, the other’s pretty friendly. [b] a formidably impressive person: she is so wonderful, so sweet, so rad, so amazing; she’s a badass. adj. [a] tough, uncompromising, or intimidating: a badass demeanor. [b] formidable; excellent: this was one badass camera.

The b senses are lovely examples of deliberate semantic reversal: they’re so bad they’re good.

And then, from my 12/16/15 posting “Go H+A+R+D”:

His cute ass. An ambiguity here: M-Dig treasuring Kenny Boy’s buttocks, and the anus that is their centerpiece; or him treasuring Kenny Boy the man, with his cute ass used as a pronominal expression. For the second sense, with possessive pronoun + ass used as a pronominal, there is in fact some linguistic literature, namely

John Beavers & Andrew Koontz-Garboden, A universal pronoun in English? Linguistic Inquiry 37.3.503-13 (2006)

One example (of a number) from this paper: “their asses sure know how to fuckin’ jam” ‘they sure know how to jam’. Yes, the construction is very much street vernacular (but not specifically black street vernacular)

The joke, which was new to me and entertained me enormously:

(#1)

Then, passed on my a friend yesterday, from Facebook, the joke supplied with a photo, the result then labeled as a “meme” (in my terms, since the text is the crucial element, this is a texty creation, or just a texty, a cousin of cartoons):

(#2)

The joke turns on an ambiguity in the communicative intent of This is a library, which is merely an assertion that the place the two conversants are in is a library. The question is why the librarian asserts this to the patron. Surely the patron knows that already.

However, we are to understand the librarian’s response as reproachful. But for what reason?

Here, we need to supply some sociocultural background, about the nature of libraries,  as places where, in addition to borrowing books and other materials, patrons sit and read to themselves, a practice that normally calls for quiet, so it’s common for librarians to remind patrons of that requirement — stereotypically, by shushing patrons who speak too loudly. That is, we would normally suppose that a librarian would be reproaching a patron for the form of their speech: her response would convey ‘that’s not the way we use our voices in a library’.

However, the content of the patron’s speech in #1 and #2 is quite remarkable in the context of a library: he appears to expect to find access to hookers and booze there. Now, in the real world some libraries have on occasion been afflicted by both drinking and sexual activity in the stacks, but no library provides these as actual services. Given that, the librarian is clearly reproaching the patron for his preposterous expectation: her response conveys ‘that’s not what a library is for’.

The patron, however, disregards the clear communicative intent of the librarian and chooses to respond as if it were a shush, so repeats, verbatim, his preposterous announcement that he’s looking for hookers and booze — but in a whisper. Absurdly, fixing the form but not the content.

Apparently, he’s so much in need of booze and hookers that he’s lost his grip on how libraries work. That makes him a stock figure of jokes, and comedy in general: the narcissistic fool — insensitive to his surroundings, responsive only to his own aims and desires. A figure of fun. (Of course, in the real world, such people are moral monsters, and they’re dangerous.)