Clik here to view.
clubbing
Yesterday’s Bizarro, with a silly pun: (#1) The verb club ‘go to (dance) clubs’ is now with us. Let’s go verbing. And the caveman cartoon is a durable genre (right up there with the desert island...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A five-pack
From recent images sent on by Chris Ambidge, five that could have gone on AZBlogX (though they are not visually X-rated) but would also fit here. 1. Toby Young. One of the genres that Chris specializes...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tacolicious
On Wednesday the Stanford QUEST group (queer staff and faculty) had our monthly happy hour, this time at Tacolicious in Palo Alto, a Mexican restaurant that not long ago replaced the Indian fusion...
View ArticleClik here to view.
More rhesus humor
Today’s Rhymes With Orange: A rhesus/Reese’s pun that depends on your knowing about the candy called Reese’s Pieces. (And of course on your knowing about rhesus monkeys.) The candy: They’re like...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Code 404
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a pun on page: A pun of a type that juxtaposes two strikingly different contexts (here, court life in a monarchy, on the one hand, and the internet, on the other) in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bizarro portmanteau
Today’s Bizarro: That’s Zen + piñata, with a little joke on Zen. I’m especially fond of portmanteaus with diacritical marks in them; see the Rhymes With Orange with jalapiñot noir in it, here.
View ArticleClik here to view.
Annals of innuendo and ambiguity: from 10PerCent
In my e-mail today, a sale on gay greeting cards from the 10PerCent company. Reproduced here are the fronts of four birthday cards, starting with a phallic number (with an ambiguity inside), going on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Three penultimate comments
Comments on my posting on penultimate (in penultimate Frisbee) took three directions: a comic association with antepenultimate; complaints about a relatively recent non-standard use of penultimate (to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Not your typical pornstar
Over on AZBlogX there’s a piece on gay pornstar Dale Cooper (who took this name from agent Dale Cooper in the tv series Twin Peaks). A man of many talents. He writes for the Huffington Post on (mostly)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Departments: There’ll always be an England
In the NYT on the 21st, this entertaining story by Sarah Lyall: “Common Gnomes Pop Up at Rarefied Flower Show, to Horror of Many”, where it is reported that: it was not surprising that the staid Royal...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Possessive ambiguity
Today’s Pearls Before Swine: The -’s possessive is multiply ambiguous, and that ambiguity can be exploited for language play. A few days ago, I posted about the greeting card caption “Here’s your dick...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gnome puns
Following on my posting on gnomes at the Chelsea Flower Show, Andy Rogers remarked on Facebook that he had a garden Noam, and I recalled two Language Log postings from 2010 on gnome puns: one on Gnome...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Word avalanche
Today’s Pearls Before Swine, with a type of language play I have no ready name for: (The human in the last panel is the cartoonist, Stephan Pastis. And Rat’s question is rhetorical, conveying ‘the word...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Porn play
Offered in a current porn sale, this entertaining item: (#1) (#2) Yes, a take-off on The Bourne Identity, about the exploits of Chason (Chasin’) Porne rather than Jason Bourne. Perhaps I’m just...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Transposed proverbs
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with a proverb altered spooneristically (and a pun folded in): (A pun on gnu and new and a transposition of dog and new in You can’t teach an old dog new tricks — though...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The opposite of bareback
Having posted recently on bareback sex, bare sex, or raw sex, I wondered idly about the term for the opposite — for sex using condoms. In actual practice, the most commonly used term isn’t parallel to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Penguin cartoon
Today’s Rhymes With Orange: A pun on flight, ‘flying’ (as in flightless bird) or ‘fleeing’ (as in the legal term flight risk).
View ArticleClik here to view.
whoopee cushion
I was moved yesterday to wonder about the whoopee cushion, its history, and the various names for it. In particular, I mused that there would be no good way to predict what the thing is called in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In the midst of death we are in life
Though there is some uncertainty in the date (June 6th is the date on the death certificate), today is the day on my calendar for remembering the death of my husband-equivalent, Jacques Transue, who...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Have an X, have a Y
From Ann Burlingham on Facebook a little while back, with reference to a passage in “Marry the Man Today”, from Guys and Dolls (1950): Sure, now I’ve got this earworm. Seems to me Arnold wrote an essay...
View Article