Going the Facebook rounds:

the song that was number 1 on your 14th birthday defines your life

(pretty clearly intended: #1 in the US — though you could certainly carp about that)

Hey nonny ding dong: it’s “Sh-Boom (Life Could Be a Dream)” as recorded by the Crew-Cuts in 1954.

(#1) Trading card photo of The Crew-Cuts. In 1957, Topps gum cards issued a series of movie stars, television stars and recording stars.

You can listen to it here:

(#2) Top of the US charts from late August through mid-September 1954

About the song. From Wikipedia:

“Sh-Boom” (sometimes referred to as “Life Could Be a Dream”) is an early doo-wop song. It was written by James Keyes, Claude Feaster, Carl Feaster, Floyd F. McRae, and James Edwards, members of the R&B vocal group the Chords and published in 1954. It was a U.S. top ten hit that year for both the Chords (who first recorded the song) and the Crew-Cuts.

And the doo-wop group. They were Canadian:

The Crew-Cuts were a Canadian vocal quartet … that made a number of popular records that charted in the United States and worldwide. They named themselves after the then popular crew cut haircut, one of the first connections made between pop music and hairstyle. They were most famous for their recording of The Chords’ hit record, “Sh-Boom.”

It’s a teen love song, plus some nonsense syllables appropriate to the genre:

Hey nonny ding dong, alang alang alang
Boom ba-doh, ba-doo ba-doodle-ay

Oh, life could be a dream (sh-boom)
If I could take you up in paradise up above (sh-boom)
If you would tell me I’m the only one that you love
Life could be a dream sweetheart

Background: some doo-wop. Postings on this blog:

on 4/3/15, “More na na na”: on the 1957 song “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes; and the American rock and roll group Sha Na Na, named after the nonsense syllables in this song

on 8/4/16, “Zippy and the Edsels”: the 1957 doo-wop song “Rama Lama Ding Dong” by the Edsels

on 8/23/17, “Bluto says: join or else”: the 1955 doo-wop song “Speedoo”by the Cadillacs

Background: the haircut. The 1950s were a high moment for doo-wop and also for the crewcut hairstyle. From Wikipedia:

The crew cut, regardless of the name applied to the hairstyle, was not limited to, nor did the style originate in the United States. In English, the crew cut and flat top crew cut were formerly known as the pompadour or short pompadour, as well as the brush cut, and had been worn since at least the mid 18th century. The style went by other names in other languages; in French, coupé en brosse; in German, Bürstenschnitt; in Russian, ёжик. A short pompadour with a flat top was considered the standard while a somewhat curved appearance across the top was suggested for wider foreheads and face shapes. The style with a flat top acquired the name brush top short pompadour and the style with a more rounded top, round top short pompadour. Prior to the invention of electric clippers with a motor in the handle in 1921 and their ensuing marketing and widespread use, barbers considered the perfect short pompadour to be the most time consuming style to trim.

The term, originally crew haircut, was most likely coined to describe the hairstyles worn by members of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell and other university Crew teams, which were short to keep the hair from being blown into the face of the rower as the boat races down the course opposite the direction the rower is seated with both hands on the oars, making it impossible to brush the hair out of the face. The name drew a contrast to football haircuts, which had been long since 1889 when Princeton football players began wearing long hair to protect against head injury, thereby starting a trend, not altogether welcome; mop haired football players were frequently caricatured in the popular press. In 1895, the championship Yale football team appeared with “close-cropped heads” and subsequently long hair went out of style for football. Almost concurrently, the first helmets began to appear.

Crew cuts were popular in the 1920s and 1930s among college students, particularly in the ivy league. The style was often worn as a summer haircut for its cooling effect.  Men inducted into the military in World War II received G.I. haircuts, crew cuts, and a significant proportion continued to wear a crew cut while serving and after, as civilians. As long hair became popular in the mid 1960s, the crew cut and its variants waned in popularity through the 1970s. The crew cut began to come back in style in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the flat top crew cut being the most popular crew cut style during the 1980s.

My crew-cut days. Back in those 1950s. Here are two pages from a 2009 volume (compiled by Ruth Anne (Maier) Bengtson about the 50-year anniversary of the youth concerts of the Reading (PA) Symhony Orchestra, in particular the summer concerts at the Bynden Wood resort on South Mountain in Wernersville PA.  I was a performer in the third Bynden Wood concert, in 1957. Two pages of reminiscences of that day, from Ruth Anne’s book, with two photos of a crew-cut AMZ in them:

(#3) The 2-piano 8-hands pieces were a lot of fun

(#4) A few years after this I was reviewing Bynden Wood concerts as a reporter for the Reading Eagle

More #1 hits from 1954. Preceding “Sh-Boom”: Kitty Kallen’s  “Little Things Mean a Lot”. Following it: Rosemary Clooney’s “Hey There”. More popular music on the relations between the sexes, but different in tone from each other, and both from a woman’s point of view — in contrast to “Sh-Boom”, which is very much a guy song.

“Little Things Mean a Lot” is a little hymn to conventional gender gestures. You can listen to it here:

(#5)

Blow me a kiss from across the room
Say I look nice when I’m not
Touch my hair as you pass my chair
Little things mean a lot

Give me your arm as we cross the street
Call me at six on the dot
A line a day when you’re far away
Little things mean a lot

Don’t have to buy me diamonds and pearls
Champagne, sables or such
I never cared much for diamonds and pearls
‘Cause honestly honey, they just cost money

Give me your hand when I’ve lost the way
Give me your shoulder to cry on
Whether the day is bright or gray
Give me your heart to rely on

Send me the warmth of a secret smile
To show me you haven’t forgot
For always and ever, now and forever
Little things mean a lot

About the song, from Wikipedia:

“Little Things Mean a Lot” is a popular song written by Edith Lindeman (lyrics) and Carl Stutz (music), published in 1953. Lindeman was the leisure editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Stutz, a disc jockey from Richmond, Virginia. Stutz and Lindeman are also known for writing Perry Como’s 1959 hit, “I Know” (which reached No.47 on the U.S. Billboard chart and No.13 on the UK Singles Chart).

The best known recording of “Little Things Mean a Lot,” by Kitty Kallen (Decca 9-29037), reached No.1 on the U.S. Billboard chart in 1954

Note that the lyricist was a woman.

“Hey There” is something else again. As sung here, it’s a woman advising herself to break off an obsessive relationship with a man:

(#6)

Lately when I’m in my room
All by myself
In the solitary gloom
I call to myself

Hey there
You with the stars in your eyes
Love never made a fool of you
You use to be too wise

Hey there
You on that high flyin’ cloud
Though he won’t throw a crumb to you
You think someday he’ll come to you

Better forget him
Him with his nose in the air
He has you dancin’ on a string
Break it and he won’t care

Won’t you take this advice I hand you like a mother
Or are you not seein’ things too clear
Are you too much in love to hear?
Is it all goin’ in one ear and out the other

Hey there
You with the stars in your eyes
(Are you talking to me?)
Love never made a fool of you
(Not until now)
You used to be too wise
(Yes, I was once)

But now look at the history of the song, from Wikipedia:

“Hey There” is a show tune from the musical play The Pajama Game, written by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. It was published in 1954. It was introduced by John Raitt in the original production. It was subsequently recorded by a number of artists. The recording by Rosemary Clooney reached #1 on Billboard’s chart in 1954. Another version was also recorded about the same time by Sammy Davis Jr., reaching #16 on Billboard’s retail chart.

… In the show, Sid sings it to a recording device, telling himself that he’s foolish to continue his advances to Babe. He plays the tape back, and after responding to his own comments, sings a duet with himself.

The original lyrics have been shifted to a male viewpoint — pronouns altered, “like a brother” changed to “like a mother” — and we can wonder about the consequences of this gender shift. Foolish romantic attachments are surely different in character for men and for women, and they might even be more common for men (who so often hold to a belief in The One for them) than for women, but in any case “Him with his nose in the air / He has you dancin’ on a string” doesn’t quite ring true, while (with pronouns shifted)  it sounds a lot like a man complaining about a woman he believes to be “playing him”, “leading him on”.

Today’s morning name. I really have no idea why. I haven’t even seen the movie and was only vaguely aware of its theme. Maybe the sound-symbolic values of the names, the contrast between the /l/s of Lilo, voiced liquids, symbolically flowing; and the /s t č/ of Stitch, all voiceless obstruents, symbolically spiky and aggressive. And the /aj/ of Lilo, long and with a low nuclear F2; versus the /ɪ/ of Stitch, quite short and with a very high F2. Lilo is female, human, and family-oriented; Stitch is male, alien, and destructive.

From Wikipedia:

Lilo & Stitch is a 2002 American animated adventure science fiction comedy-drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Disney’s 42nd animated feature film, it was written and directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (who is the voice of Stitch), and features the voices of Daveigh Chase, Tia Carrere, David Ogden Stiers, Kevin McDonald, Ving Rhames, Jason Scott Lee, and Kevin Michael Richardson.

… The film’s story revolves around two eccentric and mischievous individuals: a Hawaiian girl named Lilo Pelekai, who is raised by her sister Nani after their parents died in a car accident, and a blue extraterrestrial creature named Experiment 626 that gets adopted by Lilo as her “dog” and is then given the name “Stitch”. The creature, who is genetically engineered by his scientist creator to cause chaos and destruction, initially uses her family to avoid being captured by an intergalactic federation, but the two individuals develop a close bond through the Hawaiian concept of ˈohana, or extended family. This bond causes him to reconsider, and later defy, his intended destructive purpose in order to keep his family together.

We love stories. We tell each other the stories of our lives, in bits and pieces, all the time. We avidly consume stories of other people’s lives, in (auto)biographies, histories, gossip, documentary movies, biopics, sociological studies, reality tv, celebrity magazines, and so on. And we enjoy made-up stories: fairy tales, narrative jokes, fables, comic strips, biblical tales, episodes of tv series (sitcoms, police dramas, westerns, family dramas, monster chronicles, and more), science fiction and fantasy, retellings of myths, novels, epic poems, movies, and so on. The made-up stories are all life stories of one kind or another, and they are also moral stories in one way or another: they show us the courses of real or possible lives, inviting us to participate imaginatively in them; and (sometimes realistically, sometimes metaphorically) they offer us lessons in living: this is a way people might live, learn from that by expanding your range of empathy, or by avoiding this course, or by emulating these characters, or at least by contemplating one or more of these responses.

Animated cartoons for children, especially long-form animations, are not only moral stories, they are almost always transparent in offering lessons in living — as Lilo & Stitch is, just read that brief description again. That’s not a criticism; in fact, it’s hard to even imagine an animated cartoon story for children that wasn’t grounded in a moral universe of some kind. Having no point of view, no purpose in telling, would be monstrous. The art comes not from achieving a moral vacuum, but in conveying the complexity of lives through imagery both rich and subtle. The sort of thing that makes, say, My Neighbor Totoro and Coco so enormously satisfying.

Mike Pope on Facebook, following up on my posting of the 25th “Lilo & Stitch”, with a question about the naming of the characters in the movie:

(#1) Stitch and Lilo

MP: Do you think the animators consciously followed a kiki/bouba paradigm?

AZ:  Almost surely not consciously; they just chose names that “sounded right” to them.

In general, writers’ name choices for fictitious characters are inscrutable in detail; even if the writers have an explicit account of where the names came from, unconscious preferences for certain kinds of names can usually be seen to be at play.

One of these preferences is the bouba/kiki effect, which has to do with the visual appearance of the referents (see the images above). Also involved are effects having to do with the gender of the referents (Stitch is male, Lilo female). No doubt there are more.

From Wikipedia:

(#2) The shapes

The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. This effect was first observed by German-American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929. In psychological experiments first conducted on the island of Tenerife (where the primary language is Spanish), Köhler showed forms similar to those [in the illustration] and asked participants which shape was called “takete” and which was called “baluba” (“maluma” in the 1947 version). Although not explicitly stated, Köhler implies that there was a strong preference to pair the jagged shape with “takete” and the rounded shape with “baluba”.

In 2001, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated Köhler’s experiment using the words “kiki” and “bouba” and asked American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India “Which of these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?” In both groups, 95% to 98% selected the curvy shape as “bouba” and the jagged one as “kiki”, suggesting that the human brain somehow attaches abstract meanings to the shapes and sounds in a consistent way.

There’s an awful lot of variables here — in the physical characteristics of the shapes and, especially, in the many phonetic properties of the names that might play a role in people’s judgments: high vs. low F2, voiceless vs. voiced consonants, lip rounding, obstruents vs. continuants, and more.

In any case, the character Stitch is spiky, the character Lilo rounded.

Then there are effects associating gender with the phonetic characteristics of names. Here there’s a fairly substantial, but quite complex literatures on the phonetics of women’s vs. men’s FNs (first names, personal names), some of it alluded to in the handout for my presentation “How to name a porn star” at the January 2005 meeting of the American Name Society. From the bibliography:

Cassidy, Kimberly Wright; Michael H. Kelly; & Lee’at J. Sharoni. 1999. Inferring gender from name phonology. J. Exp. Psych.: General 128:362-81.

Cutler, Anne, James McQueen & Ken Robinson. 1990. Elizabeth and John: sound patterns of men’s and women’s names. JL 26.2.471-82.

de Klerk, V. & B. Bosch. 1997. The sound patterns of English nicknames. Language Sciences 19.4.289-301.

Lieberson, Stanley. 2000. A matter of taste: How names, fashions, and culture change. New Haven CT: Yale U P.

– & Kelly S. Mikelson. 1995. Distinctive African American names: An experimental, historical, and linguistic analysis of innovation. American Sociological Review 60:928-46.

Slater, Anne Saxon & Saul Feinman. 1985. Gender and the phonology of North American first names. Sex Roles 13.429-40.

One general finding in this literature is that monosyllabicity is a strong tendency in male FNs. So it’s immediately relevant that Stitch is a monosyllable, Lilo a disyllable. (There’s more, but this is a particularly strong effect.)

PN1 & PN2 names. Lilo & Stitch is the name — the title — of a fiction (in this case, a tv show), in form a coordination of two proper names (either FNs or LNs), of the two major characters in the fiction. Coordinate titles of fictions are quite common (War and Peace, Freaks and Geeks, The Young and the Restless, and on forever), and two-protagonist coordinate titles are familiar in popular culture, for instance in the titles of tv shows with detective partners:

Starsky & Hutch, Turner & Hooch, Rizzoli & Isles, Cagney & Lacey, Tango & Cash, Dalziel & Pasco, …

and in the titles of children’s tv shows featuring partners in adventures:

Phineas & Ferb, Drake & Josh, Ren & Stimpy, Kenan & Kel, …

(I use the ampersand rather than and in all these titles, though the actual usage varies from show to show.)

About these coordinate names, we can ask how the contrast in the names corresponds to contrasts in the characters (as above), and we can ask how the ordering of the names correlates with characteristics (especially phonetic characteristics) of them and with characteristics of the name bearers (like gender, relative social power, normativity of their behavior, whatever).

On the purely literary front, we can ask why writers might choose two-protagonist titles in the first place: why they chose to frame the fiction in terms of these characters, rather than in terms of some aspect of their their physical or sociocultural setting (Law & Order, Partners in Crime, Cold Case, Midsomer Murders, Bones, etc.), and rather than using a title playing on some sort of fixed expression (an idiom, in particular, as in Law & Order, Partners in Crime, Blue Bloods, etc.).

In anticipation of a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden with motss.conners on Saturday, two items from my last visit to the garden (on 7/31): blue flax-lilies, which are neither flax nor lily plants, but do have bright blue berries; and dark purple, almost black, hollyhocks.

Blue is the color of my true love’s eyes. Flax-blue, specifically.

From Wikipedia:

(#1) Strap-like leaves and flaxflower-blue berries

Dianella caerulea, commonly known as the blue flax-lily, blueberry lily, or paroo lily, is a perennial herb of the family Asphodelaceae, subfamily Hemerocallidoideae [the subfamily of daylily plants], found across the eastern states of Australia and Tasmania. It is a herbaceous strappy perennial plant to a metre high, with dark green blade-like leaves to 70 cm long. Blue flowers in spring and summer are followed by indigo-coloured berries. It adapts readily to cultivation and is commonly seen in Australian gardens and amenities plantings.

It was first described by English taxonomist John Sims in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine in 1802. Its specific name is the Latin adjective caerulea “blue” [referring to sky or sea blue < caelum ‘sky, heaven’ + diminutive -ule- suffix, with dissimilation of the first l]. The genus name is derived from the Roman goddess Diana, with a diminutive suffix –ella.

Why flax? As usual with plant names, it’s a metaphorical reference — to the color of the flowers of the flax plant. From Wikipedia:

(#2) That color, in the garden

Flax (Linum usitatissimum), also known as common flax or linseed, is a member of the genus Linum in the family Linaceae [see below]. It is a food and fiber crop cultivated in cooler regions of the world. Textiles made from flax are known in the Western countries as linen, and traditionally used for bed sheets, underclothes, and table linen. Its oil is known as linseed oil. In addition to referring to the plant itself, [by metonymy] the word “flax” may refer to the unspun fibers of the flax plant. The plant species is known only as a cultivated plant, and appears to have been domesticated just once from the wild species Linum bienne, called pale flax.

[Digression on the Linaceae plant family. From Wikipedia:

Linaceae [#99 in my running inventry of plant families] is a family of flowering plants. The family is cosmopolitan, and includes about 250 species in 14 genera, classified into two subfamilies: the Linoideae and Hugonioideae (often recognized as a distinct family, the Hugoniaceae).

… In the Linoideae, the largest genus is Linum, the flaxes, with 180-200 species including the cultivated flax, Linum usitatissimum. Members of the Linoideae include herbaceous annuals and perennials, as well as woody subshrubs, shrubs, and small trees (Tirpitzia) inhabiting temperate and tropical latitudes of Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. The largest genus of the Hugonioideae is Hugonia (about 40 species); the Hugonioideae are woody vines, shrubs, and trees, and are almost entirely tropical in distribution.

End of digression.]

We get two color images from the flax plant. From the flowers, flax blue, as in flax-blue eyes — strikingly bright blue. The image in “Blue is the color of my true love’s eyes” (above), a play on the title of a haunting folk song. From Wikipedia:

“Black Is the Color (of My True Love’s Hair)” … is a traditional ballad folk song first known in the US in the Appalachian Mountains but originating from Scotland, as attributed to the reference to the Clyde in the song’s lyrics.

… Many different versions of this song exist, some addressed to women and others addressed to men, as well as other differences

Flax as a kind of blue is also available for naming colors commercially, as in this paint chip from the Sherwin-Williams company:

(#3)

Meanwhile, the flax plant is the source of flax the fiber, and the color of the fiber is pale yellow. Which gives us, from NOAD:

adj. flaxen: [a] adjective of flax. [b] literary (especially of hair [AZ, also: especially of females]) of the pale yellow color of dressed flax: her long flaxen hair.

Which gives us, most famously, Debussy’s girl with the flaxen hair. From Wikipedia:

(#4) A 2001 performance by Lang Lang

La fille aux cheveux de lin is a musical composition for solo piano by French composer Claude Debussy. It is the eighth piece in the composer’s first book of Préludes, written between late 1909 and early 1910. The title is in French and translates roughly to “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”. The piece is 39 measures long and takes approximately two and a half minutes to play. It is in the key of G♭major.

The piece, named after the eponymous poem by Leconte de Lisle, is known for its musical simplicity, a divergence from Debussy’s style at the time.

(#5) Cate Blanchett’s flaxen hair in 2014 (photo from the Telegraph (UK))

That’s the largely female version. For males — especially boys — the favored color adjective is tow(–)haired or tow(–)headed. Going back to flax again (from NOAD), via two nouns:

noun towhead: [a] a head of tow-colored or very blond hair. [b] a person with very blond hair.

noun tow: [a] the coarse and broken part of flax or hemp prepared for spinning. [b] a bundle of untwisted natural or man-made fibers.

A towhead is especialy male and especially young: John Greenleaf Whittier’s barefoot boy with cheek of tan,

(#6) Norman Rockwell magazine cover

and this lad from a site aggregating photos of cute haircuts for little boys:

(#7) Note the blue eyes, tending towards flax-blue

Black flowers — well, very dark purple. Not far from the blue flax-lily at Gamble Garden back on the 31st was a stand of extraordinarily dark purple hollyhocks in bloom. Perhaps this cultivar (nobody, including a staff member, could find a label):

(#8) Alcea rosea ‘Blacknight’ / ‘Black Knight’, from the Walters Gardens site, offering seeds for sale

See my 3/27/13 posting “Abutilon and its relatives”, with a section on hollyhocks, genus Alcea, especially A. rosea.

I noticed that the hollyhocks had suffered quite badly from insects gnawing holes in its leaves. Later I discovered that the insects seem to have no taste for various Hibiscus species, including the showy H. rosa-sinensis and the rose of sharon shrubs (H. syriacus), or for several varieties of abutilons, though the plants are all closely related to Alcea.

Note on life on the net/web. I had originally assembled several really nice photos illustrating the range of hollyhocks in the dark purple range, all from a site that aggregates garden information. When I went to check out the site, to give proper credit for the images, I found that its address was copped from a UCC church in New Jersey and that its very brief About page pointedly said nothing of substance about the site. Some sort of scam, I guess. So I deleted the photos and chose just the one above, from an actual seed company.

(Sex toys and all they bring with them, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Today, a leek (for St. David’s Day, March 1st), but yesterday (the intercalary day February 29th) a leap.

The mail arrives and wow! (you exclaim) there’s a Leap Day flash sale at the Guy Gear Store, just for today! You have visions of well-designed equipment for hunting, fishing, and camping; cool bikes; hot athletic shoes;  t-shirts for teams, bands, and plain ol’ aggression; tools Craftsman never dreamed of; electronics to rule the world of the future; and all that good guy stuff.

And then you examine the ad in detail:

(#1) Quick! Identify the three sale items in the ad; the model’s shapely buttocks are not actually on offer

Probaby not your father’s idea of guy gear.

Answers to the leap quiz, from left to right:

a Firefly Contour Plug — a silicone butt plug / prostate stimulator that glows in the dark; it comes in three sizes

the Renegade PSI Pump — “a sophisticated penis pump with built-in pressure gauge for precise pumping session”

an aluminum cock ring, size large (the Guy Gear Store doesn’t tell you this, but it can also serve as a modernist napkin ring)

(Personal notes: I have good things to say about some anal probes (cousins of the Firefly above) and many cock rings (adjustable leather ones on myself, and other types, like the metal number above, to admire on other guys), but I’m deeply dubious about penis pumps, which are advertised as treatments for small penis size and erectile dysfunction.)

As for cock rings, we get this store illustration of what they can do in practice:

(#2)

Then two things: another bash at categories and labels, in the domain of sex toys (where I ventured back in 2013); and a lot about the uses of gear (and its complex associations with masculinity).

The domain of sex toys. From my 2/18/13 posting “Commercial categories: gay sex toys”, about the (quite extensive) section of the TLA Video on-line catalogue devoted to gay (male) sex toys:

There turns out to be a pretty rich category structure here, involving a number of categories that (not surprisingly) have no ordinary-language labels. A category structure devised for the users of these items, by their designers, manufacturers, and sellers.

We see much the same thing on the Guy Gear Store site, though the category structure there isn’t as complex as on the TLA Video site. They initially list five categories:

anal toys, cock & ball, lubes, fantasy & fetish (nipple clamps, wrist cuffs, collars, ball gags, crops, and more), undergear (most of it highly pouch-focused)

and then add four more:

masturbators, dildos, accessories (the Toy Cleaner product, for instance), penis enhancement

As at TLA Video, the categories include a number that are familiar to the users / customers, though not necessarily under the labels Guy Gear uses: ANAL-TOYS and UNDERWEAR (labeled undergear), for example. Others are categories of commerce, with names created by the makers and sellers: masturbators and penis enhancement, for instance.

gear. The short version of the story from NOAD (which tries to put the currently most frequent usages first in its entries):

noun gear:  1 (often gears) one of a set of toothed wheels that work together to alter the relation between the speed of a driving mechanism (such as the engine of a vehicle or the crank of a bicycle) and the speed of the driven parts (the wheels). … 2 [a] [usually with modifier] equipment that is used for a particular purpose. [b] informal clothing, especially of a specified kind: designer gear. [c] informal a person’s personal possessions and clothes. [d] Nautical a ship’s rigging.

It won’t be entirely obvious from this entry — in part, because of the way the NOAD definitions are framed — but in fact the various referents of gear are, for the most part, strongly associated culturally with the activities and interests of men, so that the word gear in many of its uses evokes masculine associations as well. I’ll call these associations, for the referents and for the word, brosociations; gear is, generally, strongly brosociated.

As a result, the choice of gear, rather than some alternative item (equipment, clothing, belongings) can be used to index masculinity; to supply masculine connotations where they would otherwise be absent (with reference to skin-care products, for example); and to reinforce and intensify explicit masculine associations (in gay-related contexts, in particular, as in the Guy Gear Store).

This turns out to be a much bigger topic than I had anticipated, so my comments here are just exploratory.

But to start the discussion, I ‘ll point out that NOAD‘s sense 1, with mechanical gears, puts us solidly in a context that in our culture is traditionally the province of men: mechnical apparatus of all kinds. And that its sense 2d takes us into another, the world of ships and sailors. In fact, its sense 2a takes us into still another, since the actual uses of gear here involve not just any kind of equipment, but specifically tools, again conventionally in a male territory.

Senses in greater detail. A (fairly drastic) boiling-down of the relevant material in OED2’s entry for the noun gear:

I. Equipment
1. a. collective singular… Apparel, attire, dress, vestments [from a1350 on]
2. Armour, arms, warlike accoutrements [from c1275 on]
3. a. Accoutrements of a riding horse, or his rider [from a1400-50]

II. Apparatus
5. a. Apparatus generally; appliances, implements, tackle, tools [from a1400 on]
b. The organs of generation. Now only slang. [1st OED2 cite 1675] [GDoS has slang gear for the female genitals from the 14th century on, then for the male genitals from the 16th on]
6. Machinery
a. A combination of wheels, levers, … [1st cite 1523]
8. Nautical. Rigging in general; ‘the rigging of any particular spar or sail’ [1st cite 1669]

III. Stuff
9. a. Goods, movable property, household necessaries and utensils [from c1380]

The earliest cites are in solidly male territory, warfare. And much of the rest of it involves extensions to other culturally masculine domains (even to the male sexual bodyparts); in particular, gear for ‘apparatus’ has become strongly associated with tools: men use gear ‘tools’, while women mostly use equipment or supplies (or, in the kitchen, utensils). (These are tendencies, not rules.)

Two notable exceptions. First exception: gear ‘stuff’, which seems to be largely free of gender associations. (My 16-year-old grand-daughter reports that this usage is normal for her, as in the dialogue “What’s in the bag? Oh, that’s my gear” (‘my stuff, my belongings’). Otherwise, she might use my gear to refer to her drawing supplies — she’s serious about her artwork — the way her mother and other photographers use gear to refer to their cameras and other equipment of their craft. But probably not in any other context.)

Second exception: gear ‘clothing’, which turns out to be pretty complex. A clothing seller offering gear is, first of all, offering casualwear, and probably special-purpose apparel: activewear or sportswear (including workout clothes). So we get things like the Guy Gear men’s clothing and sportswear shop in Sylmar CA:

(#3) Offering team wear, t-shirts for bands, streetwise t-shirts, flannel clothing, jeans, athletic shoes, etc.

And we get the gear.com site (roughly comparable to REI, Patagonia, and North Face — outdoor retail stores) selling adventure gear for skiing, climbing, and camping; bags and backpacks; and clothing for these activities (both men’s gear and women’s gear).

And of course the UnderGear / Undergear marketing company (often posted about on this blog), offering premium men’s underwear, primarily for gay men to use, for whatever purpose suits them.

(So there’s a hint in all of this of clothing as tools.)

The word gear as providing masculinity. If you want to promote a product that normally would lack masculine associations as an item for men, you can tap brosocial gear. As here:

(#4) Guy Gear toiletries for men

The ad copy, very heavy on the toiletries as grooming tools:

issimo guy gear tri wash hair, face and body wash and issimo guy gear face art shave emulsion are formulated for the gentleman who needs to simplify his daily routine. Cleanse face, hair and body with one effective formula formulated for all skin types and follow with issimo guy gear face art, a clear shave emulsion whose main purpose, in addition to keeping the facial hair (or body hair) visible during a shave, does NOT draw out beneficial oils from the skin. issimo guy gear face art provides proper lubrication for the blade, and conditions the skin all in one swoop.

The word gear as jacking up already explicit masculinity. In gay contexts, where we’re already awash in men with men, but edgily, because any mansex or male-male desire smells like femininity to some people. So gay men are inclined to pile on as many brosociations as we can get. Hence (gay) Guy Gear.

Alternatives to gear. A summary adapted from the NOAD thesaurus for the word, keyed to three subsenses in the NOAD entry. This can then serve as material for further investigation of the connotative consequences of choosing gear.

[sense 2a] EQUIPMENT equipment, apparatus, paraphernalia, articles, appliances, impedimenta; tools, utensils, implements, gadgets; stuff, things; kit, rig, tackle, odds and ends, bits and pieces, trappings, appurtenances, accoutrements, regalia; archaic equipage.

[sense 2b] CLOTHES clothing, garments, outfits, attire, garb, dress, wear; informal togs, duds, getup, threads; formal apparel

[sense 2c] BELONGINGS belongings, possessions, effects, personal effects, property, paraphernalia, odds and ends, bits and pieces, bags, baggage, luggage;  Law chattels; informal things, stuff.

The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from yesterday, on running evolutionary errands:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

Venture Fish crawls out onto land, no doubt to return after foraging there, then will venture onto land again, and in time its descendants will have become amphibians, and then, well, you know the story.

But why does Venture Fish go on land? It insists on doing this for some reason — the primary reason for the act —  that is inscrutable to its aquatic companion, but Home Fish asks that Venture Fish meanwhile run an errand: fetch some things on the trip, thus supplying an additional, secondary reason for the act.  Home Fish uses the format BACKGROUND CONDITION + REQUEST:

BACKGROUND CONDITION: If you’re going out / Since you’re already up / As long as you’re up / While you’re up / …

+ REQUEST: (could you / would you / why don’t you / please /…) VP-BSE

— made famous in the slogan for an early 1960s ad campaign:

as long as you’re up get me a Grant’s

A Grant’s exemplar:

(#2) Grant’s is a blended Scotch whisky bottled by William Grant & Sons in Scotland (Wikipedia link)

Gender and language note. Though I left no gender flags in my comments on #1 above, you probably took Home Fish to be female and Venture Fish to be male, and you might want to reflect on those genderings.

In #2, the stationary member of the pair is given as male, and almost everyone took the Scotch-fetcher to be female. This was widely viewed as sexist at the time: the woman is being asked to serve the man. Later ads, in which the professional male was replaced by a fashionable or artistic woman, while intended to redress the gender differential, only made it worse, at least in the eyes of many viewers, who saw the woman as offering her charms and talents in exchange for the favor.

The differences between #1 and #2 are then worth further reflection. It would would seem that at least part of the answer has to be with fetching things inside vs. outside the home.

#1: Why go away? Four possible purposes:

— A: to run an errand, to fetch something. The explicit secondary purpose in the cartoon.

— B: to go on a quest, a journey to maturation, to find oneself. The purpose suggested by the title Wayno gave #1 on his blog: “Walkabout”. From Wikipedia:

Walkabout is a rite of passage in Australian Aboriginal society, during which males undergo a journey during adolescence, typically ages 10 to 16, and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months to make the spiritual and traditional transition into manhood.

They then return home. But that would be a very long time to wait for the delivery of a grocery item.

— C: to leave home to take up adult life elsewhere. Cue the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home”. From Wikipedia:

“She’s Leaving Home” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and released on their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul McCartney wrote and sang the verse and John Lennon wrote the chorus, which they sang together.

You can listen to the 2009 remastered version here (#3).

— D: to abandon a previous life entirely. They go out for a loaf of bread, or possibly some mealworms, and just never come back. It happens. Cue Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart”. From Wikipedia:

“Hungry Heart” is a song written and performed by Bruce Springsteen on his fifth album, The River. It was released as the album’s lead single in 1980…

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back
Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going

You can listen to the official audio here (#4).

— E: for some social purpose, especially for male sociability, activities with one or more buddies (the guys, the boys). Sports events, hunting and fishing together, drinking together, going to strip clubs, things men in our culture do with one another, customarily without the company of female companions. Venture Fish is probably going out to score some larvae with his buddies, or for a gang spawn.

#2: the ghost cartoon. Apparently, a fair number of people who only dimly remember the Grant’s ad campaign in #2 have a vivid recollection of a New Yorker cartoon take-off on its ads and their slogan. The cartoon they recall has a male figure much like the one in #2, but at a desk, with piles of books and papers on it as well as the typewriter; he is obviously a writer or scholar of some kind, and the caption has him saying (to an out-of-frame character):

As long as you’re up, get me a grant.

I myself remembered this cartoon with great affection. I believed it to be the work of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Saxon, known for skewering the affectations of urban upperclass men. From Wikipedia:

Charles David Saxon (November 13, 1920 – December 6, 1988) was an American cartoonist known for his work for The New Yorker.

… Much of his New Yorker work gently pokes fun at the privileged denizens of prosperous suburbs; unusually, he wrote his own words, often highlighting clichés, as in an image of well-fed executives in a boardroom, the chairman stating “Of course, honesty is one of the better policies.”

Get me a grant would be so Saxon; if the cartoon were being done now, it would be by William Haefeli (who might even bring the addressee into the frame, making him the speaker’s male partner; the world has changed a lot in the last 60 years).

The only problem is that, apparently, there never has been such a cartoon, in the New Yorker or anywhere else. It’s a ghost memory, composed of shards of separate actual events, reconfigured in many ways. As I point out every few months on this blog, our memories are deeply undependable in their details; they are cobbled together from bits of real stuff, reworked by hearsay and imagination and often (unintentionally) altered so that they’re better stories than the actual events. Even when we are absolutely certain of their accuracy. (A lot of people get really angry when I point this out, but there’s a gigantic literature on the subject and I’ve looked at a fair amount of data first-hand.)

What do I know to be true? First,  As long as you’re up, get me a grant (or close variants of it) is actually well-attested as a purely verbal joke, without a drawing attached. Going back to the time of the Grant’s ads. For example, it’s the title of an article in Esquire magazine of June 1966: “As Long as You’re Up, Get Me a Grant” by Anonymous. And it continues to be used in pieces offering advice to grant applicants.

Second, there were at least two magnificent joke cartoons taking off on the Grant’s slogan in the early 1960s, but not involving grant in the ‘award, subsidy’ sense. From the celebrated cartoonist George Price of the old New Yorker and from the celebrated pinup artist Alberto Vargas.

From Price in the New Yorker on 12/21/63:

(#5) A wonderfully convoluted joke, involving the transposition of grant and up, Ulysses S. Grant for grant, and Up in the brand name 7-Up (naming a beverage parallel to Grant’s whisky). Also a joke that would be very hard to tell in words alone.

I suspect that anyone recalling a New Yorker cartoon — and that includes me — is recalling this one, which is just hugely more intricate than the simple and memorable get me a grant.

From Wikipedia on the artist:

George Price (June 9, 1901 – January 12, 1995) was an American cartoonist who was born in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After doing advertising artwork in his youth, Price started doing cartoons for The New Yorker magazine in 1929. He continued contributing to the New Yorker well into his eighties, displaying a talent for both graphic innovation (many of his cartoons consisted of a single, unending line) and for a wit that somehow combined the small issues of domestic life with a topical sensibility.

Then there’s the Vargas, from the May 1965 Playboy:

(#6) grants / pants

I seem not to have posted on Vargas before, but here are a few basic facts from Wikipedia:

Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chávez (9 February 1896 – 30 December 1982) was a noted Peruvian painter of pin-up girls. He is often considered one of the most famous of the pin-up artists.

… Vargas’ artistic work, paintings and color drawings, were periodically featured in some issues of Playboy magazine in the 1960s and 1970s.

BACKGROUND CONDITION + REQUEST jokes more generally. Not involving /grænt/. A rich joke genre, turning usually on a contextually surprising or preposterous REQUEST. Two New Yorker examples, one from Charles Saxon himself (but in 1987) and one from a newcomer to the magazine, Karen Sneider, in 2019:

(#6) From 10/5/87

(#6) From 7/8/19 (note the eyelashes, conventionally indicating a female fish)

The queer option, not yet taken. I was mildly surprised to discover that the tag while it’s up (referring to an erection) seems not to have been exploited in the title of gay porn. Possible dialogue: “Oh look, Joey’s got a boner! While it’s up, let’s use it, guys!” Ok, maybe too subtle for the genre.

From the American tv series Emergency! S7 E11 “The Convention” (from 7/3/79), a tv movie following the regular series. Two women end up serving as a paramedic team together — female paramedics were a new thing at the time, only grudgingly accepted, and they were normally paired with a male partner — so a male paramedic tells them the watch commander wouldn’t approve of the women teaming up. One of the women good-naturedly but pointedly snaps back at him:

(1a) How would you like a thick lip, to go with your thick head? No offense.

With the idiomatic tag No offense — a shorter version of No offense intended — literally meaning something like ‘I intend/mean you no offense by saying this’, but almost always conveying something more complex than that.

The tag is very often introductory, and followed by but, rather than appended:

(1b) No offense, but how would you like a thick lip, to go with your thick head?

Quite commonly the speaker does in fact intend to offend, criticize, or insult the addressee, but piously disavows these intentions so as to deflect negative reactions by the addressee. What’s going on in (1a) is, however, a bit more indirect than that.

The show. On the (complex) episode of Emergency!, from the IMDb plot summary:

San Francisco firefighters and paramedics rescue a man trapped on the rigging of a schooner. A paramedic convention brings [Los Angeles paramedics] [John] Gage [Randolph Mantooth] and [Roy] DeSoto [Kevin Tighe] back to San Francisco, where they assist a choking victim in a restaurant, then deliver a baby while two female paramedics [Gail (Patty McCormack) and Laurie (Deirdre Lenihan)] treat a sniper’s shooting victims. [more action follows]

It’s a nice touch that John and Roy deliver the baby, while Gail and Laurie treat the shooting victims.

The idiom. Then from the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary site:

no offense idiom — used before a statement to indicate that one does not want to cause a person or group to feel hurt, angry, or upset by what is about to be said // No offense, but I think you are mistaken. // “No offense, but you’re nutty as a fruitcake.”— Carl Hiaasen

The first example is a simple softening of unwelcome news, but the Hiaasen is a deliberately offensive no offense, with the tag serving as mere deflection. Merely deflective no offense is so common in actual practice that some take it to be the norm, as in this meme:

(#1)

And on the net, merely deflective no offense is so common that it has an initialistic abbreviation:

(#2)

But earnestly softening no offense (as in Merriam-Webster’s first example) isn’t rare, as in this touching example from FOUND magazine:  “No Offense Intended”,  found by Sam in San Francisco:

Just saw this note on the ground after leaving a coffee shop at 18th Ave. and Geary Blvd., and thought it was a pretty fair and balanced proposition for a casual “dudes only” hookup.

(#3)

[Digression on if you’re down (for a hookup). From NOAD:
adj. down: … 4 [predicative] US informal supporting or going along with someone or something: you got to be down with me | she was totally down for a selfie | “You going to the movies?” “Yo, I’m down.”.]

The note-writer did his best on the task of attempting to negotiate a sexual connection while not knowing how his offer would be taken — while recognizing that many straight guys are enraged on learning that some other men might find them sexually desirable. (Presumably because being an object of other men’s sexual desire is being “treated like a woman”, and that’s a deep threat to their masculinity.)

But back to (1a), which is neither earnestly softening nor merely deflective, but something in between. The female paramedic who uttered (1a) was in fact wielding no offense to bring her male colleague into line, by telling him the hard truth that he was behaving badly, but doing this with enough empathy for him as a colleague that he should be able to see that her words weren’t a matter of personal animus against him, and doing this with some humor (the mock-threatened thick lip). She was teaching him a lesson. In the actual story, it seems to have had the appropriately sympathetic but chastening effect. A very nice example of female assertiveness, cleverly and humanely deployed.

(I should note that this episode comes very close to the end of the show, which for years was extraordinarily male-oriented, with only the head nurse Dixie McCall (played by Julie London) playing a major role, as the highly empathetic tough broad at Rampart General Hospital — though she was a truly wonderful character. Now, it’s not fair to criticize this show in particular for its heavy male orientation, since that was pretty much the style of the time, and the show was actually quite good at depicting male friendship, male competition, the sexual marketplace, and symbolic displays of masculinity, all with some subtlety and good humor. But until the late episodes, the character Dixie McCall pretty much had to carry the weight for more than half of humanity.)

Deflections. No offense (intended) is frequently deployed as a deflection, and it’s just one in a whole armamentarium of deflections, among them: I don’t mean to critcize/complain, but … ; Not to criticize/carp, but …; and so on — all going on to express criticism, complaint, and accusation, while at the same time refusing to accept responsibility for these judgments and so trying to avert the weight of their targets’ pain and outrage. The strategy is sometimes referred to as “politeness”, but it’s rarely experienced as such.

Two very different occurrences from my experience.

The Fillmore plea. From the late 1960s, Chuck (Charles J.) Fillmore, tapped (as senior member of the linguistics department at Ohio State) to serve as acting chair of the department while Ilse Lehiste was on leave, hesitantly addressing the first faculty meeting of the year (I was one of those faculty):

(CJF) I can do this job if you all tell me, often, that you love me.

The Transue plea. From ca. 1990, my guy — my husband-equivalent — Jacques Transue, with some visible anxiety, pulling me aside for a moment of serious couple-talk, holding my hand, gazing into my eyes:

(JHT) I need you to tell me more often that you love me.

Two clearly different senses of the verb love (but both, of course, capable of different shadings in different contexts).

An approximation: the NOAD entry for the verb love:

[with object] 1 [a] feel deep affection for (someone): he loved his sister dearly | there were four memorial pages set up by her friends in honor of Phoebe, saying how much they loved and missed her. [b] feel a deep romantic or sexual attachment to (someone): she really loved him | I do realize that people get married because they love each other. 2 like or enjoy very much: I just love dancing | I’d love a cup of tea | I love this job | [with infinitive]:  they love to play golf.

These three senses correspond very crudely to three types of love in the ancient Greek configuration of these things:

1a to philia ‘friendship’

1b to eros ‘desire, sensual love’, frequently mixed with or extended to include the emotional attachments of romantic love (the combination of feelings at issue in (JHT), though intimate relationships often include also deep friendship, playful enjoyment of one another, and respect and admiration as well, as J’s and mine did)

and 2 to ludus ‘enjoyment, playful love’

There is another distinguishable sense, not in NOAD but important here because it’s the one in (CJF), and it’s attested in other circumstances as well:

[3] respect, admiration, honor: This respect shown by a boss will lead to a mutual love and respect from the team (link)

Sense [3]. In (CJF). From my 10/01/21 posting “Lila Gleitman”, about Chuck Fillmore: “administrative responsibilities made him anxious and miserable”. So much so that at that first faculty meeting he hoped to smooth the way in the coming academic year by appealing to our (genuine) personal respect and admiration for him.

I had tremendous sympathy for him. For one thing, I was only a few years away from my own grievously difficult year as acting head of a linguistics department (bizarrely, a position assumed just a year after I finished my PhD and took up my first academic position, at the Univ. of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign — a story for another time); for another, I realized that when Chuck left at the end of his acting chairmanship and moved west to Berkeley, I would become the senior member of the department, called on in emergencies to act as chair myself (as indeed I was, several times).

Chuck’s year was not in fact an easy one, with plenty of disruptions and administrative conundrums that were painful for him.

Then sense [3] plays a central role in a famous misremembered quotation, from Sally Field in 1985. The version that’s been all the way through the quotation-improvement mill is this one, from a meme site:

(#1) What lots of people remember

But, from a Vanity Fair piece “The Everlasting Audacity of Sally Field’s “You Like Me” Oscars Speech” by Ashley Spencer on 1/31/20:

Sally Field never actually said, “You like me! You really like me!” [AZ: much less “You love me! You really love me!”]

(#2) Field giving her acceptance speech, unadorned by text

When she accepted her second best-actress Oscar for Places in the Heart in 1985, just five years after her first for Norma Rae, Field gave a speech that reflected her gratitude at being recognized by her peers even after getting her start in lowbrow fare she hated, like The Flying Nun. “I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect,” she said that night, adding that she hadn’t really felt the impact of her first Oscar win. “This time I feel it. And I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me!”

… All it took for Sally Field to become a primordial meme was spontaneously admitting she was happy to be respected.

(I note that women’s speeches in public are routinely critiqued for both their content and speech style; apparently, nothing will do.)

Sense 1b. In (JHT). Jacques’s plea is a familiar one for romantic-erotic partners of men: their guys are regrettably inclined to take their partners for granted, and to assume that they shouldn’t have to tell them that they love them, they should know that. I am in general a more than usually Sensitive New-Age Guy, but it turns out that I can be as thoughtlessly boorish as any normatively masculine straight guy on occasion.

Jacques said it, and (to my credit) I saw instantly that I was in the wrong and that I was hurting my guy. (I remind you that I held most of the worldly power cards in the relationship, and that J was dependent in many ways on me — a position that most men will find threatening, so that I always had to think about how to even things out. But in this case I’d botched the job, and J had to ask for professions of my love.

The way to fix this was not just to assume that loving support would now well up from me spontaneously as needed, but to set up a routine, which would then become a habit. So, every time we came together after being separated, I told him that I loved him and kissed him. Plus, first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Maybe more than that, but certainly that. And then it became part of everyday life, requiring no thought, and pleasing both of us.

An avalanche of pop love songs. And romantic films. All based on tell me that you love me or when you tell me that you love me. I have a low tolerance for sentimental ballads, so I’ll pick just one example of each: the first because of the performers and not the song, which annoys me; the second because of its unusual approach to the theme (granted, an approach that involves a worrisomely neurotic romantic fixation).

From Wikipedia:

“When You Tell Me That You Love Me” is a 1991 song [a sentimental ballad] by American soul singer Diana Ross. The song was written by Albert Hammond and John Bettis, and produced by Peter Asher. The song was subsequently covered by various artists.

“When You Tell Me That You Love Me” was released as the lead single on August 20, 1991, from Diana Ross’s 1991 album The Force Behind the Power

There are several duet versions by Julio Iglesias, notably a duet with Dolly Parton for Iglesias’s 1994 album Crazy.

I’m sorry, but the lyrics set my teeth on edge, and not even Diana Ross, Julio Iglesias, and Dolly Parton can fix that. One verse and the chorus:

I wanna call the stars down from the sky
I wanna live a day that never dies
I wanna change the world only for you
All the impossible I wanna do
I wanna hold you close under the rain
I wanna kiss your smile and feel the pain
I know what’s beautiful looking at you
In a world of lies you are the truth

And baby, everytime you touch me
I become a hero
I’ll make you safe, no matter where you are
And bring you everything you ask for
Nothing is above me
I’m shining like a candle in the dark
When you tell me that you love me

My other example is much more recent (“Tell Me That You Love Me”, released 2018), by a hot very young talent (British pop singer James Smith, born 2/9/99):

(#3)

will you stay with me tonight
and pretend it’s all alright?
tell me that you love me
the way you used to love me
will you whisper in my ear
those three words i wanna hear?
tell me that you love me
the way you used to love me

The relationship is over, but he wants his ex-beloved to pretend to love him still and say their words of love. Creepy; you worry that stalking is next on the program.

Ominous Sonnet on Otter in Snow

FBI agent with psychic ability
pens an apostrophe lauding his otter: dac-
tylic tetrameter, deeply unsonnetesque

murderous rage at this innocent animal —
gamboling playfully, sporting in snow — who is
brutally slaughtered with weapons of poetry

How comes this nightmare? Two sources: a Facebook posting by Dennis Baron yesterday, with the pulp fiction; a letter, arrived yesterday, from Ann Burlingham, with an otter-in-the-snow stamp bought with me in mind (I was once an otter in body type, an otter being a sleeker version of the bear body type; now I’m far too bulky to be an otter, so I’m a bear by body, though not a Bear by subculture).

Sonnets on the body. Dennis forwarded this e-book ad (with his highlighting):

(#1)

Commenting wryly (ok, Rylie-ly):

(It’s all about some English expressions using the bodypart-term ass, but without any reference to human buttocks. The verb fuck (up), figuratively ‘mishandle, damage, ruin’, puts in a cameo appearance at the beginning. But: no actual bodyparts, no sexual acts, presented either verbally or visually.)

Advertised in my Facebook feed yesterday, this t-shirt, available from many sources (this via Amazon, in five colors):

The verb half-ass, here ‘do (something) incompletely or incompetently’ — as opposed to totally messing it up

We start with the racy slang verb half-ass and work back from there.

On the verb, from OED3 (June 2015):

colloq. (orig. and chiefly U.S.) trans. To perform (an action or task) poorly or incompetently; (now usually) to do (something) in a desultory or half-hearted manner. Freq. with it as object.

[1st cite] 1954 J. Thompson Nothing Man xxi. 203 It looks almost like two guys. One of ’em..half-asses the job up and the second one makes it stick.

… 2000 Big Issue 4 Sept. 17/1 It’s like, you can’t half-ass it in this band. It’s all or nothing.

2011 T. Hooper & A. Goldsher Midnight Movie 102 Having a father who half-assed his cancer treatment until he had one toe in the grave will affect you that way, you know?

The verb is back-formed from the adjective half-assed / half-ass / half-arsed / half-arse (which is also used as an adverb). From GDoS on adjective uses:

1st. cite 1865 in T.P. Lowry Stories the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell [Civil War context] There goes the half-assed Adjustant … 1949 H[enry] Miller Sexus Only a half-assed painter would deny the value of Cezanne’s work. … 1952 J[ames] Jones From Here to Eternity [WWII context] ‘What is pseudo?’ Prewitt asked. ‘It means half-assed,’ Angelo said … 2006 G[eorge] Pelicanos Night Gardener He’d see Asa on the football field, making half-assed tackles.

And on adverb uses:

1st cite 1934 J[ames] T. Farrell Young Manhood in Studs Lonigan [youth gang context] If I plan to do something, I don’t plan to do it half ass. … 1964 Larner & Tefferteller Addict on the Streets I was using stuff but I wasn’t hooked. It was still half-ass. … 1977 M[ichael] Herr Dispatches [Vietnam War context] The machine [was] running halfassed and depressed.

Uses of half–ass(ed) are heavy among working-class men in groups (in the military, prisons, work crews, youth gangs, criminal mobs, athletic teams, etc.), who seem to serve as the agents of its spread. It continues to sound street-tough and masculine. And, given its meanings — ‘inadequate, incompetent, second-rate’ and ‘unenthusiastic, lackluster, uninspired’ — dismissive or contemptuous.

A few cites from OED2 illustrating some of the variant forms of the adjective (full or clipped, American or British):

half-assed: 1955 W[illiam] Gaddis Recognitions A half-assed critic .. thinks he has to make you unhappy before you’ll take him seriously.

half-ass: 1959 N[orman] Mailer Advts. for Myself (1961) He spent years hobnobbing with gentlemanly shits and half-ass operators.

half-arsed: 1961 A[nthony] West Trend is Up You don’t know what it is to worry about what half-arsed thing your own son is going to pull on you next. … 1972 Observer 24 Sept. The sort of half-arsed dottiness they dish out in West End comedies.

The HALF part. Back to the two somewhat different senses of the adjective half-ass(ed), which share the meaning component ‘contributing only a portion of one’s being’

‘inadequate, incompetent, second-rate’ like halfway:

— AHD5 on the adjective halfway: 2 reaching or including only half or a portion; partial: halfway measures

‘unenthusiastic, lackluster, uninspired’ like halfhearted:

— AHD5 on the adjective halfhearted: exhibiting or feeling little interest, enthusiasm, or heart; uninspired: a halfhearted attempt at writing a novel

Halfway measures and halfhearted efforts. I’m suggesting that the immediate models supplying the HALF part of half-ass(ed) are these existing compound adjectives, halfway ‘half of the way (to completeness) and halfhearted ‘with half a heart (meaning courage or enthusiasm)’ — in both cases with half treated as picking out an upper bound at best and so softened to conveying ‘only a part or portion’ and implicating (in series) ‘only a bit (a small part or portion), little, not very much’.

The ASS part. Here I draw on some usages with ASS standing metonymically for the whole body, indeed the whole person.

First, from my 9/4/20 posting “Candy-ass faggots”, the noun candy-ass ‘a soft, timid, cowardly person’ and the nouns hard-ass / badass ‘a tough, uncompromising, intimidating person’ — with the soft or yielding character, vs. the hard or unyielding character, of the bodypart carried over to the whole body and then (metaphorically) to the embodied person.

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

For … possessive pronoun + ass used as a pronominal, there is … 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

Sociolinguistic note. The mildly taboo demotic nature of the bodypart noun, and its associations with working-class masculinity, tend to get carried over to the non-anatomical usages considered above: the adjective and adverb half-ass(ed), the verb half-ass, the nouns candy-ass and hard-ass, and the pronominal PossPro + ass. That’s the big generalization. But no doubt the sociolinguistic and stylistic details are different for each of the usages, so there’s a lot to be discovered here (and, of course, collecting fortuitously discovered examples from texts and off-the-cuff field work can take us only so far).

Effeminacy in the animal world, first in yesterday’s (3/28) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:

(#1) Not only elephant effeminacy, but also a cosmetic anagram, a rouge and peasant salve (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

And in one of my academic collages, with mice in the lab:

(#2) Continuing the theme of makeup for males

Lots of stuff here, far too much to treat properly in one posting. But let me start with the easy stuff.

The cosmetic anagram. ROUGE for ROGUE. This is, to start with, a frequent misspelling, frequent enough to have made it into Paul Brians’s Common Errors in English Usage; from the website:

rouge / rogue: You can create an artificial blush by using rouge, but a scoundrel who deserves to be called a rogue is unlikely to blush naturally. Many people write about “rouge software” when they mean “rogue software.”

But Wayno and Dan weren’t after ROUGE because it occurs as a misspelling of ROGUE, but just because it’s an anagram of ROGUE. Which moved me to imagine a message from the elephant to a critic of his grooming practices:

U OGRE: GORE U

(where GORE U is an elephantine euphemism for TUSK U, which in turn is proboscidean-talk for FUCK U)

And to suppose that the elephant has matriculated at ERGO U., a philosophical EU ORG.

rogue. The effeminacy theme enters in #1 through the elephant’s being a rogue, which tells us that the elephant is male (despite there being no conventional visual markers of its sex in the drawing). Then we have a male looking to buy rouge for himself at a makeup counter — a decidedly un-masculine act that then, within the system of current normative masculinity, would cause him to be labeled effeminate. From NOAD on the noun rogue (with the relevant subsection, 2a, bold-faced):

1 [a] a dishonest or unprincipled man: you are a rogue and an embezzler. [b] a person whose behavior one disapproves of but who is nonetheless likable or attractive (often used as a playful term of reproof): Cenzo, you old rogue! 2 [a] [usually as modifier] an elephant or other large wild animal driven away or living apart from the herd and having savage or destructive tendencies: a rogue elephant. [b] a person or thing that behaves in an aberrant, faulty, or unpredictable way: he hacked into data and ran rogue programs. [c] an inferior or defective specimen among many satisfactory ones, especially a seedling or plant deviating from the standard variety.

You also need to know that rogue elephants are old, male, and vicious (and, having been driven from the herd, solitary).

Makeup for men. First, guy-guy makeup.  As in a GQ piece, “The Beginner’s Guide to Makeup for Men: GQ grooming columnist Phillip Picardi makes the case for wearing concealer — and explains everything you need to know about trying it out” from 11/27/19.

NOAD on the noun concealer: ‘a flesh-toned cosmetic used to cover facial blemishes and dark circles under the eyes’

Dozens of products, from men’s grooming companies, from women’s cosmetics firms, and from specialty sources like the wonderfully macho-named War Paint For Men. On their site:

(#3) “Our cream-based concealer is great to hide dark circles, spots, scars and blemishes. Dab on and blend out with your finger or sponge” (comes in several skin tones) — hey guys, let out a war whoop as you get your faces ready for the day’s battles

But then some guys are willing on do a bit of walking on the makeup wild side. There’s even at least one cosmetics brand (offering lashes, eyeliner / eye shadow, and brushes) that caters specifically to them — and its name is perfect (warning: the company’s into new-agey ad copy):

Rouge & Rogue is an edgy cosmetics brand that not only accepts, but welcomes and embraces any and all expressions of beauty. We feel that makeup is a playground big enough for anyone to carve out their own identity and should be a place where one can feel at home in their own skin. We believe we are our own art form and that expression of beauty should only be contained by how big we dream it. Founded in 2016, our brand proudly celebrates individuality, inclusivity, and believe our differences make the beauty community a more beautiful and diverse place.

… Rouge & Rogue was born from the belief that we are our own form of art and that expression of beauty should only be contained by how big we dream it. Drawing influences from spirituality, individualism and occultism. It encapsulates the sense that opposite energies and contrary forces are all cosmically interconnected. A magical play between feminine and masculine, strength and vulnerability, light and dark.

Then from the South Florida Gay News, “Makeup Trends Bring Out the Best in Men” by Lawrence Aaron on 4/27/16:

Grooming can only take a man so far in bringing out his best self. For those days when we haven’t gotten enough sleep or just look tired, we could all use a boost. We’re happy to see that men are now letting their true selves shine through — with the help of a little makeup.

Makeup has the fantastic reputation of helping us show off whatever style we’re going for, whether it’s a natural, everyday look or something a little more on the wild side. And men are taking full advantage of this trend. From the subtle to the bold, men are proving that makeup truly is for everyone.

… While some men prefer the natural look, others prefer to showcase their makeup prowess. Our most artistic male friends use eyeliner and eyeshadow to set themselves apart from the pact [AZ: note eggcorn]. We think it’s a bold — and refreshing — way to make a late-night appearance at a party!

Consider singer / songwriter Adam Lambert, who offers a fantastic voice plus a flamboyant presentation of self that conveys intense carnal maleness — as with this remarkable performance costume, a studded codpiece:

(#4) High energy, gigantic fantasy dick, decked out in spikes for figurative battle (from my 4/17/11 posting “Bulges”, about codpieces)

Lambert enthusiastically presents himself as hypermasculine but theatrically showy, which many find un-masculine, hence straying into effeminate territory. As with his hair and especially, his makeup:

(#5) Adam Lambert at the VH1 Divas 2012 Red Carpet event; very much not a guy-guy, but to my mind really hot

On Lambert, from Wikipedia:

Adam Mitchel Lambert (born January 29, 1982) is an American singer and songwriter. … Lambert is known for his dynamic vocal performances that fuse his theatrical training with modern and classic genres.

Lambert rose to fame in 2009 after finishing as runner-up on the eighth season of American Idol. Later that year, he released his debut album For Your Entertainment

… Alongside his solo career, Lambert has collaborated with rock band Queen as lead vocalist for Queen + Adam Lambert since 2011, including several worldwide tours from 2014 to 2020. Their first album, Live Around the World, [was] released in October 2020

… His signature flamboyance and glam rock styling was a break-out moment in men’s fashion, duly noted by fashion publications and taste-makers, who compared him to Lady Gaga in terms of crossing style boundaries and being unabashedly individual [AZ: Lady Gaga also has a fantastic voice]

… Lambert is openly gay. He was in a relationship with Finnish entertainment reporter and reality TV personality Sauli Koskinen from November 2010 until April 2013 when Lambert announced that they split up amicably. From March to November 2019, Lambert was in a relationship with model Javi Costa Polo

Well, he’s a performer, and they can get away with a lot; and he’s a flagrantly gay performer. In the current system of normative masculinity, all homosexuality is fundamentally un-masculine and drastically effeminate; Lambert, like other openly gay performers, lives happily with that (however they might identify on various scales of f-gayness).

Other performers have publicly straddled lines about the nature of their sexuality, while freely bending their gender presentations. Famously, David Bowie, here in stage makeup as Ziggy Stardust:

(#6) Admirable red eye shadow

And of course Mick Jagger, who excels at displaying almost uncontrollable male sexuality while tossing out bits of sly gender play, as here:

(#7) Major black eye shadow, plus the sweaty torso (the famous lips he comes by naturally)

Meanwhile, offstage, there are ordinary men who want to sashay on the gender-presentation wild side via makeup, at least for some occasions; and there are web sites showing them how to do it. For example, on the Ogle School (hair – skin – nails) site, “Men’s Makeup Tutorial: Electric Neon Pink Glam!” by Jeff Chiarelli on 5/28/19:

Do you want to create a perfect cat eye in a fabulous shade of electric pink? This men’s makeup tutorial will explain how you can achieve the bold intensity neon makeup.

(#8) The before photo (note pointed rather than square jaw, and fairly large eyes — conventional “feminine” features; I have them myself)

(#9) After the labors of applying the makeup (and doing a nail job); with the gesture, the result could be read as a pretty woman with scruffy facial hair — or, of course, as a hot femmy guy, which is exactly what the model was aiming for

(If I could imagine going through the labors needed to achieve an effect like this, I’d probably go for emerald green eye shadow (which I think is really hot), and maybe midnight blue lips and nails. Even so, I balk at the trouble it would take to keep the eye makeup from running, the lipstick from rubbing off, and the nails from chipping. Honey, don’t even start on trying to get me to walk in heels.)

Words words words. Effeminate, femmy, fem, nelly, faggy, fag(got), fairy (boy), sissy (boy), pussyboy, whatever. Under the regime of current normative sexuality, the terms are all effectively synonyms, but such a usage can’t be adopted for further discussion, because it doesn’t accord with the usages of the affected persons (which are numerous, tied to different contexts, and often in contestation), nor can it serve as the basis for a conceptual analysis of the domain, which would require positing a large number of conceptual categories, coded very imperfectly in existing terms.

In any case, the viewpoint of current normative sexuality simply defeats — in my dark moments, I would say poisons — the enterprises of description and conceptual analysis. But it’s hard to get past, so here I can only make a few tiny steps towards progress on these enterprises.

On the descriptive side, the affected people see a large number of different views of (at least) self-perceived gender identities, self-peceived sexuality identities, gendered presentations of self, and sexual practices. Such differences in views in view show up (rather imperfectly) in the use of terminology: do you call yourself (and some others) a fem, a STR8 4 STR8s, a sissy-boy, a wolf, a t-room queen, a pussyboi, an MSM, gender-queer, a slave (or a master), a fish, a bottom (or a top), a regular guy, gay / straight / bi, on the DL, a sub (or a dom), a twink / bear / queen / leatherman / faerie / …, a circuit boy, a woman vs. a man (as used of gay men), and so on. A full list would be gigantic.

Like effeminate, these are just names, shorthand references to categories that can take a great deal of work to characterize (and to locate within their communities of use).

Meanwhile, people can perceive a kinship for others in a gender- or sexuality-related group that has no conventional name. Such unlabeled taxa in systems of folk categories are in fact quite common.

I can’t begin to cope with all this here. So I’ll just close this posting with some relevant tales of my life, from two postings on this blog.

Tales of childhood. My childhood was surprisingly sunny, all things considered, but there were some tough g&s-related moments in there.

From my 8/1/20 posting “Nuancy Nancy”:

[on nancy (boy), no longer very common in the US:] The corresponding weapon of verbal abuse used against me as a child was fairy (boy): I was able to fend off physical abuse with crazed aggression against the bullies, but the verbal abuse rained down on me pretty much constantly for years. My offense was not actual effeminacy (at the age of 8 I had a flagrantly effeminate buddy, and I understood that our ways were very different — though he did give me an early appreciation of opera; his intense enthusiasm for women’s high fashion didn’t take for me, but then you don’t expect your friends to share all your interests), but failure to conform to normative masculinity: I was nerdy and academically oriented; artistic (all that classical piano); deeply unathletic; profoundly uninterested in sports fandom; unaggressive; and given to friendships with girls.

Boys form themselves into loosely organized gangs, which enforce norms of masculinity amongst themselves; and those all-male groups continue into male associations in adolescence and adulthood. I have never been acceptable to these male groups, though I’ve sometimes been able to patch together a spot for myself off to the side, offering expertise, entertainment, or amiability.

In any case, a male who doesn’t fit these norms of masculinity is perceived as feminine — this is a binary world — and treated as “no better than a woman” [some of my childhood tormentors actually asked me, in all seriousness, I think, why I didn’t wear a dress, and they called me Arniella] (the extraordinary devaluing of women is central to the whole business), which is actually quite alarming [to guy-guys], since fems and fags and all the rest of us deviants are living exemplars of what could happen if you don’t satisfy the requirements of the male codes.

(Note: my sense of myself has always been, uncomplicatedly, that I am both male and masculine, just a non-standard form of masculine in which queerness, as defined by sexual desire, takes center stage. I am baffled by people who insist that my gender is non-binary. I have no problem with trans people and non-binary people, but I don’t think I’m among their number.)

And a little bit from my 10/5/21 posting “Masculinity comics 1”:

I can vouch for the strength of this particular bit of the Boy Code [“masculinity is the relentless repudiation of the feminine”] in 8-year-old boys … [some subclauses:] avoid women as friends rather than sexual conquests; avoid “feminine” interests (like the arts), avoid empathetic rather than competitive interactions (men improve one another, make one another into better men, by challenging each other agonistically), etc.

(Warning: as is my way, a soupçon of smart-ass street talk.)

Two on gendered topics, plus another cartoon that’s incomprehensible unless you recognize one of its elements (and only incidentally has a gendered bit in that element).

Masculine identity for young teens in a One Big Happy (a re-play from 4/26/10 in my comics feed today); a display of femininity in today’s Rhymes With Orange; and then, in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, on the equipment needed for a night lighthouse (with an incidental display of maleness).

One Big Happy. Rick Detorie — who draws OBH — with an advertisement for himself:

(#1) The Accidental Genius of Weasel High by Rick Detorie (2011); my high school was Wilson High, and I think there’s some intrinsic humor in weasels — as in  Weasels Ripped My Flesh (on this blog) — so I like the name

About the book, the short summary:

(#2)

A book for the Wimpy Kid [see Jeff Kinney’s book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid] who has grown into a Wimpy Teen: Larkin Pace [aged 14] desperately wants a new camcorder. How else is he going to become the next great filmmaker? But his dad won’t give him any money, his sister is determined to make his life miserable, and his nemesis Dalton Cooke is trying to steal his girlfriend. Now this height-challenged aspiring director must chronicle his wacky life for a freshman English assignment.

Larkin is short, eccentrically smart (about movies), artistic, and unaggressive, so he’s wimpy:

adj. wimpy: informal weak and cowardly or feeble: I’m too wimpy to express my own opinions. (NOAD)

And that’s bad for a boy to be — deviating notably from normative masculinity — but he will rise above it.

Rhymes With Orange. Piccolo / Price on an unhappy customer returning a pair of grotesquely high-heeled boots to the store.

(#3) Like Nancy Sinatra, she wanted boots for walking, but these are, let’s be brutally frank here, boots for displaying her body to entice men to fuck her — a presentation of herself as pussy in boots

(#4) Nancy Sinatra. Boots. These boots are, imaginably, made for walking.

(#5) Identità pointed toe ankle boot in genuine leather with internal zip and 100mm stiletto heel (it also comes with an, omigod, 120mm heel), $450.20 — these are fuckboots, aka pussy boots

The music. From Wikipedia:

“These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” is a hit song written by Lee Hazlewood and recorded by Nancy Sinatra [and released in 1966].

… Subsequently, many cover versions of the song have been released in a range of styles: metal, pop, rock, punk rock, country, dance, and industrial. Among the more notable versions are the singles released by Megadeth, Billy Ray Cyrus, Haley Reinhart, and Jessica Simpson.

You can listen to the 1966 recording here. Accusatory first verse and revenge chorus:

You keep sayin’ you’ve got somethin’ for me
Somethin’ you call love but confess
You’ve been a’messin’ where you shouldn’t ‘ve been a’messin’
And now someone else is getting all your best

These boots are made for walkin’
And that’s just what they’ll do
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you

The FMP posture. From Wikipedia:

High-heeled shoes, also known as high heels or simply heels, are a type of shoe in which the heel is tall or raised, resulting in the heel of the wearer’s foot being significantly higher off the ground than the wearer’s toes. High heels make the wearer appear taller, and also may serve to accentuate the muscle tone in the legs as well as make the wearer’s legs appear longer.

… Heels are often described as a sex symbol for women, and magazines like Playboy, as well as other media sources that primarily portray women in a sexual way, often do so using high heels. Paul Morris, a psychology researcher at the University of Portsmouth, argues that high heels accentuate “sex-specific aspects of female gait,” artificially increasing a woman’s femininity. Likewise, many see the arching of a woman’s back [and the accompanying pushing out of her buttocks] facilitated by wearing high heels as an imitation of a signal of a woman’s willingness to be courted by a man [see my 10/25/16 posting “tail in the air”, on the Fuck Me Please (FMP) (or lordosis) interpretation of tail in the air].

(“A signal of a woman’s willingness to be courted by a man” is a wonderful bit of cautious circumlocution.)

Bizarro. The night lighthouse.

(#6) What is that strange device? A mega-size night light, and if you don’t know about standard American night lights, the cartoon is incomprehensible (meanwhile, if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)

From NOAD:

compound noun nightlight [AZ: more often night light]: a small lamp, typically attached directly to an electrical outlet, providing a dim light during the night.

A slightly different style of night light, the Eaton Wiring 15 amp night light with rocker switch, in white:

(#7) The night light in #6 has no cover (shield, or guard); this one has an opaque cover; my bathroom night lights have always had translucent covers (the covers rotate, and can be snapped off)

The conventional American night light is a piece of good design for an everyday object: excellent for its function, easy to use, simple in design, and pleasing to look at.

When I went googling for night lights, I found tons of lights that were either elegantly stylish or fanciful (a squirrel holding an acornish object with a light bulb in it, flowers, moons, Tiffany night lights, various animals, and oh so much more). Text from the Wayfair company‘s site :

Whether you want a night light lamp to keep your baby soothed at night, or want night lights to keep your hallways safe after dark, browse our selection of night light wall lights. No matter how old you are, night lights can help put your mind at ease. We guarantee that you will find a practical plug in night light that will accent any décor. Whether you are looking for your standard night light lamp, or a fun themed nightlight, Wayfair has night lights that come in a number of styles, colors and themes…

Then I took the hint from this text and discovered that googling on standard night light brought me the things you expect to be able to find at a hardware store or an American all-purpose drugstore. (All of this took half an hour of my day, and I am resentful about that.)

Night light bonus. Your standard night light comes with a plug to insert flush into a wall socket; the ones above have two pins, but there are three-pin ones as well.

Well, that’s an object with protruding parts that you insert into an object with matching holes. Yes, insertive matched with receptive, so, inevitably, such plugs have been metaphorized as male (sporting a kind of dick) and the corresponding socket as female (housing a kind of pussy), thus providing the basis for jokes and a fair number of cartoons. We are relentlessly sexual beings (among many other things).

(This has turned out to be quite a large meze, but it’s only about one idiomatic slang expression. Well, men and masculinity come into the thing, and you know what can happen then.)

Reflecting a couple days ago on my Princeton days (1958-62) and the tangle of the attitudes of the (all-male) students at the time towards (among things) masculinity, male affiliation (as systematized in a pervasive system of male bands, the eating clubs of the time), women, homosexuals, race, and social class. The topic is vast, also deeply distressing to me personally, and I suspect that I’ll never manage to write about the bad parts of it in any detail — note: there were some stunningly good parts — but in all of that I retrieved one lexical item of some sociolinguistic interest (and entertainment value), one slang nugget: the idiomatic N1 + N2 compound noun face man / faceman / face-man.

A common noun frequently used among my friends, which was then also deployed as a proper noun nicknaming one of our classmates, a young man notable for his facial male beauty: everybody had to have a nickname (mine was Zot, for the Z of my name and the cartoon anteater), so we called him Face Man because he was a face man.

Images and links on male-beauty face man. In a posting yesterday (“Gallery: five beautiful male faces”): five images of facial male beauty from the movies and tv (Eastwood, Redford, Belmondo, Pitt, Ackles), along with links to some notable discussions of such beauty on this blog.

These five were chosen as auxiliary visuals to the posting you are now reading, not, omigod, as a photographic survey of the world of facial male beauty. They’re a tiny (though varied) sample of what’s out there, very much in line with the biases of elite men’s universities in the 1960s (which is where the current posting is focused): all Euro white guys.

In the dictionaries. From GDoS:

noun face-man [AZ: also face man, faceman] an attractive man, a ‘pretty boy’. [1st cite 1967-8 College Undergradate Slang Study: Face man A sexually attractive person, male. A socially adept person. 1980 Jamaican cite from the movie The Harder They Come. 1991 British cite, in the Guardian.]

The compound is certainly idiomatic (but subsective: a face man is a type of man), highly specialized from the generalized sense ‘man having to do with a face or faces’; a face man is a man notable for (the beauty of) his face. The subsective compound face man (with body-part N1 face) is available for ad hoc uses, for innovation in various senses: in particular, ‘portraitist, man who draws faces’ and ‘man attracted to, aroused by notable faces’ (vs., say, ass man).

Those three cites are all the ones that GDoS has, and their sources are so extraordinarily diverse that they suggest the idiom was independently innovated several times (my American college usage belongs with the first of the sources). But establishing the actual histories would require searches of Jamaican and British texts over (at least) the 1970s and 1980s.

What, then says the OED? Astonishingly, as far as I can tell, zero. OED3 (Sept. 2009) has this irrelevant entry:

noun face-man: a miner who works at the face of a mine.

but appears to have nothing for the male-beauty lexical item. It’s also not in NOAD or AHD5 — gaps that might suggest that the American (originally collegiate) male-beauty item fizzled out in general usage. But very much not so. Thanks to more or less constant reruns, we all have available to us male-beauty face man from the 1980s. From Wikipedia:

(#1) Dirk Benedict as Faceman

Lieutenant Templeton Arthur Peck, played by Dirk Benedict, is a fictional character and one of the four protagonists of the 1980s action-adventure television series The A-Team. A recognized war hero, he is often referred to as (The) Faceman, or simply Face. [AZ: he’s the really good-looking one.]

On to the idiom dictionaries. Here we immediately find a quite different idiom face man — also subsective, but with an entirely different N1, not body-part face, but a conventionally metaphorical face. This is entry 2 for face man in the Farlex Dictionary of Idioms (2022):

Someone who is used to represent something, such as a campaign or organization, favorably to the public. That guy is gorgeous — he should definitely be the face man for this ad campaign.

The N1 here, from NOAD:

noun face: 1 … [c] a manifestation or outward aspect of something: the unacceptable face of social drinking. [AZ: metaphorical; also in use further specialized to refer to someone (occasionally, something) serving as the representative of something: Camila Cabello is the new face of the Victoria’s Secret Bombshell fragrance.]

And we find a narrowing of male-beauty face man to incorporate an implicature that such a man is nothing more than a male beauty. Entry 1 in the Farlex Dictionary:

An attractive man who is otherwise dull or boring. Sure, he’s cute, but have you tried talking to him? He’s just a face man.

And the only entry in McGraw-Hill’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions (2006)

a good-looking young man with no personality. (Collegiate.) Harry is just a face man and as dull as dishwater.

(These entries are, of course, further evidence that male-beauty face man is alive and well.)

The categorization and vocabulary of male beauty. In current American mainstream culture (and in some much larger swath of cultures), there are at least three distinguishable conceptual categories of male beauty, each with an associated personal quality (and stage of life, though the men displaying these qualities can be of any age). I’ll start by giving the categories letter names (which in themselves have no content and call up no actual labels in English):

— C (suggesting Cupid), associated with playfulness (and childhood)

— A (suggesting Apollo or Adonis), associated with artistry (and youth)

— D (suggesting Dionysus, with Priapus lurking in the background), associated with power (and maturity)

Face men are men with facial beauty in category D. As we’ll see, male facial beauty in categories C and A tends to be devalued in current American culture, because it bears the twin stenches of femininity and homosexuality, which are seen not only as antithetical to true masculinity, but as undermining it; further discussion to come, later in this posting.

For an example of an adult man with facial beauty of category C, I offer this model and actor:

(#2) Matthew Gray Gubler, best known for his acting in the tv series Criminal Minds (see my 11/10/15 posting “Movies and tv: Matthew Gray Gubler”)

And, still in category C, an example of puckish, playful male beauty in an adult man (who is, by the way, a friend of mine):

(#3) Literary scholar and occasional nude model Richard Vytniorgu (see my 9/27/21 posting “Carnival for catamites”) in a 2021 self-portrait; my caption: “Adorably pixyish, with Romantic hair and faggy hands”

Then in category A, male beauty of a sort sometimes described as sensitive or delicate:

(#4) Sean Ford, a model and gay porn actor and observer of the worlds of homosexuality, sex work, love between men, and identities and personas (see my 6/4/21 posting “Fox and Friends I”)

And, still in category A male beauty of a sort sometimes described as feminine and pretty:

(#5) The Daily Jocks “party-wear poster boy, Jacob, aka DJ Debbie” (see my 4/6/22 posting “How do I look?”)

Often-used labels in English for referring to the three categories (bear in mind that these labels have a variety of other uses in the language, impinging in complex ways on these uses; in particular, American girls and women freely use cute to describe good-looking and sexy high-masculinity men who are, however, amiable and unthreatening — roughly, good-guy hot hunks):

— for C: cute, adorable, twinkish, boyish, pixyish

— for A: pretty, adorable, delicate, sensitive, feminine, twinkish, beautiful

— for D: handsome, good-looking, beautiful

Sociolinguistics. The sociolinguistic question is: who uses these labels, in what circumstances, about whom? And the answer is that it’s mind-bogglingly complex. But a significant part of the answer lies in the fact that the usages of (straight) females and (straight) males differ strikingly.

From my observations of female usage and the querying of several female informants, it seems clear that the females were entirely comfortable with using all of handsome, good-looking, and beautiful for facial male beauty in category D: in particular, they used beautiful with some frequency, found it unremarkable.

In a lifetime of experience with straight guys, I don’t think I’ve encountered a single one who was comfortable with these adjectives in this function, in particular with beautiful, which is pretty much unimaginable for them. You just cannot call another guy beautiful. Certainly in the context of an all-male college in 1958-62, no guy would have uttered the adjective in this sense in public. It would totally violate the Guy Code.

I’ve posted about the Codes repeatedly, but here’s a pastiche of Michael Kimmel on the Boy Code and Guy Code in modern American culture:

The first rule is that “masculinity is the relentless repudiation of the feminine”, and the central precept of the first rule is “No Sissy Stuff!”: avoid anything that might suggest homosexuality. Men subscribe to these ideals not because they want to impress women, let alone any inner drive or desire to test themselves against some abstract standards. They do it because they want to be positively evaluated by other men. Masculinity is largely a “homosocial” experience: performed for, and judged by, other men.

Now, here’s the thing. Pretty much everybody recognizes facial (and bodily) male beauty when they see it, and that includes young men in all-male living spaces. We recognize handsomeness in face and body because (among other things) it is highly valued and rewarded socially — so that you’d expect young men in those spaces to be keenly attuned to handsomeness.

If you are a man handsome in body and face, if you are tall (and, maybe, if you sport a big package), then you get more of the good things in our culture. You are much more likely to be selected as a leader, to be hired for jobs, promoted, and paid well. People are more inclined to listen to what you say and to defer to you. It’s a big fucking thing, and it has nothing to do with your qualities as a person; all of this comes from what nature gave you.

Because these things are prominent symbols of masculinity. And we value masculinity. In some contexts — like those all-male enclaves of young men in close quarters — we value masculinity a whole hell of a lot.

This is a fact, and you can legitimately view it as appallingly problematic, as I do. I am, after all, a small-boned 5ʹ 7ʺ guy with a dick on the small side and a face widely considered to be sweet, but on the feminine side, and culturally of rather marginal masculinity, with many close female non-sexual friends, tons of artistic interests, deep indifference to sports, and on and on — plus I actually am a faggot (and a feminist, too). So I am affronted by the sociocultural valuing of things that are basically flukes of nature, without actual intrinsic value to society. (I am also affronted, big time, by the sociocultural valuing of inherited privilege, but that plaint will have to wait for another day.)

In a cleft stick. Back to the guys at Princeton 60+ years ago. On the one hand, male facial beauty is in fact a big thing in our little community. On the other hand, the Guy Code rules in our world, exquisitely, and the existing vocabulary for male facial beauty all smacks of femininity, or worse.

So there’s this thing we want to talk about, in fact want to celebrate in some of our number, but the vocabulary we have would subject us to ridicule or worse. We are in a cleft stick.

The obvious solution is linguistic innovation. College kids, both sexes (but guys do it a lot for show), are given to inventing slang, lots of it, and passing it around. There are good reasons why they do it — affirming group identity is a powerful one — but somewhere down on the list of reasons is the actual need for an expression that will fill a gap in the available vocabulary.

English has rich resources for fresh expressions, among them the recruitment of an N + N compound from the essentially inexhaustible resource of possible but hitherto unused compounds. Somewhere in the American college world in the 1950s, some guy ventured on face + man ‘man having something to do with the bodypart the face’ specialized to refer to a man with a notably handsome face, an expression that would be free of the stigmas associated with Adj + N expressions that have adjectives like beautiful, or handsome, or even good-looking or attractive.

(In case you missed this, the problem was not adjectives like beautiful in themselves. These guys were entirely comfortable with talking about beautiful stuff in arts contexts (Eduard Hanslick’s The Beautiful in Music struck no one as feminine or queer, even if Hanslick did come down on the side of the lyrical Verdi rather than the muscular Wagner, whose music he detested), about handsome thoroughbreds or furniture, or of course about good-looking or attractive women. The problem arose only with references to male beauty.)

In any case, the innovation was inspired (it’s short and easy, just two very familiar syllables, and it makes some kind of sense on first hearing), it spread fast, and it’s lasted for 70 or so years. (If you’re a word person like me, it’s also entertaining. I mean, face man could be referring to a man who was nothing but a face, no body, no limbs, just a huge face.)

I am, however, left with the puzzle of why none of the standard general dictionaries has this compound in it. I know, I know, lexicography is hard.

From yesterday’s posting “Three responsibilities”:

— p. 11, Douglas Howard Pierce (Democratic), candidate for Senate full term: begins by greeting the readers — Hello, California 2022 Voter! — and continues in the 1sg with a big list of specific policy concerns, in what I think of as a Salesman presentation (framed as if this were an exchange between intimates, full of factual sales points) — a candidate presentation used by men but very rarely by women (mirroring the fact that the aggressive salesperson role is largely reserved for men in the wider culture)

— p. 12, John Thompson Parker (Peace and Freedom), candidate for Senate full term: brief statement of high-level policy concerns (Higher Purpose), no reference to the candidate; this is a distanced statement, authoritative in tone (Just the Facts) — another candidate presentation used by men, very rarely by women.

— p.  12, Alex Padilla (Democratic), candidate for Senate full term:  begins:

With California facing multiple emergencies from wildfires, Covid and the dual homeless and housing crisis, I went to the U.S.Senate to fight for California.

Continues in 1st-person with shirtsleeves-rolled up for action, policy-wonk stuff: Hire Me for the Job. In my experience, used equally by women and men.

— p. 13, Chuck Smith (Republican): candidate for Senate full term. In its entirety:

America must be governed according to the Constitution; For the People and By the People. I am a Marine Veteran, Retired Law Enforcement Professional and Patriot. I am also a Christian and I believe God wants to use me to help Him make America Righteous Again.

Wow. Higher Purpose, plus Life Experience, in this case the high-masculinity experience of the military (double points for the Marines) and law enforcement. (Women use Life Experience presentations, but usually not these experiences.) Plus Called by God (used much more often by men than by women).

— p. 13, Akinyemi Agbede (Democratic): candidate for Senate full term. In its entirety:

Rescue America!!! America must be Revived from collapsing. Therefore, electing Dr. Akinyemi Agbede, for the United States Senate is the answer.

Sui generis. A deeply felt call to action, but framed not in the 1sg, instead as if it came from some concerned party rather than Agbede himself, so that Agbede is referred in the 3sg, by his full name.

— p. 14, then two statements from candidates for Senate full term, with maximum-sized statements, of two very different sorts. In an image:

— Cordie Wiliams’s statement is a Hire Me For the Job with a bunch of extra stuff.

He begins by introducing himself, using the 1sg formula I’m FullName. In the information guide, Mike Schaefer (Democratic candidate for the District 4 Board of Equalization) also uses the formula; as does Michela Alioto-Pier (Democratic candidate for the District 2 Board of Equalization), in the uncontracted form I am FullName. And two candidates use the related formula My name is FullName: Matthew Harper (Republican candidate for the District 4 Board of Equalization) and Sally Lieber (Democratic candidate for the District 2 Board of Equalization).

These formulas function here as social glue rather than information, since they come right under the candidate’s name in the guide.

Williams then loads up on Life Experience points, four of them, all functioning to present him as strongly masculine (and dependable), leading with husband. I can’t imagine a female candidate identifying herself with I’m a wife, ...

Then comes father (both a proven stud and dependable), an identifier that is so important to Daniel R. Mercuri (Republican candidate for governor), that he actually puts it on the ballot as part of his occupation: Father/Business Owner.

Then the military, the Marines again. and then the occupation, doctor, one conventionally filled by men.

— Grundmann’s statement is unclassifiable looniness (in 1sg). (No qualified party preference means that he gave an affiliation that the elections board doesn’t recognize) As I said in yesterday’s posting,

an anti-vaxxer, climate-change denier, stolen-election, anti-abortion, and transgender-hostile raver. Hard to beat.

— p. 20, Robert C. Newman, II (Republican candidate for governor), with a big list of Higher Purposes:

I am Pro-God, pro-life, traditional marriage, U.S. and State Constitutions, Pro-second Amendment, military, legal immigration, agriculture, small business, truckers; School Choice, a patriot honoring veterans. [verbatim quote]

— p. 20, Jenny Rae Le Roux (Republican candidate for governor), begins:

Jenny Rae Le Roux is a business owner, mom, and entrepreneur who will revive the California Dream. … Under Jenny Rae’s leadership, California will again be known …

Framed in 3sg, with references to her by her first name (a naming practice that conveys either solidarity / intimacy or subordinate status). The only female candidate to identify herself as a mom (or mother). Otherwise, Hire Me For the Job.

— p. 23, Mariana B. Dawson (No Party Preference candidate for governor), the statement in its magnificent entirety:

F all politicians.

— p. 24, Daniel R. Mercuri (Republican candidate for governor), the statement in its entirety:

We are sovereigns, not serfs, with God-given constitutionally protected rights. I’m in this race to stop the erosion of our freedoms and put oath violators behind bars! With Jesus as my foundation, I’ll bring accountability back into our government, God back into our country, and stop treating the state like a business which enslaves Californians to meet a profit margin.

I have to confess that I’m not sure about the nature of the serfdom / slavery he inveighs against.

— p. 25, William Cavett “Skee” Saacke (Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor), another statement in its entirety (three masculine Life Experience points):

Husband, Father, Trial Attorney for 25 years [plus link]

— p. 31, Steve Glazer (Democratic candidate for controller), notable for 3sg usage:

Senator Steve Glazer is the Legislature’s toughest fiscal watchdog. … he demonstrated … Senator Glazer took on … He fought …

— p. 39, Veronika Fimbres (Green candidate for insurance commissioner), again the statement in its stunning entirety:

Nurse. Black Trans Woman. Single payer universal healthcare.

(plus a really fine photo)

— p. 44, Braden Murphy (Democratic candidate for the District 1 Board of Equalization), who leads with two masculine Life Experiences:

I’m a proud middle-class husband and father of four. While property taxes …

Quadruple stud attacks the property tax system.

That will do for this posting, though there’s plenty more there.

A physician writes to the NYT Magazine‘s ethicist about a patient who used a racist slur (the N-word) to his Black nursing staff and a homophobic slur (probably the queer F-word, but maybe the queer D-word) to his receptionist, and contemplated ways to support these staff members as an outsider, explaining in the letter that he’s “a Hispanic, cisgender male”.

The first identifier, Hispanic, is a racial / ethnic identifier, counterposed to Black, White, API, Indigenous, etc. The second identifier, cisgender, is clearly intended to be counterposed to homosexual / gay / queer, terms that refer to same-sex (rather than other-sex) sexual orientation; but that looks like some kind of category mistake, since the standard usage of cisgender (with the prefix cis– ‘on this side of’, opposed to trans– ‘on the other side of’) is for a sexual identity that aligns with birth sex (and so is opposed to transgender) — a matter that’s orthogonal to sexuality / sexual orientation. Indeed, most same-sex-oriented people are cisgender; I myself am a cisgender queer, one of millions, though we’re hugely outnumbered by the cisgender straights, who are all over the place. And while some transgender people are sexually oriented towards their own sex, some are oriented towards the other sex.

The text. From “Can I Withhold Medical Care From a Bigot?:  The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on a physician’s duties” by Kwame Anthony, Appiah on-line 6/7/22, in print 6/12/22, eliding the parts about the ethical issues to focus on the cisgender matter, with relevant bits bold-faced:

I am a physician, and last year, I took care of a white female patient in the hospital for a bacterial bloodstream infection. A few days into her stay, she began referring to Black staff members by the N-word and to our receptionist by an anti-gay slur. As the supervising physician, I made it clear that this was unacceptable. In general, with challenging patient behavior, I find it best to clearly lay out expectations and the consequences for violating them. So before talking to her, I discussed the situation with the nursing staff and hospital risk management, and we concluded that if she persisted in using this language, we would discharge her from the hospital, against her will if necessary.

I made all this clear to the patient. Thankfully, she stopped and completed the rest of her hospital treatment. But if she had continued using racist and homophobic slurs, would I have been wrong to force her to leave the hospital?

… Several Black nursing staff members felt strongly that this is what we needed to do, and I felt it was important to unequivocally support them. (I am a Hispanic, cisgender male.)

The cisgender usage issue. So, what’s up with the earnestly supportive doc?

At least two possibilities. One, which I’m very much hoping is not what’s going on, is that the doc subscribes to the deeply misguided theory that homosexuals are literally inverts, people of one sex in the bodies of the other — regardless of their feelings or beliefs about their sexual identities. In effect, unknowing or covert trans people.

If you genuinely believe in this idea — which has a long, sad, and complex history, complete with efforts to “treat” homosexuals by subjecting them to sex reassignment surgery — then you believe that saying you’re cisgender implies that you’re straight, so asserting cisgender status together with support for homosexuals would be expressing straight support for them.

Like I said, I really hope the doc isn’t an adherent of this crap.

Another possibility is that the doc has misapprehended the meaning of cisgender by abstracting, from the occasions where he’s heard or read it used, an extended meaning, a broader meaning than was intended by those who used it — fixing on something like ‘default for all of the SGO properties’ (sexual identity, gender identity, sexual orientation — elaboration below), or just ‘normal’ (in the SGO domain). In which case a cis sexual identity would come along with a sex-appropriate gender identity and an other-sex orientation.

SGO properties: the thumb-nail sketch. Three high-level categories and their primary subcategories (there are of course other subcategories; the subcategory structures can be quite complex):

— sexual identity, or SEX for short (sometimes, alas, referred to as gender): the primary subcategories of SEX are FEMALE and MALE

— gender identity, or GENDER for short: the primary subcategories of GENDER are FEMININE and MASCULINE

— sexuality, or sexual orientation, ORIENTATION for short: the primary subcategories of the category ORIENTATION are SAME-SEX and OTHER-SEX

The default settings:

— default SEX aligns with birth sex; cis(gender) means ‘having default SEX’

— default GENDER aligns with SEX (FEMININE with FEMALE, MASCULINE with MALE)

— ORIENTATION is, by default, OTHER-SEX

(Warning: a vulgar term for the primary female sexual anatomy will end up playing a big role in this posting.)

Where this is going: to an alternative name for an American President (#45, aka TFG); and to an alternative name for a classic American novel (by J.D. Salinger) — both names being exocentric V + N compound nouns, the first in English, the second in French. (I’ll call them exoVerNs for short.)

Conceptual background. We’re dealing here with V + N compound nouns in which the notional head is not the usual one — the referent of the second element (the N in the combination) — but instead is a referent not explicit in either element of the compound, a referent calculated from the semantic relationship between the two elements. For concreteness, we’ll look at the English exoVerN catchtfly, referring to a plant (especially one in the genus Silene or Lychnis) whose sticky stems may trap small insects; and the French exoVerN gratte-ciel, literally scrape-sky, referring to a very tall building of many stories.

These compounds have Agt/Inst (agentive / instrumental) semantics, with the N understood as the direct object of the V — so that the notional head is someone or something that Vs Ns: in our examples, a catchfly is something that (potentially) catches flies; and a gratte-ciel is something that (metaphorically) scrapes the sky.

In your everyday compound — like, say, English housefly — the second element (here, the N fly) supplies the notional head of the compound: the compound refers to a (kind of) fly — it’s subsective. In a more traditional terminology, it’s endocentric, with its center, its notional head, within the compound. An exoVerN, in contrast, is exocentric: a catchfly is a (kind of) plant (not a fly), a gratte-ciel is a (kind of) building (not a sky).

A catchfly and a gratte-ciel:

(#1) Silene armeria, the garden catchfly / Sweet William catchfly, from the Gardening Know How site, “Growing Silene Armeria: Learn How To Grow Catchfly Plants” by Bonnie L. Grant (image by Henk Hulshof)

(#2) One of my favorite gratte-ciel(s), looking aspirational: the Art Deco Chrysler Building, on the East Side of Manhattan, at the intersection of 42nd St. and Lexington Ave. in Midtown (James Maher Photography)

exoVerNs in French and English. As a vehicle for expressing Agt/Inst semantics in morphology, exoVerNs have very different status in the two languages. In French, exoVerNs are the routine device for this purpose; a number of them (like the metaphorical gratte-ciel) are conventionalized, but new ones can be freely created at any time. In contrast, in English, exoVerNs are a minor device for this purpose, available throughout the history of the language, occasionally becoming fashionable for a time (as in the 16th century), but never serving as the routine morphological expression of Agt/Inst semantics; instead, in English this service is provided by synthetic compounds of the form N + V-er, with the Agt/Inst suffix –er:

— flycatcher / fly-catcher, denoting something that catches flies (conventionally specialized to refer to a type of bird, but also available for semantically transparent use: this useful household device is a fly-catcher for kitchens; the catchfly is a fly-catcher plant)

— skyscraper, denoting a tall building of many stories, metaphorically something that scrapes the sky (gratte-ciel was how skyscraper got borrowed from English to French, French lacking  N1 + N2 compounds in general, including those in which N2 is of the form V + Agt/Inst suffix; there is a derived N gratteur ‘scratcher, scraper’, figuratively ‘moocher, parasite’, but nothing like *ciel-gratteur, lit. ‘sky-scraper’); cf. the semantically more transparent ice scraper, denoting a device for scraping ice (from the windshield of a car)

Some English exoVerNs over the centuries: catchfly and pickpocket (16th century), killjoy (18th century), suck-thumb ‘a child that sucks its thumb’ (19th century), my Grabpussy ‘POTUS #45’ (21st century; see below).

Semantic specialization. As has been noted by many observers, in the English 16th-century fashion for exoVerNs, we see a further semantic development: the many coinages referring to human beings (rather than inanimate objects) are predominantly derogatory, even insulting. Paradigm examples of this sort, the cutthroat killjoy pickpockets:

— cut-throat / cutthroat ‘throat-cutter, (NOAD) a murderer or other violent criminal’

— killjjoy ‘joy-killer, (NOAD) a person who deliberately spoils the enjoyment of others through resentful or overly sober behavior’

— pickpocket ‘pocket-picker, (NOAD) a person who steals from people’s pockets’

The derogatory connotation carries through to new coinages using the exoVerN pattern. Which brings us to my coinage (Squire / Helmet) Grabpussy as a derogatory name for POTUS #45.

The vile perquisites of stardom. The background, from Wikipedia:

On October 7, 2016, one month before the United States presidential election, The Washington Post published a video and accompanying article about then-presidential candidate [N N] and television host Billy Bush having “an extremely lewd conversation about women” in 2005. [N] and Bush were in a bus on their way to film an episode of Access Hollywood, a show owned by NBCUniversal. In the video, [N] described his attempt to seduce a married woman and indicated he might start kissing a woman that he and Bush were about to meet. He added, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Note: the problem here is not really the term pussy. This bit of sexual slang can be used boldly and celebratorily in reference to the vagina (or, in fact, to the male anus as a sexual, rather than excretory, organ) — the vagina viewed as a (powerful) source of pleasure, both receptive and insertive. The problem is in the contemptuous, utterly vile, attitude that [N N] flaunts towards women and their bodies.

In response, as surveyed in my 10/29/16 posting “Grab It While You Can”, a wave of pussy-grabbing protest art immediately broke, including this mail art by Ryan Tamares:

(#3)

And I was inspired to malign [N N] via the exoVerN name Grabpussy, which I’ve used ever since for the unspeakable former guy. I just love the way it rolls off the tongue.

And now to English vs. French. In e-mail yesterday from Luc Baronian, under the header “NV compounds in English”, at least initially about publications suggesting that exoVerNs appeared in English through influence from French — not a very likely hypothesis, given the full history of exoVerNs in English and the derogatory connotations of so many of the human exoVerNs in English, not notable in French. I mentioned my Grabpussy, and Luc responded (response lightly edited by me):

When I read Grabpussy it triggered L’Attrape-cœurs [an exoVerN, literally ‘catch-hearts’] in my brain, which is the French title for Catcher in the Rye, which is more romantic… though one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other

Yes, there’s a poignant sweetness in L’Attrape-cœurs that’s absent in Grabpussy, and that sweetness translates the aching earnestness of Salinger’s Agt/Inst derivative catcher into the romantic attachment of the exoVerN attrape-cœurs.

The background, from Wikipedia:

The Catcher in the Rye is an American novel by J. D. Salinger that was partially published in serial form from 1945–46 before being novelized in 1951. Originally intended for adults, it is often read by adolescents for its themes of angst and alienation, and as a critique of superficiality in society. The novel also deals with complex issues of innocence, identity, belonging, loss, connection, sex, and depression. The main character, Holden Caulfield, has become an icon for teenage rebellion. Caulfield, nearly of age, gives his opinion on just about everything as he narrates his recent life events. [AZ: I read it not long after it was published in full; I was 12 at the time, precocious in many ways, and familiar in a superficial way with the NYC settings of the novel]

… [the explanation of the title:] When asked if he cares about anything, Holden shares a selfless fantasy he has been thinking about (based on a mishearing of Robert Burns’s Comin’ Through the Rye), in which he imagines himself as making a job of saving children running through a field of rye by catching them before they fell off a nearby cliff (a “catcher in the rye”).

The passage in the novel:

I thought it was, “If a body catch a body,” Anyway, i keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and no ones around – nobody big I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of this crazy cliff. What i have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they are going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know its crazy, but that the only thing I’s really like to be. I know its crazy.

Part of Holden’s larger impulse to protect the innocence of little kids (also seen in his fixing the graffito FUCK to BOOK to keep the taboo item from the eyes of little kids). I saw that impulse at 12, and still do, as a lament for his own lost innocence, plus a glimmer of understanding that he was in fact becoming one of those phonies he constantly inveighed against.

(I remember thinking, again and again, “What an asshole!”, and then getting twinges of appreciation for the complexity of Holden’s feelings and his motives. And meta-twinges of admiration for Salinger’s writing; I was already sure that whatever I did in life, writing would be an important part of it, so I earnestly scrutinized what effects could be created through words on a page and how writers achieved them. I read that misheard-Burns passage over and over, analyzing every detail in its composition.)

In French, of course, Holden catches, not (just) the little kids’ bodies, but their hearts.

Today’s Zits strip manages to assemble three disparate bits of assumption about cognition into a joke about maternal shrillness:

(#1) So shrill — in particular, so high-pitched — that it takes a ladder to get up there and read what’s in the speech balloon

Whoa! You might not have subscribed to any or all of these cognitive stances built into the strip:

— conceptualizing speech and thought balloons as physical objects

— perceiving women’s speech as shrill — an impression that incorporates (among other things) sociocultural associations of high pitch and loudness with various personal and interactional states, and also the association of high pitch with femininity

— (metaphorically) associating high pitch with height above the ground

Balloons. From my 11/12/22 posting “Hold on to the bubble …”:

[A] Mother Goose and Grimm strip goes all meta with speech and thought bubbles / balloons:

(#2) [caption:] They’re physical objects, with words in them, and (like helium-filled balloons) they’ll rise in the air, taking their content — and, unless you fight against it, you too — with them. Aieee!

A recurrent theme on this blog, going back at least to my 10/8/13 posting “Speech balloons in Dingburg”, with a Zippy strip:

(#3) [caption:] The strip treats word balloons as physical objects, revealing the thoughts of whoever holds them

I’m merely noting that this goofy physicalist conceptualization of speech bubbloons first appeared on this blog in the posting above; I have no idea when it first turned up in the comics (no doubt much longer ago than we’re inclined to suppose). Such meta-play has certainly been recently popularized in a few strips: MGG and Zippy, as above, and especially in Pearls Before Swine

Shrillness. From NOAD:

adj. shrill: [a] (of a voice or sound) high-pitched and piercing: a shrill laugh. [b] derogatory (especially of a complaint or demand) loud and forceful: a concession to their shrill demands

The [a] sense is implicitly derogatory; a sound characterized as being piercing is an unpleasant sound. Part of what makes a sound piercing is loudness. Another part is its being (impressionistically) “sharp” in timbre / tone / vocal quality (“strident, raucous, screeching, harsh”) — presumably, the (impressionistic) effect of sounds with prominent high-pitched overtones.

So: three components to shrillness: high pitch; loudness; “sharpness” in timbre. The first of these is associated with femininity, but in a complex way. Other things being equal, mean F0 in speech is significantly higher for women than for men (primarily for physiological reasons), but there’s considerable overlap and also considerable individual variation — plus sociocultural jigglings of these settings (American men tending to pitch their voices lower than expected mean, Polish women tending to pitch their voices higher, plus culture-specific differences in particular registers, very often in combination with vocal quality differences (like falsetto, breathy voice, and creaky voice).

Out of all this emerges a persistent inclination of many men to evaluate women’s somewhat higher F0 as unpleasant: too high, too loud, and too strident. There seems to be little objective basis for these evaluations, which would appear to result from some men attending to any deviation from their expectations of appropriate feminine behavior as quiet and unobtrusive.

Meanwhile, high pitch and loudness accompany various personal states (like surprise, delight, and anger) and interactions (like admonishment, complaint, and command); a notable display of some of these by a woman might be seen as unfeminine. As Jeremy’s mother’s — surely justified — complaints seem to be in #1.

Up in the air. As if that weren’t enough, Scott and Borgman have also folded in a (cross-modal) metaphorical association of high F0 (there’s also such an association of high F2) with location above the ground, up in the air. So Connie Duncan’s complaints about Jeremy’s bad behavior are in a speech balloon over Jeremy and Pierce’s head, up where the boys can’t read them except by climbing up there on a ladder.

Combining speech balloons as physical objects with high-pitched speech as located up in the air is a bit of imaginative genius — deeply goofy, but inspired.

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a complex composition in which two centipedes look for bar snacks:

(#1) First bit of language play: the portmanteau barthropod = bar + arthropod, centipedes being arthropods, creatures in the gigantic phylum Arthropoda — also encompassing insects (including silverfish and springtails as well as flies, butterflies and moths, beetles, and more), spiders. crustaceans (among them, shrimp, crabs, lobsters, and barnacles), and millipedes (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

Then there’s a more subtle bit of language play in silverfish serving as bar snacks in a world in which centipedes drink in bars — given that Goldfish crackers (gold fish, silver fish, bring out the bronze) are often served as bar snacks in the real world.

(I note that the Eurasian carp species Carassius auratus, commonly called goldfish (because it is frequently golden in color), and the insect species with the metaphorical common name silverfish both have compound names that are fixed in their spelling, as solid — rather than hyphenated (gold-fish, silver-fish) or separated (gold fish, silver fish) — no doubt because their names aren’t semantically transparent.)

Centipedes. From Wikipedia:

(#2) There are a great many species of centipedes, including several found in house and garden; this is Scutigera coleoptrata (Wikipedia photo)

Centipedes (from Neo-Latin centi-, “hundred”, and Latin pes, pedis, “foot”) are predatory arthropods belonging to the class Chilopoda … of the subphylum Myriapoda, an arthropod group which includes millipedes and other multi-legged animals. Centipedes are elongated segmented (metameric) creatures with one pair of legs per body segment. All centipedes are venomous and can inflict painful bites, injecting their venom through pincer-like appendages known as forcipules. Despite the name, no centipede has exactly 100 pairs of legs; [the] number of legs ranges from 15 pairs to 191 pairs, always an odd number.

… Centipedes are predominantly generalist predators, which means they are adapted to eat a broad range of prey, including lumbricid earthworms, dipteran fly larvae, and collembolans [springtails] [and also silverfish].

The centipedes in #1. Wayno has drawn these so as to clearly differentiate them. Maybe they’re of different species (see above) — bars do often collect a variety of customers — or maybe they’re a larger gray male, with stiff antennae (on the left), and a smaller, more colorful female, with larger eyes and more graceful antennae (on the right). Even centipedes can be gendered along human lines, at least in cartoons.

Goldfish crackers as bar snacks. From the WSIL-tv site, “Goldfish is chasing a new demographic: Grown-ups” by DanielleWiener-Bronner, CNN Business, on 1/20/22:

Goldfish is growing up.

Pepperidge Farm, which makes the crackers, is rolling out a new line of snacks called Goldfish Mega Bites, which is designed to appeal to adults. Mega Bites come in two flavors: Sharp Cheddar and Cheddar Jalapeno.

… Pepperidge Farm launched Goldfish in the United States in 1962. At first, the snacks were targeted toward adults: Early on, the crackers were marketed as a bar snack, said [Janda Lukin, Chief Marketing Officer at Campbell Snacks].

Then from the The Mermaid NYC site — the Mermaid Inn oyster bar restaurant in the West Village — with a photo:

(#3) Goldfish are our bar snacks.

Wayno’s title. As so often, it’s yet another, different,  joke on the content of the Bizarro strip, playing on our venture into the insect world:

“They [AZ: the centipedes] already ate the barflies”

Centipedes do eat flies, and fly larvae, so, sadly, the centipedes in #1 might savagely ingest any fly that happened into that bar. But barfly is metaphorical, referring to (human) habitués of bars, who are presumably safe from the venom of house and garden centipedes, even those that frequent dive bars. (In any case, the bar in #1 looks pretty tony.)

From NOAD:

compound noun barfly: informal a person who spends much time drinking in bars: a beer-swilling barfly.

Note that this barfly is to be pronounced as a compound noun — /bár flàj/ — not as a manner adverbial /bárfli/ on a base noun / verb barf ‘vomit, puke’.

Received in e-mail this morning, from Dave Sayers on the Variationist mailing list:

We are delighted to announce the next in the 2023-24 series of online guest seminars here in the English section at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland — open to all!

On Tues 10 Oct at 11:00 East European Summer Time Mie Hiramoto (National University of Singapore) and Wes Robertson (Macquarie University, Australia) will give a talk titled ‘Framing masculinity and cultural norms: A case study of male VIO hair removal in Japan’.

That’s it. I was baffled by VIO hair removal; it has two possible parsings, and some large number of possible interpretations. And I was baffled by what looked like an unfamiliar initialism, VIO. Masculinity and cultural norms being one of my areas of interest within the G&S (gender and sexuality) field, I wasn’t willing to let these puzzles just slide.

Two parsings (and many interpretations).

 [ VIO [ hair removal ] ‘hair removal related to VIO’, where VIO is one of: a social group, the removers of hair (cf. born-again hair removal, transsexual hair removal, Ainu hair removal, Japanese hair removal ‘hair removal by Japanese (people)’), a method of hair removal (cf. laser hair removal), a philosophy of hair removal (cf. Buddhist hair removal), a place where hair removal is practiced (cf. Japanese hair removal ‘hair removal in Japan’), or any number of other interpretations

[ [ VIO hair ] removal] ‘removal of VIO hair’, where VIO hair is hair related to VIO, VIO admitting of a wide variety of interpretations: an area of the body (cf. armpit hair, pubic hair), a racioethnic group (cf. Black hair, Jewish hair), an evaluative characterization (cf. ugly hair, unwanted hair), a physical characterization (cf. kinky hair), a color (cf. gray hair), and much more

The (apparent) initialism VIO. Acronym dictionaries list a great many unpackings for VIO, but none even remotely hair-relevant. Searching on “VIO hair removal”, I eventually discovered that VIO is Japanese terminology for the bikini zone, with the initials standing for

V line (the pubes and genitals), I line (the perineum), O line (the anus)

So: the three Latin letters are to be understood as iconic signs, as (highly abstract) pictures of the three bodyparts, not as an acronym, not as the initials in an abbreviation. I don’t think that such an interpretation would ever have occurred to me.

No doubt it never occurred to Hiramoto and Robertson, steeped as they are in Japanese sexual culture, that the letter-sequence VIO would be utterly opaque to outsiders, but it is; I had no clue as to what their paper is about, except that hair removal and males are involved, and that the removal takes place in Japan.

Missing lexical items. A recurrent theme on this blog is that languages regularly lack ordinary-language, widely used lexical items for referential categories of things that are in fact relevant in the sociocultural context the language is embedded in.

So it is for English and the body region that extends from the waistline under the crotch to the anus: the pubes, genitals, perineum, and anus, taken together. This is a region of modesty, and it’s socioculturally highly salient in English-speaking communities generally, but English has no lexical item covering just that territory.

The composite phrase private parts would have been a good choice, but it’s already taken, as a euphemism for the central portion of the region of modesty, the genitals. In this case, it’s hard to see how we could get by with a narrow sense of the phrase (the current usage) alongside a broad sense (for the region of modesty). So we’ll bump along with things as they are, as we do in lots of other cases; people cope. Maybe someone can start a fashion for VIO in English.

Cover your VIO, dude! Were you born in a barn? (And while you’re at it, close the front door!)

This remarkable photo left me dumbstruck yesterday when Monica Macaulay passed it along on Facebook, having gotten it from the Art Deco FB group on 10/10:

The Pickle Sisters, a vaudeville group from the 1920s (photo: eBay.com)

[Here I repeat a note from the last posting I was able to manage, the 10/7 posting “THE shirts”, six days ago:

Note: this is massively a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting, indeed something of a celebration of my being able to post anything at all, not to mention through enormous pain in my swollen fingers. But no details about any of that here; at the moment, I truly am pleased to be still alive and want to show that I can manage a posting.

This caution applies fully to this Pickle Sisters posting.]

From the Art Deco site (text edited for mechanics):

Margaret, Mavis, Opal and Florence were just names that no one knew until they changed them to Dillie, Kosher, Gherkin, and Bee Bee [AZ: for bread and butter]. they recorded a few songs that got on the radio. They appeared in a newsreel that grabbed every moviegoer’s attention — and suddenly everyone was crazy about the Pickle Sisters. Green studded dresses started flying off the racks, children ransacked their parents’ wardrobe closet for anything that looked like a pickle hat, and “I’m Green for Your Form” reached 6 on the hit parade.

Alas, no recordings are available online; they might not have survived.

The category of the image on the Art Deco site. I had to file the image in one of my photo categories, at least six of which were all fitting:

clothing, food, women, musicians, phallic (all pickles being, by nature, phallic symbols)

On the grounds that the costumes the women are wearing are the truly remarkable aspect of the image, this one went into clothing.

The title of this posting. A play on the folk song title “Green Grow the Rushes, O”. From Wikipedia:

Green Grow the Rushes, O (alternatively “Ho” or “Oh”) (also known as “The Twelve Prophets”, “The Carol of the Twelve Numbers”, “The Teaching Song”, “The Dilly Song”, or “The Ten Commandments”), is an English folk song (Roud #133). It is sometimes sung as a Christmas carol. It often takes the form of antiphon, where one voice calls and is answered by a chorus.

… It is cumulative in structure, with each verse built up from the previous one by appending a new stanza. The first verse is:

I’ll sing you one, O
Green grow the rushes, O
What is your one, O?
One is one and all alone
And evermore shall be so.

There are many variants of the song, collected by musicologists including Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp from the West of England at the start of the twentieth century. The stanzas are clearly much corrupted and often obscure, but the references are generally agreed to be both Biblical and astronomical.