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(some vulgar slang, but (I think) tolerable by kids and the sexually modest) Today’s (4/24) morning name, the final line of a quatrain I learned as boy lore about 1950: How’s your ma and how’s your pa And how’s your sister Sue? And while we’re on the subject, How’s your old wazoo? (#1) The family-wazoo rhyme; I didn’t know the quantity adverbial up the wazoo at the time, so I mistakenly took wazoo to be a variant of street slang dick / cock ‘penis’ That is, I took #1 (with How’s your old…
A report on an exchange between me and my UNC-Chapel Hill colleague Bruno Estigarribia about polypersonalism (explanation to follow). As it unfolded in e-mail between us, presented here with BE’s permission. This is one in a series of reports on linguists musing about stuff and groping with ideas — showing people something of what we do professionally (before actual publication, if that eventually comes) and something of our passion for and commitment to this work. About BE. Some notes to…
This is a complicated background to a mishearing posting that has itself turned out to be more complex than I first imagined — a mishearing of the title word in the song “Cardinal” as recorded in 2024 by Kacey Musgraves. This posting is about the song; the titular bird, the northern cardinal; KM the singer-songwriter; KM’s wonderful performance of the song; and the song’s moving background story, inspired by the late country / folk singer John Prine. The song. “Cardinal” is from KM’s 2024 album…
Two things: in my e-mail, the list of the members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the 2026 class, including two linguists and two scholars of LGBTQ+ matters (I might have missed others); then through the USPS, the information booklet for this June’s California direct primary elections, with its massive list of candidates for governor (61 of them). AmAcad. The linguists are brought to you by the letter A: — Adele Goldberg (elected in Psychological Science), from Princeton…
(lots of man-on-man sex, described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) In yesterday’s (4/21) “Prodigious macrophallicity, contemptuous noblesse” on the g4p porn actor who performs under the name Malik Delgaty: a very big man with a really big dick and a frequently disdainful attitude towards the men who service that dick. In his first videos, his line readings were wooden, and he showed little interest in his partners as people. Over the years 2020 to…
(all about man-on-man sex, described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest) My latest gay porn DVD, ordered on sale and on spec, on the basis of Malik Delgaty’s brief appearance in a different MEN.com compendium, the The Men’s Room. The DVD Malik Delgaty: The Ultimate Ride (2026), with 4 scenes: “Ass Blaster” (2020), “(The) Bootyguard” (2022), “Bussy Control” (2023), and “Hook Up Trade” (2023). About MD, from Wikipedia: Justin Lesage (born 29 September…
A brief notice. A recent issue of the New Yorker recommends an earlier piece in the magazine, on an aspect of our mental lives, on mental imagery (experienced in the phenomenon of phantasia) — with which we can compare mental sounds (experienced in the phenomenon of auralia) — and how it works (or not) in different people: Annals of Inquiry: “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound: Research has linked the ability to visualize to a bewildering variety of human traits…
(man-on-man sexual encounters. described in street language, so totally not for kids or the sexually modest) Gay porn videos bring us depictions of a variety of sexual acts that few of us have actually encountered; one service of the performers in the business is to bring us moving experiences from the fantasy land of mansex, taking us places we’re unlikely to go in real life, places we might not have known existed, where men do things that we don’t even know how to talk about. Hot action — but…
Yesterday’s (4./17) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon shows two snowmen conferring: Left Snowman reassures Right Snowman that the frozen confection that they are eating in a cone (“fruit-flavored crushed ice” (NOAD)) is not in fact snow — that would smack of, ick, cannibalism — but instead sno, a substance that merely resembles snow (Wayno’s title for the cartoon is Faux Cone); it’s just a sno cone / sno-cone (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this…
As I regularly point out on this blog: if you look for it, ambiguity is everywhere; almost any expression can be understood in multiple ways, especially if you’re willing to entertain preposterous or unlikely ideas. So if you had a device that detects every possible ambiguity, it would be ringing forever and driving everyone crazy. […]
In two parts. First, an appreciation of a piece of intellectual history written by Geoff Pullum: Geoffrey K. Pullum, The prehistory of generative grammar and Chomsky’s debt to Emil Post, Historiographia Linguistica, October 2025 And then a puzzle about the source of the central idea in my very first academic publication (appearing in an extraordinarily […]
On 4/10/26 My USPS mail included a postcard showing penguins at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, with brief messages from three different people, each signed with a first name. So as not to get these people embroiled in this discussion, I’ll use their initials: E (common male name), I (uncommon female name), M (common male name). […]
Yesterday (4/14), my helper Isaac and I took a walk around the block (Ramona to Forest to Emerson to Homer and back to Ramona), taking advantage of the end of days of rain. Officially we were visiting the oregano plant on Emerson St. (see my 4/14 posting “Things I didn’t know”, in the section on “a […]
In today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro, a bank teller focuses on how quaint it is that a bank robber has written his demand on paper (the way they did it in old movies), while disregarding the pressing threat of the robber’s gun: (1) A quibbling triumph of details of form over the real threat of […]
Following up on my 4/13 posting “A host of voices”, on an enormous amount of variability in the way mental imagery and mental sounds work, in different people and for different purposes focusing on auralia, on hearing sounds in the mind, and on anauralia, its lack (in a small percentage of people), in various contexts: […]
Things I probably should have known, but didn’t, and have just recently discovered: one linguistic (on a pronunciation in BrE), one botanical (on the identity of a plant growing on the street a block from my house). How to say it: urinal in BrE. The porcelain bathroom fixture, a recurrent subject of my postings — […]
Today’s (4/14) Zippy strip has our Pinhead in conversation with a giant cement duck: (#1) An anatine day in Southampton From the thrillist site, “This Giant Duck on Long Island Has Serious Street Cred” by Jessica Sulima on 11/17/23: (#2) The Big Duck at home An orange-yellow beak juts out unassumingly over Flanders Road [in Southampton] […]
Following up on my 4/11 posting “Variability in our mental lives”, about (a)phantasia and (an)auralia, having to do with, respectively, visual and auditory mental experience and their lack: having, or not having, a mind’s eye or a mind’s voice. Almost immediately, it becomes clear that there’s an enormous amount of variability in the way mental […]
A couple days ago, with my helper Isaac, I was preparing triplefruit trail mix: a large pouch of commercial trail mix — of almonds, cashews, and (dried) cranberries — with added packs of (dried) blueberries and cherries. (A couple handfuls of this trail mix is then added to some granola — rolled oats with almonds, […]
From the Visit Pittsburgh site, for 4/12’s occasion, “How to Celebrate 412 Day in Pittsburgh”: We love celebrating Pittsburgh every day, but 412 Day is an extra excuse to honor all things Steel City. Whether you live in the 412 or outside of it (maybe the 724 or 814?), people far and wide come to […]
The background. In two postings on this blog. — on 8/9/23, in “The states of matter: coconut X”: the spreadable coconut fat (a semi-solid cream I use for daily treatment of my feet, legs, hands, and arms) melts (at around 77F) to to a free-flowing liquid; when cooled in the refrigerator, it’s transformed into a […]
Variability in language — from person to person, and for any particular person, from context to context — is all around us. It’s a routine aspect of our mental lives, amazingly complex in its details, but in no way surprising as a phenomenon. Similarly for variability in factual and procedural knowledge: impressively intricate, but familiar. […]
E-mail from Ellen Kaisse this morning: I don’t know how I failed to learn this for 60 years or so but Purcell’s cataloguer is a Z person, Franklin Zimmerman. You probably have known forever, but thought I’d mention it just in case. How can someone who died so young have 860 Z numbers? And probably […]
(about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) Welcome to the t-room. The noun t-room (now my favored term; also tearoom): a public men’s room (restroom, lavatory, toilet, etc.) frequented by men for (typically anonymous) sexual encounters; these encounters are clandestine, kept secret from other users of […]
Continuing my laborious examination of the 2026 MEN.com 5-part DVD The Men’s Room (TMR). So far, two postings on the goofy “human urinal” segment (#1): 4/8 in “human urinal” and 4/9 in “human urinal, the photo album” (nobody expects a porcelain pissoir to have human bodyparts and a fierce desire for sexual relations with men). […]
(raunchily entertaining but utterly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) To the photo in my “human urinal” posting yesterday — Tony D’Angelo reacting in surprise to Edward Terrant’s half-man half-pissoir (in a scene from The Men’s Room DVD from men.com) — two further images: — D’Angelo’s and Johnny Donovan’s faces while being serviced by Terrant’s […]
(a brief note about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) The hybrid. From “The Human Urinal” episode of MEN.com’s The Men’s Room DVD (the first scene (of 5) on my recently arrived copy of the 2/26 DVD: (#1) Surprise! (D’Angelo’s genitals fuzzed out for WordPress […]
A Jacquie Lawson digital greeting card from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell (who appears frequently on this blog) for Easter, featuring garden flowers, cresshead eggs (eggshells with human faces drawn on them and with green plants — cresses especially — sprouting from them, like hair), and, eventually, large amiable rabbits (not shown below). A […]
(thoroughly unacceptable for kids and the sexually modest) Or: The swains in Spain / Are effing profane. A posting on the occasion of my scoring my own copy of the gay porn romp Joey’s Surf Vacation (MEN.com, 2024), in which twink Joey Mills travels to Spain to learn to surf, but ends up mostly with […]
Walking the neighborhood with Isaac brought us to resting by a planter of weird plants — tall, stiff, hollow tubes in sections, living green things with no hint of flowers or seeds — outside Joe and the Juice at 240 Hamilton Ave. (at Ramona St., a block and a half from my house). I noted […]
