Today’s Zits, with Jeremy and Sara and their kisses:

An extension of commando to new territory, but still having to do with a protective layer.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang has commando in go commando,

(U.S. campus) to go without underwear

(possibly because “tough commandos need no such ‘soft’ apparel”) from Connie Eble’s Campus Slang in 1974 and on from there.

Going commando lacks the underwear layer; Jeremy’s extended it to lacking the lip gloss layer. You can imagine further possibilities.

Today’s Zippy, starring Mr. the Toad:

Here I’m focussing on the slang N + N compound stud muffin, which Toad has chosen to interpret parallel to blueberry muffin ‘muffin with blueberries in it’: stud ‘a large-headed piece of metal that pierces and projects from a surface, esp. for decoration’ (NOAD2) + muffin ‘small domed cake or quick bread’ = stud muffin ‘muffin with studs in it’.

But the customary sense of the compound involves different senses of each of the two components: U.S. slang stud ‘a sexually successful man’ (attested in Green’s Dictionary of Slang from the early 19th century) or ‘a man as a sexual performer’ (in Green from 1961 on) + muffin ‘an admirable person’ (U.S. campus slang from 1976 on) = stud muffin  (or stud-muffin or studmuffin) ‘an exceptionally successful and attractive person’ (campus slang, in Green from 1989 on), in my experience usually a man.

So in the Toad usage, the relationship of the two parts of the compound is containment in, while in the current slang usage it’s joint predication (a stud muffin is a muffin who’s a stud).

I think I’ll pass on the Toad stud muffins, thank you.

My last compendium of postings on my X Blog seems to have been on August 17th (here). Since then, a number of sets of photos passed on to me by Chris Ambidge, preceded by two other postings. The list, with brief comments. (Remember that this is (mostly) an X-rated site.)

8/24/12: The cocksucker’s gaze (link): the title says it all: what to do with your eyes while you’re taking care of business

9/9/12: Nighthawks X (link): an X-collage taking off from Edward Hopper’s painting

9/15/12: Naked protest (link): a set of photos of Spanish firefighters protesting via public nudity

9/15/12: An assortment (link): six assorted photos from Chris Ambidge, rear view and frontal

10/11/12: The spooge chronicles (link): three cum-face photos, illustrating the symbolic value of semen for gay men

10/11/12: Two on a rail, three on a snuggle bed (link): two group photos

10/22/12: More kilties (link): a set of men in kilts, exposing themselves inadvertently (or not)

10/22/12: Back to front (link): carefully composed butt shot; photo celebrating foreskins (with notes on slang)

That’s the title of an entertaining op-chart by Ben Schott in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times yesterday. The framing text:

By now, we’re all fluent in the language of corporate coffee – from Dunkaccinos® to Caffè Vanilla Frappuccinos®. But across America, independent coffee bars have developed private vocabularies to describe the intricate beverages they brew and the idiosyncrasies of those who order them.

The chart gives a wide selection of these two types of vocabularies.

Two points. One, that a great deal of slang is extraordinarily local, a fact that means that a complete, comprehensive slang dictionary is an impossibility. Two, that the instinct for language play is strong; given any opening, people will engage in all sorts of playful language (clippings, portmanteaus, rhyming and alliteration, puns, colorful metaphors, allusions, and so on).

There are a few recurring items in the chart, notably the clipping spro or ‘spro for espresso, sometimes combined with other elements, as in simulspro ‘two shots brewing at the same time’ (Cognoscenti Coffee, Los Angeles and Culver City); bro ‘spro ‘espresso in a demitasse, no spoon, plate, or sparkling water’ (Dogwood Coffee Co., Minneapolis); and ‘spro-mance ‘to be falling in love with (or especially fond of) a particular type of espresso’ (Olympia Coffee Roasting Co., Olympia WA).

Some drinks: cheeseburger, cheeseburger ‘a series of drinks made with a standard espresso’, after the Saturday Night Live sketch starring John Belushi and set in a diner that serves little but cheeseburgers (Sterling Coffee Roasters, Portland OR); the Devito ‘a 3.5-ounce Americano that is small, stout, and strong’, like actor Danny Devito (Blue Bottle Coffee, San Francisco and Oakland, and New York City); jitter juice ‘Toddy method cold brew’ (Gimme! Coffee, New York City and Finger Lakes NY); mama-jama ’20-ounce drink’ (Holy Spirit Espresso, Santa Fe NM).

Some customers: stranger danger ‘new customers who want 22-ounce cups and ask lots of time-consuming questions’ (Espresso Vivace, Seattle); crushtomer ‘a customer a staff member has a crush on’ (Joe, New York City and Philadelphia); sweaty Susan ‘an impatient customer’ (Trabant Coffee & Chai, Seattle); phonies ‘customers who order while on their cellphones’ (Birch Coffee, New York City).

The local landscape has been brightened for some time by flowering pear trees, which are planted all over the place; there’s even a Flowering Pear Drive in Cupertino. These are mostly Callery pears. Whole trees in bloom, and some flowers close up:

The Wikipedia page on the plant leads us to bodily secretions:

The Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) is a species of pear native to China and Vietnam,[2] in the family Rosaceae. It is a deciduous tree growing to 15 to 20 m (49 to 66 ft) tall, often with a conic to rounded crown. The leaves are oval, 4 to 7 cm (1.6 to 2.8 in) long, glossy dark green above, and slightly paler below. The white, five-petaled flowers are about 2 to 3 cm (0.79 to 1.2 in) in diameter. They are produced abundantly in early spring, before the leaves expand fully. The flowers smell like smegma.

The fruits of the Callery pear are small (less than one cm in diameter), and hard (almost woody) until softened by frost, after which they are readily taken by birds, which disperse the seeds in their droppings. In summer, the foliage is dark green and very smooth, and in autumn the leaves commonly turn brilliant colors, ranging from yellow and orange to more commonly red, pink, purple, and bronze.

… The species is named after the Italian-French sinologue Joseph-Marie Callery (1810–1862) who sent specimens of the tree to Europe from China.

“Smell like smegma” is the link to bodily secretions. From OED2:

Latin smēgma, < Greek σμῆγμα a detergent, soap, or unguent, < σμήχειν

Physiol. A sebaceous secretion, esp. that found under the prepuce.

1813   Pantologia,   Smegma,..soap. Any concrete substance resembling it, as the hardened matter often found, in the morning, on the lachrymal caruncle.

[from 1877 in the genital sense]

Glosses on some of the terms in this entry:

sebaceous: ‘pertaining to, of the nature of, or resembling tallow or fat; oily, greasy’; more specifically, ‘ having the nature or characteristics of sebum; connected with the secretion of sebum’ (OED2)

sebum: ‘the fatty secretion which lubricates the hair and the skin’ (OED2)

prepuce: ‘foreskin’

lachrymal caruncle: ‘red portion of the corner of the eye that contains modified sebaceous and sweat glands’ (Wikipedia)

Note the connection here between genital smegma and the hardened matter often found, in the morning, in the corner of the eye; both are seen as resembling soap.

This hardened matter has many slang names, among them:

matter, sleep, sleepies, sleepydust, crusties, eye crust, eye boogers, eye gunk, duck butter, gound

(OED2 marks gound — ‘foul matter, esp. that secreted in the eye’ — as obsolete; it has cites from c1000 through 1671.)

Technically, sleep in the eye is a type of rheum. Rheum in OED3 (June 2010):

Watery or mucous secretions, esp. as collecting in or dripping from the eyes, nose, or mouth, originally believed to originate in the brain or head and to be capable of causing disease

My favorite of the slang terms is duck butter. Once again a connection between genital smegma and ocular rheum. Green’s Dictionary of Slang (vol. 1, p. 1784) explains the compound as combining duck (from the smell, reminiscent of duck droppings) and butter (for the color). Green’s earliest cites for the compound are for the meaning ‘semen’ (from 1933 on), with the now dominant sense ‘genital smegma’ attested from 1965 on. Sources like Urban Dictionary add other senses, in particular ‘accumulated sweat and dead skin cells underneath the genitals’ and ‘natural anal lubrication’ (ass juice).

There are also two commercial products that have been named Duck Butter (no doubt jocularly): a brand of pipe joint lubricant and a brand of hot sauce. And you can find recipes for a spread called “duck butter”, made of cream cheese and blue cheese, with Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco sauce. No duck is involved in any of these cases.

It’s not hard to imagine a spread made from ground duck meat. Maple Leaf Farms, which markets ground duck meat, offers ten suggestions for using it:

1. There’s nothing better than burgers on the grill. Duck meat burgers are even better.
2. Liven up your party dip with a little ground duck meat. Insert chip and enjoy.
3. Easy casserole: mac and cheese, plus ground duck meat. Voila!
4. Who doesn’t love pizza? Ground duck meat is the perfect topping.
5. Add your own spices and make duck sausage.
6. For a quick comfort food, substitute ground duck meat for ground beef in chili.
7. Add some ground duck meat to scrambled eggs or an omelet for additional protein.
8. Ground Duck Meat + Veggies + Broth = Duck Vegetable Soup
9. Update sloppy joes by using ground duck meat instead of beef with your favorite barbeque sauce.
10. Add a twist to traditional tacos by adding ground duck meat. Easy and tasty!

#2 is as close as they get to duck meat spread. Mostly the suggestions are simple replacements of ground beef by ground duck.

There is, of course, something called duck sauce — but it’s a (Chinese) sauce *for* duck, not one made *from* duck.

Passed on by Karen Erickson on Facebook (with general agreement from the readers that I would appreciate it), this photo on the HappyPlace site from 9/10/12:

HappyPlace commentary:

Jon Hamm’s penis photographed shopping on Madison Avenue

It was a pretty muggy in New York this past week, and like most penises suffering through the humidity, Jon Hamm’s apparently tried its best to get a little fresh air. Either those are some very thin pants, or the ridges of his member are as well-defined as his jawline. We can practically count the veins. Never has junk sagged with such gravitas. (Also, his dick looks fat.)

On Jon Hamm, from Wikipedia:

Jonathan Daniel “Jon” Hamm (born March 10, 1971) is an American actor and director. For much of the mid-1990s, Hamm lived in Los Angeles as a struggling actor, but later appeared in multiple television series, including Providence, The Division, What About Brian, and Related. In 2000 he made his feature film debut in Clint Eastwood’s space adventure, Space Cowboys. The following year, Hamm appeared in the independent comedy, Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), in a minor role.

Hamm gained recognition for playing advertising executive Don Draper in the AMC drama series Mad Men—which premiered in July 2007. His performance earned him a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series in 2008. That same year, Hamm appeared in a remake of the science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still. His first leading film role was in the 2010 independent thriller Stolen. Hamm had a supporting role in The Town (2010), Sucker Punch (2011), and Bridesmaids (2011). He has also directed an episode of Mad Men. Hamm has also received eight Emmy nominations for his acting on Mad Men and 30 Rock.

Hamm is known for his inclination to go without underwear (as in this case) and so to sport a prominent bulge, or moose knuckle (links later in this posting). Here’s the close-up:

Yesterday’s news story on Hamm’s package, from the iVillage site:

AMC Tells Jon Hamm to Put on Some Underwear for ‘Mad Men’ Season 6! [by Terri Schwartz]

Jennifer Westfeldt is one lucky lady, because everything we’ve learned about her longtime boyfriend Jon Hamm suggests that he is one sexy man. We’re not talking about his great body (though he has that) or a handsome face (okay, he has that too), but a — ahem — package so prominent that it actually had to be toned down in AMC’s marketing for Mad Men.

Well, at least that’s how the story goes. A source for The New York Daily News claims that the marketing team for AMC had to Photoshop the promotional materials sent to members of the press during Seasons 1 and 2 of Mad Men to “make his privates more, well, private.” Hamm’s masculinity was apparently too in-your-face during filming of the upcoming sixth season as well, as a network employee reportedly had to tell the 42-year-old actor to make sure he wore underwear while filming his scenes.

“This season takes place in the 1960s, where the pants are very tight and leave little to the imagination,” the insider says. “Jon’s impressive anatomy is so distracting that they politely insisted on underwear.”

Going without underwear is known in slang as freeballing or going commando. The first of these involves an unusual compound verb freeball conveying something like ‘with balls free (of constraint)’. Green’s Dictionary of Slang (vol. 2, p. 231):

freeball (v.) (US) of a man, to wear no underwear.

with only one cite:

2001 ‘Randy Everhard’ Tattoo of a Naked Lady 229: I wasn’t wearimg any underwear — freeballin’ for the hell of it.

The idiom go commando I’ve looked at on this blog twice: here with a Zits involving a semantic extension of commando, plus a reference to Green’s Dictionary on the idiom; and here with an extended discussion of the idiom from Wikipedia and the OED.

Hi-def clothing (especially underwear), bulges, and moose knuckles have been enduring topics on my two blogs; it’s a gay penis thing. Some highlights:

This blog, 11/27/09: Hybrid underwear (link)

AZBlogX, 8/16/10: Hi-def (link)

AZBlogX, 9/21/10: Phallicity: hi-def meets hot dog (link)

This blog, 12/8/10: More trendy underwear (link)

This blog, 12/21/10: The Xmas package 4 (link)

This blog, 12/23/10: The Xmas package 5 (link)

AZBlogX, 1/9/11: Showoff (link)

AZBlogX, 1/21/11: Valentine gift (link)

AZBlogX, 4/12/11: Phallicity: anatomically correct paper dolls (link)

This blog, 4/17/11: Bulges (link)

This blog, 4/19/11: Basket : moose knuckle :: butt : ? (link)

AZBlogX, 5/1/11: The moose-knuckle jock watch (link).

AZBlogX, 5/3/11: Moose-knuckle days at Undergear (link)

This blog, 5/10/11: Monty Glover’s fortune cookies (link)

AZBlogX, 5/20/11: Crotch, or basket, shots (link)

This blog, 12/20/11: Another hunk and his sack (link)

AZBlogX, 7/29/12: On the moose knuckle watch (link)

This blog, 8/8/12: Olympic exposure (link)

In Today’s Zippy, our pinhead reverts to adolescence on a snowboard:

The slang in the body of the strip — airdog, boned out, shred, shred the gnar, pop, nollie, pow-wow — is all genuine snowboarder slang, listed in the enormous collection of snowboarding terms here. The title, “Shagnasty”, is slang, but apparently not slang specific to snowboarding.

I’ll start with the element shag, which is immensely versatile; NOAD2 has five entries for shag, some with distinguishable subentries:

shag¹
noun
1 [usu. as modifier] a carpet or rug with a long, rough pile: wall-to-wall shag carpet.
• [as modifier] (of a pile) long and rough: a shag pile.
• cloth with a velvet nap on one side.
2 a thick, tangled hairstyle or mass of hair: her hair was cut short in a boyish shag | [ as modifier ] : a shag cut.
3 (also shag tobacco )a coarse kind of cut tobacco.
ORIGIN late Old English sceacga ‘rough matted hair,’ of Germanic origin; related to Old Norse skegg ‘beard’ and shaw.

shag²
noun
a western European and Mediterranean cormorant with greenish-black plumage and a long curly crest in the breeding season. [Phalacrocorax aristotelis, family Phalacrocoracidae.]
• chiefly NZ any cormorant.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: perhaps a use of shag¹, with reference to the bird’s “shaggy” crest.

shag³
noun
a dance originating in the US in the 1930s and 1940s, characterized by vigorous hopping from one foot to the other.
ORIGIN of obscure derivation; perhaps from obsolete shag ‘waggle.’

shag⁴
verb [with obj.] Baseball chase or catch (fly balls) for practice.
ORIGIN early 20th cent.: of unknown origin.

shag⁵ Brit. vulgar slang
verb [with obj.]
have sexual intercourse with (someone).
noun
an act of sexual intercourse.
• [with adj.] a sexual partner of a specified ability.
ORIGIN late 18th cent.: of unknown origin.

The shag of the Zippy shagnasty (also spelled shag-nasty and shag nasty) is pretty clearly shag⁵ ‘fuck’ (as noun or verb, or possibly adjective used adverbially), but with a shift in sense to something like ‘extreme(ly), very’ (similar to one use of fucking), giving an enhanced variant of nasty. It’s in Spears’s American Slang and Colloquial Expressions (4th ed.) in this sense, with the cite I want out of this shag-nasty mess. Also in Urban Dictionary in this sense:

Unpleasant, grimy, unhygeinic, generally undesirable. [paraphrasable as ‘beyond nasty’] You spunk swallowing shagnasty fuckpig. (titwanker 4/10/03)

Usually used as a proper noun (someone’s name) to show disdain, contempt. Also used in jest on acquaintances. You shut yer fuckin’ trap, Shagnasty! (Ant 8/8/03)

But UD also has a reversed sense:

Freakin’ awesome. Anything that is deserving of a title stronger than ‘cool’ and in a positive sense. “That new shirt is shagnasty, bro” (Tmoney 2/16/05)

Reversals of this sort, converting a slang term of negative evaluation to one of positive evaluation, are quite common. And that’s probably what’s going on in the Zippy title. And possibly in this company name:

Shag Nasty Swimwear Manufacturer, Las Vegas NV: Shag Nasty manufactures the stylish swimwear and fitness clothing you design. If you’re a swimwear designer in need of a high quality and affordable manufacturer, Shag Nasty is the company for you. (link)

Digression on (mostly) irrelevant occurrences of shagnasty. First, there’s Shagnasty Isand:

Shagnasty Island is a small, rocky ice-free island lying 0.3 miles (0.5 km) west of Lenton Point in the north part of Clowes Bay, close off the south coast of Signy Island in the South Orkney Islands.

… The name … arose from the unpleasant state of the island due to its occupation by a large colony of blue-eyed shags (Phalicrocorax atriceps). [The blue-eyed shag is a type of cormorant: shag².] (link)

Next, there’s a family name Shagnasty:

Thank you for your interest in All Natural Shagnasty Raw Honey. Oliver Shagnasty, “The Cosmic Bee Keeper,” has been harvesting honey on Kauai since 1975. (link)

And possibly in this name of a bar and grill:

Shagnasty’s Food & Spirits, Deer Park WA, B.T. Shagnasty, Proprietor [though it's not clear whether this is serious; in any case, the place is now First Street Bar and Grill]

And there are occurrences that seem to evoke shag ‘fuck’ directly, as in the name of an X-rated British tv show, Shagnasty and Muttley, with main characters Randy Shagnasty (“Shag”) and Stan Muttley (“Mutt”).

Finally, there are band names:

Shagnasty: high energy rock & roll (link)

Shag Nasty UK – 1976-79 UK Punk Music (link)

These could be either flaunting nastiness or proclaiming awesomeness. My guess is that the first proclaims awesomeness, the second flaunts nastiness.

From various people on Facebook, this WPA poster with the compound fag bag:

The fag here is the fag of cigarette smoking, though it turns out that there are now two notable uses of fag bag involving the sexual slur fag: for reference to a fanny pack and as a personal slur.

The poster comes from a WPA public art project:

The Work Projects Administration (WPA) Poster Collection consists of 907 posters produced from 1936 to 1943 by various branches of the WPA. The posters were designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and educational programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia, with the strongest representation from California, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. (link)

The silkscreened poster above is described in a Library of Congress document as being the work of Louis Hirschman, created in Pennsylvania between 1941 and 1943, and characterizes it as a

Poster encouraging use of “fag bag” for disposal of matches, showing stylized Japanese soldier standing behind a tree with a match, with the rising sun in the background.

The connection to cigarettes is through matches, the most common use of matches in matchbooks being to light cigarettes. If these fag bags were also used to collect cigarette butts, the connection would be even stronger. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any information about what these fag bags looked like, how they were used, or who used them in what contexts. Nor do I fully understand how matches would aid the Axis.

We find the poster funny today, especially if we’re American, because of the intrusion of the sexual slur fag, which can contaminate any word with FAG in it, even food names (see “Fag food”).

But the fag in the poster has nothing to do with fag ‘homosexual male’. From OED2u under fag n. 4:

Etymology:  Abbreviation of fag-end n. [‘the last part or remnant of anything, after the best has been used; the extreme end’]
slang.
a. The fag-end of a cigarette [‘cigarette butt’].
b. A cheap cigarette.
c. Any cigarette (the current use).

The OED’s cites are all British except possibly for a 1945 cite from Lou Shelly’s Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary. That would accord with current impressions that fag ‘cigarette’ is a specifically British usage — a fact that makes the (decidedly American) poster above even more mysterious.

On to other uses of fag bag, starting with the fanny pack. From a site devoted to a particular product designed for carrying small firearms:

For covert carriage of a pistol the Fast Action Gunbag ["FagBag" or, "Fanny Pack"] can be a good option.

Illustrated here:

(A second photo shows him putting a pistol in the bag.)

Here, fanny pack and fagbag are simply treated as synonyms.

Digression on fanny packs, from Wikipedia:

A fanny pack (US, Canada), belt pack (US), belly bag (US), Buffalo pouch (US), hip sack (US), phany pack (US), waist bag (or waistpack) (US), hip pack (UK), bum bag (UK, Australia, Oceania, Ireland), or moon bag (South Africa), is a small fabric pouch secured with a zipper and worn by use of a strap around the hips or waist.

The name “fanny pack” is derived from the fact that they were traditionally worn facing the rear above the buttocks, for which “fanny” is a slang term in the United States.

Despite the name, fanny packs are often worn on the hip or (as in the photo) in front, rather than in back.

And despite their popularity with hikers and outdoorsmen, fanny packs have become associated with gay men, primarily because bags of all sorts (except shopping bags, duffel bags, gym bags, and backpacks) carried or worn by men — man purses, canvas bags, messenger bags, and fanny packs — are seen as unmasculine (because they are associated with women); men have wallets or carry business accessories like briefcases and attache cases.

Then it turns out that some people associate fanny packs with gay men because of the association of the buttocks with anal sex, which is widely seen as a specifically gay thing; see this foaming piece (from 4/2/05) on male fashion:

Why are there still people wearing fag bags? Ok the 80′s are over…we are not wearing biker shorts for the hell of it and women are not wearing enough make up to make them look like cheap 80′s B movie whores. Guys especially; dude all the other guys think you are gay ok, so while you are prouncing around in the mall acting like Mr. big shot with your purple or black leather fag bag just remember that every guy that is passing by you is silently calling you a fag. Another thing, why is it that so many body builders wear this crap? If I were gonna work that hard to impress chics, I’m not gonna go and ruin it by wearing a fag bag, so if you have been working out for years and the only thing you get is a smile from guys that pass by you..it’s time to drop the fag bag. Have you ever seen those fat guys with the hot chics? I bet they’re not wearing fag bags. In my opinion, they call it fanny pack because if you are a guy and you wear one of these long enough they’ll be packing your fanny with something besides a bag.

[Prouncing is a very common error for pronouncing, but here it seems to be a portmanteau of prancing and pouncing. Chics as a misspelling of chicks was new to me, but you can find more occurrences.]

So the fanny pack becomes associated with gay men, which facilitates the rude names fag bag / fagbag and queer bag / queerbag (also attested) for it. Fag bag has the edge over queer bag, because of its rhyme.

Now to the insult use, which combines fag and douchebag (for a different combination, see my posting on douchefag, here). There’s a “quiz” cite asking “Are you cool or are you a fag bag?”. I answered the questions and got this response:

You Scored as Fag bag
Ha Ha your Gay

And on Urban Dictionary fagbag and queerbag are glossed variously as ‘extreme fag, total and complete fag, someone who embodies all that is queer, too gay for their own good’. Like this prouncing, shirtlifting queer:

One UD contributor nails the source, in an entry that treats fag-bag (the third possible spelling) as having the libfix -bag:

a versatile suffix added to many offensive words to describe a person. classically used with root word “douche”, modern insult artists now utilize it with other more offensive root words.

douche-bag. fuck-bag. cock-bag. fag-bag. ass-bag. shit-bag. cunt-bag. sack-bag. etc.

So -bag now can function as an intensifying suffix.

We’re a long way from WWII fag bags.

Among today’s cartoons, a Zippy on manliness and a Bizarro on slang for money:

In the Zippy, Claude asserts his manliness by rising above cultural conventions associated with femininity and/or homosexuality: the colors pink, lavender, and purple, plus nail extensions and nail polish — combining them by having his extended nails done in hot pink and having his facial stubble (that symbol of masculinity) dyed lavender (that symbol of queerness). Zippy, meanwhile, has his own idiosyncratic assertions of security in his manhood, involving maple glazed doughnuts and the Moonlight Sonata, two items I had not previously associated with either women or gay men. (As a bonus, there’s the nouning by truncation in maple glazed for maple glazed doughnut.)

Meanwhile, “American business magnate, television personality and author” (as Wikipedia describes him, neutrally) Donald Trump figures in the Bizarro via his love of money (and the wielding of it). The refrigerator door has money symbols on it (as well as Bizarro symbols), dividends spelled out in refrigerator magnets, the figure of Rich “Uncle” Pennybags (“the round old man in a top hat who serves as the mascot of the game Monopoly”, as Wikipedia puts it), and slang synonyms for money on the grocery list (plus “You’re fired!” from Trump’s tv show The Apprentice).

On slang terms for money (for amounts, or for specific coins or bills), here’s a chatty column from Jed Hartman’s Words & Stuff column of 7/27/97, “The Roots of Money” (with the words from the Bizarro cartoon boldfaced):

Slang terms for money derive from some … unlikely places. I used to have trouble remembering whether a fin was a five-dollar bill and a sawbuck a ten, or vice versa, until I learned that “fin” (also “finnif”) is from “finf,” Yiddish for “five,” and “sawbuck” refers to a kind of sawhorse with crossed wooden legs, forming an X, the Roman numeral for 10. A double sawbuck is thus a twenty-dollar bill. “Sawbuck” is sometimes abbreviated “saw,” but not, of course “buck.” [buck meaning 'dollar']

The 1920s and 1930s were a particularly rich time in terms of American slang terms for money, some of which are still in use today. Some terms presumably referred to money’s use in purchasing food: bacon (as in “bring home”), bread, dough, and so on. (One term for counterfeit money was “sourdough.”) Other terms referred to the green color of American bills: cabbage, lettuce, kale, folding green, long green. Yiddish was the source of some terms, such as “gelt”though that particular one had been part of the English language since at least 1529, possibly by way of German and Dutch. There were other old terms for money: “rhino,” for instance, of unknown origin, entered the language in 1670, two centuries before the word was used as a shortened form of “rhinoceros.” I’m not sure, but I suspect that “jack” derives from “jackpot,” originally referring to the large amounts of money you could win playing a jacks-or-better poker game. Some slang money terms I have no idea of the origin of: mazuma, moolah, oscar, pap, plaster, rivets, scratch, spondulicks. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some monetary slang was invented by Damon [Runyon] or other writers of the time…

… slang terms for a dollar include ace (which term derives from a word referring to a copper coin in Latin), bean (as in bean counter), boffo (presumably from Variety headlines’ shortening of “box office” referring to money collected at theatres), bone, buck, bullet, case note, clam, coconut, fish (which in ’20s slang could also refer to a convict), frogskin, lizard, peso, rock, scrip, simoleon, and yellowback. The heavy dollar coin was once known as an iron man, plug, sinker, or wagon wheel. And the old Spanish peso coin could be physically broken into eight pieces, each worth one real, an eighth of a peso; hence the coins were called “pieces of eight,” and a 25-cent coin, a quarter dollar, is “two bits.”

(Note that in American English, the plural of several count nouns referring to a dollar as an amount can be used as synonyms for money: bucks, clams, and pesos, in particular. Other synonyms for money are mass nouns, like money itself.)

Today’s Bizarro plays on the association between penguins and tuxedos — with penguins in t-shirts and open-necked shirts instead of tuxedos:

  (#1)

There are other cartoons about penguins and tuxedos (and other cartoons about Casual Fridays, though I won’t look at them here); in fact, there are vast numbers of cartoons about penguins, which are easily anthropomorphized (they walk, or waddle, on two legs, and have arm-like, flipper-like wings) and are fascinatingly anomalous creatures (flightless birds that feed underwater and live in extreme climates and terrain). They are also gregarious and gather in large numbers, leading to cartoons about the difficulty of telling one penguin from another.

Now some words about actual penguins, and how some of them can easily be seen as wearing tuxedos, leading to altered photos of penguins *in* tuxedos and penguins as the emblems of tuexo rental stores; about tuxedos; and about Casual Fridays. Then a selection of penguin cartoons that haven’t already appeared on this blog.

Three penguin species that can be seen as tuxedo-wearing, if you’re inclined to anthropomorphize the creatures. The emperor penguin:

  (#2)

The Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) is the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species and is endemic to Antarctica. (link)

The emperor penguin figures in a cartoon by Carol Stokes, entertainingly taking off on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. in which the emperor is tricked into parading naked;

  (#3)

Next, the chinstrap and the Magellanic:

  (#4)

The Chinstrap Penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus) is a species of penguin which is found in the South Sandwich Islands, Antarctica, Deception Island, the South Orkneys, South Shetland, South Georgia, Bouvet Island and Balleny. Their name derives from the narrow black band under their heads which makes it appear as if they are wearing black helmets, making them one of the most easily identified types of penguin. (link)

  (#5)

The Magellanic Penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus) is a South American penguin, breeding in coastal Argentina, Chile and the Falkland Islands, with some migrating to Brazil where they are occasionally seen as far north as Rio de Janeiro. It is the most numerous of the Spheniscus penguins. Its nearest relatives are the African, the Humboldt and the Galápagos Penguins. They are native to the Strait of Magellan in the cool climate of southern Chile, hence the name’s origin.  (link)

It’s a Magellanic that served as the model for this image of a penguin in a tuxedo by graphic designer Gunter Schobel:

  (#6)

Penguins then lend themselves to serving as emblems for tuxedo rental stores, like Mister Penguin Tuxedo Sales and Rentals, with stores in Anderson IN, Ottawa IL, Pueblo CO, and Salina KS. And as mascots for non-clothing organizations, notably the Linux operating system:

  (#7)

Tux is a penguin character and the official mascot of the Linux kernel. Originally created as an entry to a Linux logo competition, Tux is the most commonly used icon for Linux, although different Linux distributions depict Tux in various styles. (link)

Tux is a cartoon penguin, not easily identified with any particular species. He figures in this cartoon by Rob Cottingham:

  (#8)

Now about tuxedos, from Wikipedia;

A tuxedo (American English) or dinner suit or dinner jacket (British English) is a semi-formal evening suit [the fully formal alternative is the tailcoat, or tails] distinguished primarily by satin or grosgrain facings on the jacket’s lapels and buttons and a similar stripe along the outseam of the trousers. The suit is typically black (though may be midnight blue) and commonly worn with a formal shirt, shoes and other accessories [a bow tie, cufflinks, and cummerbund, in particular], most traditionally in the form prescribed by the black tie dress code.

Although many etiquette and sartorial experts have insisted for a century that tuxedo is less correct than dinner jacket, the first written reference to tuxedo predates dinner jacket by two years: tuxedo first appeared in 1889 while dinner jacket is dated only to 1891. Contrarily, the Prince of Wales had apparently ordered a “tailless dinner jacket” from his tailors in 1885.

Today, the terms are variously used in different parts of the world. Tuxedo (or, colloquially, tux [note the clipping]) is used most often in North America; it was associated with Tuxedo Park, a planned resort community developed as a hunting club in the Ramapo Mountains near New York City. In Britain “tuxedo” is sometimes used to refer to the white version of the suit jacket. Conversely, in North American, the white jacket is generally known as a dinner jacket.

In French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian and also other European languages, the jacket is called a smoking. In French the shawl-collared version is le smoking Deauville, while the peaked-lapel version is le smoking Capri. In many places, it is often nicknamed a “penguin suit,” given its black and white colors. In the United States, it is also referred to as a “monkey suit” in slang. Street musicians with pet monkeys dressed them in miniature tuxes for entertainment.

And then Casual Friday. Again, from Wikipedia:

Casual Friday along with dressing casually during the week became very prevalent during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s rooted in a relaxed California-based business culture. The day (also known as Dress-down Friday, or simply Casual day) is an American and Canadian trend which has spread to other parts of the world, wherein some offices may celebrate a semi-reprieve from the constrictions of a formal dress code. Whereas, during the rest of the week, business shirts, suits, ties, trousers, and dress shoes would be the norm, on Casual Friday workers might be allowed to wear more casual dress. Some companies might allow jeans, casual blouses or T-shirts, hoodies, track jackets, and sneakers/running shoes or even stocking feet, but others require business casual or smart casual dress. Some offices allow a themed dress down day. On this day, even managers in such workplaces are allowed to dress down.

The tropical roots of Casual Friday go back to at least 1947 in Hawaii, when the city of Honolulu allowed workers to wear the Aloha shirt part of the year. The term Aloha Friday dates from the 1960s, when the shirts were worn on Fridays instead of normal business attire. It may be seen as a corporate response attempting to raise worker morale in a sometimes stifling white-collar office environment. In the late 1970s, when the production of cheap clothing outside the United States became more widespread, there was a massive campaign by large clothing producers to make Casual Friday a weekly event.

In workplaces that have no dress codes some employees enjoy ‘Formal Fridays’ by dressing up on Friday.

Once again, I note how much cultural knowledge it takes to appreciate the humor of cartoons. The connection between penguins and tuxedos, what tuxedos look like and when and why they’re worn, what Casual Friday is — all that and more goes into making the Bizarro cartoon interpretable at all, and funny when interpreted.

Finally, four bonus penguin cartoons, one with a penguin in Antarctica, one with penguins in no identifiable place, and two with them bizarrely out of place. In Antarctica, a nasty, foul-mouthed penguin from Phil Selby:

  (#9)

Then from Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens:

 (#10)

And then the bizarrely out-of-place. With Sigmund Freud (from Rob Middleton):

  (#11)

And in the executive office, from Randy Glasbergen:

  (#12)

Glasbergen is a penguin enthusiast. From his website on 3/18/10:

For some reason, I love drawing penguin cartoons and they are some the most popular cartoons on my website. Whenever I put up new penguin cartoons, I always get some nice e-mail about them. (A few years ago, a group of penguin researchers actually invited me to visit them at the South Pole!) I’ve never put a bunch of my penguin cartoons together in one collection before…until now.

Glasbergen Cartoon Service offers cartoons about penguins in love, cartoons about penguins in the wild, cartoons about penguins with computers, cartoons about penguin researchers, cartoons about party penguins, cartoons about penguin romance, cartoons about penguins mating, cartoons about religious penguins, cartoons about penguins in business, customer service penguins, cartoons about penguin diet and eating habits, cartoons for penguin greeting cards, penguin cartoon posters, penguin cartoon mugs, penguin cartoon t-shirts, and more.

And that’s just from *one* cartoonist.

Today’s Zippy has our pinhead hero looking for a clue:

A play on the ambiguity of clue and clueless. And an allusion to the board game Clue.

Zippy goes back and forth between the older meaning of clue (as in crime detection, and the board game) and a newer slangy meaning, as in these entries from NOAD2:

PHRASES   not have a clue informal   know nothing about something or about how to do something.

clueless   adjective informal  having no knowledge, understanding, or ability: you’re clueless about how to deal with the world.

Now, the board game:

Cluedo …, or Clue in North America, is a popular murder-mystery themed deduction board game originally published by Waddingtons in Leeds, England in 1949. It was devised by Anthony E. Pratt, a solicitor’s clerk and children’s entertainer from Birmingham, England. It is now published by the United States game and toy company Hasbro, which acquired its U.S. publisher Parker Brothers, and Waddingtons.

The object of the game is for players to strategically move around the game board (representing the rooms of a mansion), in the guise of one of the game’s six characters, collecting clues from which to deduce which suspect murdered the game’s perpetual victim, Dr. Black (Mr. Boddy in North American versions), and with which weapon and in what room. (link)

(The board game spawned a v ideo game, a musical, a book series, a film, and a  tv series, all called Clue.)

A solution to the mystery is of the form:

It’s SUSPECT in ROOM with WEAPON.

(as in Zippy’s “It’s Mrs. Peacock in th’ library with a candlestick.”)

There are six suspects: Miss Scarlett (spelled Miss Scarlet in North American versions after 1963 – a red piece), Colonel Mustard (a yellow piece), Mrs. White (a white piece), Reverend Green (named Mr. Green in pre-2002 North American versions – a green piece), Mrs. Peacock (a blue piece), Professor Plum (a purple piece).

And nine rooms (excluding the “cellar” on this diagram):

And six weapons: candlestick, dagger (knife in North American editions, each represented by a respective depiction), lead pipe (called lead piping in earlier UK editions; the early tokens were made out of actual lead and therefore pose a risk of lead poisoning), revolver (first depicted in the UK as a Dreyse M1907 semi-automatic pistol, and in North America as a Colt M1911 pistol; all current editions typically represent an Allan & Thurber Pepper-box revolver first depicted in the 1972 Clue edition), rope, wrench/spanner in North American editions and depicted as a monkey wrench (it may also be shown as an open-ended spanner in some traditional UK versions).

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a pun on page:

A pun of a type that juxtaposes two strikingly different contexts (here, court life in a monarchy, on the one hand, and the internet, on the other) in such a way that two different senses of an expression are both applicable.

The two senses of page, from NOAD2: historical senses and a computing sense:

[(1)] a boy in training for knighthood, ranking next below a squire in the personal service of a knight; a man or boy employed as the personal attendant of a person of rank

[(2)] a section of stored data, esp. that which can be displayed on a screen at one time

It’s sense (2) that’s relevant to Code 404: Page not found (an HTTP error code) — a message that has come to be played on in popular culture and slang. From Wikipedia:

During the May 2011 Greek protests, one of the most popular slogans was “Error 404: Democracy not found”.

In Tunisia political censorship led to 404 becoming so ubiquitous that Tunisian bloggers invented a character called Ammar they held responsible for its deployment.

In 2008, a study carried out by the telecommunications arm of the Post Office found that “404″ had become a slang synonym for “clueless” [itself a slang usage; see here] in the United Kingdom. Slang lexicographer Jonathon Green said that “404″ as a slang term had been driven by the “influence of technology” and young people, but at the time, such usage was relatively confined to London and other urban areas.

An eCard:

Well, smartass isn’t directly a compound of the adjective smart ’impertinent’ and the noun ass; instead, -ass serves here as an expressive extension of smart (as in sweet-ass ‘really sweet, big-ass ‘really big’, dumb-ass ‘really dumb’, etc.) — note He’s always asking smart-ass / dumb-ass questions — and the extended adjective was then nouned, giving an alternative to smart aleck, smartypants, and in fact the noun smarty.

The sense of smart here is glossed by NOAD2 as follows:

showing impertinence by making clever or sarcastic remarks: don’t get smart or I’ll whack you one.

And here’s Neal Whitman on obscentity-based intensifiers, taking off from sweet-ass car in an xkcd cartoon:

it looks like two of the obscenity-based intensifiers, fucking and as shit, can go with either predicative or attributive adjectives, while ass is limited to attributives. This peculiarity of ass may be a relic of its origin. Patricia O’Conner writes on her Grammarphobia blog that the original ass-suffixed adjective was big, and at first it was written big-assed, and referred to people that had big asses.

Then -assed was shortened to -ass, and -ass was reanalyzed as an intensifier and extended to use with other adjectives.

I was moved yesterday to wonder about the whoopee cushion, its history, and the various names for it. In particular, I mused that there would be no good way to predict what the thing is called in English, given a description of it; fart cushion would be the obvious candidate.

From Wikipedia:

A whoopee cushion, also known as a poo-poo cushion and Razzberry Cushion, is a practical joke device, used in a form of flatulence humor, which produces a noise resembling a raspberry or human flatulence. It is made from two sheets of rubber that are glued together at the edges. There is a small opening with a flap at one end for air to enter and leave the cushion.

To use it, one must first inflate it with air, then place it on a chair or squeeze it. Some whoopee cushions can be self-inflating. If placed on a chair, an unsuspecting victim will sit on the whoopee cushion, forcing the air out of the opening, which causes the flap to vibrate and create a loud, flatulence-like sound.

The Roman Emperor Elagabalus [aka Heliogabalus] was known to employ a prototype of whoopee cushions at dinner parties, although the modern version was re-invented in the 1920s by the JEM Rubber Co. of Toronto, Canada, by employees who were experimenting with scrap sheets of rubber. The owner of the company approached Samuel Sorenson Adams, the inventor of numerous practical jokes [like the joy buzzer, Cachoo sneezing powder, the snake nut can, and the dribble glass] and owner of S.S. Adams Co., with the newly invented item. Adams said that the item was “too vulgar” and would never sell. JEM Rubber offered the idea to the Johnson Smith Company which sold it with great success. S.S. Adams Co. later released its own version, but called it the “Razzberry Cushion.”

Leads to follow up: the word whoopee; the word raspberry / razzberry; the compound Bronx cheer; and then the clipping razz.

whoopee. From NOAD2:

whoopee  informal   exclam. expressing wild excitement or joy.

noun   wild revelry: hours of parades and whoopee.

• dated   a wild party.

PHRASES   make whoopee   1 celebrate wildly. 2 have sexual intercourse.

So whoopee cushion suggests the wild excitement or joy that the item affords to perpetrators. (By the way, the etymology of exclamations is notoriously difficult to track. How to tell who was the first to shout whoopee!?)

raspberry / razzberry and Bronx cheer. The histories here are fascinating. From Wikipedia (using reliable sources):

Blowing a raspberry, strawberry or making a Bronx cheer is to make a noise signifying derision, real or feigned. It is made by placing the tongue between the lips and blowing to produce a sound similar to flatulence. In the terminology of phonetics, this sound can be described as an unvoiced linguolabial trill [r̼̊]. It is never used in human language phonemically (e.g., to be used as a building block of words), but the sound is widely used across human cultures.

The nomenclature varies by country. In the United States, Bronx cheer is sometimes used; otherwise, in the U.S. and in other English-speaking countries, it is known as a raspberry, rasp, or razz – the origin of which is an instance of [Cockney] rhyming slang, in which the non-rhyming part of a rhyming phrase is used as a synonym. In this case, “raspberry tart” rhymes with “fart”. It was first recorded in 1890.

… The term “Bronx cheer” is used sarcastically because it is not a cheer; it is used to show disapproval. The term originated as a reference to the sound made by some spectators in Yankee Stadium, located in the Bronx

The verb razz. From NOAD2, I learn (to my surprise) that the verb is modern:

razz  informal   verb [with obj.]   tease (someone) playfully.

noun   another term for raspberry [‘derisive sound’].

ORIGIN early 20th cent.: [clipping] from informal razzberry, alteration of raspberry.

Zippy the Pinhead has long played with metastrips, in which the cartoonist figures as a character  or the characters talk about cartooning or both. Other strips sometimes indulge in this play: I posted about a recent Doonesbury in this vein, and Pearls Before Swine fairly often goes into this territory, with cartoonist Stefan Pastis appearing in the cartoon (as here). The current story line in Pearls goes deep into metacartooning. Yesterday’s strip:

  (#1)

and today’s:

  (#2)

Note the reference in the second to the convention in many comic strips that cartoon animals don’t wear clothes (some Disney characters, like Mickey Mouse, are exceptions).

Then there’s the slang verb flash, which is attested in the 19th century, but in its clearly sexual uses seems to have become current in the late 20th century. From OED2:

trans. (also refl.). slang. Of a man: to exhibit or expose (part of one’s body, esp. the genitals) briefly and indecently. Also intr.

1846   Swell’s Night Guide 119/1   Flash, to sport, to expose, he flashed his root.

1893   J. S. Farmer & W. E. Henley Slang III. 11/2   To flash it,..to expose the person.

1968 [implied in: J. Lock Lady Policeman ii. 11   City parks also have their share of ‘flashing’. (at flashing n.1 5)].

1969   M. Pugh Last Place Left xv. 108   He has a great faith in people like me. He would flash himself to the Sovereign before he searched my house.

1978   G. Vidal Kalki iv. 104   Men stared at me. Some leered. None, thank God, flashed.

Similarly for the noun flasher :

slang. One who ‘flashes’ or exposes himself indecently. See flash v.1 13c.

[1896   J. S. Farmer & W. E. Henley Slang IV. 297/2   Meat-flashing,..exposure of the person. Hence meat-flasher = a public offender in this line.]

1974   Kingston (Ont.) News 10 Jan. 2/6   A middle aged man indecently exposed himself to a female student… There were several reports of a so-called ‘phantom flasher’ in the University..area.

1976   A. Powell To keep Ball Rolling i. iii. 44   He was apparently a ‘flasher’, who had just exposed himself.

Commenter John yesterday on my “whoopee cushion” posting:

So the point of intersection of “making whoopie” and “razzberry” is quiff?

Well, it turns out that in addition to quiff referring to a hair style (first discussed in this blog here), it has plenty of other senses. What I said in that first quiff posting was:

(Quiff is a word that sounds like it ought to be at least naughty, if not actually coarse slang — “his quiff in her quim”, something like that — and indeed a huge variety of slang senses have been reported. Apparently, it’s just one of those dirty-sounding words that can get pressed into service for any old off-color meaning. Including as an onomatopoetic verb meaning ‘fart’.)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists quite a variety of meanings, and Urban Dictionary adds more.

From Green, on the noun quiff in anatomical or sexual senses:

1 the vagina [cites from c.1709 through 2001]

2 women, esp. sexually available ones [cites from c.1930 through 2002] [a common metonymic shift from sense 1]

3 (US) a homosexual [cites from 1950 through 1980] [another common shift, metaphorical in character, from 'woman' to 'homosexual man']

And it has the verb quiff ‘to have sexual intercourse’ (cites from 1674 though 1811 — so now obsolete).

(Compare quim, with the senses ‘the vagina’; ‘a woman; women collectively viewed in a sexual context’; (US gay) ‘the anus’; (US gay/prison) ‘a heterosexual inmate, subject to homosexual rape’; ‘a general derog. term of abuse’ — this last a common sense-development from ‘woman’ or ‘homosexual male’.)

Urban Dictionary has the sense that my commenter John was presumably alluding to, combining vaginal sex (making whoopee / whoopie) and farting (the razzberry); in one formulation:

Air admitting from the vagina mixed with bodily fluid making a farting sound.. otherwise known as the pussy fart.

Other entries have the hairstyle, plus ‘fart’, ‘vagina’, ‘slut, prostitute’, ‘homosexual man’, and a generic derogatory.

In the NYT on May 21st, a front-page story by Leslie Kaufman, “For the Word on the Street, Courts Call Up an Online Witness”, beginning:

The wheels of justice move slowly sometimes, but not, apparently, as slowly as Webster’s New World Dictionary.

Slang has always been a challenge for the courts in cases that involve vulgar or insulting language. Conventional dictionaries lag the spoken word by design. That has lawyers and judges turning to a more fluid source of definitions: Urban Dictionary, a crowdsourced collection of slang words on the Internet.

The online site, created by a college freshman in 1999, has found itself in the thick of cases involving everything from sexual harassment to armed robbery to requests for personalized license plates, as courts look to discern meaning and intent in the modern lexicon.

Some examples:

Last month, Urban Dictionary was cited in a financial restitution case in Wisconsin, where an appeals court was reviewing the term “jack” because a convicted robber and his companion had referred to themselves as the “jack boys.”

The court noted, however, that according to Urban Dictionary, “jack” means “to steal, or take from an unsuspecting person or store.” It then rejected the convicted man’s claim that he should not have to make restitution to the owner of a van he stole to use in a robbery.

Two weeks earlier, a court in Tennessee noted that a phrase used by a manager at a supply chain logistics company — “to nut” — was defined by Urban Dictionary as “to ejaculate.” After weighing that and other evidence, it rejected a motion to dismiss a sexual harassment claim by female employees.

It can take years for slang terms to be included in traditional dictionaries, whose editors want to be certain that the words have staying power. By contrast, some new words rush into Urban Dictionary in less than a day. As a result, the site has cropped up in dozens of court cases in recent years, according to a Lexis database of federal and state cases, although the outcome rarely rests solely on a definition.

This trend is likely to accelerate, according to Greg Lastowka, a professor of law at Rutgers specializing in Internet and property law. “If it is Urban Dictionary or hire some linguistic expert to do a survey, it seems like a pretty cheap, pretty good alternative for the court,” he said.

In the last year alone, the Web site was used by courts to define iron (“handgun”); catfishing (“the phenomenon of Internet predators that fabricate online identities”); dap (“the knocking of fists together as a greeting, or form of respect”); and grenade (“the solitary ugly girl always found with a group of hotties”).

Consensus is supposed to govern the utility of UD. However:

The idea that consensus rules has its skeptics. Tom Dalzell, senior editor of The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, is a fan of Urban Dictionary, but he argues that the site has obvious limits.

“Using them in court is a terrible idea; they don’t claim to be an authority or a reference,” he said. “Some of the stuff on their site is very good, but there is more chaff than wheat. It is a lazy person’s resource.”

Urban Dictionary’s move into the legal arena surprises no one more than Aaron Peckham, its founder, who has continued to run it like a homegrown business. Mr. Peckham, who is 32 and lives in San Francisco, has never taken venture capital money and still runs the entire site from his laptop. For revenue, he contracts with others to put advertising on the site and to make merchandise — like T-shirts and mugs printed with some of the site’s more interesting definitions. He has no paid staff members, though he does contract for help with things like advertising and design.

Still, he argues, the development of Urban Dictionary into a tool for courts is “logical.”

When he began the site in 1999 at California Polytechnic State University, it was meant to be a parody. “Friends and I would sit around and make up words,” he said. As the Internet grew in size, however, contributors from around the globe began to join in and enforce a kind of democratic evaluation of the words.

…  Users can contribute their own definitions to existing words. The word “emo,” for instance, currently has more than 1,100 definitions — including “Like a Goth, only much less dark and much more Harry Potter,” (definition No. 3) and “sensitive music and the kids that cry while listening to it” (No. 1,122).

The definitions are ranked by popularity, with the idea that democracy will reveal some truth about how the word is really used. “Readers can tell not to put too much faith in a definition that is really unpopular,” Mr. Peckham said.

He added: “Dictionaries may be more heavily researched, but the real authority on language and the meaning comes from people who speak the language. The whole point of Urban Dictionary is we are defining our own language as we speak it.”

Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary, points out, however, that popular does not mean accurate. “People may like a word because it was posted by their friend or because it was funny,” he said. (Mr. Peckham said that private analyses the site has conducted show that “funny” is the No. 1 reason people give for voting for posts.)

A great many of the UD definitions (including some that are ranked highly) are obviously jocular. But beyond that, the fact is that ordinary people are not very good at defining words explicitly. They give exemplars instead of definitions; from the 338 definitions for nerd:

George McFly in Back to the Future before Marty went back in time an altered history to make Biff George McFly’s bitch.

Or they supply what they take to be information about the referent rather than a definition; two for nerd:

Guys who’ll be running the country in the future.

A person constantly criticized for being overly obsessed with his/her school work. The criticizers usually work for the nerds.

Or they provide evaluation rather than definition; again for nerd:

A man who because of his tiny penis and ugly looks, never has a girlfriend and spends all day playing video games and pretending to be a gangsta.

In general, as in the last example, they supply connotations for the word from their personal experience with it, or characterize contexts in which they’d use the word, and these “definitions” will depend enormously on what examples the definers hit on first.

Worse than that, slang items are highly variable in meaning according to who uses them in what contexts for what purposes. (See my comments on the many uses of quiff here.) In addition, a huge number of very frequent nouns, verbs, and adjectives have slang uses as well as neutral uses, and some of the slang uses would be problematic in certain contexts — but context (and speaker’s intent), not just hearer’s understanding, are crucial in assessing what’s going on in linguistic exchanges, and legal rulings need to take that into account.

It began with the porn flick Twinkalicious (a 5-hour compilation of scenes featuring twink sex, that is, sex between twinks). The front cover of the DVD (showing a twink sucking cock) and the back cover (a montage of twinks in heat) can be viewed in the posting “Twinkalicious porn” on AZBlogX (where such images are allowed). The word twinkalicious has two parts, the twink part (with a piece of sexuality slang) and the -licious part (related in some way to delicious). I’ll comment on both parts. But first, some other combinations of these two parts.

More -licious sex. Next up: a series of three Twink-A-Licious porn flicks, the front covers of which are (just barely) WordPressable:

   (#1)

Summary of the action in this flick (courtesy of the blogger 8TeenBoy) on the TLA Video site, here.

  (#2)

  (#3)

My “Twinkalicious porn” posting has the back cover of the first of these (#3 there), an extremely crowded montage of twink sex.

Then came two bloggers, one using the name Twinkilicious, the other the name Twinkielicious.

Finally, there’s a Twinkylicious porn site; the image from the home page on the Twinkylicious.com site (which offers huge numbers of films of twinkies having sex, plus still photos of hot twinkies) is #4 in my “Twinkalicious porn” posting. And there’s also a Twinkylicious Bareback porn site.

So there is variation in the way twink / twinkie / twinky gets combined with -(V)licious: twinkalicious, twink-a-licious, twinkilicious, twinkielicious, twinkylicious. Compare these to my treatment of scruffalicious and scruffilicious.

On twink and twinkie. (Twinky is sometimes found as a variant of the usual twinkie.) Discussion of these items (and on the Hostess snack food) in a posting of mine on male photographer Howard Roffman, who specializes in twinks. Here’s an Urban Dictionary entry (by M. Alan Wood 2/17/08) on twinkalicious that makes a stab at defining twink:

Formed by a combination of the words twink and delicious. It is used as an adjective to describe a very attractive young white male. Twinks tend to be under 25 years old, slim, no body hair, stylish hair and clothing, enjoy clubbing, effeminate and somewhat arrogant. They are also considered to be the ultimate prize for many older gay males, a trophy boyfriend.

Twinkalicious can also be used to describe a situation or setting.

Have you been to the new club downtown? I heard it is twinkalicious. Packed wall to wall with hotties.

This entry has several of the problems that afflict UD entries (some discussion here). It describes a stereotype of the twink, injects the writer’s opinions and attitudes, and adds side information that’s not really relevant to the definition.

For the record: twinks are by no means all white — there are Asian and Asian American twinks of several ethnicities, and some black ones as well — and many are in no way effeminate, or arrogant, for that matter. What they do have is youthful male beauty, embodying the ideal of Apollo rather than Priapus. There are muscle twinks and preppy twinks and even leather twinks. Light body hair doesn’t disqualify a young man from twinkhood, but there are limits. Serious facial scruff moves you towards Priapus territory, but a small beard, for instance a goatee, is fine (indeed, the cocksucking twink on the front cover of the Twinkalicious DVD — #1 in “Twinkalicious porn” — has a modest goatee).

As with all social categories, the central members of the TWINK category are easy to discern, but the boundaries of the category are fuzzy, and many men will clearly belong neither to TWINK nor to one of its alternatives, like BEAR.

On -licious. From a 2009 posting of mine on “Liciousness”:

On her Fritinancy blog, Nancy Friedman has recently posted (under the heading “the tastiest suffix”) an inventory of playful -licious brand names and brand descriptors, from Bake-a-Licious through Zombielicious. The -licious words come up every so often on Language Log, starting with 2006 postings by me (here) and Ben Zimmer (here), and going on with additional examples in 2007 (here) and this year (here).

In my 2006 posting, I wrote that:

there are cites of babelicious and blackalicious from 1992, which seems to have been a particularly morpholicious year.  The larger point is that -Vlicious words are likely to have been invented independently on many occasions, as portmanteaus, leading eventually to the emergence of the jocular suffix.  Some innovations in language have no clear single moment of creation, but arise as natural re-workings of the material of a language, by many different hands.

That is, -(V)licious is moving into libfix territory. In a 2011 posting on “Pornmanteaus”, I noted the  following items with “libfixes or incipient libfixes” attached to the base porn (relevant ones for this posting boldfaced):

pornacious, pornastrophe / porntastrophe, pornerrific, porneteria / pornoteria, pornilicous / pornalicious, pornmageddon / pornageddon, pornocaplypse / pornpocalypse, pornorarama, pornoscopic, pornotopic, pornovision, pornplex / pornoplex, porntastic, pornucopia, pornvalanche / pornalanche, pornzilla

For most of these, the semantic contribution of the combining element has been bleached to some degree, a point I expanded on in a 2012 posting on portmanteaus:

The appearance of dicktionary in [a] product description reminded me of another family of portmanteau words: cocktacular, cocktastic, cockalicious; dicktacular, dicktastic, dickalicious (cock / dick + spectacular / fantastic / delicious). All are in the Urban Dictionary. Some of them have uses related to sex, but mostly they seem to be generically positive adjectives (with cock or dick in there purely as attention-getters).

I’m inclined to see the various -(V)licious words based on twink(ie) in the same light: the final formative contributes merely (strong) positive affect, rather than attributing sensory deliciousness. Some -(V)licious words do look more like portmanteaus; from my 2012 posting:

Then there’s Dickalicious, an “edible penis arousal gel”, available in four flavors: banana, strawberry, raspberry, pina colada. [The gel provides you with a delicious dick.]

But most seem to have a generically positive libfix. In particular, a twinkalicious young man is a hot twink, not necessarily literally delicious. And a twinkalicious club is one that’s well supplied with such men.

Today’s Zits:

  (#1)

It’s been a slice, as a way of saying ‘it’s been good; goodbye’, was new to me. It’s in a few recent dictionaries of American slang / idioms, but not in Green’s Dictionary of Slang or (unsurprisingly) the OED; I have a citation from the late 1990s, but not (yet) anything earlier than that. And its origins are murky.

The 2007 Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions from McGraw Hill and the 2002 McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs both have the expression. And it appears in Disney’s animated Hercules (film in 1997, tv series in 1998), in this exchange between Hercules and Meg (Megara, who becomes his first wife):

 (#2)

Meg, saying goodbye: “It’s been a real slice.”

There is speculation about the origins of the expression, which certainly looks like a truncation — so, possibly, from It’s been a slice of life, said in the same spirit as It’s been real. But I’ve found no occurrences of the full expression used as in #1, so for the moment this is pure speculation.

In this posting I’m going to try to tie together several threads: a recent story about a dancer forced out of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet school for making gay porn videos on the side; the proverbial sexual activity of certain animals, in particular minks (a topic suggested by my recent posting on three fur-bearing mustelids); and the lexical semantics of the verb fuck. You can see the connections — and you can see why this posting might not be to everyone’s taste (though no images over the X line will appear in it).

1. The story of Jeppe Hansen. From several sources on Facebook, this recent story:

Dancer asked to leave Royal Winnipeg Ballet after doing porn

Jeppe Hansen landed a coveted spot last fall. Now he’s accusing the prestigious troupe of unfairly trying to define what constitutes art.

WINNIPEG—An aspiring ballet star who beat out thousands of other dancers for a spot with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet has been asked to leave the prestigious troupe after appearing in gay pornographic videos.

Jeppe Hansen got a spot and a scholarship last September in the dance school’s professional division.

Hansen had danced on stages around the world and studied in Montreal, New York City and his native Denmark before joining the RWB……

He appeared in his first pornographic video earlier this year as a side project, but when the ballet found out about the video, it asked him to sign a letter stating that he voluntarily withdrew from the program.

Hansen left the school in late March and moved to New York in April to pursue adult entertainment full-time.

He’s now accusing the ballet company of unfairly trying to define what constitutes art.

The RWB will only say that the school has a code of conduct for students and won’t comment further on personnel issues due to privacy concerns.

The code of conduct, which is included in the school’s student information handbook, says nothing about side projects, such as the video Hansen was in.

Hansen says he hopes to return to professional dance someday.

Hansen, 22, makes videos for the Cocky Boys firm under the name Jett Black. (Presumably, Jett was suggested by the name Jeppe, and Black followed from that, though Hansen is notably blond.) He has a very slim dancer’s body, nicely muscled, and he smiles a lot (including during sex):

I’ve found five Cocky Boys videos featuring Black — listed here with links to brief clips from them:

Introducing Jett Black (link): a solo performance in which Black fucks himself with a big black dildo while jacking off; at the very beginning:

[(1)] My name is, umm, Jett Black. I like to suck. And I like to fuck [conveying 'I like to be fucked', and he demonstrably does].

JD Phoenix Fucks Jett Black (link)

Arnaud Chagall Fucks Jett Black (link)

Gabriel Clark Pounds Jett Black (link)

Jett Black and Levi Karter Flip-fuck (link): billed as the first time either of them tops on camera; this clip has Black screwing Karter

Black’s sexual performances are wildly enthusiastic and energetic; he fucks like a mink, as they say. Quite something to watch.

[Digression: Greg Morrow posted on Facebook this morning:

I spent my morning commute concluding that I want to write a webcomic named "Jett and Muff" about two mismatched get-rich-quick characters. [cf. Mutt and Jeff]

Even better would be a ballet featuring Jett Black as a bottom and his partner, top man Muff Driver.]

2. Proverbial similes. Wiktionary on fuck like a mink:

(simile, vulgar) To be extremely amorous while copulating

– 1979, Warren Murphy, Frank Stevens, Atlantic City, page 209

“She’s a really sweet girl, kind and honest and decent, and all of her clients tell me that she fucks like a mink.”

“With that endorsement and the boots and the whips, maybe I should give her a try.”

– 2006, John Ringo, Kildar

“…But, for general info, she’d just as gladly slide a knife in as anything else. Don’t let her fool you. On the other hand, she can fuck like a mink. Have fun. I’ll take Bambi any day.”

– 2011, Carolyn Briggs, Higher Ground: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost

“You fuck like a mink,” Eric told me one night in his sister’s bedroom. His parents were out of town, and Eric and I had the run of the house.

It’s not an accident that all three citations are about women. That’s a general fact about intransitive. fucks like a N (imputing great enthusiasm in intercourse): a singular subject almost always refers to a woman — or a gay man in the bottom role (like Jett Black) — that is, to someone who gets fucked. Some non-mink examples I’ve googled up:

fucks like a star / a beast / a champ / a pro / a machine / a slut / a wild woman / a rabbit / a weasel

Some of these get many hits (but only a few for weasel; the mustelids are represented by minks).  He fucks like a rabbit (referring to the penetrator in intercourse) does occur, but apparently almost always in a reference to what’s known as rabbit-fucking: fucking someone with very rapid short thrusts.

The focus on women (and gay bottoms) seems to carry over to fucks like crazy / hell.

With plural subjects, things are a bit different; similes like

they fuck like rabbits / monkeys / beasts / minks / animals / weasels / …

are mostly applied to couples (though occasionally to groups of two or more people, attributing enthusiastic fuckability to each of them). Odd fact: I got no hits for These guys fuck like minks, but a modest number for These guys fuck like rabbits, with reference to man-man sex.

3. The lexical semantics of fuck. OED3 (March 2008) gives three relevant subentries for fuck (in this material, sexual intercourse is understood to cover both vaginal and anal intercourse):

coarse slang.

1. In these senses typically, esp. in early use, with a man as the subject of the verb.

a. intr. To have sexual intercourse.

b. trans. To have sexual intercourse with (a person).

c. trans. With an orifice, part of the body [as in fucked his arse], or something inanimate as object. Also occas. intr. with prepositional object of this type.

The entry is framed so as to be neutral as to the participant role played by the referent of the subject. So the OED‘s cites in 1a (intransitive) include:

[(2)] a1749   A. Robertson Poems (?1751) 256   But she gave Proof that she could f—k. [sg. subject referring to a woman]

1865   ‘Philocomus’ Love Feast ii. 17   That night I never shall forget; We fucked and fucked, and fucked and sweat. [pl. subject]

The cites in 1b (transitive) include none parallel to (2), but they are easily found, and easily invented — things like:

(3) She’s fucked every man here, including the butler.

And  Jett Black’s I like to fuck in (1) is parallel to (2) in that the referent of the subject plays the Patient role (as receptor) in the event described, rather than the Agent role (as insertor). So in (1), Black asserts that he likes to suck in the sense of ‘suck cock’, but not that he likes to fuck in the sense of ‘fuck ass’; suck and fuck are not understood in parallel ways. However, they could be: I like to fuck, uttered by a man, could mean either that the speaker likes to fuck other people or that he likes to be fucked (by men). Similarly,

(4) I’ve fucked every man here, including the butler.

spoken by a man, could mean either that the speaker has penetrated all the men in intercourse or that he’s been penetrated by all of them. These strike me as genuine ambiguities (with different assignments of participant roles), but the OED‘s entries treat them as lack of specification (as to the participant roles involved): I like to fuck in (1) would be OED-glossed as something like ‘I like to engage in acts of intercourse’ and (4) would be OED-glossed as something like ‘I’ve engaged in an act of intercourse with every man here, including the butler’.

But the OED-style glosses are unsatisfactory, since they’re consistent with the speaker’s playing different roles on different occasions. This consequence is especially unsatisfactory for (4), which on the lack-of-specification account is true if the speaker has penetrated some of the men and been penetrated by the others, and I think that’s just wrong. Similarly, this account predicts (incorrectly, I believe) that

(5) I’ve fucked every man here, and so has Jett.

is true if the speaker has penetrated all of the men, while Jett has been penetrated by all of them.

In my survey of the participant roles of subjects (here), I didn’t include Patient-subject fuck (and screw etc.), but I think now that it should be added to other Patient-subject cases.

I don’t know when Patient-subject fuck spread to become routine, as it seems to me it is now. Nor do I understand how hearers and readers use context to fix on one interpretation of the syntactic arguments of fuck, though I was struck by how immediately I came to a Patient-subject understanding of fuck in Jett Black’s (1) — even before I saw the rest of the video clip.