(Warning: high sexual content.)

Continuing my series of postings on sexual practices and slang terms for them, I turn today to cum play of various kinds, in particular snowballing and gokkun (illustrated in #1 and #2, respectively, in this posting on AZBlogX). The first practice was familiar to me, though I didn’t know it had a slang name, other than the transparent name cum sharing; and the second I vaguely recalled having heard about, but under the transparent name cum drinking.

There are many forms of cum play, and they have special emotional power in the gay world, because of the symbolic value of cum to gay men. Cum feeding (with the fingers) and cum eating (by licking it off a dick or the surface of someone else’s body) are common practices, as of course is swallowing the cum of a partner at the climax of cocksucking. Coming on your partner’s face or in their open mouth (in a cum facial) was discussed, and illustrated, in an AZBlogX posting ”Scruff cum” on cum facials (and related forms of bukkake). And rubbing cum into the skin (your own or someone else’s), like a lotion, is also common. That brings us to more complex events. (Just about every kind of cum play you could imagine is depicted in a 4-disc (!) porn compilation by Treasure Island Media, Drunk on Come. Note: I use come for the ejaculatory verb and cum for the noun, but you can see that usage varies.)

On snowballing, from Wikipedia:

Snowballing or snowdropping is the human sexual practice in which one takes someone else’s semen into their mouth and then passes it to the mouth of the other (another), usually through kissing.

The term was originally used only by homosexuals. Researchers who surveyed over 1200 gay or bisexual men at New York LGBT community events in 2004 found that around 20% said they had engaged in snowballing at least once. In heterosexual couples, a woman who has performed fellatio may afterwards return the semen to her or to one of their partner’s mouth, mixed with saliva; the couple or other partners may then exchange the fluid several times, causing its volume to increase (hence “snowballing”). Many heterosexual men are uncomfortable with the practice. The practice is very visual, making it a popular activity in pornography and when more than two people are involved. Snowballing is commonly seen in bukkake films.

In popular culture: In Kevin Smith’s film Clerks, the character Willam Black is nicknamed “Snowball” because he enjoys the practice.

And on gokkun, again from Wikipedia

Gokkun … is a Japanese term for a sexual activity in which a person, not necessarily but usually a woman, consumes the semen of one or more men, usually from some kind of container. Commonly-used containers in this genre include cups, beakers, bowls, and wine or cocktail glasses. The vast majority of these scenarios involve the semen of multiple men. As the genre’s producers attempt to outdo one another, the number of men participating has exceeded 200 in recent Japanese films and 140 in recent American films. Less frequently, the scenes involve a large container of semen from a single male who has, over time, stored up a large volume for this purpose, generally by freezing it.

“Gokkun” can also refer to the sexual act of swallowing semen after performing fellatio or participating in a bukkake.

The word “gokkun” is an onomatopoeia, which translates into English as “gulp”, the sound made by swallowing.

Some other cum-related practices: the creampie (internal ejaculation, also known in a gay context as breeding or as seeding), felching, and (getting) sloppy seconds. On the creampie, see this posting, which also mentions felching briefly:

Breeding is sometimes followed by felching, which involves sucking the semen from the partner’s anus.

Finally, sloppy seconds. From Wiktionary:

(vulgar, plural only) The act of having sex with someone soon after a previous partner has had sex with them. [almost always used, so far as I know, only for fucking and only with respect to the fucker]

The expression has been around for quite some time; sloppy is in there from the days of unprotected sex.The connection with cum here is that the cum of the first man serves as a lubricant for the second man’s fucking.

(Sloppy seconds has been used in all sorts of language play, in particular to refer to second occurrences of something, usually sexual in character. There’s an extended use for a girl dating a guy who’s just been dumped by another girl. And the 2006 movie Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. And the Ramones-influenced Indianapolis punk band Sloppy Seconds. And the Tucker Max book Sloppy Seconds. And so on.)

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Now out on YouTube, the Steam Room Stories music video:

 (#1)

Let’s go relax
In the steam room,
Get back and hang with all the bros

Full of dude, bro, etc., plus towel play and four-part harmony.

About SMS, from my posting on to gay-flirt:

The characters are guys in a steam room talking jokily about sexual subjects: among them, masturbation techniques, testicle self-examination, being piss shy, telling when a guy is gay, getting pegged, gay drinking games, “the 9-inch Italian” (which turns out to be a submarine sandwich), and the game of Gay Chicken (between two straight men; the guy who pulls back first from kissing his buddy loses). [Then there's the one on the taste of semen.] Some of the guys are straight, some gay, and they’re all in great shape.

From an interview with singer and songwriter Ben Palacios:

my favorite thing about Steam Room Stories is that [director, producer, and writer] JC [Calciano] has created a place where gay men and straight men are not only both equally welcome, but are comfortable sharing ‘steamy stories’ and hashing out whatever problem is on their mind, and supporting each other as men.  Not gay, not straight, just men. In essence, the genius of Steam Room Stories is that in such an exaggeratedly sexualized template, JC has managed to transcend sexuality.

It certainly normalizes gayness — which means that there’s a hell of a lot of queer content.

(Calciano is also a gay film-maker, the director of Is It Just Me? (2010) and eCupid (2011).)

Here’s Palacios looking friendly and ripped in a steam room:

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Palacios is very physical and enthusiastic, lots of fun to watch. He makes music videos on a site called WatchBenSing — among them the very playful The Penis Song, framed as a song for a Sesame Street-like kid’s show:

 (#3)

The song runs jauntily through names for the penis, with lots of penis puppets bouncing around.

[Addendum: I hadn't realized that if you linked to this video, you got cycled through all of WatchBenSing, including the Katy Perry song. Great bonus.]

In the vein of recent postings of mine on shirtlessness, here are some more of the SMS cast shirtless (not all in a steamroom setting). The minority representatives, Pacific Islander Cedric Jonathan and African American Tamario Fletcher:

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Then a torso shot of Josh Wise and three of the guys in their steamroom towels:

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Joe Fidler:

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Chad Olson:

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And Chris Reid:

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Enjoy the videos.

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Yes, there are words — compound nouns — specifically for this meaning, but unless you’re into gay porn, you might not be familiar with man pussy, boy pussy, man cunt, boy cunt, man hole, or boy hole. These are terms strongly associated with gay porn (fiction, scripts of videos, and descriptions of videos) but not much used by gay men in everyday life; they are part of a specialized porn register, akin to the specialized registers in some other domains, for instance, restaurant menus (with vocabulary items like the adjective tasty that rarely occur outside the menu context).

(The compounds are variously printed separated, hyphenated, or solid. I’ll punctuate them as separated in my text, but otherwise cite them with the punctuation in my sources.)

I got into these compounds through a larger project on the porn register, especially in descriptions of gay porn films and videos. Working my way through some of these, I came across this sentence from an ad for the bluntly named flick Sleazy Gangbang (2001):

Hot bubble butt bottoms and juicy man pussy are available for fucking all day long.

Juicy man pussy is repeated on the cover of the DVD, which can be viewed, along with a number of actual man pussies, in my AZBlogX posting of 7/21/13, “Dream World, Sleazy Gangbang, man pussy”. (Man pussy can be used as a count noun, or through what I’ve called sex-part conversion (here), as a mass noun, as in the Sleazy Gangbang quote.)

Before I take up the pornesque compounds, a few words on reference to the male anus in everyday gay contexts. Most commonly, the semantic components of maleness and sexual use are not explicit in the vocabulary, but are supplied by context, linguistic or otherwise; the everyday terms are ass (with its ambiguity between ‘buttocks’ and ‘anus’), asshole, and the abbreviated hole:

I’d like to fuck his ass / asshole / hole.

Much less commonly (but still attested), shithole, with an explicit reference to excrement that many shrink from.

Sexual use (but not maleness) is explicit in the variant fuckhole, which is the first of these terms taken over by gay speakers from reference to the vagina, also the first to edge into porn territory (though it does occur some in (“dirty”) sex talk by gay men in ordinary life).

[Note: There is frequently some "leakage" of vocabulary from specialized registers into ordinary language -- a kind of quotation, in effect. People sometimes talk about food in an everyday context with vocabulary characteristic of menus, recipes, and professional food writing, for instance. So it is with gay porn vocabulary: men will sometimes spice up their sex talk by importing some of these items into it.]

On to the Big Six: man / boy + pussy / cunt / hole. The boy variants tend to connote youth, but are sometimes used of mature men; the man variants seem to lack age connotations.

Maleness (but not sexual use) is explicit in man / boy + hole. I’ll take boy hole first, since it’s less complicated. Raw ghits of 92,800, reduced to 380 when repetitions are removed. One example from porn, one from non-porn usage, both involving young men:

Landon Fucks Angel. Description: Landon and Angel are relaxing on vacation when things get a bit heated in the living room. They start kissing, and the clothes fly off. Angel discovers Landon’s huge cock, and sucks it hard. In no time at all he inserts it in his boyhole and rides Landon wild. (link)

These are the thoughts of a bottom boy, learning to be a bitch, to be submissive to men. Read my dirty thoughts below, or scroll to the bottom to read more about me.
My puckered up boyhole, an hour after abusing it with dildos and a length of steel chain, already tightened back up. (link)

Man hole is complicated because a search for it pulls up so much material that’s irrelevant here: manhole the covered opening; the Manhole Gay Hotline; gay clubs called the Manhole; and so on. (I pulled up a few hits for manhole in my rear garden, which looked like an interestingly figurative reference to the writer’s asshole, but turned out to involve British rear garden (= American back yard) and a sewage system.) Here are two straightforwardly anal occurrences, both from gay porn:

[gay porn video] I want you to hammer my hairy manhole
Bang my tight hairy manhole. Fuck yea, I want it sooo bad. I need it stuffed with your hard cock, Give it to me! (link)

[gay porn flick] Eat My Manhole: Cum Watch Us Eat Ass. These guys love the taste of sweaty dirty assholes. Stick your tongue deep inside me! (link)

The remaining four compounds involve the transfer of the slang vaginal terms pussy and cunt (which are not necessarily sexual) to the male anus (where they are). Of course, pussy and cunt are in everyday gay use in their transferred senses (you can even find some occurrences of transferred twat), but men vary considerably in their attitudes towards these uses, because of the femininity associated with the words; some men will use pussy and cunt only for effeminate or submissive men and reject the usage for themselves, while other men embrace the associations, and a few seem to treat the words as neutral in connotation.

Wiktionary has taken up man / boy + pussy / cunt, giving the same gloss for all of them:

(vulgar, gay slang) the anus of a man, usually the passive participant in gay sex

When I began these investigations, my intuitions were that the dominant combinations were man pussy and boy cunt, but Google counts don’t bear this out. Here are the counts, giving raw ghits first, then the reduced figures:

man-pussy: 562,000 > 381
man-cunt: 161,000 > 423
boy-pussy: 453,000 > 345
boy-cunt: 78,000 > 359
(cf. boy-hole: 92,800 > 380)

The reduced counts are comparable to one another.

Wiktionary provides examples from porn fiction. For man-pussy:

2010, Michael Gleich, Sarge and the Sailor Boy: With the floor cleaned and swept with the use of his ass, the men were getting horny watching the talented hole at work.”How about a little man-pussy, Sarge?” someone asked.

2006, John Patrick, Taboo!: The Lure of the Forbidden, page 90: As my lover continued to plow into my tender man-pussy, he pulled me closer to him, kissing me passionately with each violent fuck.

2005, John Butler, The Gay Utopia, page 83: On a surprisingly large number of those occasions, gentle, submissive, effeminate Danny also received a lot of blow-jobs and fucked a lot of man-pussy himself.

1995, Perry Brass, Albert, or, The Book of Man, page 93: We’re up for a little man-pussy, Albert. Me and Jake, we’re gonna get our dicks into you, you cute little shit.

For man-cunt:

2010, R. Jackson, Bears in the Wild, page 115: He spat onto his cock and watched the bubbles of his saliva disappear into Josh’s man-cunt.

2010, Eric Summers, Teammates, page 34: Ryan was moaning with pleasure, and these noises were egging him on to go deeper into the hole, to try and lick the inside of his beautiful man cunt.

2009, Mickey Erlach, Pretty Boys and Roughnecks, page 13: The smell of sex, the heat of the sun and the warm dampness of Eddie’s man-cunt had brought him to the point of no return.

2009, Mickey Erlach, Boys Caught in the Act, page 46: Dale stepped over to Toby’s beach towel and lay down. Simon joined him, squatting down on his erection, taking the whole length up his man cunt, and inviting Toby to squat down on his boyfriend’s face.

For boy-pussy:

2010, Jackman Hill, Forty-Dollar Butt Boy: I carried the lube pump with me and set it on the floor next to the bench, so I raised my legs up high, took a few big dollops, and then worked them into my boy pussy, pressing into the well-fucked, well-rimmed passage, which was already sticky from the cum of my last few customers. Then I just lay on the bench, my greased fuck hole open and ready for more.

2009, Mickey Erlach, Pretty Boys and Roughnecks, page 50: ”Put your legs up for me. That’s it bitch, show me that boy pussy,” Marco said. “You want this, whore?” he said, rubbing his wildly throbbing cock against the boy’s tight hole.

2006, John Patrick, Boys of the Night, page 144: ”Yeah, I’ll eat your little boy pussy. I need to make it nice and wet so I can fuck it long and hard.”

For boy-cunt:

2010, Bret Yerlac, Cub Boy Training, page 36:  Your butt plug is on the sink there clean it up too and put it back up your boy cunt and go upstairs and meet me in the office for your instructions.

2009, Christopher Pierce, Sex Time: Erotic Stories of Time Travel, page 120:  While the other two fucked his throbbing boy-cunt, Dirk started jerking off.

2009, John Patrick, Juniors 2, page 15: Rex slid in smoothly, relishing the enfolding heat of Corky’s slick boy-cunt as he entered him for the first delicious time. He clasped Corky firmly, holding onto him as he powered deep into his ass.

2007, John Patrick, Mad About the Boys, page 117: His tiny ass opened and I slid into the tightest boy cunt I’ve ever had. Javier’s eyes grew wide, and I thought he must be in incredible pain, but he took only a moment to slide further down on my prick, then a wide grin spread across his face.

For another occasion: porn vocabulary like pussy-boy (referring to a gay man, usually a bottom, often effeminate or submissive) and man-meat (referring to a penis).

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From Gail Collins’s NYT op-ed column on the 18th, “The Cheney in Waiting”:

So what do you think Wyoming wants? Somebody younger? [Liz] Cheney is 46, and apparently planning on suggesting — in the most discreet way possible — that [incumbent Senator Mike] Enzi is toast at 69. Since the average age of the current Senate is around 62, however, he is barely brown around the edges.

Collins is taking the slang idiom be toast and playing with it — treating being toast as the end-stage or completion of the process of doom or (metaphorical) death, so that she can refer to earlier stages of the process as analogous to earlier stages of toasting. Cute.

Some glosses for the slang idiom (to) be toast, from Dictionary.com:

[Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, 2010] Slang. to be doomed, ruined, or in trouble: If you’re late to work again, you’re toast!

[Richard A. Spears, Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions, 4th ed., 2007]  done for:  If you don’t get here in twenty minutes, you’re toast.

[Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 2003]  Informal to face certain destruction or defeat

[Denis Howe, The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, 2010] jargon Any completely inoperable system or component, especially one that has just crashed and burned: “Uh, oh … I think the serial board is toast.”

Some of these appear to treat be toast as an adjective, some as a noun. And they differ in how far along to ruin or (metaphorical) death someone or something is when it’s toast.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang categorizes it as an adjective and takes it back to 1983:

toast adj.
1 facing serious problems; esp. in phr. you’re toast.
- 1983 Aykroyd & Ramis Ghostbusters [film script] This chick is TOAST!
- 1986 Eble Campus Sl. Mar. 10: toast – victim of misfortune: I broke the TV. I’m toast!
- 1990 Eble Campus Sl. Apr.
- 1996 A. Heckerling Clueless [film script] Cher: Did you get your report card? Dionne: Yeah. I’m toast. How’d you do?
- 1999 K. Sampson Powder 366: If you have got one single piece of ass in there, your fuckin’ ass is toast!
- 2004 P. Howard PS. I Scored the Bridesmaids 233: I don’t worry about him. The goy’s focking toast.

2 (US campus) (also french toast) tipsy or hungover. [Eble cites from 1989, 1993]

3 dead.
- 2004 P. Howard PS. I Scored the Bridesmaids 43: Scooby’s more than stunned. He’s toast.

(Sense 3 is a natural extension of sense 1.)

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Today’s Zippy has Zerbina totally in the groove:

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A series of slangy panels, culminating in an air glockenspiel (a percussion counterpart of the air guitar, quite possibly a simulation of playing an electric glockenspiel). A glockenspiel gets into it because so many people think the word glockenspiel is silly.

The short story, from NOAD2:

a musical percussion instrument having a set of tuned metal pieces mounted in a frame and struck with small hammers.

ORIGIN early 19th cent. (denoting an organ stop imitating the sound of bells): from German Glockenspiel, literally ‘bell[s]-play.’

A somewhat longer version rom Wikipedia:

A glockenspiel … is a percussion instrument composed of a set of tuned keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. In this way, it is similar to the xylophone; however, the xylophone’s bars are made of wood, while the glockenspiel’s are metal plates or tubes, thus making it a metallophone. The glockenspiel, moreover, is usually smaller and higher in pitch.

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… Two well-known classical pieces that uses the glockenspiel are Handel’s Saul and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, both of which originally used instruments constructed using bells rather than bars to produce their sound.

Musical instruments play a major role in Zauberflöte, beginning with Tamino’s Flöte, a flute, and Papageno’s Waldflöte, a little wooden flute (sometimes referred to in English as pipes or pan pipes) and continuing with Papageno’s Glockenspiel or Glöckchen ‘little bells’. From Act II Scene VIII, in which Papageno is lamenting that he is without his mate Papagena and the Three Boys advise him to play his magic bells to bring her to him:

Drei Knaben: So lasse deine Glöckchen klingen;
Dies wird dein Weibchen zu dir bringen.

Papageno: Ich Narr vergass der Zauberdinge!
Erklinge, Glockenspiel, erklinge!
Ich muss mein liebes Mädchen seh’n!
Klinget, Glöckchen, klinget!
Schafft mein Mädchen her!

It works, and Papageno and Papagena go on to sing a sweet duet.

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A while back, when Ned Deily was visiting me, my iTunes produced an album of Joshua Bell playing Fritz Kreisler violin music, and Ned joked about my computer being on the fritz — and we both wondered about the source of the slang idiom. It turns out that it’s not very old — the OED‘s first cite is from 1903 — but is nevertheless of unknown origin, and the etymologies that come first to mind are very unlikely.

Here’s Michael Quinion in World Wide Words of 8/11/01:

QFrom Dan Leneker: I am looking into how the expression on the fritz came about. Please help.

A I’d like to, but most dictionaries just say, very cautiously and flatly, “origin unknown”, and I can’t do much to improve on that verdict.

The phrase is now a common American expression meaning that some mechanism is malfunctioning or broken: “The washing machine’s on the fritz again” (the British and Australian equivalent would be on the blink). However, when it first appeared — about 1902 — it meant that something was in a bad way or bad condition. Early recorded examples refer to the poor state of some domestic affairs, the lack of success of a stage show, and an injured leg — not a machine or device in sight.

Some people, especially the late John Ciardi, the American poet and writer on words, have suggested it might be an imitation of the pfzt noise that a faulty connection in an electrical machine might make, or the sound of a fuse blowing. This theory falls down because none of the early examples is connected with electrical devices, and the phrase pre-dates widespread use of electricity anyway.

Others feel it must be connected with Fritz, the nickname for a German soldier. It’s a seductive idea. There’s one problem, though — that nickname didn’t really start to appear until World War One, about 1914, long after the saying had been coined.

William and Mary Morris, in the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, suggest that it may nevertheless have come from someone called Fritz — in the comic strip called The Katzenjammer Kids. In this two youngsters called Hans and Fritz got up to some awful capers, fouling things up and definitely putting the plans of other members of the strip community on the Fritz. The strip appeared in newspapers from 1897 onwards, so the dates fit rather nicely. But there’s no evidence that confirms it so far as I know. There’s also the key question: why don’t we talk about being on the Hans? [Well, not everything has a deep explanation; someone could have chosen randomly between Hans and Fritz.]

As is so often, Mr Leneker, I’ve gone around the houses, considered this theory and that, but come to no very definite conclusion. But the truth is that nobody really knows, nor now is ever likely to.

OED2 on the noun fritz:

slang (orig. and chiefly U.S.). Phr. on the fritz: out of order, defective, unsatisfactory; to put on the fritz  (also to put the fritz on): to spoil, destroy, put a stop to.

1903   R. L. McCardell Conversat. Chorus Girl 15   They gave an open air [performance] that put our opera house show on the Fritz.

1906   H. Green At Actors’ Boarding House 359   What with me ketchin’ ‘em cookin’ spaghetti on the gas an’ tearin’ up the bedspreads to use fur makeup towels, they’re puttin’ the place on the fritz!

1924   P. G. Wodehouse Bill the Conqueror v. 122   Everything’s on the fritz nowadays.

1962   Guardian 11 Apr. 9/2   It appeared, for an awful moment, that a cue had failed, that the teleprompter was on the fritz.

1968   R. H. R. Smithies Shoplifter (1969) vii. 151   It’s Mother’s plan to put the fritz on shoplifting.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang adds more cites, including another one from 1903 (with away to the fritz), but (as in the OED) those involving mechanical or electrical devices — now by far the predominant usage — don’t turn up until roughly 1960 (in the 60s, the antonym off the fritz ‘working’ also appears). Instead, the early examples involve people, events, situations, and the like.

(Green floats the German soldier and the onomatopoetic etymologies, but without much assurance.)

There is one tiny bit of support for the Katzenjammer Kid etymology, in the 1903 OED cite above, where the expression is spelled on the Fritz, with a capital F. But there’s still no direct evidence connecting the expression to the Kids.

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In today’s Pearls Before Swine, Pig continues to struggle with idioms:

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Michael Quinion was on the case back in 2007. Both clean ‘thrash’ and clock ‘face’ are involved.

From World Wide Words on 6/9/07:

Q From Jim Marchant, California: What are the origins of the phrase Clean their clock? It produces a lot of hits on Google, and sportswriters are fond of it, but I don’t see anything about its pedigree.

A In American English, To clean someone’s clock means to trounce one’s opponents in a game (“We’ll clean the Dodgers’ clocks today”) or generally to inflict a severe reverse (“Republicans got their clocks cleaned in November’s elections”).

It became particularly popular from the 1990s on, but it’s possible to trace it back a surprisingly long way. The first example that I’ve come across is a baseball report in the Trenton Evening Times in July 1908: “It took the Thistles just one inning to clean the clocks of the Times boys.” The stronger sense is to give somebody a thrashing, as in Stephen King’s story The Ten O’Clock People: “If I blew some [smoke] in his face, I bet he’d come over the top and clean my clock for me.” It’s not obvious from the written history of the expression that this is the original meaning, though it’s more than likely.

To clean goes back a lot further. Jonathon Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang lists it from 1819 in the sense of vanquishing or drubbing. All the early examples are either clean out or clean off but by Mark Twain’s time it had reduced to just clean (“He went for ’em! And he cleaned ’em, too!” is in Roughing It, dated 1871). The slang use of clock to mean face may also be from the nineteenth century, though the first examples are contemporary with the 1908 Trenton report. (We British had dial with the same sense from a century earlier.) Around that time to fix someone’s clock in North America also meant to defeat somebody but in a more thorough way. However, to clock a man, meaning to hit him in the face, is recorded only from the 1930s.

As an intriguing aside, US railway slang used clean the clock (and also wipe the gauge) to mean that a driver brought his train to a sudden halt by applying the air brakes. The allusion is to the gauge that shows the air pressure. A sudden use of the brakes will cause the needle to swing right over, so figuratively cleaning the glass of the gauge. This is recorded only from the late 1920s, so quite how it fits into the history of the expression isn’t clear.

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Another installment of material on the (gay) porn register, following up on this posting, where I looked at some lexical features, saying about

man pussy, boy pussy, man cunt, boy cunt, man hole, [and] boy hole. These are terms strongly associated with gay porn (fiction, scripts of videos, and descriptions of videos) but not much used by gay men in everyday life; they are part of a specialized porn register, akin to the specialized registers in some other domains

Today there’s some more lexical stuff, but mostly it’s about the prosody of some writing about porn; like some other advertising copy, there’s some tendency for it to fall into metrically regular patterns.

The text is the copy on the front cover of the Dream World (1994) DVD:

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(This image is cropped so as to eliminate naughty bits; the full image can be viewed on AZBlogX, here, along with some write-up about the flick.)

Lexical notes: the N – N compounds dick-pig and man-meat. The first I have heard in real life (though not often), to refer to a man who is an avid fellator (aka cock junkie). The second I have never encountered except in porn writing, where it’s one of a number of variants of cock or dick that writers use to avoid repeating these vernacular-standard terms; the strategy is a kind of “elegant variation”. In any case, thick man-meat is a frequent collocation, particularly satisfying because of the echo of dick in thick (as well as the actual semantic contribution of thick, thickness being, a desirable property of dicks), though

The text above comes in two parts — the maker’s copy and a quote from a TLA Video review, which is not metrical, though it has the half-rhyme dudes / chew and the rhyme shit / spit. The maker’s coipy, however, is three lines of trochaic tetrameter (with some short feet and some extra unaccented syllables.

Cock suckin’ dick pig Ethan Wright: SWW  SW  SW  S
Offers up his hot mouth: SW  SW  S  S
Slobbering and swallowing thick man-meat: SWWW  SWW  S  SW

I’m not claiming that the writers of this copy were aiming at trochaic tetrameter, only that in English this metrical pattern comes naturally to writers essaying short forms.

The back cover copy (visible on AZBlogX) continues the pattern (and is heavy with porn lexical items):

Hot sweaty man loads:  S  SW  S  S
Sucking and riding huge, stiff cocks:  SWW  SW  SW S

But the ad copy isn’t metrical:

Some people spend all their time dreaming about sex; the feel, the taste, the smell, the fantasy. Welcome to the world of David Bradley, a frustrated stud who spends his days dreaming about men.

Only stud suggests that this comes from the porn register.

To come: more Ethan Wright movies and overheated ad copy.

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Some time ago on Facebook, several posters ended up chatting about the vocabulary for talking about a gay man’s anal virginity. The term cherry plays a central role in this vocabulary domain — taken over, like some other sexual vocabulary, from reference to women and their sexuality.

We start with women. In Green’s Dictionary of Slang, it begins with the cherry as an image of ripeness, with two related subsenses (both originally U.S.), with the second as an extension of the first:

(a) (i) the hymen; (ii) one’s viriginity [antecedent cites in Green from 1641 and 1700, clear cites from 1918]

Subsense (ii) has the syntax of virginity, normally with an obligatory possessor, as in the collocations

save, keep one’s cherry; lose one’s cherry (to someone), give (up) one’s cherry (to someone); have, get, take, steal someone’s cherry

plus the very common pop and bust someone’s cherry, with a vivid allusion to breaking the hymen.

Now the anus has no real analogue to the hymen, but the ‘viriginity’ subsense can be transferred to anal intercourse, giving the full range of possessive collocations as above, but now used of gay men rather than women.

Back to vaginal intercourse, with another sense of the noun cherry, referring to a person rather than virginity:

(b) (orig. US) a female virgin [antecedent cites from 1881 and1889; clear cites from 1942 on] (c) a male [vaginal] virgin [from 1948 on]

These uses have the syntax of count nouns — Kim’s a cherry, Kim and Sandy are cherries — but there’s also an adjectival predicative use, as in Kim is cherry,

Finally, we get the gay analogue of (b) and (c):

(gay) an anal [receptive] virgin [also 'anal virginity', together with cites from 1941 on]

In the Facebook discussion, I recalled that the man I lost my anal virginity to, many years ago, didn’t use any of the cherry expressions, but instead referred to what he did as breaking me in.

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From Ben Zimmer, two instances of ass-avoidance in the news.

First, from the New York Times, a story about GoDaddy shifting its advertising strategy, “GoDaddy Steps Away From the Jiggle” by Stuart Elliott (on September 5th):

A marketer whose sexy advertising polarized consumers for years is trying to distance itself even more from its previous provocative approach, as executives seek to strike a balance between being noticed and being castigated.

In a commercial scheduled to begin running on Thursday, GoDaddy, the Internet services company, will recast itself as a helpmate to small-business owners by adopting a new theme for its advertising, “It’s go time.” The commercial, by Deutsch New York, part of the Deutsch division of the Interpublic Group of Companies, features the action movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme playfully embodying the new GoDaddy brand personality by enabling entrepreneurs to meet whatever challenges they face.

In interviews and news releases, GoDaddy executives are describing the new brand personality with phrases like the one a family newspaper would paraphrase as “enabling our customers to kick tail.” But the sassy unparaphrased version is missing from the commercial, which will appear on godaddy.com as well as on television, initially during the NBC coverage of the first game of the N.F.L.’s 2013-14 season.

The changes in GoDaddy’s approach arrive as marketers and consumers debate how far is too far when it comes to language and imagery in mainstream ads. The original GoDaddy brand personality was characterized by buxom, scantily clad women called “GoDaddy Girls”; ad copy replete with double entendres, many delivered by the racecar driver Danica Patrick; and online commercials that were racier than the eyebrow-raising television versions. Bob Parsons, the founder of GoDaddy who was then its chief executive, originated and reveled in those tactics for what he called “GoDaddy-esque” ads.

The unexpurgated “help you kick ass” version can be viewed here:

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This is a big step away from the raciness of the earlier GoDaddy ad copy, though it has the slang idiom kick ass (with the alternative kick butt):

[Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms 2003] to be very exciting or effective … The DVD of that war movie truly kicks ass.

[Collins English Dictionary 2003] [vb intr] to be impressive, esp in a forceful way pop music that kicks ass; [adj kick-ass]  forceful, aggressive, and impressive

But even this has been toned down for the NFL tv ad, and the NYT has chosen to paraphrase the idiom because of the word ass in it, despite the fact that the word is not understood literally.

The paper has not always been so ostentatiously modest. Its coverage of the Kick-Ass movies, for instance, has been straightforward.

On the first movie, from Wikipedia:

Kick-Ass is a 2010 British-American superhero action-comedy film based on the comic book of the same name by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr. The film was directed by Matthew Vaughn, who co-produced with Brad Pitt and co-wrote the screenplay with Jane Goldman. Its general release was on 25 March 2010 in the United Kingdom and on 16 April 2010 in the United States. It is the first installment of the Kick-Ass film series.

It tells the story of an ordinary teenager, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who sets out to become a real-life superhero, calling himself “Kick-Ass”. Dave gets caught up in a bigger fight when he meets Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), a former cop who, in his quest to bring down the drug lord Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) and his son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), has trained his eleven-year-old daughter to be the ruthless vigilante Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz).

The cover of the comic book and a poster for the movie:

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And from the 4/16/10 review of the movie by Manohla Dargis in the NYT:

A story about a teenager who yearns to be a superhero, and a little girl who’s the star of her own splatter-happy head trip, the big-screen comic “Kick-Ass” could not be more calculating, or cynical.

No avoidance there, or in other Times stories about the comic book and the movies.

Now on to a different case of ass-avoidance, involving author Meg Medina and her young-adult novel Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, about bullying. In her own words (from September 4th):

Author Uninvited: A School Decides I’m Trouble

Let me start by saying that I am not making this up.

This week I was officially uninvited to speak on bullying at a middle school due to the title of my latest YA novel, YAQUI DELGADO WANTS TO KICK YOUR ASS.

The timing could not have been more ironic. September is the month when the American Library Association celebrates Banned Book Week, our annual reminder about the importance of intellectual freedom.

Sure, the title has raised eyebrows – as I knew it would. But the title of my book wasn’t an issue several months ago when I was contracted  to be part of the school’s anti-bullying event. YAQUI DELGADO WANTS TO KICK YOUR ASS  is the story of girl’s unraveling as she navigates being in the crosshairs of a physical and emotional abuser.

… last Friday, I received a painful email from the teacher who had reached out to me in the first place. She was apologetic as she explained that her principal needed reassurances. He needed to be sure that I would not state the name of my novel. Or show a slide of the cover. Or use “coarse language” during the presentation.

Medina was of course unwilling to provide these reassurances, so she was uninvited.

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Here we have a different slang idiom. From the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary (2nd ed., 2006):

kick (somebody’s) ass  (mainly American very informal!)  to punish someone or to defeat someone with a lot of force The General saw the conflict as a chance for the Marines to go in and kick ass. We want to go into the game and kick some ass.

Or, as in Medina’s title, ‘beat somebody up’. Not (necessarily) literal ass-kicking, but generalized aggression and dominance — a sense that is extended further in the ‘forceful, aggressive, impressive’ idiom kick ass.

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From David Nash on Google+, this ad (from Australia, I assume):

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(meaning, ‘in the native language of the country where the games will be held, namely Brazil’ — that is, in Brazilian Portuguese).

The verb sledge was new to me, though David quickly explained it to me.

From Urban Dictionary:

commonly used in sports to insult players from an opposing team. the sport with the highest amount of sledging is cricket, with one player having to stand in the middle of the opposing team for what could be hours on end. because cricket requires supreme concentration; witty, clever and insulting sledges can be useful in putting the batsman off his game.

(similarly in football, i.e. soccer).

Taunting of this sort is common in sports in all parts of the world (see my posting on a vulgar chant in soccer, and google on “sports taunting”). What’s notable here is the verb sledge referring to it. It’s not in Green’s Dictionary of Slang or of course in the OED. It turns out to be specifically Australian. From A Dictionary of Australian Slang:

sledge Verbal abuse of one sports player to another in order to break focus on the play. The Oxford Australian lists it as a cricket term pertaining to a fielder heckling a batter. However, I heard it on the news with regard to a footy player sledging another player, i.e., insulting someone on the opposing team in a moment of heated play. This is identified as a uniquely Australian colloquialism, and I recently heard the story of its origin on a British talk show, starring Australia’s own Dame Edna. Shane Warne, a recently retired and very celebrated Australian cricket player, appeared as a guest. Warne explained that sledge means “when you have a go at an opposition player.” He said that years ago there was a famous Australian cricket player who was particularly aggressive in hurling verbal abuse at the other team’s batters. His unusually combative heckling style won him the nickname of Sledgehammer, and as such things go in Australia, it was very quickly fashioned into the verb to sledge. (link)

A nice story, and possibly true, though it sounds like a mythetymology.

[Added later: the Australian cricketer Ian Bell has the nickname The Sledgehammer of Eternal Justice, but he's young (age 31) and still playing, and he seems to be the object of sledging rather than a perpetrator.]

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Two recent news stories on word use, one from a South London school and one from Malaysia.

Slang in school. Passed on by Dave Sayers on VAR-L, the variationists’ mailing list: “ ’Like’, ‘innit’ and ‘bare’ among slang words banned in school by Harris Academy Upper Norwood” 10/15/13 by Hannah Williamson:

“Like”, “innit” and “bare” are just some of the words firmly placed in the vocabulary of the young people of today, but they have made the list of banned words at one Croydon school.

Students at Harris Academy Upper Norwood now have to think before they speak, after new principal Chris Everitt introduced a list of 10 informal phrases forbidden in classrooms and corridors that are now considered formal language zones.

The list which also includes “coz”, “aint”, “extra” “you woz” and “we woz”, was implemented by Mr Everitt who took charge of the newly opened academy in September.

As part of the initiative students are also unable to begin sentences with “basically” and end sentences with “yeah”.

The banned words form a sample of the frequently heard in places the school considers to be a formal setting.

… The initiative aims to raise awareness about the use of formal language and staff hope it will prepare students for formal situations they will face in later life, such as interviews.

Students are corrected if they are heard to use any of the banned phrases in the formal language zones.

I haven’t found a source that explains what constitutes a formal language zone, but the Harris schools enforce quite a few behavioral standards throughout the schools, including calling out students for ties askew in school corridors.

Note that the banned usages are not only slang words but also non-standard syntax, as in the verb form was in you was and we was.

In case you were wondering about bare, here’s a bit from Wikipedia on London slang:

The large number of immigrant communities and relatively high level of ethnic integration mean that various pronunciations, words and phrases have been fused from a variety of sources to create modern London slang. The emerging dialect draws influences from Jamaican English and other Caribbean speech. This form of slang was born and is mainly spoken in Inner London and has been popularised by UK Rap music. Although the slang has been highly influenced by black immigrant communities, a large number of teenagers of all ethnicities in London have adopted it. Popular slang words include sick (“good”), bare (“very”, “a lot of”), alie (“indeed”, or to encourage agreement), skeen or seen (“I concur”), long (“boring”, “repetitive”), wallad (“fool”), peak (“very bad”), sket (short for the Afro-Caribbean … Skettle, meaning a loose woman), wah gwarn (“what is happening”, “hello”), wavey (“tipsy”), badman (“thug”), jezzy (“loose woman” (from Jezebel)), ting (“thing”, or, when pluralised, to refer to the current situation), bossman (patriarchal figure), safe (“trustworthy”, “good”, or to show agreement), spliff (“marijuana” or to refer to an individual marijuana cigarette), peng (“attractive” i.e girl), leng (“weapon”), piff (“above average”, derived from a strain of marijuana), nang (something desirable), dutty (“dirty”), Happz (“happy”), allow it (“leave it be”) .

Allah in Maylasia. From the NYT on the 15th, in “Malaysian Court Restricts Use of ‘Allah’ to Muslims” by Thomas Fuller:

A Malaysian court ruled on Monday that non-Muslims may not use the word “Allah” to refer to God, the latest decision in a long dispute that has polarized the multicultural country.

The decision, by a panel of three judges, was intended to protect Islam, the country’s official religion, from conversions.

“It is my judgment that the most possible and probable threat to Islam, in the context of this country, is the propagation of other religions to the followers of Islam,” the chief judge, Mohamed Apandi Ali, said in the decision, according to the news Web site Malaysiakini.

The Malay language is infused with Arabic, and while 60 percent of the population is Muslim, Malay-speaking members of other monotheistic faiths in the country often use Allah to refer to God.

Monday’s ruling overturned a 2009 judgment that allowed a Catholic newspaper, The Herald, to use Allah in its Malay-language newspaper.

The use of the word Allah “is not an integral part of the faith in Christianity,” the chief judge said. “The usage of the word will cause confusion in the community.”

Non-Muslims in Malaysia, where religion, ethnicity and politics are tightly intertwined, reacted with anger.

The story has been widely reported, but (so far as I can see) without an account of the penalties for the use of Allah by non-Muslims.

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It starts with tlhe clipping amaze for amazing and then goes on to the playful extension amazeballs (or amaze balls). Then both of these can be modified by the slang clipping totes (for totally). And another slang intensive modifier, def, can be added to the mix, giving things like the slogan on this tea towel:

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1. amaze. This is where the recent discussion on ADS-L started: a not very startling informal clipping of amazing. Likely to have been made multiple times. Two examples from the net (from Twitter and The Wrap):

@TaniaGuyer it’s AMAZE [of a piece on pumpkin five ways] (link)

Ellen Pompeo Breaks Silence on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’s’ Katherine Heigl, Isaiah Washington Drama – and It’s Amaze (link)

Urban Dictionary has both predicative and attributive examples.

2. amazeballs. Like amaze, this playful extension of it is an adjective. It’s a recent creation, and it’s widely unpopular; a 6/15/09 Urban Diction entry by amirjoon:

a douchey/hollywoody way to say amazing, originated by a Youtube comedy duo named Jessica and Hunter and popularized by blogger Perez Hilton

It was certainly popularized by Paris Hilton. But it’s ultimate origin is a matter of dispute.

A 12/27/12 Slate column by Katy Waldman reports on a Katy Steinmetz column in Time on the worst words of 2012, noting that despite such hostility,

in September 2012, amazeballs rolled into the Collins Online Dictionary, with the definition “an expression of enthusiastic approval.” The Urban Dictionary glosses it thusly: “Basically beyond amazing. Being so awesome that a regular word can’t describe you.”

On the primacy dispute between Perez Hilton vs. Jessica and Hunter, Waldman writes:

As it happens, they’re both wrong. The originator of the term appears to be fashion blogger Elizabeth Spiridakis. In an interview with Gavin McInnes, Spiridakis takes credit/responsibility for the adjective/noun/adjective-annoyingly-disguised-as-a-noun—though she wisely displaces some of the blame onto her BFFs. Spiridakis:

To be fair, the true originator of “amazeballs” was probably Ece Ozturk or Andrea Oliveri, two of my best friends. We met at Details mag in 2003 and all had a love of ridiculous shorthand and nicknames and dumb jokes like that. Putting “-balls” on everything was pretty standard (starveballs, hungballs, tiballs, exhaustballs = starving, hungry, tired, exhausted. regs vocab for girls at magazines.) I just had a forum to make it more public because I am addicted to the internets and they are just sorta “whatevs” about blogs, etc.

3. totes. This item is a playful slang clipping, functioning as an intensive, much like totally. It combines naturally with both amaze and amazeballs. Totes amaze elicits some hostility, as in this Middle Class Handbook posting of 12/29/11, entitled “Middle-c lass annoyance of the year: “totes amaze” “.

And then there’s totes amazeballs. There is, or was, even a cereal with this name:

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According to this site, the cereal was available only at one music festival. The cereal consisted of Choco rocks, shortbread, raisins and marshmallows.

4. def. A clipping of definite(ly) to def would be perfectly natural, and it might have been invented many times. But most occurrences are associated with African-American English, especially in hip-hop. So the dictionaries are all over the place on this one.

AHD4 (2009) marks it as slang, glosses it as ‘excellent, first-rate’, and says it’s short for definite.

The Collins English Dictionary (2003) marks it as slang, glosses it as ‘very good, esp. of hip-hop’, and says “perhaps from definitive”.

But the Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary (2010), labeling it as slang and glossing it as ‘excellent’, gives the following etymology:

1975–80, Amer.; < W Ind E pronoun of death used as an intensifier

Now it’s entirely possible that both etymologies are correct; the same form can arise from different sources. The OED is often reluctant to consider this possibility, however; it looks for a single origin whenever it can. So we get this from OED3 (March 2002):

Etymology:  Probably alteration of death n., originating in the nonstandard Jamaican English pronunciation and spelling def , and the use of the word (in both forms) as a general intensifier (see quot. 1907). Compare death adj.2

The form in quot. 1979 is often interpreted as being a use of def adj., and is in fact spelt def in many later transcriptions of the song, including that in L. A. Stanley Rap: the Lyrics (1992). However, in the original published lyrics, the word is spelt death , although the pronunciation on the recording itself is indistinct. This song, one of the most celebrated and influential hip-hop records and one of the first to enjoy international commercial success, may in part account for the enduring use of def within the genre and the strength of its association with hip-hop culture.

An alternative derivation < definite adj. or definitive adj. seems less likely, but see the form def’ in quot. 1982.

[gloss] slang (orig. U.S., esp. in African-American usage). Excellent, outstanding; fashionable, ‘cool’.

1979   G. O’Brien et al. Rapper’s Delight (song, perf. ‘Sugarhill Gang’) ,   Someone get a fly girl, gonna get some spank and drive off in a death O.J.

1982   in S. Hager Hip Hop (1984) 89   A sureshot party presentation… Thurs. January 21… ‘Aanother def’ bet’.

In any case, intensive def is now well-established slang, and not just in hip-hop contexts. Which gives us totes def amazeballs and similar things, uttered and written by people far from these contexts.

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An recent exchange on Facebook (about Gertrude Stein) led to musings on the drug noun hash, which at least historically is a shortening of hashish. One participant noted that these days you don’t see a lot of mentions of hashish, and I remarked that for some people hash was usable as another synonym (among many) for marijuana / cannabis, similar to pot. I was comfortable with that, but not everyone was.

Strict definition, from Wikipedia:

Hashish, often known as “hash”, is a cannabis product composed of compressed or purified preparations of stalked resin glands, called trichomes. It contains the same active ingredients — such as THC and other cannabinoids — but in higher concentrations than unsifted buds or leaves. … Hashish may be solid or resinous depending on the preparation

So ordinary pot is cannabis leaves or buds in raw form, while hashish is processed to a solid or resin.

When you look at OED2, you see something more complex. The first cite for hashish is from 1959 (surprisingly late, to my mind, but this will surely be antedated in OED3; Green’s Dictionary of Slang gets drug hash back to 1943). Then we get to a 1972 cite and a draft addition of February 2005:

1972   P. Dickinson Lizard in Cup x. 157   ‘It’s morphine she’s been on?’ said Pibble. But Tony shook her head. ‘Just grass. Hash.’ [not entirely clear, but suggestive]

draft addition February 2005: hash brownie   n.  [punningly after hash browns n. at hash n.1 Compounds 2] slang (orig. U.S.) a brownie or other cake containing cannabis, eaten as an intoxicant. [clearer; hash is merely cannabis, in one form or another]

And this brings us back to Gertrude Stein. And Alice B. Toklas. Toklas is famous for including a hash (or hashish) brownie recipe in her cookbook. That would be from Bryon Gysin.

On Gysin (from Wikipedia):

Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire

.On the brownies, from the same source:

As a joke, Gysin contributed a recipe for marijuana fudge to a cookbook by Alice B. Toklas; it was unintentionally included for publication, becoming famous under the name Alice B. Toklas brownies

Note: marijuana fudge, not hashish fudge. It’s reported to be tasty.

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A Roz Chast cartoon:

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Generational differences. Slang. An inadvertent pun.

(Original lead from Jonathan Lighter on ADS-L. This image via Ben Zimmer.)

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Today’s Pearls Before Swine:

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Once agan, Pig falls foul of the Comic Book Censor. This time, it’s over the expression flip s.o. the bird, understood literally (as Pig intends) or as a reference to a rude gesture, giving someone the finger (which comes up here every so often).

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Yesterday Mark Liberman posted on this Doonesbury cartoon:

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Rich in material. The main thing I want to note (as Mark did) is a sense development in the slang verb rock, from an older sense, around at least since 1990 (‘impact strongly’), to a newer sense, the one in the cartoon, around since at least 2007 (‘wear or display conspicuously or proudly’); this is a change from a more objective sense to a more subjective one, such as Elizabeth Traugott has repeatedly discussed.

(On the cartoon: it’s from 1/18/13 and was posted, and discussed, on Slate (here) on 2/8/13; apparently, many readers didn’t get the sense of rock in it.)

Further remarks:

in the first panel, the clipping do for hair-do from Joanie Caucus’s grand=daughter Alex;

in the second, the snowclonelet X queeni in make-over queen, from Joanie;

then from Alex, “way to rock the snark but so not you”, with the new sense of rock, plus the slang noun snark (apparently a portmanteau of snide and remark) and GenX so (discussed many times on this blog) in so not you.

Note the explicit comment on generational differences in slang use.

(In the original posting, I had Alex and Joanie exchanged.)

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(The title provides a warning for the sensitive.)

On the 11th on Facebook, Greg Parkinson commented on steroid-induced gynecomastia, with this image:

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Tom Kirkland followed up with:

What surprises me is … how large the fan base for bitchtits [is].

(introducing the slang bitchtits for gynecomastia; bitchtits would be doubly unsuitable for the New York Times, which treats both parts of the compound as taboo, unacceptable in print; also note the syntax).

From Wikipedia:

Gynecomastia [BrE gynaecomastia] … is the benign enlargement of breast tissue in males. It may occur transiently in newborns. Half or more of adolescent boys have some breast development during puberty. Gynecomastia may arise as an abnormal condition associated with disease, such as Klinefelter syndrome, metabolic disorders, as a side-effect of medication, or as a result of the natural decrease of testosterone production in older males. In adolescent boys, the condition is often a source of psychological distress; however, 75% of pubertal gynecomastia cases resolve within two years of onset without treatment.

The OED2′s etymology: Greek γυναικο-, comb. form of γυνή woman, female + Greek μαζός var. μαστός breast.

Both parts of the compound are socioculturally complex. I’m c comfortable with each in some contexts, not at all in others, and it’s clear that usage differs according to who’s using it, in what contexts and for what purposes, to whom.

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From Damien Hall, a pointer to this Questionable Content cartoon (by Jeph Jacques):

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Wicked here doesn’t attribute literal wickedness; instead, it serves as a highly positive intensifier, roughly a New England counterpart to Northern California hella.

About the strip, from the website:

What is this “Questionable Content” thing about, anyway? 
Questionable Content (or “QC,” as it is frequently abbreviated) is an online comic strip that is ostensibly about romance, indie rock, little robots, and the problems people have. For a more detailed explanation (including spoilers, beware) why not check out the WikiPedia page?

In any case, the use of wicked above is one sort of development of non-literal intensifiers. Another route develops such intensifiers from modifiers originally denoting insanity but now connoting extreme, unbelievable degree. As in this use of insane itself in a commercial for RockinBody.com’s dance workout,’ offering “insane weight loss”:

(#2)

That brings me to crazy used this way. Many examples, for instance “Crazy Cool”, the second single from Paula Abdul’s 1995 album Head over Heels. And, more recently, Vonage’s “Crazy Generous” campaign; still photo here:

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(You can also find YouTube videos.)

The actor is disheveled, with wild hair. This has suggested to many viewers that he is in fact a homeless and (literally) crazy person. Against this is the fact that he is engaging and well-spoken, indeed impressively multilingual (at least for brief formulaic expressions).

Some have taken the “Crazy Generous” slogan literally and were offended by it. Here’s the beginning of a Change.org petition by Cindy Olejar of Seattle, “Stop Vonage’s Highly Offensive “Crazy Generous” Ad Campaign!”:

Vonage, a VoIP service provider, has a new advertising campaign. The Campaign’s slogan is “Crazy Generous.” The Campaign’s new spokesman, known as the “Chief Generosity Officer,” is a mentally ill homeless man who yells at strangers on the street about generosity. Vonage’s campaign is highly offensive to individuals afflicted with mental illness. This campaign perpetuates negative mental illness stereotypes, exploits the mentally ill, and makes light of the suffering that individuals afflicted with mental illness experience.

I see the ads as weird but entertaining, but not to be taken literally. Clearly, there’s room for different interpretations.

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Today’s Zits:

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There’s a lot of fun in there — I’m fond of Michisota, in particular, and the idea that Pierce’s fake ID has him as female — but here I’m looking at the rhyming slang idiom commit to the bit, which was new to me (hey, I’m an old man). From context, it seems to convey something like ‘embrace whole-heartedly’. But I’d welcome comments from native speakers.

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