Today’s hip Zippy:

Full of hippie slang, from days now gone.

Some references:

1. Jazzbo Collins. From Wikipedia:

Albert Richard “Jazzbo” Collins (born January 4, 1919, Rochester, New York — d. September 30, 1997, Marin County, California) was an American disc jockey, radio personality and recording artist who was briefly the host of NBC television’s Tonight show in 1957.

2. Badges. It starts with We don’t need no stinking badges (in the book and movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and eventually develops into the snowclone:

We don’t need no stinking /stinkin’ /steenkin’ Xs

See the Stinking Badges site, also the “Stinkin’ Up the Place” section (from 10/05) on this site.

3. Maynard G. Krebs. From Wikipedia:

Maynard G. Krebs is the “beatnik” sidekick of the title character in the U.S. television sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

The Krebs character, portrayed by actor Bob Denver, begins as a stereotypical beatnik, with a goatee, “hip” (slang) language, and a generally unkempt, bohemian appearance.

4. majuberized (in the title). At the moment I’m stumped by this one. Suggestions welcome.

Today’s Zippy:

(#1)

Fleer’s product was pink (hence the strip’s title, “In the pink”), apparently because that was the only coloring the inventor had on hand.

From Wikipedia:

Dubble Bubble is a [rhyming] brand of pink-colored bubblegum invented by Walter Diemer, an accountant at Philadelphia based Fleer Chewing Gum Company, in 1928. One of Diemer’s hobbies was concocting recipes for chewing gum based on the original Fleer ingredients. Though founder Frank Fleer had come up with his own bubble gum recipe in 1906, it was shelved due to its being too sticky and breaking apart too easily. It would be another 20 years until Diemer would use the original idea as inspiration for his invention.

… The original gum featured a color comic strip, known as the Fleer Funnies, which was included with the gum. The featured characters, ‘Dub and Bub’, were introduced in 1930 but were replaced by the iconic Pud and his pals in 1950. Originally, Pud was much more rotund than the slimmed down version seen in the 1960s. The early comics were especially large and colorful.

(#2)

Some kids were said to have bought the stuff primarily for these little comics rather than for the gum.

[Pud's name was pronounced /pʌd/, with the /ʌ/ of double and bubble -- rather than /pʊd/, with /ʊ/, as in pudding, which is used as a (British) clipping of pudding 'dessert' and also as coarse slang for 'penis', as in the expression pull one's pud 'masturbate'.]

As for bubblegum rock… from Wikipedia:

Bubblegum pop (also known as bubblegum rock, bubblegum music, or simply bubblegum) is a genre of pop music with an upbeat sound contrived and marketed to appeal to pre-teens and teenagers, that may be produced in an assembly-line process, driven by producers and often using unknown singers. Bubblegum’s classic period ran from 1967 to 1972. A second wave of bubblegum started two years later and ran until 1977 when disco took over and punk rock emerged.

Examples cited in #1 (“Sugar Honey” is a terrible earworm for me).

From several sources recently, reports of the Great Northern Jerk-Off. No, nothing to do with masturbation; jerk-off here refers to a competition — like bake-off, a competition in food.

A story from the Vilas County WI News-Review of 3/4/14 (updated on 4/27) that begins:

Club 45 in Conover was full to the brim Feb. 15 for the 20th anniversary of the Great Northern Jerk-Off. The event raised $1,000 for Warm The Children.

There were 25 participants who provided 38 jerky entries trying to win the title of the Best Homemade Jerky in the North.

Ah, jerky.

The t-shirt for the event:

On jerky, from Wikipedia:

Jerky is lean meat that has been trimmed of fat, cut into strips, and then dried to prevent spoilage. Normally, this drying includes the addition of salt, to prevent bacteria from developing on the meat before sufficient moisture has been removed. The word “jerky” is derived from the Spanish word charqui which is in turn derived from the Incan Quechua word ch’arki. which means to burn (meat). All that is needed to produce basic “jerky” is a low-temperature drying method, and salt to inhibit bacterial growth.

Jerky is to be distinguished from jerk(ed) food — a very different thing (though apparently they share an etymology). Again, from Wikipedia:

Jerk is a style of cooking native to Jamaica in which meat is dry-rubbed or wet marinated with a very hot spice mixture called Jamaican jerk spice. Jerk seasoning is traditionally applied to pork and chicken. Modern recipes also apply jerk spice mixes to fish, shrimp, shellfish, beef, sausage, lamb, and tofu. Jerk seasoning principally relies upon two items: allspice (called “pimento” in Jamaica) and Scotch bonnet peppers. Other ingredients include cloves, cinnamon, scallions, nutmeg, thyme, garlic, and salt.

When I still cooked real food  at home, I was particularly fond of stir-fried jerk(ed) lamb

Three cartoons today, on diverse topics: Calvin and Hobbes on explanations, Zits on means of communication (again), Bizarro on word play turning on ambiguity.

(#1)

Inventive but screwy explanation, plus an appeal to the (claimed) superior reasoning ability of men (vs. women).

(#2)

Jeremy and Pierce mockingly catalogue obsolete means of communication that they would never use, starting with the telephone. A recurrent theme on Zits.

(#3)

Language play turning on two different slang uses of hooter: ‘nose, esp. a large nose’ (as in the cartoon) and ‘female breast’, as in the dining establishments Hooters, featuring women with large hooters.

This morning I discovered that yesterday was not only Cinco de Mayo, but also National Cartoonists Day. In honor of the occasion, three cartoons for today. Then some account of Cartoonists Day, which leads to the early newspaper cartoon featuring the Yellow Kid.

1. Three  cartoons today. Two (a Rhymes With Orange and a Zippy) on means of communication, plus a Zits on what counts as retro to whom.

(#1)

A parody of Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, with chat instead of hat.

(#2)

Old-fashioned communication, on paper (“snail mail”, stressing the slowness) or face-to-face (“oral download”!), vs. trendy means of communication (of five types); the difference is a recurrent theme in Zippy the Pinhead, and also in Zits.

(Odds and ends: as usual, the proper names, which I won’t try to unpack here. Anyone who would like to take a bash at the first two — I assume that Einstein Feinstein is, as Zippy names go, straightforward — is welcome to. The egg is probably just a bit of surrealism. Credenza is there because it’s a delicious word. And we get Judge Judy again.)

2. National Cartoonists Day and the Yellow Kid. The second is the source of the first. See the Wikipedia page (with the crucial bit boldfaced):

The Yellow Kid was the name of a lead comic strip character that ran from 1895 to 1898 in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Created and drawn by Richard F. Outcault in the comic strip Hogan’s Alley (and later under other names as well), it was one of the first Sunday supplement comic strips in an American newspaper, although its graphical layout had already been thoroughly established in political and other, purely-for-entertainment cartoons.

… Mickey Dugan, better known as The Yellow Kid, was a bald, snaggle-toothed boy who wore an oversized yellow nightshirt and hung around in a slum alley typical of certain areas of squalor that existed in late 19th-century New York City. Hogan’s Alley was filled with equally odd characters, mostly other children. With a goofy grin, the Kid habitually spoke in a ragged, peculiar slang, which was printed on his shirt, a device meant to lampoon advertising billboards.

The character who would later become the Yellow Kid first appeared on the scene in a minor supporting role in cartoon panel published in Truth magazine in 1894 and 1895. The four different black-and-white single panel cartoons were deemed popular, and one of them, Fourth Ward Brownies, was reprinted on 17 February 1895 in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, where Outcault worked as a technical drawing artist. The World published another, newer Hogan’s Alley cartoon less than a month later, and this was followed by the strip’s first color printing on 5 May 1895. Hogan’s Alley gradually became a full-page Sunday color cartoon with the Yellow Kid (who was also appearing several times a week) as its lead character.

Two images of the Yellow Kid:
(#3)

(#4)

Hogan’s Alley is from what some have called “the platinum age” of the comics (preceding and surpassing the golden age). Besides the Yellow Kid, characters from this time include Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, and Micky Mouse.

On Facebook, Chris Hansen (looking forward to London Pride this weekend) reports this advert for Fortnum & Mason:

You wouldn’t expect the venerable F&M to get their apostrophes wrong (they are in fact Grocers to the Queen), and indeed this punctuational choice was entirely intentional.

From the UK Metro, Allison Lynch on the 24th, “Fortnum & Mason does something special for Gay Pride magazine”:

Luxury Piccadilly grocers, Fortnum & Mason, has pretty much won Pride Month with this cheeky ad.

The ad appeared in Gay Pride magazine ahead of Pride in London this weekend and went viral when it was shared by Twitter deity Stephen Fry.

Fortnums has played on its years of association with the Royal Family – it has held many Royal Warrants over the last 150 years – and its close relationship with the Queen.

But, as Fry points out, with the clever positioning of the apostrophe, the luxury department store has subverted its traditional image and delivered a quirky marketing message in one keystroke.

We applaud both the advertising genius and proficient use of punctuation.

Seconded from the US. (And, by the way, AmE should take up the useful adjective cheeky.)

Yesterday I reported on Fortnum & Mason’s use of queen in an advert in support of Gay Pride: “Proud to be the queens’ grocer”, with the plural possessive of the common noun queen, rather than the singular possessive of the proper noun Queen. Not everyone is entirely comfortable with this use of queen, seeing it as an offensive and demeaning slur. But the import of words, even slurs and other problematic vocabulary, depends crucially on context — on who’s using them, in what circumstances, for what purposes. Given that, you can read F&M’s queens’ as affectionate, in fact celebratory.

For the purposes of this posting, put aside the snowclonelet composite X queen (drama queen etc.), which deserves its own treatment, and consider queen on its own. Its most common usage in the domain of sexuality is as an anti-gay slur. Glosses from dictionaries from two different families (Merriam-Webster, Oxford):

[Merriam-Webster Online] often disparaging :  a male homosexual; especially :  an effeminate one

[New Oxford American Dictionary 2] informal   a male homosexual, typically one regarded as ostentatiously effeminate.

The history is complex, but a significant thread in it is the very common sense development in which a word referring to a woman (especially a “loose woman”) is extended to disparaging use for a gay man (especially an effeminate or promiscuous one). That gives us the slurs above, and it makes non-sexual uses of queen in a gay context risible or perilous, as in this New Yorker cartoon by William Haefeli (published 11/15/99), with a gay male couple trying out a queen size mattress:

But that isn’t the end of it. Some out gay men reject the slur in queen and rise above it proudly (and with some humor) by using the label of themselves. The formula big old / ol’ queen (parallel to big old / ol’ fag, with similar use) lends itself to this in-your-face use. Some of these men are noticeably effeminate, but many are not.

So we get John Barrowman –

John Scot Barrowman, MBE (born 11 March 1967) is a Scottish-American actor, singer, dancer, presenter and writer who holds both British and American citizenship. (Wikipedia link)

(who has played a drag queen but also many masculine characters, and whose presentation of self is as an out gay man, though not an effeminate one) referring to himself as a queen: from the Broadway.com site on 10/21/09, by Matt Wolf:

La Cage Star John Barrowman Dishes on Being a ‘Big Old Queen’… Onstage and Off!

That was my first actual introduction to Jerry [Herman, the composer], but honey, I’m a big old queen from musical theater, so of course I knew his work.

Discussion of Barrowman on this blog here, along with three pictures of him (#1 shirtless, #3 shirtless and wet, #4 kissing his husband). Barrowman is vocally out, and a staunch supporter of gay causes.

You can do a lot of things with slurs.

Google Alerts has, well, alerted me to a story about a skateboarding cop, as has Horton Copperpot in e-mail. From a site provided by Copperpot, this story of June 25th, “Holy Kickflip Batman! Is that a Skateboarding Activist Cop?!”:

Meet Officer Joel Zwicky, “Skateboard cop,” of the Green Bay Police Department.

Zwicky is not your typical cop, for starters, instead of harassing skaters, he’s shredding right next to them.

Instead of lobbying for more strict laws on skateboarding, he’s fighting to get restrictions lifted; and he’s successful at it.

Earlier this year, Zwicky convinced the city of Green Bay to lift the skating ban on the 25 mile urban path known as Fox River Trail.

Zwicky is trying to change the stereotypes about skaters.

“Wanted to break that down and show people that skateboarders aren’t just punk kids causing trouble, they are all kinds of people in the community, and they’re even your police force,” Officer Zwicky told KHON 2 News.

(A certain amount of skateboarding jargon — kickflip, shredding — comes through in this short piece.)

Now the Zwicky diaspora. The story goes back to the little town of Mollis, in Canton Glarus, Switzerland. Mollis is in the midst of mountains and forests. The Walensee (one of Switzerland’s larger lakes, mostly in the Canton of St. Gallen but partly in the Canton of Glarus) is not far away, and so is the oddly named Arschwald (‘Ass Forest’). The closest cities of some size are Zürich and Lucerne (in Switzerland) and Vaduz (in Liechtenstein).

From Mollis, over the centuries (five or so of them) Zwickys have swept around the world (from Australia to Argentina and of course in North America and Europe). We are all sorts of people, including factory workers, farmers, poets, diplomats, scientists, tech folks, manufacturers, and of course the descendants of dairy farmers and wine growers. The dairy farm connection explains the fairly high number of Zwickys in the upper Midwest of the U.S., which is probably how Joel Zwicky ended up in Green Bay WI. (Joel is of course a strikingly un-Swiss name, but then these are modern times; on the other hand, my name, Arnold, is a stunningly Swiss name.)

In the NYT Book Review yesterday, a set of three reviews of quirky books about people and animals (elephants, a tawny owl, and the giant squid); and then today in the Daily Post (Palo Alto and Mid-Peninsula), the story “Another cougar reported” (by Angelo Ruggiero), which I took at first to be a silly story about sexually aggressive older women in the area but which turned out (of course) to be about mountain lions.

The NYT reviews:

by Sara Gruen, of Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save World War II, by Vicki Constantine Coke [about Lt. Col. James Howard Williams, nicknamed “Elephant Bill”]

by Liesl Schillinger, of The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Living With a Tawny Owl, by Martin Windrow [about his own owl]

by Jon Mooallem, of Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, by Matthew Gavin Frank [about the Rev. Moses Harvey]

All three books are about eccentrics passionately involved with animals; the third appears to have an eccentric author as well. Delightful to see the three reviews packaged together.

Then there’s the local cougar. The story begins:

For the third time this month, a mountain lion has been spotted in San Mateo.

The area has loads of undeveloped space — foothills, parklands, forests, creeks, and so on — and plenty of deer and smaller animals for cougars to prey on (residents are of course concerned about their household pets, not to mention their small children).

On the big cat, from Wikipedia:

The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as the mountain lion, puma, panther, painter, mountain cat, or catamount, is a large cat of the family Felidae native to the Americas. Its range, from the Canadian Yukon to the southern Andes of South America, is the greatest of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in most American habitat types.

Then there’s the slang term cougar. For a change, this one seems to be genuinely recent; from Wikipedia:

Cougar is a slang term that refers to a woman who seeks sexual relations with considerably younger men. It typically refers to women aged 30–40 years old. ABC News states that these women pursue sexual relations with people more than eight years younger than they are, while The New York Times states that the women are over the age of 40 and aggressively pursue sexual relations with men in their twenties or thirties. However, the term can also refer to any female who has a male partner much younger than herself, regardless of age or age difference.

The origin of the word cougar as a slang term is debated, but it is thought to have originated in Western Canada and first appeared in print on the Canadian dating website Cougardate.com.

For some discussion, see this piece by lexicographer Grant Barrett, who takes slang cougar back to 2001 in Canada.

There doesn’t yet seem to be a generally used term for a cougar’s boytoy.

Today’s Zippy, with Griffy and Claude at odds on sources of information:

(#1)

The setting for all three panels is Neon Las Vegas in its heyday.

But first a brief note on the text, in particular the insulting slang N+N compound dirtball. Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists it as US for ‘a dirty or generally unpleasant person’ (the sense in #1), with first attestation in a 1974 novel by Victor Strasburger (and then in 1989 in a Carl Hiaasen novel). The appearance of its dirt- cousin dirtbag ‘general term of abuse’ (also originally US) is similarly recent: first attestation in Green from a slang compendium in 1967-68.

On to the settings of #1. The first panel depicts the Atomic Lounge on East Fremont St. in Las Vegas (near the downtown), which happens to be the subject of a story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal today, about attacks on the blight on the street, in particular a planned renovation and reopening of the lounge:

(#2)

(seen from the other side of the sign).

Then in the second panel we get the wonderful Sky Ranch Motel, also on East Fremont St.:

(#3)

(This from the Daily Neon site.)

Finally, also from Daily Neon, Society Cleaners’ “neon sign with its signature top hat and cane, a reminder of a more elegant era”:

(#4)

Some of the history:

In September 1946, Society Cleaners opened on the corner of 11th Street and Fremont at 1031 East Fremont Street. The Society Cleaners’ neon sign has been installed on Las Vegas Blvd. near the US-95  on ramps and part of the outdoor sign collection from the Neon Museum.

Yes, there’s a Neon Museum:

The Neon Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, features signs from old casinos and other businesses displayed outdoors on over 6 acres … The museum is restoring the La Concha Motel lobby as its visitor center, which officially opened on October 27, 2012.

For many years, the Young Electric Sign Company stored many of these old signs in their “boneyard.” The signs were slowly being destroyed by exposure to the elements. The museum is slowly restoring the signs and placing them around the Fremont Street Experience.

On the FSE:

The Fremont Street Experience (FSE) is a pedestrian mall and attraction in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada. The FSE occupies the westernmost 5 blocks of Fremont Street, including the area known for years as “Glitter Gulch,” and portions of some other adjacent streets.

The attraction is a barrel vault canopy, 90 ft (27 m) high at the peak and four blocks, or approximately 1,500 ft (460 m), in length.

I haven’t visited the Neon Museum or the FSE, but way back in 1965 I experienced some of these places in their original settings (hey, it was for a computer conference).

It starts with today’s Doonesbury –

(#1)

and ends with shirtless lycanthrophy. In between: Roland Hedley, III, the apps Tinder and Grindr (with some shirtlessness), geosocial networking (aka geosocial), and professional lycanthrope Tyler Posey (appearing shirtless). A long strange trip.

Hedley. The Doonesbury features the character Roland Hedley. From Wikipedia:

Roland Burton Hedley, III is a fictional character in the comic strip Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau, inspired by the on-air style of the veteran US reporter Sam Donaldson.

… [At one point in the strip] he has developed an extraordinarily large ego, which remains his defining trait to this day. He is a total sensationalist, willing to stretch the truth and say anything that would further his career.

What a douchebag, on the job and in his social life (as seen above)! (More douchebag below.)

Tinder. In the third panel of #1, an insert declares the topic of the remainder of the cartoon: “Adventures in Tinder”.

From Wikipedia:

Tinder is a matchmaking mobile app. The application connects with users’ Facebook profiles to provide pictures and ages for other users to view. Using GPS technology, users can set a specific radius, and they will have the option to match with anyone that is within that distance.

On the Tinder site itself:

Tinder is how people meet. It’s like real life, but better.

Let’s face it: Tinder is designed for more-or-less instant sexual hookups, without further commitment, between men and women. Quickie fucks for heterosexuals.

There’s net discussion on what works well in Tinder. One piece of advice for men is to post photos with their dog or dogs; adorable dogs suggests adorable men.

But some guys go for more carnal things — like this shirtless university student (University of Rhode Island, presumably) showing off his model’s body:

(#2)

(Don’t know how many women go for this presentation, but it would certainly catch the eye of many gay men. Still, he could use a puppy.)

Grindr. Tinder is relatively new — its initial release was 9/15/12 — but it’s been flourishing. It seems to have been modeled on the immensely successful app Grindr:

Grindr [initial release 3/25/09] is a geosocial networking application geared towards gay, bisexual, and bi-curious men.(Wikipedia link)

Grindr has expanded its software to provide filters for a variety of male “types”, among them:

Bear, Clean-cut, Daddy, Discreet, Geek, Jock, Leather, Otter, Poz [HIV-positive], Rugged, Trans and Twink

From the Grindr site:

Find local gay, bi and curious guys for dating or friends for free on Grindr. Meet the men nearest you with GPS, location-based Grindr.

(Yeah, sure, “dating or friends”. Code for: let’s fuck now.)

The profiles can be unpleasant. In fact, several users have assembled galleries of “Grindr douchebags” or “douchebags of Grindr”, for instance:

(#3)

A classic “fags” vs. “real men” distinction: NO FAGS.

Geosocial networking and the noun geosocial. On the Grindr Wikipedia page, we see the technical term geosocial networking, which seems to be a portmanteau of geolocation [via GPS] and social networking — both originally technical terms themselves, though they’ve moved into more ordinary use.

From Wikipedia, in a heavily technical-register article:

Geosocial Networking is a type of social networking in which geographic services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social dynamics. User-submitted location data or geolocation techniques can allow social networks to connect and coordinate users with local people or events that match their interests.

Later in the article:

The evolution of geosocial can be traced back to …

A nouning by truncation of geosocial networking to geosocial, suggesting that the writer of the sentence was so comfortable in this domain that they could abbreviate the longer expression, expecting the reader to interpret it in context.

Tyler Posey. And here’s where I came across the Tyler Poser story. From E! Online on the 5th, “Tyler Posey Jokes That He Has a Grindr Account (That’s a Gay Hookup App FYI)” by Brett Malec:

Does Tyler Posey have a Grindr account?!

In a sneak-peek preview clip for the 22-year-old’s upcoming MTV special Being Tyler Posey, the Teen Wolf star’s friends try to teach him about the straight dating app Tinder. That’s when Posey confesses he knows all about Grindr, the gay hookup app equivalent of Tinder.

“You know what Tinder is?” one friend asks Posey.

“Tinder? No, what is that? Is it like Grindr for straight people?” Posey responds. “I know what Grindr is because I have an account.”

This is a put-on, of course. But it puts the actor in a good light, in that he’s so comfortable in his sexuality that he can joke about Grindr, without disavowals or hedges.

On the man, from Wikipedia:

Tyler Garcia Posey (Born October 18, 1991) is an American actor and musician. Posey is best known for his role as Scott McCall in MTV’s show Teen Wolf.

… In February 2002 [as a young boy], he appeared in the film Collateral Damage; in December of that year, he played Jennifer Lopez’s son in the romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan.

(He plays rhythm guitar and sings vocals for the band Lost in Kostko.)

Posey in lycanthropic guise:

(#4)

and shirtless, playing in the band:

(#5)

Definitely cute (and he has a very sweet smile), though not quite as model-hunky as his lycanthropic colleague Taylor Lautner of Twilight (discussed in “Lycanthropic shirtlessness”, here).

Some time ago on ADS-L one of the list members wrote to ask about the verb fapp, which he’d seen in print but couldn’t interpret in context. The answer, from Urban Dictionary:

fapp ‘to masturbate furiously’

where it was said to be onomatopoetic in origin — from the “fap” noise generated by this activity (for males). And there’s fappening (cf. happening), fapping in a group.

New to me, but apparently reasonably well established in some circles. A visual (no body parts):

(Notice the finite clause as an object of the preposition about. Non-standard, but P + Clause is very common indeed.)

It’s not clear to me whether fappening is (in its origins) a portmanteau using the verb fapp, or whether fapp is a back-formation from a jokey fappening.

[Later note: a number of Facebook commenters say that they spell the verb FAP rather than FAPP.]

Today’s Zits:

(#1)

Jeremy and his buddy Pierce, and the slang euphemism lady parts.

Two questions about lady parts: What is its referent? And how long has it been around?

On the semantic question, there are two answers, one much broader than the other. The broad sense, from Segen’s Medical Dictionary (2012):

lady parts Slang for the external parts of the female anatomy—e.g., the breasts, clitoris, labia and, for some, the buttocks.

And the narrower sense, as a synonym for vagina, from “The season of penis and vagina”, on this blog on 10/30/11:

June Thomas on Slate on September 19th [2011] noted “a sudden affection for using anatomical terms [vagina and penis] for lady parts and manly bits”

It’s often unclear which sense is being used. Even in this now-notorious e-card briefly used in the 2012 Obama-Biden campaign:

(#2)

(The image was quickly dropped from the Obama-Biden website after backlash.)

On the historical question, I have no answer. The compound lady parts doesn’t seem to have made it into Green’s Dictionary of Slang, and (unsurprisingly) it’s not in the OED. Occurrences on the net (though very frequent) seem to be relatively recent.

Two cartoons this morning, a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro:

(#1)

(#2)

A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) on a usage-peeve theme; and borrowed vocabulary put to slangy uses.

The Rhymes. Grammar police dog is a portmanteau of the overhapping N + N compounds grammar police and police dog. The usage point that the dog is enforcing here is the superstition called, variously, No Stranded Prepositions or Dryden’s Rule (after one of its most dogged exponents, John Dryden). A wretched idea that just will not die, despite the writings of all the responsible usage writers.

(Another recent posting on the enforcement of usage prohibitions is the grammar sheriff here, who shoots you dead for using non-standard multiple negation.)

The Bizarro. Rather more complex, involving the items juju and mojo, both with African ceremonial uses, but now adapted to slang use.

juju in Wikipedia:

Juju or Ju-Ju is a word of either West African or French origin used previously by Europeans to describe traditional West African religions. Today it refers specifically to objects, such as amulets, and spells used superstitiously as part of witchcraft in West Africa.

and in NOAD2:

a charm or fetish, esp. of a type used by some West African peoples.
● supernatural power attributed to such a charm or fetish: juju and witchcraft.

But the Online Slang Dictionary gives an extended meaning:

the “magic” of a given plant, liquid or object. It will either help or hinder health, well-being etc.; i.e. the juju can be “good” or “bad.” It is up to a shaman to know what juju to use when. Windows 1998 upgrades are full of bad Juju. [Hence there are uses to mean ‘luck’, either good or bad.]

On to mojo. From NOAD2:

a magic charm, talisman, or spell: someone must have their mojo working over at the record company.
● magic power.
ORIGIN early 20th cent.: probably of African origin; compare with Gullah moco ‘witchcraft.’

You can see extended uses developing here. The Online Slang Dictionary gives a number of these, especially ‘style’ and ‘sex appeal’. (I don’t give the illustrative examples here; OSD entries are offered by users, and these rarely have examples that convey the senses of items in context at all well. After all, the contributors know what the examples mean to them.)

Today’s Dilbert has Catbert giving advice on naming the company’s new dress code:

  (#1)

(in fact, a dorky name for it). Now on dork and dorky.

On this blog, look at “geek, dork, etc.” of 9/1/13, about a Shoebox cartoon, with links to earlier postings on the slang terms dweeb, nerd, geek, and dork, but focusing on the two items, nerd and geek, that have come to be used with neutral affect, even proudly (while dweeb and dork are contemptuous). From a character in the cartoon: “Nerds are more academically inclined, while we geeks are just super-passionate about our hobbies.”

Dork starts as vulgar slang for ‘penis'; the earliest cite in OED2 is for this sense, from a lexicographic discussion (so that this use is guaranteed to be earlier):

1964   Amer. Speech 39 118   The word dick itself serves as a model for two variants which are probably Midwestern, dirk and dork, also meaning ‘penis’.

Then comes the sense ‘a foolish or stupid person; also as a general term of contempt’, with a first cite from 1972 (Wikipedia has ‘a slang word for a stupid or inept person’). The sense development here is one that has occurred with several other slang terms for ‘penis’ — dick, prick, tool, putz; from ‘penis’ by metonymy to ‘person bearing a penis’, carrying over the vulgarity of the term.

This second sense of dork serves as the basis for suffixation with -y, to yield dorky, roughly ‘like a dork’, or as OED3 (Dec. 2005) has it:

slang (orig. U.S.). Contemptible or pathetic; spec. socially awkward, unfashionable.

with a 1970 cite from Current Slang (Univ. S. Dakota) 4 iv. 17: “Dorky, ridiculous, unfair”. Once again a lexicographic source, guaranteeing that the word is older than 1970.

The website “Lovely Little Lexemes: Exploring the strange and wonderful English language, one word at a time” by “Mrs. B” has a 3/3/12 entry on dorky, defining it as ‘stupid, inept, or unfashionable'; summarizing the OED‘s material on dork and dorky; and supplying this image from Sodahead.com:

  (#2)

A slang term (also spelled doxing) from the Gamergate controversy (see below), for “researching and publishing personally identifiable information about an individual” (Wikipedia), in a form of cyber-bullying. The Wikipedia article derives the term from dox, which it treats as a clipped version of document, but it seems more likely that dox is just a re-spelling of docs, which is a clipped version of documents, used here with a specialized meaning.

Now on Gamergate, from Wikipedia:

In video game culture, Gamergate (sometimes referred to as the hashtag #GamerGate) is an online movement which emerged around false allegations of unethical conduct levied against indie game developer Zoe Quinn in August 2014. Some supporters have stated that they are concerned with ethical issues in video game journalism, particularly conflicts of interest between video game journalists and developers. However, Gamergate has become most notable for a series of misogynistic and violent threats and harassment targeting Quinn and other prominent women in gaming, which have drawn widespread condemnation of the movement. Though the harassment is seen as coming from a minority of Gamergate supporters, the movement’s unwillingness or inability to control the attacks carried out in its name is generally seen as preventing constructive engagement. The harassment campaigns against women, combative rhetoric, and criticism of those examining video games from feminist or other minority perspectives has resulted in the movement being widely viewed as fighting a culture war against the increasing diversity of video game culture.

It seems that some traditional gamers, who are heavily male and into fiercely aggressive games, see critiques of their world by women, and the development of other types of games (especially by women), as a threat to this world and have responded with an appalling stream of misogyny directed at individual women. This bad behavior is encouraged by the ease with which people can post anonymously or pseudonomously and otherwise behave in socially irresponsible ways on the net.

A recent skirmish in Gamergate was reported by Lauren C. Williams on ThinkProgress on the 23rd, in “Actress Felicia Day Opens Up About GamerGate Fears, Has Her Private Details Exposed Minutes Later”, quoting Day:

“I have been terrified of inviting a deluge of abusive and condescending tweets into my timeline. I did one simple @ reply to one of the main victims several weeks back, and got a flood of things I simply couldn’t stand to read directed at me. I had to log offline for a few days until it went away. I have tried to re-tweet a few of the articles I’ve seen dissecting the issue in support, but personally I am terrified to be doxxed (having personal information such as an address, email or real name released online) for even typing the words ‘Gamer Gate.’”

In fact, Day was reportedly doxxed within an hour of writing her post on GamerGate.

Other targeted women have fled their homes to escape the abuse (sometimes including death threats).

[Added: Not long after I posted this, today's NYT arrived, with this excellent pained piece by video game enthusiast Chris Suellentrop, "Can Video Games Survive?: The Disheartening GamerGate Campaign".]

… from Karen Schaffer: on trickle treat, and on gangbang and gangbanger.

Trickle treat. Karen wondered about this Mumsnet posting:

To take my kids out tonight – not trickle treating, just out?

with trickle treat for trick or treat. This looks like a mishearing (syllabic /l/ for syllabic /r/) now enshrined as a demi-eggcorn; trickle makes no particuar sense here. There are others, for example from Netmums:

how old do u take kids trickle treat

And here’s a guy (“starshipspirk”) who’s just now figured it out:

only this Halloween did I realise it’s not trickle treating

I AM 18 YEARS OLD AND HAVE BEEN SAYING TRICKLE TREATING MY WHOLE LIFE AND NOT ONCE DID I QUESTION WHY

Then there are sites that look like deliberate language play, like this one (with both versions of the idiom):

Halloween….trickle treat!

Here is my little Elmo trick or treating for the first time. Tell the truth Americans, does anyone ever do a trick?

There are at least two deliberately playful uses: Trickle Treat Bathrooms, a home improvement firm in Nottingham (UK), and the title of a book on a “diaperless infant toilet training method”.

gangbang(er). Karen wrote earlier about the cooexistence of the sexual slang noun gangbang ‘gangfuck’ and the non-sexual slang noun gangbanger ‘gang member': how does the first not poison the second? It looks like the two are different enough in their syntax, morphology, and semantics that they can occupy different gragmatic spheres.

Background on the noun gang ‘group of people’. NOAD2 divvies up the uses in a way that I don’t find entirely natural, but there are two senses that are relevant here: the one in the sexual noun gangbang, which refers to an event in which a group of people (usually men) engage in successive intercourse (banging ‘fucking”) of one person, the “target” (who typically is an unwilling participant, that is, who is raped, but can be a willing, even celebratory, participant). (I’ve written on other occasions on other sexual gang scenes — in particular, gang sucks, in which the target performs fellatio on a series of men; and bukkake or a ‘gang cum’, in which a set of men ejaculate on the target.)

The sexual noun gangbang is just an ordinary N + N compound: a bang ‘fucking’ by a gang-1 ‘a group’. The group is not (necessarily) criminal in nature, and the event is not necessarily violent. (Phonologically, the rhyme between the two nouns is an attractive plus.)

The noun gangbanger is, first of all, a personal noun, referring to a person belonging to a gang-2 (an association of people involved in at least petty criminality, and probably group violence), not an event. Its meaning is ‘gang-2 member’, but banger ‘member’ as a second element of a N + N compound doesn’t occur independently (though banger can of course be used as a clipping of gangbanger); apparently it was chosen here for the sake of the rhyme. (The history of the word is pretty much impossible to piece out, given the extraordinary range of uses of its parts, in different social contexts, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang.)

All these differences between a gangbang and a gangbanger seem to be enough for most people to prevent the first from poisoning the use of the second, though some (including some friends of Karen’s) are made uncomfortable by the phonological overlap.

In the NYT yesterday, a piece “A Step-by-Step Guide to Berkeley’s Many Quirks” by Malia Wollan, beginning:

Tom Dalzell looks too strait-laced to be the arbiter of the eccentric.

Nonetheless, almost two years ago, Mr. Dalzell, 63, set out in his khakis and comfortable shoes to walk every street, alleyway and path and document this city’s material oddities on a website he calls Quirky Berkeley. “There is a tremendous diversity of thought here,” Mr. Dalzell said. “And one of the ways we express our lack of conformity is with the quirky things we put on our houses and in our yards.”

Ah, the name Tom Dalzell, familiar to me from a very different context.

Mr. Dalzell moved to Berkeley 30 years ago, after a stint working for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. He manages a labor union of gas and electric utility workers by day and moonlights as an author of slang dictionaries and a collector of idiosyncrasies.

In fact, Dalzell parlayed an enthusiasm for words into a lexicographic career.

More on Quirky Berkeley:

The rules are simple: no seasonal decorations, and all quirk must be viewable from the street.

So far, Mr. Dalzell has walked nearly 150 miles and shot some 9,000 photos of rogue garden gnomes who moon passers-by; a four-foot-wide peace sign outside a house long occupied by Wavy Gravy of Woodstock fame and his Hog Farm commune compatriots; dozens of colorful hard hats hanging from a front yard tree; a massive wolf sculpture made from old car parts; a menagerie of animal-shaped mailboxes; a giant metal orange that once served as a roadside refreshment stand but now sits in a wooded side yard; and a variety of wildly painted houses and sculptures.

Dalzell on this blog:

☛ 9/23/09: Lifting shirts

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/09/23/lifting-shirts/

The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, vol. 2 (Dalzell and Victor, 2006) follows OED2 in marking the word [shirtlifter] as Australian, dated 1966

☛ 1/1/11: Genital junk

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2011/01/01/genital-junk/

[from Ben Zimmer:] something about the sound and sense of the word must have made it ripe for reinvention. Tom Dalzell, whose latest book is “Damn the Man!: Slang of the Oppressed in America,” sees junk catching on euphemistically

☛ 1/3/11: Metaphorical circle jerks

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2011/01/03/metaphorical-circle-jerks/

There are a lot of different directions here, and I wasn’t sure which one(s) Engelmann intended, but Tom Dalzell pointed out on ADS-L that HDAS (the Historical Dictionary of American Slang) has circle jerk ‘mess’ since 1973, and the compound seemed to him to be fairly common in that sense.

☛ 6/7/11: Package deal

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2011/06/07/package-deal/

[quoting Ben Zimmer on ADS-L:] In my On Language column on genital “junk” in January, I quoted Arnold Zwicky and Tom Dalzell on the useful vagueness of “junk” and such related euphemisms as “down there,” “unit,” “thing,” and “stuff”. Lettermanian “deal” fits well into that category.

☛ 6/8/13: Crowdsourced lexicography

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2013/06/08/crowdsourced-lexicography/

[quoting from the NYT:] 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.

Over the years, Dalzell has published (alone or with various collaborators) a number of word-enthusiast collections on popular topics: The Slang of Sin (1999), Sex Slang (2007), Vice Slang (2007), Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang (2010), Damn the Man!: Slang of the Oppressed in America (2010), The Slang of Poker (2012), Vietnam War Slang (2014).

Musing on the line “You’re toast!” — a usage that turns out to be only about 30 years old.

The OED (draft additions December 2002) takes things back to Ghostbusters:

colloq. (orig. U.S.). A person or thing that is defunct, dead, finished, in serious trouble, etc. Freq. in proleptic use, esp. in you’re (also I’m, we’re, etc.) toast : you (I, we, etc.) will soon be dead, in trouble, etc. Cf. history n.

The lines in quot. 1983   do not in fact appear in the U.S. film Ghostbusters as released in 1985, since a considerable amount of the dialogue is ad-libbed. The actual words spoken by Venkman (played by Bill Murray) as he prepares to fire a laser-type weapon, are, ‘This chick is toast’; this is prob. the origin of the proleptic construction which has gained particular currency.

1983   D. Aykroyd & H. Ramis Ghostbusters (film script, third draft) 123   Venkman..: Okay. That’s it! I’m gonna turn this guy into toast.

Note history as a parallel usage, as in the 1989 song “You’re History” by British-based pop act Shakespears Sister:

You’re history
– like a beat up car -
No good for me
– like an old film star -
You’re history
– that’s what you are

So: the figure of speech prolepsis,

the representation of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so, as in he was a dead man when he entered. (NOAD2)

My current favorite gay porn title of the outrageous pun variety: Romancing the Stone > Bromancing the Bone. We start with the portmanteau noun bromance. From Wikipedia:

A bromance is a close, emotionally-intense, non-sexual bond between two (or more) men. It is an exceptionally tight affectional, homosocial male bonding relationship that exceeds that of usual friendship

This can then be verbed and (separately) sexualized, to refer to what are sometimes called brolovers (there’s a brolovers site on tumblr, which has sexy images, many with a definitely romantic cast to them, as below).

That gets us to bromancing. Then the object bone, slang for an (erect) penis, which echoes the stone of the title Romancing the Stone and throws in some alliteration as well.

The various “bromancing the bone” sites are all over the map. Some are about batebuds, buddies in masturbation — either jacking off together or jacking each other off. Some are about buddies in fellatio. Some are about buddies in anal intercourse; the commercial gay porn Bromancing the Bone DVDs seem to be “amateur” anally oriented videos; amateur videos feature non-professional actors presented as straight guys having sex with one another — not a genre I’m at all fond of.