(Men and their underwear, plus suggestive mansexiness, so not for everybody.)
Today’s Daily Jocks sale ad for Marco Marco (in this case, the company’s Light Tetra Brief), with a caption of mine wrapped around it:
Tetras maricones,
Showy fish,
Flash their stuff at
Sandbars.
(#1)
Marco
Maricone
Tiled his crotch in
Triangle pastels,
Not only a
Shield, also an
Enticement.
Yes, a cheap play on the Spanish offensive slang maricón ‘faggot’ (pl. maricones). Combined with the name Tetra of the line of Marco Marco briefs: the Light Tetra in #1, the Dark Tetra below:
(#2)
(same model, different hand positions, and #2 doesn’t show the fabulous hair).
DJ ad copy:
MARCO MARCO SALE!
Marco Marco is an American men’s underwear, swimwear, and sportswear manufacturer named after its founder and head-fashion designer Marco Morante. The brand is arguably best known for its underwear, which include street, sport and fashion lines.
The Tetra name might be meant to suggest the Greek numerical prefix tetra– ‘four’, though the tiling on the briefs is 3-sided rather than 4-sided.
Or the computer tiling game Tetris (though again there’s the 4-sided problem):
(#3)
Tetris (Russian: Те́трис) is a tile-matching puzzle video game, originally designed and programmed by Russian game designer Alexey Pajitnov. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra– (all of the game’s pieces contain four segments) and tennis, Pajitnov’s favorite sport. (Wikipedia link)
Or the showy tropical fish, the tetras:
(#4) Neon tetras in a school
A tetra is one of several species of small freshwater fish from Africa, Central America, and South America belonging to the biological family Characidae and to its former subfamilies Alestidae (the “African tetras”) and Lebiasinidae. The Characidae are distinguished from other fish by the presence of a small adipose fin between the dorsal and caudal fins. Many of these, such as the neon tetra (Paracheirodon innesi), are brightly colored and easy to keep in captivity. Consequently, they are extremely popular for home aquaria.
Tetra is no longer a taxonomic, phylogenetic term. It is short for Tetragonopterus, a genus name formerly applied to many of these fish, which is Greek for “square-finned” (literally, four-sided-wing). (Wikipedia link)
Tetras the fish gave me an opening to allude to the slang fish in the sense ‘an effeminate male homosexual’ (GDoS), esp. a young one. (And to play on the bar of sandbar and gay bar.)
My invented Spanish surname Maricone inadvertently echoes the Italian surname Morricone, as in the film composer Ennio Morricone:
(#5)
Ennio Morricone (born 10 November 1928) is an Italian composer, orchestrator, conductor, and former trumpet player. He composes a wide range of music styles, making him one of the most versatile, experimental and influential composers of all time, working in any medium. Since 1946 Morricone has composed over 500 scores for cinema and television, as well as over 100 classical works. (Wikipedia link)
You can listen to the The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme here. No particular linguistic or underwear relevance, however.
