(Plenty of language stuff, about English and French, but also quite a bit about man-man sex, sometimes in very plain language, so use your judgment.)
Over on AZBlogX, the posting “A fucktage”, with an ad flyer for a Falcon Studios sale, a montage of fuck scenes from four recent releases. A small WordPressable sample from this scrum of bodies and body parts, with especially notable facial expressions:
The portmanteau fucktage (accented, like montage, on the second syllable) is my take-off point here, for musings about montage, mounting sexually, pederasty, gay slang, and children’s songs.
(On the facial expressions, see my 5/4/13 X blog posting “What do I look like when I’m getting fucked?”)
From the AZBlogX posting, starting with an account of fucktage as a portmanteau:
Four fucks in a montage (montage < Fr. monter ‘to mount’ + noun-forming –age), “the technique of producing a new composite whole from fragments of pictures, text, or music” (NOAD2), or (as here) a collage created by this technique. Deliciously, each fuck is a montage ‘a mounting’ (of one man by another), so that the whole thing is a montage montage.
Dipping into French here brought me to the slang term pédé (shortened from pédéraste), which now generally means just ‘homosexual, gay, queer’ (and sometimes translates roughly as faggot), with no reference to age of sexual partner, indulgence in anal sex, or role in anal sex, though all three of these are canonically involved in the reference of pédéraste (and English pederast). From my Aptil 15th posting “Ganymede on the fly”, where I noted that a pederastic relationship is between an older man and a pubescent boy, stereotypically (not not necessarily) for anal sex. But:
it’s not entirely clear which partner in a pederastic relationship [pederast] refers to, though when the roles in such a relationship are sharply defined, it seems to be used most often for the dominant partner (in the Zeus role); there’s no standard term for the submissive partner, though I’m fond of catamite (with its direct association with the Ganymede role)
In any case, all this is leveled in pédé. All eight of the characters in the Falcon display are pédés, reveling in it for their viewers’ pleasure.
From the French: pédé led me to the curious conventional simile pédé comme un phoque ‘gay as a seal’ or (less commonly) comme un foc ‘as a jib’ (in sailing); and monter ‘to mount’ led me to the children’s song “Monter sur un éléphant” (“To mount / climb on / get on an elephant”).
comme un phoque. Etymological speculation runs rife: characteristics of seals and jibs are surveyed, English fuck is (repeatedly) appealed to, even French foutre (though it now means something like ‘fuck around’, while baiser is used for sexual connection; but foutre still has some of its vulgar power) — these last speculations turning on the fact that thoughts of faggots lead so many people to thoughts of men fucking.
But this is all speculation, and I haven’t seen anything like credible etymological research.
Much the same seems to be true of the English rough equivalent, gay as a goose. Maybe there is something etymologically significant in the characteristics of geese (their behavior or their appearance — goose necks are phallic), or in a connection to the verb goose ‘poke between the buttocks’, or maybe it’s just the appeal of the /g/ alliteration. But the etymology has yet to be nailed down. (“If it’s not true, at least it’s a good story” won’t cut it for serious lexicographers and historians of language.)
“Monter sur un éléphant”. (Serious earworm warning.) The song that I know is a song for children, meant to teach them to count. Verse 1 goes:
Monter sur un éléphant, c’est haut, c’est haut!
Monter sur un éléphant, c’est haut, c’est haut!
Monter sur un éléphant, c’est haut, c’est effrayant!
(haut ‘high’, effrayant ‘terrifying’). Then we get “Monter sur deux éléphants”and on and on.
In a version that’s new to me, each verse has a new animal (“Monter sur un crocodile” etc.), with the rest of the text altered appropriately. You can watch a performance by Ben Bowen here, with big gestures for kids to imitate.
This variant inspired me to devise crudely gay variants, using monter ‘mount’ in a sexual sense (and putting two notes on the article un):
Monter sur un pédé, c’est gai, c’est gai!
or
Monter sur un giton, c’est gai, c’est gai!
(or c’est vrai! or, for the rhyme, c’est bon!). The second version uses slang giton, earlier ‘male hustler’, now (apparently) ‘sissy, catamite’.
Here ends the pédé-mounting stream of consciousness.
