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commando
Today’s Zits, with Jeremy and Sara and their kisses: An extension of commando to new territory, but still having to do with a protective layer. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has commando in go commando,...
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stud muffin
Today’s Zippy, starring Mr. the Toad: Here I’m focussing on the slang N + N compound stud muffin, which Toad has chosen to interpret parallel to blueberry muffin ‘muffin with blueberries in it’: stud...
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AZBlogX compendium
My last compendium of postings on my X Blog seems to have been on August 17th (here). Since then, a number of sets of photos passed on to me by Chris Ambidge, preceded by two other postings. The list,...
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Java Jive
That’s the title of an entertaining op-chart by Ben Schott in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times yesterday. The framing text: By now, we’re all fluent in the language of corporate coffee –...
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Flowering pears and secretions
The local landscape has been brightened for some time by flowering pear trees, which are planted all over the place; there’s even a Flowering Pear Drive in Cupertino. These are mostly Callery pears....
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The Hamm knuckle
Passed on by Karen Erickson on Facebook (with general agreement from the readers that I would appreciate it), this photo on the HappyPlace site from 9/10/12: HappyPlace commentary: Jon Hamm’s penis...
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Snowboard Zippy
In Today’s Zippy, our pinhead reverts to adolescence on a snowboard: The slang in the body of the strip — airdog, boned out, shred, shred the gnar, pop, nollie, pow-wow — is all genuine snowboarder...
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fag bag
From various people on Facebook, this WPA poster with the compound fag bag: The fag here is the fag of cigarette smoking, though it turns out that there are now two notable uses of fag bag involving...
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Manliness and money
Among today’s cartoons, a Zippy on manliness and a Bizarro on slang for money: In the Zippy, Claude asserts his manliness by rising above cultural conventions associated with femininity and/or...
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Penguins and tuxedos
Today’s Bizarro plays on the association between penguins and tuxedos — with penguins in t-shirts and open-necked shirts instead of tuxedos: (#1) There are other cartoons about penguins and tuxedos...
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clueless
Today’s Zippy has our pinhead hero looking for a clue: A play on the ambiguity of clue and clueless. And an allusion to the board game Clue. Zippy goes back and forth between the older meaning of clue...
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Code 404
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a pun on page: A pun of a type that juxtaposes two strikingly different contexts (here, court life in a monarchy, on the one hand, and the internet, on the other) in...
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smartass
An eCard: Well, smartass isn’t directly a compound of the adjective smart ’impertinent’ and the noun ass; instead, -ass serves here as an expressive extension of smart (as in sweet-ass ‘really sweet,...
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whoopee cushion
I was moved yesterday to wonder about the whoopee cushion, its history, and the various names for it. In particular, I mused that there would be no good way to predict what the thing is called in...
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Meta-Pearls
Zippy the Pinhead has long played with metastrips, in which the cartoonist figures as a character or the characters talk about cartooning or both. Other strips sometimes indulge in this play: I posted...
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Non-hair quiffs
Commenter John yesterday on my “whoopee cushion” posting: So the point of intersection of “making whoopie” and “razzberry” is quiff? Well, it turns out that in addition to quiff referring to a hair...
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Crowdsourced lexicography
In the NYT on May 21st, a front-page story by Leslie Kaufman, “For the Word on the Street, Courts Call Up an Online Witness”, beginning: The wheels of justice move slowly sometimes, but not,...
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-licious sex
It began with the porn flick Twinkalicious (a 5-hour compilation of scenes featuring twink sex, that is, sex between twinks). The front cover of the DVD (showing a twink sucking cock) and the back...
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It’s been a slice
Today’s Zits: (#1) It’s been a slice, as a way of saying ‘it’s been good; goodbye’, was new to me. It’s in a few recent dictionaries of American slang / idioms, but not in Green’s Dictionary of Slang...
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Sexual lexical semantics
In this posting I’m going to try to tie together several threads: a recent story about a dancer forced out of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet school for making gay porn videos on the side; the proverbial...
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