(Adult content, but no X-rated images.)

A sale from porn purveyor GameLink offering their “most viewed [gay] movies” (for on-line viewing):

Bareback Boyfriends (Raw Reality)
Hairy Bare Loads (Hairy and Raw)
Drink the Jizz, Teen-Whore! (Bareback Boys)
Nacho Vidal’s Ass Destroyers
Hairy and Raw #2 (Hairy and Raw)
Twinks Swallow Anthology (Eboys)

No subtlety here; these are crudely named flicks, outside of the tradition of playfully titled porn films. And four of them have bare, bareback, or raw in their titles or in the name of their makers. Bare is short for bareback, and raw here means ‘bareback’. It turns out that the Nacho Vidal item is nothing but barebacking as well, so only Twinks Swallow offers something other than raw sex.

[On barebacking, see this recent posting of mine on Sean Cody's Bareback Fuckfest (and let me note here that this title is a nice double trochee). And for some gay porn flicks that are more inventively named, see this AZBlogX posting on Memorial Day sales from porn firms (Falcon Studios and, again GameLink, with military-themed films).]

[Addendum 7/19/13: in porn material, bareback is frequently abbreviated as BB. Nothing to do with pellet guns, bulletin boards, BlackBerries, Bernard Baruch, Brigitte Bardot, etc.]

In case you missed the company name Bareback Boys above for Drink the Jizz, Teen-Whore! (a title that should win some sort of Tasteless Prize), the back cover says it offers ”Dirty little barebacking jizz-drinking teen-whores!”. And for the Nacho Vidal, the (overheated) GameLink description works raw ‘bareback’ into the text:

Nacho Vidal moves into direct, male-on-male gay sex, in a similar vein to his popular 2005 feature Face Fuckers. Hot, hung Brazilian dudes live out horny, edgy anal encounters from which there is no escape. Muscular Latino men dominate each other, bending their slave boys over and probing tight asses with dildos, shaving their buttcheeks, and indulging in breath play and choking, before getting down to raw assfucking. Nacho’s scenes evoke thrilling fantasies of rough trade, sexual dread and hard-edged danger on the gay mean streets.

This use of raw seems to be recent. Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists this sense (the tenth of twelve) as:

(US) used of sexual intercourse without a condom

with two cites, a 1994 quote from Gary Indiana’s novel Rent Boy (“The only real intelligent part of Chip is his penis, getting it up there raw is unbelievable…”) and a 1997 one from POZ magazine (“I’ve only gone raw with a positive guy that one time…”).

It hasn’t yet reached the OED or NOAD, but it’s in AHD5, where a significant ambiguity in sexual raw is noted: in addition to the condomless sense, the dictionary also gives ‘done in a rough or unrestrained manner’ (referring to sex).

For raw sex, Wikipedia gives two links:

a British comedy musical group consisting of Rowland Rivron and Simon Brint

bareback sex, sexual activity without the use of condoms

but you can also find plenty of references to uninhibited, animalistic, somewhat rough sex, especially in material with a significant female audience, like the article ”Why Raw Sex Gives You a Stronger Orgasm” in Cosmopolitan Philippines.

Sometimes it’s not clear which of the senses of raw sex is intended. So we get the Boston band Raw Sex – with an album entitled Seven Hard Inches and this phallic logo:

  (#1)

And a 2010 album from Jimmy Edgar entitled Hot, Raw, Sex:

  (#2)

Among the cards in the SexDeck –

(“Has Missionary become monotonous? Is Doggie getting dull? Tonight, skip the same-old-same-old and give Leg Wrap. Easy Rider, or the Sun Worshiper a try.”)

The names are mostly inventive, definitely non-standard, but every so often you come across a technical term from the world of sex research. So it was with card #16, depicting the reverse CAT, where CAT is glossed as Coital Alignment Technique.

From Wikipedia:

The coital alignment technique (CAT) sex position, known colloquially as grinding the corn, is a variant of the missionary position designed to maximize clitoral stimulation during coitus. This is achieved by combining the “riding high” variation of the missionary position with pressure-counterpressure movements performed by each partner in rhythm with coitus.

The coital alignment technique (CAT) sex position, known colloquially as grinding the corn, is a variant of the missionary position designed to maximize clitoral stimulation during coitus. This is achieved by combining the “riding high” variation of the missionary position with pressure-counterpressure movements performed by each partner in rhythm with coitus.

The technique for coital alignment was formulated by American psychotherapist Edward Eichel and the original study was published by Eichel, De Simone Eichel, and Kule in 1988 in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. Since then, the topic has been studied several times in the same journal. A report in 1992 by Kaplan and her sex therapist trainees described the team’s cursory trial of the C.A.T., acknowledging that they may have resorted to old routines after only a few attempts out of fear of disappointing their partners. Their call for other sex therapists to give the technique more rigorous testing instigated a series of controlled studies by Hurlbert and colleagues reporting statistically significant results in the treatment of female hypoactive sexual desire sex therapy.

So: not only a technical term, but a relatively recent one, for a technique that might also have been devised recently — though I’m a bit suspicious that it has a (metaphorical) colloquial name, which I didn’t recall having heard before (but now it turns out that it figured in episode 9 (“Grinding the Corn”) of season 4 of the tv show Six Feet Under (2004), in which one character brings another to orgasm, for the first time, by using the technique).

The position depicted in SexDeck #16 is a woman-on-top variant of CAT as described above.

(Though many of the positions in the SexDeck can be fairly easily adapted for man-on-man anal intercourse, CAT and reverse CAT look singularly unpromising.)

(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.)

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).

An image sent to me by Chris Ambidge:

(#1)

The sheer fun of showering together! The illustration shows one style of gang shower, with shower heads arranged around a central pillar. In the other main style, the heads are located side by side along one, two, or three sides of a communal shower room, as in this elegant (but unpeopled) installation:

(#2)

Some further illustrations, with cultural comment, then some discussion of the compound gang shower.

Pillar-style. Here’s a color version of the Bradley item in #1, with ad text, plus some more recent commentary from the company:

(#3)

From the Washfountain, the Bradley Corporation Blog

What can you really say about this? It was the 60’s, things were different then.

You’ve probably seen this picture before… We definitely wouldn’t run this ad now, but back then I bet nobody thought it was strange at all. The same picture and tagline actually got used in a few different places, so it must have been fairly successful. You can see another example below.

We’ve been selling group shower fixtures since the 30’s,  and the fact is it always makes sense to install fixtures that use space and water economically in larger facilities. The thing that changes is our sense of modesty. Maybe try out one of our showers that include privacy stalls?

(Gang showers are traditionally a male thing; women’s communal shower rooms have usually had privacy stalls or at least curtains between the shower heads.)

Here’s Zac Efron using a pillar-style shower (but alone), in a couple of shots that didn’t make it into High School Musical 3:

(#3)

In-line-style. Very much the dominant style, in school gyms, health clubs, and the like. Here’s a version with two guys showering:

(#4)

and one with a whole gang:

(#5)

plus one from photographer Luke Smalley (“Untitled (Group Shower)” of 2008, with two guys but a very different tone from #4:

(#6)

(#6 presents many of the interpretive problems I mentioned in this posting: what are we to make of it?)

More group bathing in “Recruiting men”.

Cultural context. Guys being naked together (especially in showers or locker rooms) sets up a potential context for men to cruise men — a potential that’s sometimes realized in life and is massively realized in gay visual materials. It’s easy to see #4 as a cruise, or at least a scoping-out, of the guy on the left by the guy on the right, And #5 is a cropped version of an explicitly (and celebratorily) homoerotic painting by artist Rick Chris (the full painting, plus four others of naked hunks in communal settings, can be viewed on AZBlogX, in “Gang paintings”).

The number of gay porn flicks set in shower rooms and/or locker rooms is enormous.

(More discussion in “The triad” jockstrap, locker room, shower room” on AZBlogX and, with a shower room fantasy of French rugby players, in “Keeping clean” on this blog.)

The compound gang shower. This is a reasonably straightforward N + N compound, with a FOR interpretation of the relationship between the two referents (‘shower (place) for a gang (of men)’, with gang understood merely as referring to a group, with no criminal associations.

There are few really parallel compounds with first N gang: gang bang and gang shag (and the innovations gang suck and gang piss, discussed in other postings on this blog) are probably the closest, but they have the the BY interpretation rather than the FOR interpretation, they refer to events rather than locales or objects, and their head nouns are not usually used on their own to refer to events (note the marginal character of I took part in a bang and similar things).

(Technically not visually X-rated, but very heavy in sexual content.)

In writing about facial expressions during gay sex (especially, during man-on-man intercourse), I’ve remarked on an ecstatic expression often shown by one partner (usually, the bottom) or both of them. From a posting on “Captioned croppings”, this example of mutual ecstasy (mouths open, eyes narrowed or fully shut):

The expressions are an outward manifestation of an inner state of mind (and body), an intense giving over of one’s self to, or losing one’s conscious self in, the sexual experience — an ecstasy or rapture. Gay men sometimes speak of a bottom in this transcendant state as being in heat; the counterpart for a top would be, I suppose, being in rut or rutting, though I’ve never heard the expression. These ways of talking adopt the vocabulary of sexual behavior in certain animals for an only very roughly analogous human phenomenon.

From Wikipedia:

In species with estrous cycles [like cats and dogs], females are generally only sexually active during the estrus phase of their cycle … This is also referred to as being “in heat”. (link)

The rut is the mating season of ruminant animals such as deer, sheep, elk, moose, caribou, ibex, goats, pronghorn and Asian and African antelope. During the rut (also known as the rutting period, and in sheep sometimes as tupping), males often rub their antlers or horns on trees or shrubs, fight with each other, wallow in mud or dust, and herd estrus females together. (link)

In human beings, the transcendant state during sex can be distinguished from a preceding state of intense desire for sex, though the two are part of a larger behavioral and psychological pattern. For the state of intense desire for gay sex, the general expression in English seems to be the all-purpose being horny, although this is most often used of men desiring the sexual services of another man (who serves as fellator or bottom). Otherwise, being in heat or in rut can be extended to the preparatory phase, or a longer, more compositional expression can be used: need dick or be hungry for dick, need a blow job, need to be fucked, need (an) ass, etc.

Some animal behavior that looks sexual may in fact spring from other sources — humping in dogs, in particular. (The term humping relates the phenomenon to sexual intercourse, since it also serves as a synonym for the stronger fucking.)

From a Psychology Today piece of 9/1/12, “Why Dogs Hump: There isn’t, a single reason behind this normal behavior”, by Mark Bekoff:

“On a beautiful, warm afternoon, I watched a group of dogs frolic in a dog park. Suddenly, I heard a woman’s high-pitched yelp, followed by the pounding of human feet. There was no need to look; it was obviously about humping, which we can also refer to as mounting.” So wrote Julie Hecht in her excellent review of humping by dogs. Indeed, because humping often often offends some people, Julie titled her essay ”H*umping”.

Mounting and humping by dogs are among those behavior patterns about which humans make lots of assumptions but we really don’t know much about them. Dogs will mount and hump other dogs and other nonhuman animals … from a wide variety of positions, human legs, and objects such as beach balls, water buckets, food bowls, pillows, and garbage pails without a care in the world. If you want to watch please do but an audience isn’t necessary. Sometimes they hold on for upwards of 20-30 seconds and sometimes they just jump on and slide off and saunter away. And size doesn’t matter.

While many humans feel embarrassed when they see a beloved four-legged friend mount and hump in public places, this behavior is a normal part of a dog’s behavioral repertoire. Both males and females mount and hump, and these behaviors first appear early in a dog’s life, particularly during play. Mounting and humping should not be considered abnormal behavior patterns.

While mounting is best known for its role in reproduction, it also occurs in many other contexts and emotional states. Dogs mount when they’re excited and [aroused] and even when they’re stressed and anxious. Take out the leash to go for a walk and Lassie starts humping Toto. You come home after a long day’s work and Spot goes for your leg.

Earlier today it was kick-ass avoidance in the NYT. Now Ann Burlingham has pointed me back to a story from last month with a puzzling bit of avoidance in it. The background is the tale of philosopher Colin McGinn and the events that led to his leaving his academic position. Jennifer Schuessler in the NYT on August 3rd, in “A Star Philosopher Falls, and a Debate Over Sexism Is Set Off”:

While the status of women in the sciences has received broad national attention, debate about sexism in philosophy has remained mostly within the confines of academia. But the revelation this summer that Colin McGinn, a star philosopher at the University of Miami, had agreed to leave his tenured post after allegations of sexual harassment brought by a graduate student, has put an unusually famous name to the problem, exposing the field to what some see as a healthy dose of sunlight.

… Meanwhile, some of Mr. McGinn’s posts —  including one meditating on the difference between “suggesting” an action and “entertaining” it, and another (since removed) riffing on alternate meanings of a crude term for masturbation — have struck even some of Mr. McGinn’s onetime supporters as less philosophical than self-incriminating.

It’s “a crude term for masturbation” — without an indication of what term he used. We have to speculate.

If McGinn had merely said that he masturbated while thinking about the student — he apparently did that — that would have been offensive, but the paper could have reported the situation without commenting on his word choice; the verb masturbate would have served. Instead, he embarked on a semantic analysis of a crude slang expression. The relevant blog posting has been removed, so the direct evidence has disappeared.

My guess is jerking off, but jacking off is an alternative, and so is a reference to a handjob. Since I have an interest in the analysis of sexual vocabulary, it would have been good to see what McGinn actually said (though I might just have been annoyed by it, as quite a few readers seem to have been).

Heard on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an instance of get pelvic (with someone) ‘have sex (with someone)’, a euphemistic idiom based on the image of the pelvis as the cradle of the genitals. I don’t recall having heard the expression in other contexts, but it seems to have been picked up in Buffy fanfic, where there are many occurrences. Two examples:

Set after season six. After she got back but before they got pelvic, Spike leaves … (link)

Gunn just didn’t get the finer points of the Buffy/Angel relationship, ‘Because they like to get pelvic and now they can ’cause Angel got his soul anchored… (link)

Back on the 19th, in a collecion of miscellany, I reported (in item 4) on the porn film title Pacific Rim Job: an overlap of Pacific Rim and rim job ‘anilingus / analingus’. Which made me reflect on sexual X job expressions, a small family of compounds referring to sexual acts, of which three are especially frequent: blow job and rim job (of the form V + job) and hand job (of the form N + job). So to other snowclonelet composites examined on this blog and Language Log (among them, X fag, X porn, X queen, X rage, X virgin, X whore, X drag, X magnet, X Nazi, X slut, X porn, X police), we can now add X job.

Some exclusions. Not every compound of the form X job is an instance of this snowclonelet; only ones with job ‘sexual act’ as their head are. So compounds referring to types of plastic surgery (boob job, nose job, butt job) are irrelevant, as are those referring to automotive work (lube job, grease job).

(These compounds are variously punctuated — written separated, hyphenated, or solid — and I’ll preserve the punctuation of my sources, but otherwise will cite them, as above, in separated spellings.)

History of the big three. The compounds are not venerable; they go back only to the middle of the 20th century. It looks like hand job was coined first, but not by much. OED3 (June 2013) has its first cite from 1939:

P. Di Donato Christ in Concrete ii. vii. 99   If you death-murdered cocks desire not to work then say so and go into the cellar and do the hand-job!

There are four cites in all; one cite is solid, three hyphenated.

Then blow job, which OED2 has first in 1961:

A. Hecht in Hudson Rev. XIV. 371 59   And you can get a blow-job Where other men have pissed.

(This cite is hyphenated; the others are written separated.)

(OED2 has blow ’fellate’ first in 1933.)

But OED2 hasn’t been revised for a long time. And Green’s Dictionary of Slang has cites for blow job ‘fellatio’ in the 1940s, not long after the first cite for hand job.

Now, rim job is genuinely more recent. OED3 (June 2010) has its first cite in 1969:

S. Cannon Groove, bang & jive Around 8   Thrills shot from one end of Annette’s body to the other, as his tongue ran circles around her behind, giving her a rim job.

(OED3 has rim ’to stimulate the anus of (a person) with the tongue or mouth, as a sexual act’ first in 1941.)

Semantics of the big three.  For hand job, OED3 has:

slang (orig. U.S.) an act of (usually male) masturbation, esp. performed by one person on another

The core meaning is of one man masturbating another, but the compound can also be used for someone masturbating themselves or for someone masturbating a woman; speakers differ as to which of the uses are natural for them.

For blow job, OED2 also has a broader meaning than I would have expected:

 slang (orig. U.S.) (the act of performing) cunnilingus or fellatio

Green’s Dictionary says that the ‘cunnilingus’ sense is specifically U.S. black and gives only one cite, from 1997. But there may well be some speakers who have extended the compound to oral sex in general.

Finally, rim job in OED3:

 coarse slang (orig. U.S.) an act of stimulating another person’s anus sexually with the tongue

More jobs. Hand job and blow job are the conventional X job compounds for the referents, but people have explored other possibilities: for hand job, jack job and mano job are both attested; and for blow job, suck job and mouth job.

Then there’s clit job as a slang variant of cunnilingus.

And my favorite, the hum job, a blow job accompanied by humming to further stimulate the recipient.

Note that all these terms except clit job take the point of view of the “active” participant in these sex acts: the person who supplies the hand and does the jacking in a hand job; the person who supplies the mouth and does the sucking or blowing in a blow job; the person who does the rimming in a rim job.

(Warning: high sexuality content.)

In my posting on the Folsom Street Fair, a 2007 poster for the fair including this image:

(#1)

This is a man in a dog mask or hood, part of a BDSM fetish scene. From a posting on gay sex toys::

specialized items for puppy play/dog training, in which men are fantasy-transformed into dogs and trained as such, and pony training aren’t listed in the TLA catalog; on puppy training, there’s a book — Michael Daniels’s 2003 Woof! Perspectives into the Erotic Care and Training of the Human Dog — and a surprisingly engaging porn flick — Kennel Master, from Titan Men

And on Wikipedia:

Animal roleplay may be either a non-sexual or a sexual role-play (when it may also be called petplay, ponyplay, ponyism, kittenplay, or pup-play, etc). In its erotic sexual role-play form, one or more of the participants takes on the role of a real or imaginary animal in character, including appropriate mannerisms and behavior, and sometimes a partner will act as another animal, or, in a sexual context, may take the role of rider, trainer, caretaker, or even breeding partner. The principal theme of animal roleplay is usually the voluntary transformation of a human being to animal status, and focus on the altered mind-space created. The most common examples are probably canids (pup, dog, wolf), felines (cat, kitten, lion) or equines (pony, horse). Animal roleplay is also used in a BDSM context, where a person may be humiliated by being treated as an animal. … BDSM puppy play: Puppy play, or dog play, is where at least one of the participants acts out canine mannerisms and behaviors, it is sometimes associated with leather culture. The dominant role is taken by a “Handler”, “Trainer”, “Master”, or in the case of someone who still identifies as canine, an “alpha”. The submissive may be considered a “pup” or a “dog”. Unlike other forms of animal roleplay, it is not uncommon for two or more pups to play together as equals, fight for dominance, or play where one is clearly the “alpha”. Puppy play is often about being playful, mischievous, and instinctive. In relation to other BDSM play, a “puppy” who is “unowned” or “uncollared” can be referred to as a “stray”. Other elements rooted in BDSM play involve bondage and restriction with collars, leashes, cages, and hoods, the submissive’s hands are often covered in mitts, both sexual and non-sexual services are requested, and “training” may take place in order to teach commands. The submissive may be asked to bark, kiss/lick the dominant’s foot/shoe, and eat like a dog.

Wikipedia’s image (with the penis blurred out), of a pup, with collar, harness and other restraints, knee pads, and fist mitts, eating from a dog bowl:

(#2)

As the Wikipedia article makes clear, there’s a broad range of puppy play, all involving submission, but ranging from affectionate and playful relationships between dog and master, to frank abuse and humiliation (gratefully accepted). Some sites focus on gear: if a dog has an owner; then he has some kind of collar and his master has a leash:

(#3)

Here the pup has a light collar and leash, but a substantial hood and an elaborate tail (a butt plug with an external tail for the pup to wag). At the abuse/humiliation end of the scale, here’s an image from the Folsom Street Fair:

(#4)

Two pups in severe restraints, including muzzles. Finally, also from FSF, a cute pup (with collar, leash, harness, mitts, and knee pads, but otherwise free to move, happy to please his master):

(#5)

There are a number of sites on puppy training (fewer on the pleasures of being a puppy). From one of these:, emphasizing the emotional experience of puppydom:

To be a pup you will come to feel a second skin surrounding you, whether it be rubber, neoprene or fur – it’s your pup skin. You will feel a hood enclose your head and hide your face, giving you a muzzle. Mitts will transform your hands to paws, and you will have kneepads to make it easier for the times you want to be on all fours. And most importantly, you will have a tail in your arse to wag. These things – the hood, the skin, the mitts, the tail – are not always needed for you to be a pup. They are your gear, your tools to facilitate an expression of your pup self. Ultimately you will find your pup inside you all the time, ready to come out when you choose, with gear or not.

The world of sexual experience is indeed varied and complex.

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

(Warning: This posting discusses gay sex in very plain terms and has images that are right on the X line — between X-rated and nominally for general consumption — but in recompense, there is some actual lexical discussion. Use your judgment.)

On AZBlogX, a piece “Blowout and sleaze” on two pieces of e-mail:

In my mailbox in recent days, a sale bulletin (“Labor Day Inventory Blowout”) for Falcon / Raging Stallion (today is Labor Day in the US) and an ad for a recent Channel 1 Releasing feature Sucked Off in Weird Places featuring Jason Phoenix and a very sleazy Johnny Hazzard. The images and the texts are both intensely oral.

Cropped versions of the images, right on the X line:

(#1)

(#2)

Ok, no question about what’s going on in these images, but here you see no acual naughty bits. Note blowout in the title of #1, and in #2, the normally well-groomed Johnny Hazzard (though presenting himself as working class) with sweaty face and greasy hair — definite sleaze. So some words about these two lexical items, then a few about the over-the-top rhetoric of the (advertising) sex for #2.

(The full images are in my XBlog posting, along with some discussion of Hazzard and Phoenix’s porn careers.)

Blowout. From NOAD2:

blowout  noun

1 a sudden rupture or malfunction of a part or an apparatus due to pressure, in particular the bursting of an automobile tire. [apparently the historical original, a nouning of V + Prt blow out]

• an outburst of anger; an argument: that exchange led to a big blowout five years ago. [a development from this]

2 informal  an easy victory in a sporting contest or an election: they had lost seven games—four by blowouts and three by slim margins. [presumably from the implicated 'going all out']

3 informal  a large or lavish meal or social gathering. [ditto]

More recently we get the sense in Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, 2010:

Also called blowout sale. a quick sale of retail merchandise at very low prices.

and in AHD5, 2013:

informal  A sale in which the discounts are unusually large.

and the porn ad.  You can find blowout sales for, among (many) other things: makeup, t-shirts, weight loss and dieting supplies, craft supplies, books, and school supplies.

On this most recent sense development, see Evan Morris on his Word Detective site:

The logic behind this use [‘large or lavish meal’] of “blow-out” is that of excess without limits, as if a richly-stocked pantry had been completely (and, metaphorically, explosively) emptied for one feast. This “blow-out” is very much still in use today, and appears to be the sense behind “blow-out sale,” an “event” offering a wealth of goodies at insanely low prices. … In a sports-obsessed nation like the US, I suspect that [the] “stunning victory” sense also lurks behind “blow-out sale.”

Of course, in the porn ad there’s also the fellatial sense of blow at play.

Sleaze. Back to NOAD2:

sleaze  noun  immoral, sordid, and corrupt behavior or material, esp. in business or politics: political campaigns that are long on sleaze and short on substance.

• informal  a sordid, corrupt, or immoral person.

ORIGIN 1960s: [simple] back-formation from sleazy.

On to the adjective:

sleazy  adjective  (of a person or situation) sordid, corrupt, or immoral.

• (of a place) squalid and seedy: a sleazy all-night cafe.

ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: of unknown origin.

Sigh. We get driven back to “of obscure origin”.

The rhetoric of porn ads. The characteristically frenzied text that goes along with #2:

Talk about instant chemistry, you must see the way that these 2 Superstars gobble each other’s cocks and assholes to believe it. Johnny can’t get enough of Jason and his huge uncut piece and thick juicy load. Fans of Johnny Hazzard will eat this one up, every drop.

Fellatio in the title (Sucked Off in Weird Places) and then in gobble and eat, and of course in the image. Plus the almost formulaic huge uncut piece (uncut is informative, piece is an ostentatious ad variant of the vernacular dick or cock, and of course all pornstars by convention have huge cocks, so huge is not informative but merely reinforcing) and thick juicy load (the cumload reappearing in every drop).

I’ve never figured out whether such fevered descriptions actually move gay men to buy or rent the videos.

The story so far concerns three items pronounced /fæp/:

(fæp-1) an exclamation of annoyance, similar to drat!

(fæp-2) an onomatopetic expression, representing the sound of vigorous male masturbation

(fæp-3) a verb meaning ‘to masturbate vigorously’ (of a man)

(The first is discussed here, the others on 9/10 here, where the second is taken to be the source of the third, and on 9/11 here, about the second.)

How do we spell these items? As far as I can tell, the first has only the simplest available spelling, FAP, but the sexual items show variation between FAP and FAPP. What to make of this?

In discussion of (fæp-3) on ADS-L (where FAPP happened to appear in the first occurrences reported there) and Facebook it wasn’t always clear whether people were taking FAP and FAPP to be two distinct verbs or simply spelling variants. But surely they’re just spelling variants for one verb, with no distinction in meaning. Similarly, for onomatopoetic (fæp-2), except that here the earliest attested examples, in the webcomic Sexy Losers, have only FAP.

Spelling variation often excites passions. Even where both variants seem to have standard status (and are recognized as such in dictionaries) — as for AGING and AGEING, MOVABLE and MOVEABLE, productive suffix -IZE and -ISE, and many others — many are inclined to insist that only one spelling is correct, to insist that there is One Right Way (a usage attitude I have deprecated on other occasions).

For onomatopoetic (fæp-2) and the verb (fæp-3), both spellings can be defended. FAP is simpler (shorter), and AP for /æp/ is clearly the default spelling:

(1) LAP, CAP, MAP, JAP, PAP, ZAP, TRAP, CRAP, and many more.

But APP is also attested, in the clipping of (computer) application, and in a number of proper names:

(2) the ethnonym LAPP, the cartoonist (Al) CAPP, E. F. Benson’s character MAPP (and Lucia), Hercule Poirot’s colleague Inspector JAPP, theatrical producer Joseph PAPP, the funk band ZAPP, the performing family TRAPP, and the KRAPP of Krapp’s Last Tape

(Note the item-by-item parallels between lists (1) and (2).)

The APP spelling is clearly the minority, special, variant, but it’s certainly attested, and it has the virtue of orthographic weightiness. So FAPP is heavier, and possibly more forceful, than FAP.

And then there’s a possible historical route to the spelling FAPP, according to which onomatopoetic FAP spins off a verb FAP, with PST/PSP spelled FAPPED and PRP spelled FAPPING, from which FAPP can be extracted by a kind of orthographic back-formation (the verb forms could have been based on FAPP just as easily as FAP).

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.

(High sexual content.)

I discovered yesterday that I’d been neglecting my file of postings on the language of sex and sexuality (covering postings on LLog, AZBlog, and AZBlogX on vocabulary in the domains of sexuality, sexual roles, and sexual identities; sexual practices and devices; and sexualized clothing). I’ve been slowly remedying the deficiencies, but that’s a very considerable task, and there are topics I don’t seem to posted much on. Then along came an ad for a sale on gay porn with an illustration (on AZBlogX, here) of a sexual act that I haven’t posted much about: double-sucking, taking two penises by mouth at once (the anal analogue is called double penetration).

Both the double acts are essentially stunts, not easy to manage and not particularly satisfying for any of the men involved, but they make entertaining fantasy photos: two at once, the fantasy goes, must be twice as hot as one. (The corresponding gang acts, gang sucks and gang bangs, with the sex seriatim rather than simultaneous, are another matter, both in gay porn and, on occasion, in real life.)

The image on AZBlogX also has an unusual handling of gaze. The man in the photo isn’t looking at either or both of the men he’s serving, but instead is gazing directly at the camera — and, thus, at us, the viewers.

From Gregory Ward, a link to a piece in the Guardian today: “Just how ‘gay’ is anal play, really?: The kind of sex that gay men are having isn’t exclusive to the LGBT community. It’s just that few straight people admit having it” by Zach Stafford.

Excerpts from the piece:

In 2012, … Esquire magazine asked 500 men [the] question: “During foreplay, what’s the one thing that you want more of from your current partner?” Blowjobs, apparently on the wane, were mentioned by 46% of the men surveyed; “a little rough play” sat at 6%. And rim jobs – or, to the unfamiliar, the act of having your anus stimulated orally – came in at 14%, which is quite surprising because straight men and their own behinds are rarely talked about in the same breath … unless they’re used in the same breath as a homophobic slur.

… From the data we know that men, straight and gay and everything in between, can derive pleasure from butts – their own and other people’s. We know that women can, too, with over 43% of women having participated in analingus according to [a] 2010 academic study. And according to the most recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, straight people don’t just like analingus – they like going all the way: 44% of men, and 36% of women, reported having had penetrative anal sex.

From this blog, a 9/28/13 posting “X job”, on anilingus / analingus, rim job, blow job, hand job, synonyms for these, and some other X job sexual terms. And a 3/26/13 posting “The masochism spectrum”, with sections on two anal practices: fisting, which is not particularly relevant here, and pegging, which is. From the latter, in a quote from Details magazine:

Anal-centric sex toys such as beads, butt plugs, and strap-ons are top sellers [at San Francisco's Good Vibrations store] among straight couples. It helps that there are now porn and instructional videos featuring men on the receiving end, as in the cult-favorite movie Bend Over Boyfriend, and that sex columnist Dan Savage popularized the term “pegging” to desbcribe the practice.

That is, as I wrote:

pegging is specifically heterosexual: the woman gives, the man takes. A guy, straight or gay, getting fucked by another guy doesn’t count, Nor does a guy, straight or gay, wielding a dildo on himself. It takes a woman to peg.

This seems to be Sex Saturday, though I have plenty of other things I’m anxious to post about today. But here goes, with a story from the weekend edition of the (San Francisco Mid-Peninsula) Daily Post, headlined: “Cops: Flasher strikes again: Fourth incident in a week” (by Angelo Ruggiero). About a flasher (possibly more than one) operating locally.

One recurrent feature of the Post‘s stories is the euphemism pleasure onself for masturbate (itself a technical or medical term avoiding genuinely vernacular expressions). As here, from today’s story:

The women, in their 20s, looked out the window [of Peet's Coffee in Belmont] onto El Camino and saw a man parked at the curb and pleasuring himself, said Capt. Pat Halleran [of the local police].

On to sexual to flash, flasher, and flashing on this blog: the posting “flashing” of 7/6/12. This use of the verb is a specialization of the ordinary verb verb to flash, roughly ‘to display, present’, as in

He flashed his police badge to/at the doorman.

The ordinary verb takes a direct object denoting the thing displayed, and (optionally) an oblique object (typically marked with the preposition to or at) denoting the recipient of the display. For the sexual verb, the thing displayed (a man’s genitals) is ordinarily not expressed, but understood, and the direct object of the verb denotes the recipient, as in:

He flashed two women.

The wonders of argument structure.

Meanwhile, a well-dressed man driving a BMW has been pleasuring himself in front of young women here on the mid-peninsula, and sometimes asking them to touch him. I find the last part creepy and worrisome.

(I’ve been thinking about X pleasured Y and all the things it might mean. There certainly are a fair number of examples on the net, but I have to confess my judgments about the usages have gone up in smoke.)

Annals of phallicity (and transgressive art). This giant statue in Paris:

(#1)

(Hat tip to Arne Adolfsen.)

From the Wikipedia page on the artist, Paul McCarthy:

In October 2014, he unveiled his statue “Tree” in Place Vendome in Paris. It stands 24 feet tall and resembles a large green butt plug. This has caused controversy among citizens, who believe their historic square has been sullied.

(On butt plugs, with illustrations, see this posting of 2/18/13 on (gay) sex toys. I’ve posted extensively on the language of sex, but almost entirely on English vocabulary, so plug anal was something of a find, though not an enormous surprise.)

More on McCarthy:

Paul McCarthy (born August 4, 1945), is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

… Originally formally trained as a painter, McCarthy’s main interest lies in everyday activities and the mess created by them. Much of his work in the late 1960s, such as Mountain Bowling (1969) and Hold an Apple in Your Armpit (1970) are similar to the work of Happenings founder Allan Kaprow, with whom McCarthy had a professional relationship.

… his work evolved from painting to transgressive performance art, psychosexual events intended to fly in the face of social convention, testing the emotional limits of both artist and viewer.

… McCarthy has created several Christmas-themed works. Through them, he combines the dismal aesthetic and the real meaning of Christmas. In 2001 he created ‘Santa Claus’ for the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Originally it [was] intended to be placed next to the concerthall at the locally famous square ‘Schouwburgplein’, but it never was. This was due to controversies around the statue (the work is seen by many citizens to have a sexual connotations, and therefore it also is colloquially referred to as ‘Butt Plug Gnome’), and besides the original location it was also rejected by (citizens and retailers of) several other proposed locations. On the 28th of November 2008 did it, however, receive a permanent destination: the square Eendrachtsplein, within a walkway of statues project.

The Butt Plug Gnome:

(#2)

Ooh, ribbed!

Over on my XBlog, a posting on a holiday sale (where the holiday is, omigod, already, Xmas) offering the gay porn flick Everybody Fucks. The title should warn you about the content there: not for kiddies or the modest. In passing: a note on reservation names (one of the pornstars is named Alexander Adams) and a reminder on the argument structures associated with the verb fuck.

… 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.