mental masturbation

[Arnold Zwicky]

fred shapiro:
 >"Midcult" is in OED2 as well.

yes, my error.  i don't wield that magnifying glass very well.  and
now that jesse has referred to the dwight macdonald essay, it all
comes back to me.

meanwhile, a google search nets "about 6,330" sources.  i haven't
looked at more than a few of them; some are actually about mental
aspects of masturbation, and a lot of them seem to be in blogs, which
are mostly formatted in distressingly hard-to-read ways (white letters
on a yellow background, in small type!).  but there's the logo for
fapfap.com: "Because the web is just mental masturbation."  and the
Sky Gilbert column in the 3/14/02 issue of Eye (www.eye.net), which
analyzes reading: "Taking in the words on the page -- even putting
them together in your brain and making sense of them -- that's not
reading.  I call that mental masturbation or, more succinctly,
scanning."  And a 1999 leave-no-dirty-word-unsaid review, by The
Filthy Critic (www.bigempire.com/filthy), of the movie "Dogma", which
sets up the sexual imagery early on ("It's a tedious exercise in
mental masturbation by a guy who loves hearing himself talk..."),
returns to it in mid-course ("All these actors are deployed in a plot
that's the wet dream of a geek whose [sic] memorized the bible.
[earlier, it's "Bible".]), and goes out on the same theme ("Go back to
bed, Kevin Smith, and jerk your little prick, not your mind." - this
is right after he called smith a "fucking presumptuous cocksucker".
and they say academics are harsh.)

if i had the time, and the stomach, for it, i'd look at how many
occurrences of figurative "mental masturbation" have diminishers like
"just", "only", and "merely".

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)