"jazz mags" euphemism?

[Jonathan Lighter]

I don't know what goes on in Britain when I'm not looking, but in these parts a "jazz mag" is exactly what it sounds like, a magazine dedicated to that crazy music them young sheiks and flappers "dance" to.

If God wanted us to have jazz, we'd have saxophones instead of noses.  But we have jazz mags anyway.  No good can come of it, mark my words.

JL

Chris Waigl <cwaigl at FREE.FR> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Chris Waigl
Subject: "jazz mags" euphemism?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I just entered the "hidden" eggcorn "shuffle off this mortal coil" (via
Jan Freeman's latest column in the Boston Globe
)
into the Eggcorn Database, when I was pinged on IRC by my friend Kevin
Marks about one of the cites I used:

----
There are numerous surveys that suggest that women who live alone spend
their time skipping gaily through the tulips and sipping at crystal
streams of joie de vivre until they eventually slip off this mortal coil
with a gentle sigh of satisfaction between snow-white linen sheets,
while men forget how to wash, walk and talk and are eventually killed by
MRSA from their own underpants and expire in a sticky heap of jazz mags
and burger buns.
Lucy Mangan, Guardian Unlimited, March 2, 2005

----

For Kevin, "a sticky heap of jazz mags" was "clearly", as he said, a
euphemism for pornographic magazines. I am aware that the writer, Lucy
Mangan, is apparently British, so this might be off-topic on ADS-L. On
the other hand, there's just such a wealth of expertise on "jazz" here.

Do you agree with Kevin Marks' assessment? Is this a common euphemism?

Chris Waigl

--
blog: http://serendipity.lascribe.net/
eggcorns: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/


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