[Ads-l] locomotives as female

[Jonathan Lighter]

We watched _North by Northwest_ last night.

I wonder now what it actually means to say that the tunnel moment in
question, the final moment of the film, is a "phallic symbol."

Even after our discussion, its phallicity was not obvious to me or my wife,
two Phds who spent years teaching freshmen how to read literature.

Does it mean:

1. That had it occurred in a dream, Freud would have regarded it as a
symbol of repressed sexual desire?

2. That Hitchcock [sic] placed it in the movie for his own unconscious
sexual motives?

3. That Hitchcock [sic] placed it there deliberately to show an obtuse
world that Mr. and Mrs. Thornhill were at that very moment getting it on?
(He's already indicated overtly - bed, honeymoon, etc. - that they were.)

4. That it just means, you know, like, um, sex, and we're expected to
chuckle at how perceptive we are?

5. That it doesn't particularly "mean" sex in context, it's just the end of
the movie, but that we're supposed to chuckle, as in 4, because only a
hopelessly repressed loser wouldn't think of sex when confronted with that
image?

6. None or all of the above.


Of similar interest (but undoubtedly close to 4, above) is the arguably
gratuitous use of "lickety-split" in the latest Duluth Trading Co. ad:

http://blog.duluthtrading.com/dry-on-the-fly-pants-snail-tv-commercial/

A college classmate once told me (ca1972) that "lickety-split" "means oral
sex."  When I asked him to use it in a sentence, he couldn't. (Though one
may easily formulate an ad-hoc joke about race car drivers and Italian
lesbians.)

So "mean" can be used to mean "should make you think of, if you're as smart
as I am."
Especially sex.


JL



On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 3:08 AM, W Brewer <brewerwa at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: locomotives as female
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> <<" Ships should be referred to as _she_, not _it_, even if the names are
> masculine.">>
> Moby Dick / Thar she blows!   (Damn, that sounds dirty.)
>
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