February 07, 2006

Toadying 3: More of the fellat- family


By now I should know better than to write things like "fellatial is one of NINE attested adjectives in the fellat- family", without any hedging about that exact number.  So now e-mail correspondent Tacotortoise notes yet another adjective in the family: fellatious, with the spelling variant fellacious.  It even pushes fellative out of third place in Google web frequency, not far behind the adjective that started the whole thing, fellatial.

Meanwhile, since we already had the verb fellatiate in the family, we should have expected a derived nominal fellatiation.  It's a shy member of the family, but can occasionally be sighted.  As can the derived adjective fellatiatory.


It turns out that Tacotortoise thought of fellatious because he's used it himself, for instance in a LJ entry from 2004:

If we take the guitar to be a giant phallic symbol, as I have often (read: twice) seen it described, then the act of playing the guitar becomes overtly masturbatory. This is true not only of the 15-minute guitar solo, but also rhythm guitar, ... bass, and all other guitar variants. All the reed instruments are equally blatantly fellatious.

This is a literal use of the adjective ('concerning or resembling fellatio'), but among the 566 raw Google webhits I got on 2/1/06, there are a huge number of metaphorical occurrences in the toadying domain, for instance:

I just wonder whether Graham Capill would have got the kind of fellatious women's magazine coverage given to Dravitski. (link)

As sad as it is to watch the ongoing and fellatious fawning of the Royal Saudi family by the Bush Administration, they are hardly the only administration ... (link)

(I note in passing that "the... fawning of the Royal Saudi family by the Bush Administration" doesn't work for me syntactically.  The of is off for me; to or before would work, though.)

Tacotortoise also reported the spelling variant fellacious.  This one is harder to search for.  First, you search on "fellacious -DVD" to eliminate most of the (numerous) references to the DVD Fellacious.  On 2/1/06, that gave me about 412 raw webhits.  But a large number of these are just misspellings of fallacious.  So you hand-search through these.  That yields a few occurrences of fellacious in a sexual sense, apparently all of them literal.  Here's one:

... that we shall be caught in a fellacious act as said vehicle steals from darkened garage, and daylight reveals oral glandular massage ...  (link)

So much for the fellat- adjectives (for the moment -- but read on).  In the noun branch of the family, so far we have fellatio (the borrowing from Latin), fellation (the derived nominal built on the verb fellate), and of course the nominal gerund fellating (also built on fellate).  But there are some occurrences of a verb fellatiate (which I like to think of as fellate with bells and whistles), so we'd expect a few occurrences of a nominal derived from it.  Verbs in -ate almost always have derived nominals in -at-ion, so: fellatiation.  And on 2/1/06 I got 17 web hits for it, some literal, some metaphorical:

literal: I don't about fellatiation but I'm sure masterbation and fornication would be the ... (link)

metaphorical: ... and start saying nein and nyet to blind obedience, mass-fellatiation of The upper class--give them all downers--The kind that take you waaaaay down ... (link)

(Masterbation is a not uncommon misspelling of masturbation.  I've never been able to decide whether there's some eggcornish impulse, invoking the word master, behind this spelling.  And now Seinfeld, with its catchphrase "master of my own domain" alluding to masturbation, has thoroughly muddied the waters.)

Next, just as fellate serves as a base for the derived adjective fellatory (the most frequent of the ten adjectives so far found in the fellat- family), fellatiate is available to serve as a base for a derived adjective in -at-ory: fellatiatory.  And, yes, this one has a handful of attestations on the web, and they are both literal and metaphorical:

literal: Bill's heinous sin of Fellatiatory Prevarication wouldn't even rate a footnote in the twenty-volume edition of The Complete Lies and Deceptions of Bibi ... (link)

metaphorical: ... extensively and explicitly bought out the media is (using OUR tax money), the mutually fellatiatory relationship of the White House and Saudi Arabia. (link)

I am pleased to say that although fellate yields a derived adjective fellatial (the word that brought us into this extended visit with the fellat- family in the first place), the alternative verb fellatiate has apparently not yet served as the base for a derived adjective in -at-ial, at least on the Googleable regions of the web.  I view this as good news, because fellatiatial is just silly.  Anyway, we have (as of press time) eleven other cocksuckin' adjectives to choose from, so who needs the awkwardly clownish fellatiatial?

[Afterthought: fellatiatious isn't attested, either.  Whew!]

zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 7, 2006 12:51 PM