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