{"id":3697,"date":"2015-12-23T10:50:17","date_gmt":"2015-12-23T16:50:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=3697"},"modified":"2015-12-23T10:53:55","modified_gmt":"2015-12-23T16:53:55","slug":"an-enquiry-concerning-the-nature-of-schlonging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2015\/12\/23\/an-enquiry-concerning-the-nature-of-schlonging\/","title":{"rendered":"An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Schlonging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m beginning to wonder whether the Donald Trump campaign is going to eventually eclipse the Sokal Hoax in the annals of performance art created for the sake of testing the outer limits of Poe\u2019s Law. Then again, maybe he really means all of it. Either way, are you not entertained? He keeps giving us so much to laugh and think about.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Once again, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/MSM?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#MSM<\/a> is dishonest. &quot;Schlonged&quot; is not vulgar. When I said Hillary got &quot;schlonged&quot; that meant beaten badly.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/realDonaldTrump\/status\/679463426675097600?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">December 23, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script> <\/p>\n<p>Maybe it\u2019s vulgar, maybe it\u2019s not. We\u2019re going to need a judge\u2019s ruling on this one. Thankfully, there is the case of <a href=\"http:\/\/caselaw.findlaw.com\/ca-court-of-appeal\/1239826.html\">LYLE, v. WARNER BROTHERS TELEVISION PRODUCTIONS<\/a>, a sexual harassment suit about &#8220;sexually coarse, vulgar and demeaning language in the workplace.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Reich frequently commented on his encounters with oral sex and how he wanted \u201csomeone who could give him a good blow job.\u201d   He regularly used the word \u201cschlong\u201d which Lyle knew was a Yiddish word for penis.   He would talk about \u201cschlonging this and schlonging that.\u201d   When Reich and the other writers were working on a script for a New Year&#8217;s episode Reich kept referring to \u201cschlonging in the New Year\u201d and using \u201cschlong\u201d in every other sentence.   Reich would also pretend to masturbate while walking around the writers&#8217; room and while sitting at his desk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Okay, so maybe it only counts as vulgar slang in that particular context. Probably we should look for a few other usages.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;By the way, who you schlonging?&#8221; continued Owen, just in time to stop the uncomfortable silence from levitating the reading matter on his desk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=RVoVIMst7dgC&amp;pg=PT167\">Halloween Ooga-Ooga Ooum<\/a>, pg. 167<\/p>\n<p>In this context, \u201cschlonging\u201d means basically the same thing as \u201cscrewing\u201d or \u201cfucking\u201d but presumably it falls somewhere between the two on the subjective vulgarity scale. Instances of this particular usage are relatively abundant in fiction.<\/p>\n<p>The most poetically sacrilegious use of the term shows up in <i>The Van Zanzibar testaments: Being an historical record of Dr. Hugo Maximilian Van Zanzibar&#8217;s resonance therapeutic researches of the lives of Moses and Jesus of Nazareth<\/i> which has just now been added to my Christmas wish list.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;I&#8217;m hard times Mary and I never had a cherry<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been riddled, fiddled, piddled and diddled<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been wronged, pronged, donged and schlonged<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been bad-lucked, fucked, schmucked and sucked<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been hauled, mauled, crawled, and balled,<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been yanged, pranged, ganged, and banged,<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been teamed, creamed, reamed, and I&#8217;m un-redeemed!&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(They say that poetry is what gets lost in translation, but I\u2019d still love to see what this passage looks like in German.)<\/p>\n<p>After extensive combing through the schlong-related literature, I finally came across a usage which more-or-less matches what Trump was trying to convey:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;How about if we recruit a few guys from the crew, I&#8217;ll go on stage and make an announcement about how we&#8217;re gonna get <i>schlonged<\/i> by lettin&#8217; everybody in ahead of time, and these guys can pass a basket around the audience for contributions.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><i>Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969<\/i>, pg. 245 (italics in original)<\/p>\n<p>Once again &#8220;schlonged&#8221; seems to be interchangeable with &#8220;screwed&#8221; or &#8220;fucked&#8221; but this time in the sense of getting a raw deal or suffering a major setback, rather than in the literal sexual sense. This naturally sets me to wondering about the attitudes and life experiences of whomever first thought it was a good idea to link the act of sex with the concept of suffering humiliation and defeat. Presumably, they would not have been healthy attitudes and positive experiences.<\/p>\n<p>Which brings us back to Trump. We can be minimally charitable and say that he meant something akin to &#8220;Hillary got screwed&#8221; in the 2008 primary campaign, but we might not be so charitable as to infer that he did not intend to convey even a hint of sexual humiliation by invoking this particular idiom. This is, after all, Donald Trump <a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/people\/heres-all-the-sexist-things-that-donald-trump-has-ever-said-10452180.html\">we are talking about<\/a>, so adjust your priors accordingly. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m beginning to wonder whether the Donald Trump campaign is going to eventually eclipse the Sokal Hoax in the annals&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":3698,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}