Forgive me for interrupting this interesting discussion, but Nutty's tagline broke me.

"Mister Spock is on his fanny, sir. Reports heavy damage."

This is even more of a mind boggler in UK English, which translates the above as Spock being on a male somebody's ladyparts. Are we talking Kirk sexchange Mpreg?

(I mean, I'm sure it's out there.)

No, in America, your fanny is a cute way of talking about your butt.

And it's all English, which makes it so much funnier.

nods.

Yes indeed, fanny = butt - it's an ongoing source of entertainment. Just checking that it wasn't Kirk Sexchange Mpreg, 'cause you never can tell. ;)

So you read:

"Mister Spock is on his butt, sir. Reports heavy damage."

and I read

"Mister Spock is on his pussy, sir. Reports heavy damage."

And upon reflection, I'm still not sure which is funnier.

Wrod.ETA: I remember reading where JM had a similar encounter with "fit" which to us= healthy and buff but as you know, for your lot=hot and sexy. So he was on UK TV and the host says " You're looking fit, James." And JM says "Yeah, well, I work out." and gets a HUGE laugh.

I've seen the butt variation.

(FWIW, the quote is from a Bloom County cartoon, where a bunch of animals are riding with a paraplegic man on his wheelchair = Starship Enterprise, only they don't all fit, and Opus = Mister Spock falls off. Onto his butt. It is way, way funnier than I have just described it.)

(No, Opus does not have female parts.)

Bloom County rulez! Or it did.

I love Bloom County. This week's Opus was a nice reminder of Bloom County at its best. Many of them have been, I dunno, a bit too nasty of late.

I like Nutty's theory of specialized language for porn. It makes some kind of sense to me.

Speaking of fic, since that's where we are, Thea just posted a lovely little Buffy post-Not Fade Away snippet here.

This is all very, very interesting. As for me, I've always broken down porn vs. erotica as follows:

Porn = characters aren't important, only bodies and lots of details about Tab A going into Slot B, etc. There's nothing in the story that shows why it's important why Character A is shagging Character B and/or C. In fact, it would be easy to swap in characters from another fandom with no one really noticing.

Erotica = Along with all the bits about, well, bits, it is important that it is those two (or three, or four) specific people going at it like bunnies. There should be some sort of emotional or intellectual freight, maybe some hint of consequences to be faced or obstacles that have been overcome, etc. and so forth. There doesn't necessarily have to be much of a plot, but there should be the sense that these are people screwing, not just bodies.

Does that make sense?