Hot Licks Air

Speaking In Tongues

I’m on a roll here, as today’s topic again touches on female plumbing and architecture.

Loyal readers will recall that on X-mas day, I mused on the difficulties several media outlets might have experienced when confronted with the need to employ nomenclature — and a more casual, if not downright common variety thereof — for the double-X-chromosomed set’s nether regions.

Phew! Have you penetrated my faux-intellectual obfuscations yet? Don’t worry; I can hardly tell what I’m referring to.

A Delightful Georgia O’Keeffe Image

■

Anyway, I snickered with schadenfreudal glee over what I imagined to be NPR voices’ discomfort with having to say the words Pussy Riot.

Lo and behold, the usually-stuffed shirts at CNN descended into a discussion of a certain pastime enjoyed by connoisseurs of, shall we say, the eroto-culinary arts last night. (h/t to Wonkette.)

Anderson Cooper and Dan Savage discussed the top news stories of 2013. When Cooper asked Savage what the funnest scandal of the year was, Savage immediately cited Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s celebrated forays into drugs and hookers.

Said Savage: “I love a good cunnilingus joke on the evening news.”

■

Now, most TV anchors might either pretend Savage never said any such thing or the more delicate of them might simply faint. But Cooper felt compelled to relate this story about his mother (the late Gloria Vanderbilt):

My mom once wrote a romance memoir about men she’d dated, and I use that term loosely, and she described one guy she was currently dating — my mom was 85 at the time — as the Nijinsky of cunnilingus. And she made me proofread the book.

“My mom“?

As in, My mom made brownies for my Cub Scout pack one afternoon, or, My mom made sure I always wore earmuffs in the winter.

Even Tricky Dick Nixon, when describing the woman who’d given birth to him (while, it should be added, he was drunk as a skunk) could muster only enough familiarity to say “My mother was a saint.”

■

Not My mom was a saint. My mother.

Yet here’s Anderson Cooper musing about his own sainted mother’s orgasmic calisthenics, referring about said activities as if he was Jerry Mathers as the Beaver.

My mom.

I get the feeling that merely contemplating my own mother engaging in such a refreshing pursuit would cause my skull to come apart at the seams.