Trilingual bisexuals?
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I was scanning the staider newspapers this morning looking for items of linguistic interest for our readership when I encountered a story in the Daily Telegraph concerning one Lord Laidlaw, a British peer who was recently discovered by a tabloid newspaper of the British Isles to have been fairly extraordinary quantities of money on flying prostitutes from Britain to a $12,000-a-night presidential suite at a Monte Carlo hotel where the girls "drank champagne and fine wines before taking part in lesbian and bondage sex acts." The puzzling part for me, given my remarkably sparse experience of such champagne-fueled sex acts, was the only linguistically relevant remark in the story:
One recent party was said to have involved a Vogue model, three prostitutes, a male gigolo and a trilingual bisexual.
What on earth, I wondered, was the relevance of the bisexual participant's ability to conduct business in three languages? I would have thought it was rather difficult to speak even one language when one's mouth is full (and I am told that at events of the sort Lord Laidlaw enjoyed, one could hardly be said to be participating fully if one didn't have one's mouth full). Are trilingual bisexuals well known to be in special demand among devotees of the lesbian/bondage scene? Are there perhaps special agencies where peers of the realm go to rent them? Or do they post advertisements in the "Personal Services" section of free newspapers? "Versatile male, trilingual (English/Spanish/German) and bisexual (French/Greek), seeks generous House of Lords member for party work in Monaco area…"
I merely ask. As I have already remarked, my knowledge of Vogue models and gigolos is extraordinarily scanty. Well, I did once meet a young person called Candy at a bar in San Francisco who… but never mind that.
It is possible that I have misunderstood the reference (I see now that there is a lexical ambiguity), and the trilingual person is unusual anatomically: perhaps it is a case of having three tongues rather than speaking them. Three tongues would have amounted to one for each prostitute in attendance, and I suppose that could have been relevant to his Lordship's unusual needs…
I have no idea about any of this; I simply scan the quality dailies of the world and try to bring interesting lingually-related items to the attention of Language Log's readership. It is for you to make up your mind about this one. Comments are closed because frankly, I don't want to know any more than I do now. I think I would rather know less. But unfortunately human cognition is non-reversible. Once a phrase like "trilingual bisexual" has come to one's attention it is not possible to make it go away again.
[No sooner had I posted this than a breathless colleague raced down the hall at Language Log Plaza to tell me that "trilingual" had appeared in Language Log before, in this post. He must have mistaken me for someone who would care. The post seems to have a brightly colored cartoon in it. Yawn.]