Regrettable Poems

WELL GUESS WHAT I GOT IN MY INBOX TODAY:

This is single handedly the best sentence I have ever read in my entire life, I’m so pleased with and proud of myself right now. My favourite part is that the fact that they picked just one picture means they sat down and discussed which picture of a banana peel they liked best.

I ended up submitting these five haikus:

And this is Banana Peel #6 (out of ten):

gmail marked 

you 

as unimportant in my inbox 

why 

can’t 

Tag your favorite sibling 😢 #depressingfridgepoems

For example, a ship might be referred to as a “wave’s horse”; a sword, a “wound-serpent”; a shield, “the shame of swords”, and so forth. Sometimes, kennings could be embedded in other kennings - thus, one might have “feeder of war-gulls” = “feeder of ravens” = “warrior”; this is known as a doubled or extended kenning.

Though many conventions of English literature can be traced back to Old Norse roots, kenning isn’t much encountered these days - at least, not in most genres. There’s one particular genre where the art of kenning is alive and well, though.

I’m speaking, of course, of erotic fanfic.

Whether you’re referring to a penis as a “porn-truncheon” or a vagina as “squish-pocket” (both examples I’ve seen employed in all apparent seriousness, incidentally), that perfectly fits the form and function of a kenning. Indeed, these examples even adhere to the idiosyncratic grammatical structure of many Old Norse kennings, with the base word being modified by an uninfected noun determinant inserted as a compound prefix.

Euphemisms for sex acts, meanwhile, can be even more baroque, forming multi-level allusions in the manner of doubled/extended kennings. “To ride the baloney pony”, for example, employs the act of riding a horse as an allusion to penetrative sexual intercourse - but the contained phrase “baloney pony” is, itself, a kenning of the simple type, with “pony” as the base word and “baloney” as the determinant, making the whole phrase a doubled kenning.