Probal Dasgupta

June 7, 2026

I begin the story in medias res, with a May 27th Facebook comment by Probal Dasgupta on a posting of mine:

— PB > AZ: Speaking of the way one pronounces the acronym “AZ”, I’ve been puzzled by the fact that some function words that end in orthographic s in English (as, is, has) use a /z/ while others (us, this) use an /s/. I’ve failed to find a specialist who is generous with their time to tell me the diachronic sequence that led to this … My puzzlement originated in the fact that a friend of mine, in her Indian English, says “us” with a final /z/, definitely not in keeping with what most speakers of Indian English do.

With the help of Elizabeth Closs Traugott — nether of us experts in the phonological history of English or the development of spelling conventions, neither of us able to find an authoritative text or an actual living expert, but both willing to take a shot at some possibly useful speculation — I gave PB some tentative responses.  And then came the news from his family that he had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, during the night of June 1st, at the age of 72.

His query to me was characteristic — intellectually curious and open, thoughtful and specific — and showed that he continued to follow my work closely, which is how we came to be (geographically distant) friends: when I was in an unhappy moment of doubt about the value of my research and writing, he sent me a bracing message of appreciation, with specific details, so that I came to think, jokingly, that at least I had a guy in Kolkata.

From this story, you will see his striking humanity, but nothing in that story predicts his passionate political engagement or his steady competence at academic administration.

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Posted in Death notices, Linguists | Leave a Comment »

The disastrous year 2003

June 5, 2026

Every year, for me this day (June 5th) is one of the most emotionally difficult days of the year; it’s my man Jacques Transue’s death day, in the bright early summer of what unfolded as the disastrous year 2003. Jacques died, after all those years of withering through dementia to death; I was crazed with grief (actually, I still am, it never went away, though the sharpest edges have worn down some, they would have had to); and then in November the flesh-eating bacteria came for me, and I just barely survived their onslaught, coming out disabled and disfigured, with almost all of my previous life gone.

Mozart’s disastrous year was 1791 — it’s chronicled in H. C. Robbins Landon’s 1791: Mozart’s Last Year (1988) — and ended with his death in the dark winter, but also embraced great triumphs, notably Die Zauberflöte. (More on Mozart’s last year below.)

I can’t tell you much about 2003 between Js death in June and the appearance of a painful swelling in my right armpit in November. It’s almost all lost to me. I presumably spent this time in Palo Alto. I know that I was teaching a seminar at Stanford that fall, but I know that only because people have told me about it. My actual memory is blank.

I recall my response shortly after J’s  death, because I wrote some about it in postings on the net: I wept a lot, and raged. At him: how could he have abandoned me like this, how could he have left me, damn him, how could he have just gone and died on me like this? And I sat with the flannel shirts that were heavy with smell of his body and mourned. Now, I fully understood the irrationality of my response, but I also realized that I was, like, the millionth person in the world to react this way; I would endure. Meanwhile, I wept, bitterly.

But sometimes I fall back into that hole. And then I miss Jacques terribly — well, the Jacques who mostly melted away in the 1990s, over 3 decades ago. But still…

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Posted in Books, Death and dying, Language of medicine, Music, My life | 2 Comments »

Do I dare to eat a peach?

June 5, 2026

(dripping with raunchy sexual content, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

Not what TSE had in mind, but peach-eating was the topic for some bros in a Facebook reel that came by me this morning. Another chapter in the great book of schemes for talking about analingus without sounding really gross. (And the topic comes up because a great many people find the act deeply pleasant to receive, and a fair number of us find it satisfying to perform, for the sense of bodily intimacy it affords, as a display of insertive dominance (for its own sake or as foreplay to fucking someone), as a offering of submissive service (for its own sake or as foreplay to getting fucked), or for some amorphous swirl of such feelings.

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Posted in Argument structure, Emoji, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Poetry, Puns, Signs and symbols, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

to collab

June 4, 2026

(high sexual content, not for kids or the sexually modest)

Lexicographic notes from Young America, heard on Facebook reels from bros in their 20s discussing sexual matters in a mostly bantering way: the verb to collab. Collected this morning (6/4), one bro to another:

When I collabed with Pepe, I was doing something I’d never done before … we were tossing each other’s salad

(to toss someone’s salad ‘to rim someone’ — verb rim-2: [with object] vulgar slang lick or suck the anus of (someone) as a means of sexual stimulation (NOAD) — seems to be a recent slang idiom: in Urban Dictionary in this century, but not my other sources)

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Posted in Connotation, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics | 2 Comments »

Curtains

June 3, 2026

On Facebook on 5/28, Bert Vaux reported on responses to a query of his on curtains vs. drapes. On that posting, an incidental comment by Heidi Harley:

Did anyone [among BV’s respondents] mention that you can’t threaten anyone with the utterance, It’s drapes for you! But you can with curtains!

Eliciting a series of responses from me:

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Posted in Argument structure, Complementation, Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Language and the body, Metaphor, Plays, Sociolinguistics, Style and register, Syntax | 2 Comments »

The seeds of rye bread lie deep in 19th-century England

June 2, 2026

(not the cartoonist’s fault, but my discussion veers occasionally onto fellatio, in vulgar street language, and that’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)

The Pearls Before Swine strip of 5/31, Stephan Pastis’s farewell to the month of May, devoted to one of his outrageously complex jokes (it’s so off-the-wall intricate that Rat, one of his characters, takes to protesting against it):


Three contributions: (1) the joke genre (the setup / payoff formula pun); (2) the English verb succeed, homophonous with suck seed; and (3) the familiar proverb, popularized by William Edward Hickson in 19th-century England: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again — all the while skirting (4) the sexual collocation suck seed (with seed ‘semen, cum’), a variant of suck cum

On to the four contributions.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Rhyme, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Four difficult childhoods

June 1, 2026

… all fictional, unimaginably different, each one moving in its own way; welcome to the queen of the months, here in the northern hemisphere, where, on this celebratory day, the rabbits — 🐇 🐇 🐇 — come to play

Ir starts with a burlesque of the nursery rhyme “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” in yesterday’s posting “The server’s absurd attentions”, which led Benita Bendon Campbell to Kipling’s heartbreaking short story with that title. That led me to Saki’s black-comic short story “Sredni Vashtar”. And that to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel of healing and the overcoming of adversity, The Secret Garden.  Finally, Bergman’s long masterpiece movie, Fanny and Alexander, which pretty much has everything, including some early luminous scenes of  family joy, then wrenching scenes of abuse, and finally horrific dream death made real, freeing the children. (There are two versions, a shorter one made for tv, then the full, epically long, theatrical release. Watching the long version is like packing up your mind and moving to another — fabulous but perilous —  country for some undetermined number of years; it took me several days to recover my bearings.  The only thing I can compare it to is reading García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.)

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Posted in Books, Childhood, Movies and tv | 1 Comment »

The server’s absurd attentions

May 31, 2026

Hey, there, server lad,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
One alpaca full!

This Drew Dernavich cartoon in the 6/1/26 issue of the New Yorker:


A wonderfully absurd riff on the custom of restaurant servers offering freshly ground black pepper (occasionally, also freshly ground sea salt) upon the appearance of food at the table, obliging the diners to participate in a pretentious edgy ritual of condiment dispensation

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parodies, Poetry, Pop culture | 1 Comment »

Another mishearing

May 31, 2026

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tier tiger for ultimate May, the gateway to the sultry rabbits of summer, those promiscuous creatures of the great queen, Juno (is it hot in here?)

A follow-up to my 5/29 posting “Three mishearings”, with  yet another surprising slip of the ear, eco-terrorist heard as ego-terrorist: model utterance with /k/, variant with /g/, differing minimally, in voicing — setting up a relationship that can be exploited in an imperfect pun, a possibility that’s been ostentatiously realized in writing by Wayne Bradshaw

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Posted in Errors, Events and occasions, Mishearings, Phonetics, Phonology, Puns, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »

Three mishearings

May 29, 2026

(the third mishearing takes us, in street language, into fellatio-land, a place not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

Recently logged, three mishearings of televised reels, two from commercials, one from a joke reel on Facebook, all easily verifiable as to what was said (vs. what I heard when I wasn’t looking at the tv, so didn’t get visual information about the text):


I’m not sure which substance offering body pain relief item 1 came from, but the expression is common in ads of many kinds; Muddy Mat commercials (item 2), for easily washable doormats (especially valuable if you have dogs tracking in mud and dirt), are all over the place; item 3, with BJs (referring to food from a restaurant chain, ostentatiously playing on an abbreviation for fellations), comes from a joke Facebook reel about giving BJs to homeless people, which you can watch here

All three mishearings are surprising if you’re watching the reels they come from; it’s crucial that I was looking away from the tv when I heard paint instead of pain and  money instead of muddy and DJs (disc jockeys) inead of BJs (blow jobs)  — because in all three cases, the intended words appear on-screen.

But still, but still… all three are preposterous; who needs relief from body paint, a mat for the money the dog tracks in, or disk jockeys to give to homeless people?  And worse: the first two items came from commercials I had heard a number of times before, with no mishearing.

And then once I had that first mishearing, it was inclined to be sticky: on later repetitions, even looking at the screen, my mind very briefly dredged up the mishearing, triggering a startled moment during which I corrected course. A kind of information-retrieval earworm, very annoying.  I have no explanation for this effect, and suspect that most people have experienced nothing of the sort, but there it is.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Errors, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Misreadings, Music, Phonetics, Phonology, Portmanteaus, Puns, Rhyme, Snowclonelet composites, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »

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