Multicultural birthday greetings

September 7, 2026

You say it’s your birthday / We’re gonna have a good time
— the Beatles, Birthday (1968, from The White Album)
[evoked for me in e-mail by Brian Joseph]

💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻 for (US) Labor Day, the flexed biceps of a manual worker (like my two grandfathers: Bethlehem Steel (maternal), Textile Machine Works (paternal); Melchior Zwicky doubled as a small-farmer as well). I’m two generations down and have ascended, as a professor and writer, to  the status of scholar and artist rather than worker and peasant — socioculturally if not financially in the upper middle class. With a thick veneer of high culture, but also fiercely egalitarian. It’s a balancing act.

Birthday greetings. I now veer onto something completely different (but hang on; things will come together): amidst the great avalanche of well-wishing for my birthday, #86, yesterday, an especially charming pair that came as a package. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Academic life, Bilingualism, Events and occasions, Language and culture, Languages, Linguists, Music, My life, Names, Ohio State, Social class, Social life, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »

Live long (and prosper)

September 6, 2026

The big scheme is Pleasure as Therapy: something I do for pleasure (or play or engaged curiosity) turns out to be excellent therapy, alleviating some affliction of mine or extending my life. These are unintended, but gratifying, consequences. Gravy.

Previously on this blog, the story of my singing Sacred Harp hymns in communities of shapenote singers, a practice that moves me deeply, sometimes taking me into an ecstatic state. That’s the pleasure. Then my pulmonologist — who had me using breathing apparatus to strengthen my lungs — discovered this and said that my singing full-out was much better therapy than his, and I should do it as much as possible, ideally some every day. I see this as getting a prescription to eat cake. Or, to pick a different metaphor, go for the gravy.

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Posted in Age, Language and medicine, Lexical semantics, Linguists, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Play, Social interactions, Social life | 2 Comments »

Labor Day 2026 #1

September 5, 2026

It’s Labor Day weekend in my country — unofficially serving also as the end of summer — and we are supposed to be celebrating ordinary working people (OWP). Eventually, I’ll grind into the tangled mass of sociocultural attitudes and practices clustered around the concept of OWP in America, but today I’m starting with the small and personal.

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Posted in Art, Clothing, Events and occasions, Homosexuality, Humor, Language and religion, My life, Names, Penguins, Portmanteaus, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

The birthday zone

September 4, 2026

Well, the special birthday zone, embracing my 9/6 birthday and the 10/26 birthday of my first male lover, Larry Schourup, a time suffused with delighted memories of our coming together in the spring of 1969, the way that changed both our lives, and how it led to a lifelong affectionate friendship, rewarding for both of us (we exchanged e-mail yesterday, 57 years after those days).

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Posted in Events and occasions, Friendship, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Memory, My life | 4 Comments »

Goat and beaver

September 4, 2026

Two absurdist anthropomorphized animal cartoons from the latest New Yorker (of 9/7/26, the Dolly Parton issue): Jared Nangle’s beaver resolutely doing what it’s programmed to do; and Joe Dator’s mountain goat trying to take a NYC cab to the nearest precipice.

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Posted in Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Personification, Routines and rituals, Slogans | Leave a Comment »

Edible primate

September 4, 2026

Today’s (9/4) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro offers an elegant but complex pun:


Model chip (the snack), pun chimp (the ape) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Toys and games | 2 Comments »

The cleansing elves of the night

September 3, 2026

(fecal matters in street talk; you might find it offensive)

Previously on this blog, in my 9/1 posting “Send in the rabbits”:

Made it back to my apartment, at which point the enema kicked in and I pretty much exploded with shit, everywhere, in piles. Vast amounts of cleaning up to do, and I still have to get someone in to scrub my workroom carpeting, which is beyond my (dis)abilities.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Language and religion, Language and the body, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

Keeping house

September 3, 2026

Another little posting on the minutiae of my daily life. Today: housekeeping.

Every day is housekeeping day.

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Posted in Art, Language and the body, My life, Work | Leave a Comment »

My name

September 2, 2026

I’m attached to my FN Arnold — because it comes from my father and grandfather, who I am pleased to honor. But (as I’ve written about many times on this blog) in the modern US, it comes with a load of awkward associations, and people are inclined to see it as somewhat weird, funny — maybe, ugh, foreign. So they misremember it, as something more palatable to them.

Just this morning alone, in quick succession, I was addressed as:

Albert, Harold, and Donald

I could start a law firm for us.

(Correcting people just annoys them — legitimately, because it breaks whatever kind of everyday interaction we were having.)

This is the sort of thing that led me to develop my alter ego Alex Adams (more postings on that). But Alex is there for (various) special occasions, not for everyday use. I do treasure Alex, but he’s a different guy.

Meanwhile, I have had to learn that I might be expected to respond to pretty much any trochaic male name (there are more: Arthur and Herbert, especially, but I’ve occasionally gotten Aaron and Henry, too). You learn to be flexible. But this morning I felt the powerful surge of anti-Albert revolt. When it came to Donald, I wanted to snap back: CALL ME ISHMAEL, the outcast.

(My father, in these very circumstances, just took his college nickname, Zip (an admirable name for him), and used it for everyday purposes all of his life; everybody, including my mother, called him Zip, and when my man Jacques came into the family as a second son for him, Jacques called him Zip  too. Of course.)

 

 

Posted in Errors, My life, Nicknames, Pseudonyms, Word confusions | 2 Comments »

cell farming

September 2, 2026

From the annals of mishearing (a continuing series)

Caught in tv commentary this morning, what I heard as an alert about cell farming. Cell farming — the production of cultivated meat — is a real, though still very fringe, thing; the meat-simulacrum is expensive to produce, and many people are deeply wary of it. But there it is.

Then a visual flashed by — of a wrist scored by cuts — and it became clear that the warning was about self-harming.

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Posted in Errors, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Mishearings, Phonetics | Leave a Comment »

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