(After three weeks in the grip of infections, both viral and bacterial, some potentially life-threatening, I’m limping back to life and my blog, with a return, both sentimental and high-tech, to the ancestral home of the Zwickys, the village of Mollis, Canton Glarus, Switzerland.)
I’ll lead with a photo of impossibly picturesque Mollis in the summertime, when it’s green:
(#1)
Recently from Ryan Tamares, a link to a Langfocus-channel video on YouTube, on Chavacano, the Spanish-based creole of the Philippines (especially Zamboanga):
(#1) An admirable brief presentation on Chavacano, the Spanish-based creole of the Philippines (esp. Zamboanga); and on creole languages
Earlier on this blog, my posting of 6/1/17 “No te vayas de Zamboanga”, about a song of that name:
At some point, someone looked at an ordinary soup ladle, probably one with a hooked end for hanging it up, like these stainless steel spoons:
(#1)
and realized it looked rather a long-necked animal (with the bowl as its body and the hook as its head), perhaps a long-necked dinosaur — a terrestrial brontosaur or apatosaur, or (since the bowl dips into a liquid) a marine creature, say a plesiosaur:
(#2)
Or, even better, the folkloric creature Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster:
The One Big Happy from 12/9, in which Ruthie is rotfl over the name of a card game:
Exactly my response when, at the age of 7 or 8, I first heard the name of this card game. I mean, pea-knuckle!
Yesterday’s Sally Forth (by Jim Keefe):
Ted and Sally are recalling an absurd private language they constructed for themselves to talk about nearby people in public — a language that only they would know. Their Monkeyish was absurd because, with only 12 words (7 of them prepositions!), there was clearly almost nothing that they could say.
The audience for tomorrow’s moment of revelation, in J.C. Leyendecker’s remarkable Saturday Evening Post cover for Christmas 1900:
A portrait of the Magi, the Three Kings (or Wise Men), owing much to Art Nouveau style, and with the artist’s characteristic attention to the physical masculinity of his models.
A memorable New Yorker cover for the New Year: an Owen Smith parody of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (one of a great many such parodies):
(#1)
Three things: Nighthawks parodies, Owen Smith, and party hats.
Chip Dunham’s Overboard strip from December 28th:
(#1) Captain Crow and his dog Louie
An exercise in both syntax/semantics and semantics/pragmatics: on syntactic constructions and their semantics, and on the indirect conveying of meaning in context.
Above, what will become example (c) in the syntactic discussion:
(c) I don’t think I’ve told you today what a wonderful dog you are
which will lead to a related example, Sir Van Morrison’s song line in (d):
(d) Have I told you lately that I love you?
On AZBlogX on 1/1/19 — now moved to my regular blog on 8/5/23 — the short short story (under a thousand words) “He Kissed Me” from 1/16/96, intended for a volume of such stories that was never published, perhaps in part because of the sexual explicitness of this story. The story is also one piece of my fiction about the characters Sundance and Butch; it’s a short story about Sundance and a t-room kiss. (Explicit mansex in street language, so the story is entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest — but none of that in this posting.)