Archive for November, 2023

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The Yiddish word for shpilkes

November 17, 2023

Melinda Shore on Facebook yesterday, the wry comment “How to spot the NY newspaper”, about this passage that Ann Burlingham had posted on FB:

At Lot 77062, he started to get antsy. “I’m getting shpilkes,” he said, using the Yiddish word for shpilkes. [The paragraph continues: His hope — not unreasonable, he thought — was somewhere in the high six figures.]

To supply the context (thanks to Season Devereux for pointing me to this): it’s a New York Times article by John Leland: on-line on 11/15/23 with the headline “He Thought His Chuck Close Painting Was Worth $10 Million. Not Quite: A bittersweet ending for Mark Herman, the dog walker who was given the painting: It finally sold, but for far less than he had envisioned”: in print with the headline “Gavel Comes Down on a Chuck Close Nude and a Fantasy”.

New Yorker Mark Herman was the speaker of using the Yiddish word for shpilkes; why he didn’t say using the Yiddish word for pins and needles is something of a mystery to me — but if you can’t easily pull up the English idiom pins and needles ‘anxiety’, then Yiddish shpilkes might be all you’ve got.

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Posted in Idioms, Lexicography, Yiddish | 1 Comment »

Who will read the readers?

November 17, 2023

The new issue of the New Yorker (dated 11/20/23) brings us a Psychiatrist cartoon by Elisabeth McNair, one of a special subtype I’ll call In-Group Psychiatrist (in which a patient from some extraordinary group — a dog, a robot, a squid, what have you, in #1 a book — is being treated by a therapist from that very group):


(#1) You wonder whether the notebook the therapist is writing on is itself preparing to publish its thoughts, and then it’s books all the way down

McNair is new to this blog. So a few words — her own — about her, and then some more cartoons she’s done for the New Yorker, starting with, yes, another In-Group Psychiatrist.

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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Paradoxes, Snowclones, Words and things | Leave a Comment »

The punmanteau

November 15, 2023

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro hinges on a bit of language play that cuts across two categories of play: it’s a pun based on a portmanteau, a punmanteau:


(#1) A cummerbund in the shape of a Bundt cake (Bundt punning on bund), with a name that’s a portmanteau of the names for those two things: cummerbund + Bundt (cake) = cummerbundt (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

(Note: The Cumberbatch is something else entirely.)

(Further note: Wayno’s title for this one is “Frosted Formalism”, alluding to the icing (aka frosting) on the cummerbundt in the cartoon — though Bundt cakes are not necessarily frosted.)

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Language and culture, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | 2 Comments »

Nutellahealth services

November 15, 2023

Well, what the tv commercial said was:

… our telehealth services

But what I heard was:

… our Nutellahealth services

A clear example of mishearing fostered by context, since I had recently ordered (and much enjoyed) Hella Nutella ice cream from the Scoop shop in Palo Alto. (I didn’t grow up with Nutella — it first appeared when I was in my 20s — and it’s not part of my life, but I’m quite fond of both hazelnuts and chocolate, so was pleased to find the two tastes together in ice cream.) So the name Nutella was racketing about somewhere in the attics of my mind; Nutella was, at the moment, especially salient to me.

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Posted in Language and food, Mishearings, My life | Leave a Comment »

Lisztomania enters the 21st century

November 13, 2023

As a follow-up to my posting yesterday, “Anti-Ode to Liszt” (slamming his piano transcription of the Ode to Joy section of Beethoven’s 9th symphony), an amazing New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, in print in the 9/11 issue (under a version of the title above), on-line on 9/4 under the title “The Greatest Show on Earth: Liszt defined musical glamour. But pianists now see substance behind the spectacle”.

I was pointed to the Ross piece by Lise Menn in e-mail. Apparently, I saw a thumbnail announcement of it in my New Yorker feed but missed it in scanning through the issue when it came out (I lose days, sometimes more, of attention to the media through medical or personal crises, so these reminders are genuinely helpful to me).

Now, a section from Ross’s synoptic view of Liszt — his life, his career, and his music. From here on, it’s all Ross:

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Posted in Culture, Music, Performance, Pop culture, Writers | Leave a Comment »

Anti-Ode to Liszt

November 12, 2023

Gripings and grumblings on the Liszt piano transcription of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, specifically the final (4th) movement of this work, with its choral centerpiece, the Ode to Joy. Which Apple Music was bringing to me during my 2 am whizz break. The Beethoven is one of the monuments of Western music, and though I have heard it over a hundred times in my long life, it still moves me deeply, at several levels. It comes with the intellectual and emotional satisfactions of two other lifetime favorites, Handel’s Messiah and one of the Beethoven’s antecedents, Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli (with which it shares more than the timpani).

But, alas, I was not getting the Beethoven, I was getting Liszt’s flashy piano fantasy on the score of the Beethoven, which pretty much annoys the hell out of me. Some of Liszt’s piano transcriptions have the virtue of bringing out the thematic or motivic structure of a work. God knows the Beethoven is complexly structured; there is something of an industry devoted to unpacking this marvelous complexity. But I can’t see anything structurally revelatory in the Liszt, with its plinky bits and its bombastic bits, all showy technique.

The problem might be insurmountable: the piano is percussive in its sound, extraordinarily so in a work of great drama. The Beethoven does use those timpani (and some other percussion instruments), but as amplifying notes in a work that’s richly and variously sonorous. It’s carried along by the string section, the winds (especially the brass section; it’s scored for 4 horns, 2 trumpets, and 3 trombones, which resound brightly in triumph and delight), and of course the human voice. Do it on the piano as a bravura display, and it has no soul.

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Posted in Music, My life | 3 Comments »

Against the chill of winter

November 11, 2023

It’s suddenly wintry-cold here: night-time lows in the low 40s F, day-time highs only flirting with 70 F, and then just briefly for a moment in the afternoon. It’s time to sleep warm — break out the quilts — and dress warm — it’s flannel-shirt weather — and abandon going barefoot, in favor of (if you are me) savoring the warmth of shearling-lined moccasins (which are also kind to my huge and painful bunions). Yes, there will be pictures.

But I will be brief. Like my previous two postings, this is a Posting Through Pain; the middle finger on my right hand is no longer visibly inflamed, but the first joint is still hugely swollen and painful — and, now, so are almost all of the joints on both of my hands, so typing is harrowing, and I can manage only brief bursts of writing at the keyboard.

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Posted in Academic life, Clothing, Shoes, Weather | 4 Comments »

Two exercises in cartoon understanding

November 9, 2023

From cartoonist Charlie Hankin in the 11/13/23 New Yorker (which has not yet arrived in my mailbox), a big black bird, a writer at his desk, and a penguin. And then today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with a geneticist reluctant to order fusilli at a restaurant, asking for linguine instead. The first one is pretty easy, so long as you recognize an American poet and his most famous subject. The second is more challenging, requiring that you know about both pasta and genetics, plus a concept that unites fusilli and DNA.

This is another Small Posting Through Pain (see my previous posting, on boletes), which will probably take me several hours to get through, because my poor fingers hurt like hell.

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Posted in Biology, Furnishings and tools, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins, Understanding comics | 6 Comments »

There are boletes in the bottom of my garden

November 8, 2023

Actually, following on two days of extraordinarily humid weather locally, there are boletes everywhere in my little garden strip, from one end to the other. By the time Erick Barros was able to come and take photos, they’d mostly reached a terminal stage, so this photo will require some explanation:


(#1) Among the creeping English ivy: two boletus mushrooms nearing the end of their days: their yellowish-brown caps have bleached considerably, and the sides of the caps have curled up, showing the pores on their undersides

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Posted in Language and plants, My life | 2 Comments »

Three words to marvel at

November 1, 2023

🐇 🐇 🐇 trois lapins to inaugurate November, the final month of autumn or spring (depending on which hemisphere you’re in), and celebrate the Day of the Dead. A day on which we’ll enjoy three English words that have entertained posters on Facebook (from now on, FB) recently: calceology ‘the study of footwear’; telamon ‘male figure used as an architectural pillar’; and hallux ‘the first and largest toe (on a human foot)’.

At this point, you might admit that these terms are English words but, quite rightly, object that it would be bizarre to talk about expressions that almost no speakers of English know or use as words of English. Certainly, if I asked you whether English has a word for the study of footwear, you’re almost surely going to say no, because part of our everyday understanding of word of English is that such an expression has some currency, and hardly any speakers of English know or use the expression calceology.

On discovering the technical term calceology, then, you might be willing to say that the term is an English word, or maybe even a word in English, but still balk at saying it’s a word of English. It should by now be clear that we’re dealing with distinct concepts here, and grappling, awkwardly, with putting labels on them. At least one fresh label is called for. I’ll hold off on choosing a label to cover the territory that includes words of English until after I’ve looked at three other characteristics of CTH — calceology, telamon, and hallux — separate from their lacking currency.

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Posted in Architecture, Art, Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Holidays, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Names, Shoes, Words, Words and things | Leave a Comment »

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