Archive for March, 2024

PAW days

March 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate March (3/31) and for Princeton University (from the 19th century, the Princeton locomotive cheer “Rah rah rah! Tiger, tiger, tiger! Sis, sis, sis, boom, boom, boom, ah!”), plus 🐇 a rabbit for Easter (no doubt soon to be devoured by the tigers — though it will be succeeded tomorrow by a tougher trio of rabbits inaugurating the month of April, who might be foolish but have the power of three)

And so I turn to the Princeton Alumni Weekly (which is a monthly publication, but try not to dwell on that) — PAW, from now on — and my relations to it in recent years. While noting that when I die, PAW is the only place where I’m sure to get an obituary, though my Stanford department’s weekly newsletter, the Sesquipedalian, will have a notice, as will the news bulletin from the Linguistic Society of America (the LSA), and friends will say something on Facebook; otherwise, I expect my death to go publicly unremarked (and I encourage my daughter and grandchild not to spend their money on paid announcements), so at least in the death department, PAW looms large.

Now: I’ll re-play (with little further commentary) some history from the past three years in which PAW has been involved, ending with a section from my class notes in the issue that arrived in the mail yesterday (with rather more commentary).

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An AZ icon?

March 30, 2024

Thanks to a pointer from Jeff Bowles, this first panel from a Peanuts strip (dated by Charles Schulz as from 2/16/60), now a candidate for my on-line icon:


(#1) Schroeder at his toy piano, on which rests a somnolent Snoopy, emitting the cartoon Z of sleep (also the Zwicky initial); for further personal meaningfulness, I am a former pianist (still an enthusiast of the piano repertory), now an analyst of the comics (among other things)

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Everyday beheadings

March 29, 2024

For some time now, I’ve been collecting examples of a scheme of English derivational morphology I’ve called beheading, as in

crude (Adj) oil (N) -> crude (N), where the derived item crude ‘crude oil’ is a Mass N (like oil)

commemorative (Adj) stamp (N) -> commemorative (N), where the derived item commemorative ‘commemorative stamp’ is a Count N (like stamp)

A great many of the examples come from jargons, the vocabularies of specific occupational or interest groups, like people in the energy business or philatelists — or medical professionals (N attending ‘attending physician’), food preparers, servers, and sellers (N Swiss ‘Swiss cheese’), and so on. More generally, most beheadings are notably context-specific. But some come from everyday language and don’t need much contextual backing.

Here, after a somewhat more careful account of what beheadings are, I’ll add a few everyday beheadings to supplement the ones in my files (see the Page on this blog). Then I’ll veer all the way to the other pole and note that with enough contextual backing, completely novel beheadings can be coined and understood. Finally, I’ll cite the everyday beheading that inspired this posting: three squares a day ‘three square meals a day’, from US President Joe Biden, which I put off because some commenters took it — or, possibly, the idiom square meal itself — to be outdated, hence a sign of Biden’s being old and out of touch, a development that merited some discussion on its own. But there are plenty of cites, including a NOAD entry for the beheading square; and then all those comments vanished from the net, so I had no one to bash.

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Hold the mayo

March 29, 2024

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, a Psychiatrist cartoon in which a ketchup squeeze-bottle treats a mayonnaise jar:


with a surprising pun on the verb hold, a pun that’s possible only because of the nature of this particular analysand (a sentient jar of mayonnaise)

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Brothers in news

March 29, 2024

The roster of commentators at MSNBC (the US tv channel) includes two white guys in their 40s who look like they might be brothers, dress very similarly, and often appear together in split-screen discussions, which I find vaguely disconcerting. The brothers in news:


(#1) Jonathan / Jon Lemire, from Morning Joe


(#2) Willie Geist, from Way Too Early

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Writers’ night at the Hotel De Luxe

March 28, 2024

Last night: a long — stretching over three hours of sleep, with a whizz break in the middle — and vivid story dream in which Ellen Kaisse (an old friend and a frequent character on this blog) and I were holed up for an entire night in an elegant hotel — much like the actual Beverly Hills Hotel — where we had a suite in which we were expected to produce a script for a film. The place looked like your ordinary luxury suite, except that it was dominated by a huge desk. Which, at the pressing of several buttons, converted magically into a fully functioning office, with computers, printers, phones, paper files, assorted office supplies, and of course a coffee maker. (But no staff, not even assistants to take things down for us. If we got hungry, we were to order food from room service.) Our work site for the long dark night.

We were expected to hack out an entire draft script, as well as suggestions for casting for the parts, costumes, and sets, plus a sketch of a score for the movie (I suspect that the score was especially significant to my having this dream; details to follow).

Somehow the actual subject of the film, which Ellen and I labored over, elaborately, for all those hours of my sleep, has dissolved, as dream material often does on awakening.

We didn’t question being put to work at the Hotel De Luxe through the night; apparently, that was a regular thing in Hollywood, just the way things worked there.

The dream was not at all unpleasant, sometimes actually delightful. Well, Ellen is wonderful company and an excellent person to exchange ideas with.

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Easter punday

March 28, 2024

It’s Holy Thursday, and today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro: cartoon jumps the Easter gun, / with an outrageous rabbit pun:


Wayno’s title: “Side Effects May Include Hallucinations” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)

model /ístǝr/ Easter, pun /íθǝr/ ether, shared /í…ǝr/, with coronal obstruents between the two syllabics, so not bad for an imperfect pun; meanwhile, the Easter bunny is administering ether as an anesthetic, so the pun fits the image nicely

Two things: Holy Thursday (and Easter Sunday); and anesthetic ether.

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With hooves and horns

March 27, 2024

(Male bodies, one full frontal, allusions to sex between men — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

On the male art of the young NYC artist Todd Yeager (recently encountered in Pinterest, though his drawings have been featured in Advocate magazine several times). Especially devoted to faun / satyr / goat-god Pan images (you can pretty much smell the sex on them), male buttocks and penises, and loving male couples (and to chronicling his domestic life and the street life of NYC). Also to self-portraits of many kinds; well, he’s a good-looking hunky young man who can do pensive or flagrantly sexy, as it suits him. Here’s a sexy one: boots, buttocks, and profile (really big boots):


(#1) Self-portrait With Boots and Jock

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Ancestral investigations

March 26, 2024

In recent days, I’ve been exchanging e-mail with my (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi) linguistics colleague Luc Baronian about ethnic and linguistic history, with special reference to the Welsh (and the Welsh language, Cymraeg) in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Dutch (and their language, Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch); and about tracing ancestral history. Three pieces of background here:

First, Luc is an Armenian-Canadian, the way I’m a Swiss-American. Luc is by recent paternal ancestry Armenian (as you can tell from his surname), by upbringing French Canadian; I am by recent paternal ancestry Swiss (as you can tell by my surname), by upbringing (and maternal ancestry) Pennsylvania Dutch (a descendant of primarily 18th-century immigrants to southeastern Pennsylvania, mostly from the Palatinate region of southern Germany).

Second, some years back, Luc — whose ancestry-search competence is vastly better than mine — helped me trace connections on my mother’s side and correct my misrecollections of several facts.

Third, Luc had gotten interested in the history of the Welsh language in Pennsylvania, which begins in colonial times, with late 17th-century negotiations over the Welsh Tract as a landmark event, and then apparently vanishes, leaving only place-names in its wake.

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More Hummels

March 25, 2024

On the heels of yesterday’s posting about the early 19th-century composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, more people named Hummel (with the accented vowel rounded [U] (as in English put) in German or German-influenced English varieties, like Pennsylvania Dutch English; but unrounded [Ʌ] (as in English putt) in ordinary American English). The German landscape painter Carl Hummel. The fictional Kurt Hummel in the American tv series Glee. And the artist nun Maria Innocentia Hummel, whose paintings provided the original models for Hummel figurines, which is what this posting is mostly about.

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