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Archive for August, 2024

A homo thesaurus

August 8, 2024

An alert yesterday from Ernesto Cuba about the Homosaurus project: an LGBT thesaurus, with a portmanteau name

homosaurus = homo(sexual) + thesaurus — thesaurus from Ancient Greek, meaning ‘treasure, storehouse’

and a logo featuring a mascot apatosaurus (aka brontosaurus):

(#1) The Homosaurus mascot is a huge but herbivorous (hence unthreatening, user-friendly) dinosaur, and it comes with an accompanying Pride rainbow

— all these creatures with names incorporating the formative saur(us) (ultimately from Greek again, and meaning ‘lizard, reptile’ ), utterly unrelated to thesaurus but irresistible as a source of verbal and visual play, as in #1.

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Posted in Homosexuality, Language and animals, Logos, Mascots, Portmanteaus, Rainbow, Resources | 1 Comment »

Former Frog in Fableland

August 7, 2024

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which a prince grouses, over a tipple, about his amatory career, to a nobleman, one of his courtiers:

It seems the prince was once a frog and could rake in the chicks with nothing more than a few commanding ribbits; those were the days of easy scores (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

What do women want?, the princel wonders with a whine, recalling that once upon a time a short squat body, moist smooth skin, and long hind legs for leaping used to drive them into an osculatory frenzy. It’s all so damn unfair. (Wayno’s title for the cartoon: “Unhappy Ending”.)

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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Costumes, Folklore, Hats, Language and animals, Portmanteaus, Stories | Leave a Comment »

Lowry, Looking Back

August 7, 2024

Like my earlier “Sparky Schulz and the least of us”, this was not my intention for a posting today, but you work with what you get, and what was delivered to me this morning was a paperback copy of Lois Lowry’s Looking Back: A Book of Memories (the 2017 revised and expanded edition; the first edition came out in 1998). The looking in the title alludes to the organization of the brief sections of the book around snapshots of LL, her family, and related subjects. In addition, apposite quotations from LL’s works head many of the sections.

The cover and the publisher’s blurb:

The cover of the book: a snapshot of LL and her sister Helen as girls, looking awkward in monstrously unflattering bathing suits

In this moving autobiography, Lois Lowry explores her rich history through personal photographs, memories, and recollections of childhood friends. Lowry’s writing often transports readers into other worlds. Now, we have the opportunity to travel into the real world that is her life. This edition features a refreshed design, an introduction by bestselling author Alice Hoffman, and material from Lois from the past twenty years, including the making of The Giver movie.

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Posted in Books, Writers | Leave a Comment »

Sparky Schulz and the least of us

August 7, 2024

(Not my intention for a posting today, but you work with what you get, and I happened to have a piece of (what I think of as) Jesus’s DEI Sermon sitting on my desktop, waiting for a suitable occasion. Which came this morning in a lead from Henry Mensch on Facebook that took me to a website of Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz’s widow Jean; from Jean Schulz’s Blog “The Circle Continues”, on 2/23/19:

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Posted in Cartoonists, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

The sensuality of the male nude

August 7, 2024

(Visually over the line for kids and the sexually modest)

The sensuality of the male nude, at least as painter Ron Griswold — a recent Pinterest discovery — sees things. Which means not shrinking from the sexual element in the genre, but embracing it (NOAD on the adjective sensual: ‘relating to or involving gratification of the senses and physical, especially sexual, pleasure’), and that includes full frontal nudity in compositions where it seems appropriate to him (especially in paintings of male couples). And, in turn, that means everyday-sized penises, rather than the ascetically small genitals on heroic statues of classic antiquity and in Renaissance paintings in this tradition. RG brings us hot dudes with noticeable (but not obtrusive) cocks, yes, but they’re in high-art paintings depicting the beauty of the male body and the affection of lovers, and the paintings lavish as much attention on the faces of the men in them as on their packages.

I’m going to show you only one of RG’s male couples, but felt I had to justify flouting the WordPress ban on genitals by claiming the High-Art Serious-Intent Exemption for it — while warning my readers what’s about to come, so that they can opt out of viewing it if they wish; the painting (Nella Foresta) will come last in my three examples.

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

Silver Bob and Wooden Bob

August 6, 2024

Silver Bob. From Max Vasilatos Rasmussen on Facebook yesterday:

It’s lived as a piece of carved poplar at Arnold Zwicky’s house since the 1990s.

It’s taken a lot of years to get around to the cast piece.

Here is Bob in sterling silver, waiting to go to Arnold’s to complete the circle.

(#1) Silver Bob, soon to join his poplar brother; Max says: I’ve left him not entirely finished, so his sprues are showing, and he’s a little oxidized, which I think is good

(sprue ‘a channel through which metal or plastic is poured into a mold’ (NOAD))

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Posted in Art, Lexical semantics, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

This is the day which the Lord hath made

August 6, 2024

So begins Psalm 118:24, in the KJV; the verse in full:

24 This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

Two things: one, the way in which the restrictive relative clause (with non-human antecedent) is marked — here with the relativizer which rather than that, or, unmarked, with no relativizer (in a so-called zero relative); two, the framing of the new day, in which we are exhorted to rejoice, as a gift of God (versus viewing it simply as the welcome granting of another day of life).

I take this up because the late Ann Daingerfield Zwicky was accustomed to greeting the new day by reciting the whole verse, made personal by a shift from 1pl to 1sg, but also with the morphology and syntax altered to fit her own dialect and style — with has instead of the archaic form hath; and with the which relative replaced by the shorter zero relative:

(ADZ) This is the day the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it

but maintaining her Episcopalian / Anglican creedal commitments; from the Book of Common Prayer (1662):

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord …

I admired her custom, followed her on the grammar and style, but altered the text to suit me as a non-believer:

(AMZ) This is the day I have been given; I will rejoice and be glad in it

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Posted in Language and religion, My life, Relativization, Syntax, Usage advice | 5 Comments »

Bijlert, Leonardo, parody magnets, and the Priapic-Apollonian opposition

August 5, 2024

The July 26th opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympic games included a tableau — of drag queens posed as presiding over a banquet — that vaguely resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting:

(#1) The Olympic drag pose

(#2) The Leonardo original

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Metaphor, Myths, Parodies, Poetry, Pop culture | 1 Comment »

Lament for Manfred

August 4, 2024

Ich weiß wohl, was soll es bedeutenDass ich so traurig bin

An anguish of old age is living immersed in death — of family, friends, loves, colleagues, mentors and models, students, people who have entertained, enriched, and illuminated you — while laboring just to get from day to day yourself. I have failed to memorialize many of the departed, I cannot cope any more, and I am ashamed of all of that. And now comes the death of Manfred Bierwisch, not exactly a surprise, since he was a full decade older than me, but then he was one of the few who should have been granted a life forever. And with a special role in my life.

Martin Haspelmath on Facebook this morning:

RIP Manfred Bierwisch (1930-2024, in the middle of the picture).

(MH:) The picture shows [MB] with his close friends Paul Kiparsky and Dieter Wunderlich (taken from Kiparsky’s 2023 memoir in the [Annual Review of Linguistics])

He was the GDR’s most prominent linguist, but he made no compromises with the regime. When some people were doing “Marxist linguistics” because it was good for their careers, he kept pursuing “structural linguistics”. Unlike some of his friends from the 1950s (e.g. Heinz Vater and Ewald Lang), he did not try to leave for the freer West Germany, but he stayed in the East. In 2005, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Leipzig University, where he had studied in the 1950s (and where he was jailed for 10 months for possession of illegal writings).