Archive for February, 2025

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Another gay Saint Sebastian

February 4, 2025

(saintly male bodies seen through worldly eyes and treated in sometimes very plain talk, so not to everyone’s taste)

From Susan Benson Hamel yesterday:

Thought of you yesterday when I was in the Auckland art gallery and came across this delightfully coy St Sebastian by Guido Reni:


(#1) There are an astonishing number of St. Sebastians out there; this Reni really is wonderful (I said to SBH), in its dreamy gaze welcoming death, and all done with a single mortal arrow (plus, Reni dwells lovingly on the saint’s body, giving what many have seen as a homoerotic cast to the painting; and his private parts are just barely concealed, as in a cock tease)

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and religion, Language and the body, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

The etiquette lesson

February 3, 2025

Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Planet strip from 1/27/25:


Pyle’s beings on an alien planet cope with the sociocultural world of this one with their views framed in a variety of English that lacks the usual terms, so they concoct fresh ones (slicer for knife, stabber for fork, scooper for spoon, ingest for eat); in this strip, the subject is the education of the young in the etiquette of dining, and it comes with a meta-lesson

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Social interactions, Social life, Sociocultural conventions, Words and things | Leave a Comment »

The nuh-DEER

February 3, 2025

Caught out of the corner of my ear on 2/1 and 2/2, discussions on MSNBC (which might have been re-plays from earlier dates, I haven’t been able to tell) with Nikole Hannah-Jones (creator of The 1619 Project), about the Nadir, or Great Nadir, of American race relations. I’ve since looked up some information on the subject (see below), but what got my attention was the pronunciation of nadir — back-accented nuh-DEER /nǝdír/ or sometimes nay-DEER /nèdír/ — that everyone involved used all throughout these exchanges; it stood out like the proverbial sore thumb because, I’m sure, I’d never heard it before. It was totally bizarre.

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Posted in History, Pronunciation, Race and ethnicity | 5 Comments »

The poetic groundsow

February 2, 2025

Links from Wayles Browne (a regular visitor to this blog from far above Cayuga’s waters), attached to my Ancho Rabbit posting from yesterday, which I will now expand into a posting for Groundhog Day (2/2):

The BBC reports on Groundhog Day: it’s six more weeks of winter.

And of linguistic interest: a Pennsylvania Dutch poem about the groundhog and his, or rather her, day [the BBC report “How the Pennsylvania Dutch created Groundhog Day”; in PaDu, it’s die Grundsau ‘the groundsow’] (as read by Cornell’s old grad student Mark Louden).

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Posted in Ethnonyms and demonyms, German, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and class, Language and ethnicity, My life, Poetry, Variation | Leave a Comment »

The culinary artmanteau

February 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to welcome the month of February, the month of Lincoln Darwin Day and of Valentine’s Day (this year, Mardi Gras doesn’t come until early in March)

It’s Rabbit Day, and what happens to be at the top of my posting queue has nothing to do with rabbits; it’s a Bizarro cartoon (from yesterday, 1/31) with a tasty culinary artmanteau:


(#1) The portmanteau Michelancho = Michelangelo (the 16th-century Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarotti, painter of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome) + ancho (the dried poblano chili / chile pepper) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

(an alternative culinary artmanteau: (Michelangelo) Anchorotti  = ancho + Buonarotti)

(plus, I note that #1 is about Michelangelo the Ancho Honcho, the Man of La Mancho, also one of the lesser-known film Manchowiczes, etc.)

Now some brief notes on anchos, and then a surprise finale in which today’s rabbits get cooked with anchos, in the triumph of culinary artistry conejo en adobo with red chiles, which you can think of as Rabbit Michelancho.

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Posted in Art, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns, Spanish | 4 Comments »

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