(Not lox and Gilbert & Sullivan, though that’s a charming idea for a matinee; I’d prefer to think of lx (linguistics) and g&s (gender and sexuality studies) as two gay linguists, Lex and Gus, who go together like, oh, politics and poker (from Act I of the 1959 Broadway musical Fiorello!) — or, more relevantly, like mind and body)
A non-academic friend, new to my net presence, wondered what the things I said my blog is mostly about — lx and g&s — have to do with one another. My immediate, overly glib, reply:
Nothing intrinsic, but they happen to come together in me, along with gardening, Sacred Harp singing, an interest in food and cooking, Mozart and Haydn, and more. Various accidents of history and outgrowths of different parts of my make-up.
Strictly true, but in fact my postings about lx tend to have a lot of g&s content, and my postings about g&s very often end up illustrating points of lx. And sometimes they meld together — as in my recent (from 7/26/25) posting “F-lexicography”, on the semantics of the sexual verb fuck.
So now a quick visit to Lex and Gus’s world, just picking out things from here and there in work by me and my colleagues. Not a systematic survey, just the odd snapshots.
In the organization of pragmatics, semantics and morphosyntax. Consider deictic and anaphoric elements — pronouns, in particular — marked for sex and other natural categorizations (like age and animacy) and those marked for other socioculturally relevant categorizations (like power and solidarity); consider grammatical gender (in grammatical agreement and government, and in relation to declension classes) and its — indirect and complex — relationship to the natural categorizations of sex; consider nominal classifiers and their relationship to socioculturally relevant categorizations; and much more.
These are immensely far-ranging topics, making up a large part of my work in linguistics, including writing on the conceptual foundations, general theoretical overviews, and studies of many specific phenomena in a variety of languages. But ordinary educated people invariably want the relationship between the natural categories of sex (which are, by the way, biologically quite complex) to be directly and straightforwardly realized in various categories of grammar. That would be a lovely, simple world. But it’s not the real world, and we all have to accept that.
Lexicography. Just a few topics: sociocultural labels that index sexuality (for example, homosexual, gay, queer), sex- and sexuality-related address terms (I’ve posted abut dozens of these), and sex- and sexuality-related insults (gay ‘foolish, stupid, or unimpressive’ (NOAD), pussy ‘a timid and cowardly person (typically used of a man)’ (NOAD), pussyboy / pussy-boy / pussy boy ‘passive male homosexual, catamite, bottom boy’ (from several sources)).
Sociolinguistics. The details of who says what to whom on what occasions for what purposes. Just one exemplary study: Andrew D. Wong’s “The trouble with tongzhi: The politics of labeling among gay and lesbian Hongkongers”, Pragmatics 18.2.277-301 (2008), about the address term tongzhi, originally ‘comrade’ in Communist contexts, but then highjacked by some gays and lesbians to index sexuality. (Stanford PhD ADW is now a professor in the department of anthropology, geography & environmental studies at Cal State East Bay, and is a co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sociolinguistics; allow me some Stanford pride and some gay pride as well.)
All the way to syntax. For background, my 5/7/18 posting “The profane domain”, on the linguistics of profanity, including syntactic constructions incorporating profanity. And then in my 12/27/17 posting “Expletive syntax: I will marry the crap out of you, Sean Spencer”, an inventory of English syntactic constructions incorporating profanity.
August 7, 2025 at 10:17 am |
I am delighted by your reference to Fiorello!, which is one of my favorite musicals of all time – it has some of the most sophisticated music Broadway has ever produced, In my idiosyncratic opinion. It’s too bad it never gets revived, although I suppose these days its politics would seem, well, naive at best.
August 7, 2025 at 11:46 am |
This is truly wonderful. You can thank Clark Gesner, the creator of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, for my Fiorello! appreciation. Your opinion was his, and the show was central to his Princeton senior thesis on the American musical theater, which he wrote in the suite next to mine in Joline Hall in the year 1959-60. I heard “Politics and Poker” many many times, in bits and pieces and in whole. Fabulously intricate, in tune and in text.
August 8, 2025 at 6:08 am
Likewise “The Bum Won” and “A Little Tin Box”.
August 8, 2025 at 7:05 am
On “A Little Tin Box”, see my extended appreciation of it in my 12/28/22 posting “Building wealth”, which also has an affectionate remembrance of Clark Gesner, plus some pointed remarks on being gay at Princeton in the early 1960s:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2022/12/28/building-wealth/
August 9, 2025 at 7:42 am
Ah, yes, I had forgotten about that. I see I made more or less the same comment about those two songs then.