Today: Rosh Hashanah ends, and it’s the year 5786:
Originally published in ReadTheSpirit.com (Rabbi Roy Furman’s Read the Spirit site)
Archive for September, 2025
5786
September 24, 2025Working through
September 24, 2025Creeping up on more difficult topics from my life history (along the lines of my 9/22 posting “Former Gifted Child”), here near-suicidal depression and bit of accompanying PTSD that’s still with me, almost 65 years later. The topics came up in an exchange with an old friend, a colleague in linguistics, and has finally moved me to talk about them on this blog, though the whole story is so long and complex — and throws up provocations to thought that hadn’t occurred to me before — that I’ll have to just jump in and write up chunks of it as best I can, building up the larger story.
The trigger was this 9/15 e-mail from my friend, who I’ll refer to as L (for linguist):
I only now checked your recent blog posts and found a mention of your work at the Reading Eagle [AZ: the afternoon and Sunday newspaper in Reading PA, where I worked from 1958 to 1961], where you stayed on even while studying at Princeton. All that work must have been a lot, though maybe something you handled by not wasting time on the more typical undergraduate frivolities.
And I jumped in with this answer to L:
A seminar on raunchy play
September 23, 2025(entertaining, but totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
The seminar was called to order on 9/21 on Facebook by Michael Thomas, who introduced the key background element, the internet fridge. The participants were three gay men, long-time friends (our shared backgrounds and the relaxed, playful atmosphere are important here): speakers Michael Thomas and me, with Michael’s husband Aric Olnes in a non-speaking role. From the transcript (somewhat edited):
— MT: We [MT and AO] hooked our fridge up to the internet the other day. Here’s a question for the ages: do fridges watch porn while the doors are shut?
— AZ: But of course. And then they fall asleep and dream of abusing electric sheep. And you thought that was condensation on the fridge walls, didn’t you?
— MT > AZ: fridge spunk. just scrape it off for your coffee in the morning.
— AZ > MT: Absolutely. The best jizz there is.
There’s an enormous amount of stuff packed into this — some from the widespread sexual culture of modern America or from popular culture but also some from gay male sexual culture. I will now do some unpacking.
Former Gifted Child
September 22, 2025Now coming by me on Facebook every so often, this mock ad for a cosplay costume:
There is of course no Spirit costume supplier; the ad is a total invention, serving as a vehicle to heap scorn on adults who were gifted children / (child) prodigies — I’ll call them g/ps for short — in one of the four ways Americans spew hostility towards these kids and the adults they become
I was a g/p, and I need to trust someone pretty solidly before I’ll expose my childhood to them. I’m adept at dealing with hostility towards me as a faggot, but the hostility towards me as a former gifted child is hard to cope with; it feels like a contemptuous assault on a defenseless little kid, the one who became the me I am now. But I’m working on unearthing the skeletons in my life history, including this one, in the hope that my openness will help others.
Now: the topic of g/ps is far too complex to do justice to in one posting. This is just a beginning. And, as always, there’s some background to get through.
Graduated consonants
September 21, 2025From Andrew Garrett on Facebook today:
— AG: Glad to be in this (new, despite the ostensible date) issue of AL. The press perpetrated an amusing typo in Julie Marsault’s title:
(#1) Graduated consonants
I went right for the typo (quite likely to have been introduced by a spellchecker during the layout stage for the cover [but now see Michael Vnuk’s cogent critique of this idea, in his comment below]):
— AZ: Clearly, graduated consonants are like graduated pearls; they come in a series of sizes: bigger, louder, noisier. I can hear them now.
The risks of pedantry
September 20, 2025This Chris Hallbeck cartoon came by me on Facebook this morning — a strip packed with matters of science (paleontology, specifically), lexicography and usage (the senses of the noun dinosaur, and the contexts in which they’re used), and pragmatics (the way in which the noun is used in interactions, especially in language about language; in the enforcement of language norms; and, oh alas, in the relevance of things said to the interests of those participating in the speech context):
A Maximumble cartoon from 5/24/14, whose humor turns crucially on the pragmatic foolishness of the (now deceased) professor (in the face of a ravening monster, he stops to insist, irrelevantly in the context, that his companion must use the proper terminology, while the companion flees to safety); and which is based on the usage of the noun dinosaur — for a member of a clade of prehistoric reptiles bearing the zoological taxonomical label Dinosauria; versus, in non-technical American usage, for any dinosaurid creature, resembling the prototypical dinosaurs (many people have seen a family resemblance)
An eventful day
September 19, 2025On one front, considerable unease about the long, all-consuming, and physically debilitating project of dispossession of things in my condo. So I sent out a request (reproduced below) for leads on people who have accomplished what I hope to get out of all of that.
Meanwhile, Opal Armstrong Zwicky was at the ready to direct a team of haulers to cart away a mind-blogging [a really fine typo for mind-boggling: see EMK’s comment below], pile of furniture that I had emptied of its contents; for a grand finale, they moved the big desk then in my bedroom (where I had, over a long period of work, pared down four separate complete working desks from different rooms of the condo into one) into my workspace, so that everything desky would now be more or less at my fingertips (well, a short desk chair roll away). (Granted, my printer is obstinately not working, but that has nothing to do with the haulers.)
I was of no help in any of this, because my hands are out of commission for most things; typing is only somewhat painful, so I can do that. But otherwise, this has been a day of obligatory rest (and deep, knocked-out sleep). I’m hoping they will heal some.
I also am of the ursine persuasion
September 18, 2025Encountered in going through stuff on Facebook: the episode “Fozzie encounters a bit of a language barrier” from “Rocky Mountain Holiday”, a 1983 Muppet special; in the episode, Fozzie Bear describes himself to Gonzo (a character of ambiguous species) following on reports of a bear in their vicinity:
Have you not noticed that I also am of the ursine persuasion … I’m a bear too and I speak fluent bearish
A huge ferocious bear appears, the main characters flee to Kermit the Frog, and Fozzie explains:
Gonzo! Gonzo! Just a slight dialect problem … she speaks Grizzly and I only speak Paddington
You can watch the episode on YouTube here.
(Nice ellipsis of the BEAR in grizzly bear (the name of a type of bear) and Paddington Bear (the proper name, on the pattern of FN + LN, roughly like Stanford Linguist) of a fictional bear, discovered in London’s Paddington Station), as if they were structurally parallel.
The principal characters:
Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo
A moment of renewal
September 17, 2025Cast your mind back to 8/15, when I posted “CV time at Stanford” on this blog. Where I noted that
To maintain my adjunct status [at Stanford], I must periodically demonstrate that I am worthy, by submitting my CV for scrutiny by the relevant dean.
My previous appointment, for 2022-25, was to expire on 8/31; the CV was to be for a 2025-28 appointment. I prepared a statement (included in that posting) that was not a conventional CV, but a summary showing who I am, what I do, and what I have done. An experiment, on my part.
The summary did make it clear that I am, among many other things, a very visible and noisy LGBT+ figure. Someone who’s liable to get in trouble with the current American government, and to get Stanford in trouble too, and might be a barrier to Stanford’s raking in contributions. So the dean might well choose to terminate me.
August, and my appointment, came to an end. My department came to the rescue by paying for a month of the university services I need to do my work.
And then, yesterday, the offer of a new appointment came through, and today the resourceful Opal Armstrong Zwicky, armed with technical advice from her mother, stepped me through signing my name electronically to a .pdf document (accepting the offer) that could then just be e-mailed to my department’s administrator. Who will relay it to the dean’s office. Which will then issue a letter of appointment. In the house that Jack built.
Of course they could take it back. All sorts if things can happen. But I press on.
The new appointment greatly simplifies the task of getting me to Stanford Linguistics’ 50th anniversary celebration on October 10th. And that is a Good Thing.
(The rest of my life is in utter shambles, but you really don’t want to hear about it. Though I will mention that most of the furniture in the house will be carted away Friday afternoon. Sleek and spare, spare and sleek is the land where the mammoth grazes.)
Someday he’ll come along
September 16, 2025Calendrical intro. 3 … 4 … 5 … 📐 — once in every century the days are perfectly aligned, in the pattern of a 3-4-5 Pythagorean triangle:
9/16/25: 9 + 16 = 25, that is, 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2
Today is Pythagoras Day for the 21st century; if you miss this bus, it will be a long wait till the next one.
But while you’re waiting, you can practice the song for the day,”Pythagorean Theorem”; from my 6/18/25 posting “The Pythagorean Impromptu”, about
a dream in which Danny Kaye sang the Pythagorean Theorem, in the form
The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides
(which is the version the actual Danny Kaye sang in the 1958 movie Merry Andrew, and, yes, I do remember this from 1958)
… You can listen to Danny Kaye perform “Pythagorean Theorem” on YouTube here