Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🏳️‍🌈 👨‍❤️‍👨 🏳️‍🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)

The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:

(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)

The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.

The empires. From Wikipedia on the Roman Empire:

(#2) The Roman Empire (red)  and its clients (pink) in 117 AD (at its greatest territorial extent), during the reign of emperor Trajan

The Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean and much of Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. The Romans conquered most of this during the Republic, and it was ruled by emperors following Octavian’s assumption of effective sole rule in 27 BC. The western empire collapsed in 476 AD, but the eastern empire lasted until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

From Wikipedia on the Holy Roman Empire:

The Holy Roman Empire … was a polity in Central and Western Europe, usually headed by the Holy Roman Emperor. It developed in the Early Middle Ages, and lasted for a millennium until its dissolution in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars. Initially, it comprised three constituent kingdoms — Germany, Italy, and, from 1032, Burgundy — held together by the emperor’s overlordship. By the Late Middle Ages, imperial governance became concentrated in the Kingdom of Germany …

On 25 December 800, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne Roman emperor, reviving the title more than three centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. The title lapsed in 924, but was revived in 962 when Otto I was crowned emperor by Pope John XII, as Charlemagne’s and the Carolingian Empire’s successor. From 962 until the 12th century, the empire was one of the most powerful monarchies in Europe.

… The empire reached the apex of territorial expansion and power under the House of Hohenstaufen in the mid-13th century

The lexical items.

From NOAD:

noun Caesar: a title used by Roman emperors, especially those from Augustus to Hadrian.

compound noun Caesar salad: a salad typically consisting of romaine lettuce and croutons served with a dressing containing olive oil, lemon juice, raw egg, parmesan cheese, and seasonings. ORIGIN named after Caesar Cardini, the Italian-born restaurateur who invented it in 1924.

noun romaine: mainly North American a lettuce of a variety with crisp narrow leaves that form a tall head. British term cos.

Appendix: J&A Day. From two earlier postings on this blog.

— from my 12/11/20 posting “Images of Jacques”:

Our first sexual connection, initiated by an astonishing profession of his love for me — I was doing exercises at home, where he was visiting — when he picked me up in his arms, kissed me, and told me he loved me — was almost 44 years ago (in December), though we’d been friends for some time before that (he knew that I was gay — this was public knowledge — but I didn’t know he was, though I was immensely pleased to discover it).

Some years later we privately performed our own version of the wedding ceremony (uttering “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part” — but pointedly not committing to cleave only to one another or to have either of us obey the other). We viewed these words as a binding commitment. And so they were.

— from my 10/11/21 posting “This day”:

It’s  … National Coming Out Day; and Jacques and Arnold’s Anniversary (celebrated) — the actual moment would be 45 years in December.

… NCOD. The idea was to combat homophobia by showing people that everyone knows gay people, whether they realize it or not; we are everywhere. The way to do this was for as many lgbt people as possible to come out, as publicly as possible. The project was presented as an alternative to more confrontational responses to homophobia.

As a matter of strategy, I’m inclined to think that we should be working on all fronts at once, because different tactics work for different people. And because some tactics simply enrage some people and will produce backlash (that’s not a reason for not employing those tactics).

Jacques and I went about these things in very different ways. I came out, to the world in general, blazingly in 1971 and accepted the mantle of being a publicly identified queer (since almost everyone read me as straight, I invested early in high-visibility clothing: sloganed t-shirts, rainbows and pink triangles, etc.).  As far as I can tell, J didn’t come out to the world in general until we hooked up and became lovers and partners-for life (all in one day —  see [the 2020 posting]), and then his coming-out techniques were (a) to refer to his partner Arnold offhandedly, letting people know by implication that he was coupled with another man (and, on occasion, forgetting that he was doing so); and (b) to encourage and support me wholeheartedly in my visible-queer ways. (Eventually, I asked him about this, and he said he wasn’t comfortable playing that role, but he totally admired my abilities at it, so he was delighted for me to be visible, and sometimes outrageous: I was acting for the two of us together.)

In any case, J thought that NCOD was a great idea, and it was his idea that October 11th [a date that was well away from dates of holidays or family-significant occasions] should be J&A Day …

When did this marriage-equivalent start? Before there was same-sex marriage in the law, same-sex couples who were committed for the long haul and wanted to have some reference point for reckoning how long they’d been together had lots of choices for picking START: the day they first met, the day of their first date (note: someone has to define what counts as a date for the two of you), the day they first had sex, the day they first said “I love you” to one another, the day they first made their mutual commitment to be partners for life, the day they had a formal but private ceremony of union (just for the two of them), the day they had a public ceremony of union (not sanctioned by law, but made before a community, not just to one another). (No doubt there are other possibilities.)

Three of these possibilities are bold-faced, because J and I compressed them into a single event. Which was the occasion we used thereafter as actual J&A Day, which came, however, to be celebrated on NCOD.

This entry was posted on October 11, 2025 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, History, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and politics, Language and religion, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Puns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.