Archive for October, 2025

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The passing domestic scene: waterfalls

October 18, 2025

The second installment on recent events in my life (yesterday’s posting “The passing domestic scene: biopsies”, covering 10/2 to the present, was the first).

Today’s story begins on the morning of 10/7. I was intently focused on a cute posting about a Bizarro cartoon — “The flannel frontier”, finally posted on 10/9 — when I became peripherally conscious of the sound of running water. Really loud running water. Had I left a faucet running?

I looked up from my keyboard, to witness waterfalls streaming from the ceiling in four places, drenching everything below them, pooling on the carpeting in the living room and surging in a wave into the little hallway to the bathroom.

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Posted in Clothing, Family life, Furnishings and tools, Language and the body, My life | 1 Comment »

The passing domestic scene: biopsies

October 17, 2025

Time to summarize some of the circus of my domestic life in recent weeks. I start with least complex: the skin biopsies, which reached a kind of resolution today.

The story began on 10/2, with an dermatologist’s appointment. As usual, she did a thorough examination of my body, from the top of my head down to my toes, finding an amazing assortment of benign growths and moles and what-not, but also two possible problems — on my left thigh and under my left pectoral muscle. She cut out both for biopsying (and also excised a huge annoying skintag from the pec site while she was in the neighborhood).

Leaving me with three wound sites that needed regular cleaning and bandaging. All in spots my disabled hands can’t get to, so it fell to Opal Armstrong Zwicky (my grand-child) to come by regularly for wound care. We developed a routine, and Opal was very good at it. (My contribution was to find the right bandages for the job and cause them to be delivered to my house — no mean feat.) We made a good team, and Opal is, in any case, good company. (Meanwhile, the wounds itched like crazy, which meant they were healing, but that was maddening and made sleep difficult.)

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Posted in Language and medicine, My life | Leave a Comment »

Comforting and commiserating

October 16, 2025

Follow-ups to two of the three parts of my 10/14 posting “… that I am precious to them”.

[1] in the advance health care section [of my draft legal documents] was a Treat with Dignity section that begins:

If I should suffer serious disease, injury, or illness, I desire that those who love and care for me touch me and tell me so, demonstrating that I am precious to them.

And then I burst into tears at the delicate intimacy of the wording, even though it’s probably boilerplate text these days.

[2 about the Stanford Linguistics department’s 50th anniversary celebration]

[3] .. Sally Thomason just reported:

Steve (Stephen R.) Anderson [of Yale University] died last night, October 13, after a diagnosis last month of aggressive stage 4 esophageal cancer

Damn! And I owed him e-mail [in response to his of 8/5]. An old friend from the 1960s (he was just 3 years younger than me), a true scholar, an extraordinary general linguist, a good guy, and a sturdy friend (he sent me remarkable cheeses from Switzerland when I was sick and downcast!).

Now: on 1, about comforting the sick and dying; and on 3, about Steve Anderson’s commiserating e-mail from August).

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Posted in Death notices, Friendship, Language and the law | Leave a Comment »

Revolt against the bad guys

October 15, 2025

From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook on 10/5, passing on material from Tony Michaels’s Facebook page (“The Tony Michaels Podcast: Considered ‘The Rush Limbaugh of the Left’”), also from 10/5:


A Tony Michaels fabrication (see below)

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Posted in History, Language and politics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Usage | Leave a Comment »

From the annals of NAA

October 15, 2025

The most recent Stephan Pastis Pearls Before Swine strip:


A classic NAA (non-apology apology): if you take offence, it’s your problem (in the strip: I’m sorry you were offended; ramped up: I’m sorry you’re an oversensitive ninny) (see Edwin L. Battistella’s Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology (Oxford, 2014))

From Wikipedia:

A non-apology apology, sometimes called a backhanded apology, empty apology, nonpology, or fauxpology, is a statement in the form of an apology that does not express remorse for what was done or said, or assigns fault to those ostensibly receiving the apology. It is common in politics and public relations.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Apologies, Insults, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

… that I am precious to them

October 14, 2025

I have been going over about 50 pages of draft stuff for my lawyer: revisions of my trusteeship, my will, the advance health care instructions, and a durable power of attorney — the product of a session with the lawyer last month.  Oh my. Well, it all seems to say what I said I wanted, but of course, in careful legalese and with provisos for all sorts of circumstances I had never even contemplated.

And there in the advance health care section was a Treat with Dignity section that begins:

If I should suffer serious disease, injury, or illness, I desire that those who love and care for me touch me and tell me so, demonstrating that I am precious to them.

And then I burst into tears at the delicate intimacy of the wording, even though it’s probably boilerplate text these days.

(more…)

Posted in Death notices, Events and occasions, Friendship, Language and the law, My life | 1 Comment »

Musical Millbrooks

October 13, 2025

The trigger was singing the shapenote hymn Millbrook, 484t in the 2025 edition — yes, the latest revision, successor to the 1991 revision —  of the Sacred Harp yesterday; I was at home, following along via Zoom with the Palo Alto singers (who were at the UUC church in southern Palo Alto). Four connections here:

— 1, the song comes from the 2013 Shenandoah Harmony book (where it’s 264b), which I’d sung from on occasion (so it was in fact already a favorite); I don’t know why it’s named Millbrook (from Millbrook AL? Millbrook Village NJ? from some specific millbrook?)

— 2, the song has the same name as the much more widely known utterly secular composition “Millbrook” (1998), by singer / songwriter Rufus Wainwright, referring to the very tony New York village of Millbrook — so, two musical Millbrooks

— 3, the village of Millbrook is the home of the Millbrook School, a private boarding school that’s interesting in its own right; and there’s a connection to Rufus Wainwright, who’s a 1991 graduate of the school

— 4, Bill Richardson — a friend from a boys’ summer camp (ca. 1950) / Princeton (ca. 1960) / Wyomissing PA (vs. my West Lawn PA, a couple miles away), now Golden CO vs. Palo Alto CA — is a much earlier graduate of the school (in 1958)

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Posted in Education, Friendship, Language and religion, Music, My life, Poetry | 1 Comment »

The Pomeranian-nimbus

October 12, 2025

An Ellis Rosen cartoon that came by on Facebook recently:


(#1) The hybrid creature the pomeranian-nimbus, being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner — so being presented as an extraordinary dog, a cloud canine; note that the woman’s dog recognizes the p-n as a dog, and appears to want to play with it (see the wagging tail)

(The name of the dog breed is standardly capitalized, because it’s a proper name denoting a creature originating in the geographical region of Pomerania, and I’ll use Pomeranian from here on.)

The compound Pomeranian-nimbus is a copulative  N1 + N2 compound (like Swiss-American or hunter-gatherer), denoting a thing or things of both the N1 type and the N2 type.  But in fact the creature is not just a mix of Pomeranian dog and nimbus cloud, but is actually a nimbus Pomeranian ‘Pomeranian dog that is (also) a nimbus cloud’ (your standard N + N compound in English is semantically modifier + head) — rather than a Pomeranian nimbus ‘nimbus cloud that is also, or at least resembles, a Pomeranian dog’. A nimbus Pomeranian, or, more compactly, a nimbopomeranian, a nimpom for short.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Meteorology, Music, Names, Poetry, Portmanteaus, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Word attraction | 3 Comments »

Holy Romaine Empire

October 11, 2025

🏳️‍🌈 👨‍❤️‍👨 🏳️‍🌈 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.

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Posted in 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 | 9 Comments »

Linguists spell things out

October 10, 2025

Once again, three linguists on Facebook. beginning with Lauren Hall-Lew on Facebook on 10/4:

— LHL (Univ.of Edinburgh): I’ve been binging Desert Islands Discs, because most of my podcasts are political, and my heart can only take so much.

— AZ (Stanford) > LHL: (Side comment: for me, the spelling really has to be bingeing; otherwise it’s just bing-bing-bing like bullets, or Bing like Bing Crosby.)

— LHL > AZ: excellent point! I am a terrible speller!

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Posted in Linguists, Mistakes, My life, Spelling, Teaching | Leave a Comment »

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