Archive for October, 2025

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Three linguists among the nutters

October 10, 2025

Briefly noted: a Facebook exchange on 10/8:

— Mike Hammond (Univ. of Arizona): Social media rant #2: On twitter, I keep seeing posts asking how I feel about interracial marriage. Seriously? Are there really sane people who object to this???

— John Singler (NYU): A recent poll (by a reputable organization) in the US asked about Black-white marriage. 94% said it was OK

— MH > JS: yeah, but 6% said no? nutters

— AZ (Stanford) > MH: 6% nutters is modest, in my experience. My rule of thumb is that you can expect 10% nutters on any matter of opinion or belief, no matter how outrageous

At least 10% believe that angels are at work amongst us, that the Illuminati control the media, that another race of people live in the hollow center of the earth, whatever. It’s all very sobering.

 

 

Posted in Attitudes, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

Cellarettes and cabinet drinks

October 9, 2025

Adventures in furniture inspired by a Benjamin Dreyer posting on Facebook yesterday:

Goshamighty, I completely forgot to mention, when I posted my Old Acquaintance piece a few hours ago, that in commencing this morning to read John Van Druten’s 1942 The Damask Cheek (co-written with one Lloyd Morris), I learned a new word! It’s cellarette: “a movable cabinet or container, often made of wood, designed to store and secure alcoholic beverages.”

If there’s a more perfect word to turn up in a play set in “The library of MRS. RANDALL’s house in the East Sixties, New York. December 1909,” [the  setting of The Damask Cheek] I can’t think of it.

BD locates the sociocultural milieu of the item (and then its name as well) as privileged urban upper class — traditional, elegant, and elite — and we will see that his classdar is first-rate.

I then broke in with the news that I have one of these things, a very nice one, of Danish design, made of teak, on wheels, with a durable bar top, in two parts that slide open to reveal the storage spaces within (there will be photos). I am neither elegant nor elite — I have several good points, but they are not these — but this clever and handsome object suits me (and it was mine and Jacques’s, and before that mine and Ann’s, so it comes with with waves of sweet memory; I will soon pass it on to my grand-child Opal).

But first, the cellaret / cellarette. The object and the name.

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and food, Language play, Music, My life, Plays, Social class | Leave a Comment »

The flannel frontier

October 9, 2025

The 10/7 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), multifariously playful, cleverly goofy. Something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times.


(#1) It’s all about the original Star Trek tv series (if you have somehow missed learning about the show, the cartoon will be incomprehensible to you); the top-level joke is in the title: the flannel frontier, a silly pun on the final frontier — but there’s a lot more (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Movies and tv, My life, Puns, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

The duck drops down

October 6, 2025

Say the secret word, and a prop duck made in the image of Groucho Marx drops down, to riotous applause and blaring horns — and you get prize money. That was American tv’s You Bet Your Life from 1950 to 1961 (roughly, my teenage years). And then in a Pearls Before Swine comic strip from 2006:


(#1) Another self-referential strip by Stephan Pastis (it’s one of his specialties) — the secret word is the idiomatic (originally biblical) phrase (cast) pearls before swine —  turning on shtick that disappeared from live tv about 65 years ago (but apparently lives on in pop-cultural consciousness, or at least in Pastis’s)

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

October’s song: amid rueful jesting, they slip into death

October 5, 2025

A comic poem and a cartoon for October.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Events and occasions, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Poetry, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

The view from the troubled fringes

October 5, 2025

From the New Yorker issue of 10/13/25 (which has not yet arrived at my house), on-line on 10/5, “Takes: Rebecca Mead on Mary Ellen Mark’s photo from the Puerto Rican Day Parade” — from the New Yorker Classics, about “Forward, March” by MEM, in the 6/23/2003 print edition. This photo:


[caption:] Candice Lozada, nine, and Fantashia Toro, eleven, of the S.B.K. (South Bronx Kids) Dance Group, waiting for the Puerto Rican Day Parade to start

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Posted in Art, Childhood, Music, Photography, Race and ethnicity, Social life | Leave a Comment »

The FY restaurant

October 5, 2025

Following on my 9/27/25 posting “From the annals of remarkable commercial names” (about the Chew Chew Grill / Chew Chew’s Diner in Toronto), Sim Aberson wrote on Facebook on 10/3:

— SA > AZ: While discussing commercial names, a very good Vietnamese restaurant in Miami, Phuc Yea — of course it’s pronounced fook yeh. [I omit commentary on the well-deployed SPAR (aka dangler) and the NP (topic-introducing) sentence fragment]

— AZ > SA: Oh my. No doubt intentional. Though I’ll point out that the enthusiastic intensive-modifier use of the F-word in Fuck yeah! is pretty much as low on the raunchiness scale as the F-word gets.

As it turns out, definitely intentional. And cheeky.

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Posted in Language and food, Names, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

50!

October 4, 2025

From Beth Levin to the Stanford linguistics department on 9/10:

The Department of Linguistics was officially established on September 1, 1975, and so this year is our 50th anniversary!  In celebration, we will be hosting a reception from 4-6pm on Friday, October 10 in the Linguistics Courtyard behind Margaret Jacks Hall. We have invited our many Ph.D. alumni and emeriti to attend, and we are anticipating a good turn out.

An astounding number of PhD alumni have said they’re coming (going back to 1970, from the precursor to the department). I don’t know how many emeritus faculty are coming. And then there are the people currently in the department. So it will be quite a scene.

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Posted in Events and occasions, My life, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

Three more years

October 3, 2025

The reward at the end of an extravagantly difficult week (don’t ask): confirmation that I have actually been appointed for three more years at Stanford. No longer do I get a letter of appointment from the cognizant dean; instead, my department’s administrator (the Kelly Battcher in this e-mail) gets a notice from FASA — Faculty and Academic Staff Appointments, the online integrated management system for academic appointments at Stanford. This notice:


Thus implying that the cognizant dean did in fact approve the appointment; there is an actual human being in the middle of all this, you just can’t see them

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Posted in Academic life, My life, Stanford | 1 Comment »

entre más carne mejor

October 3, 2025

More from the annals of commercial names, thanks to this Facebook report from Steven Levine, on the road in Asbury Park NJ:

On the way to Ocean Grove NJ for a weekend with some friends, our culinary tour of the Jersey Shore, I passed this sign:


(#1) The Meat & More Corporation of Asbury Park: a butcher shop, noted here for its double entendre name

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Posted in Double entendres, Jokes, Language and food, Spanish, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

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