Archive for November, 2025

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Thanksgiving music

November 30, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for the outgoing month of November; and 🎄 for the first Sunday in Advent, so the beginning of the religious Christmas season — focused on the Christ child — that ends on Epiphany, January 6th; and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 St. Andrew’s Day, 11/30, the national day of Scotland, so break out the thistles; meanwhile, 🦃 the follow-up to (US) Thanksgiving continues, on what I like to think of as Black Sunday (in the Long Black Weekend: “She walks these days in a long black veil”)

At my house, the adventures in leftover Thanksgiving food — originally, soy sauce and black vinegar roasted chicken (10-12 pieces, mostly thigh meat) on a bed of japchae (crunchy veg on Korean glass noodles, thin noodles made from sweet potato starch) — continues; the chicken has come to an end, but the japchae made the base for a fantastic herbal soup that has so far provided two meals and will give me two more. All of this done with takeout, household staples, and a microwave. I do not cook — that’s long gone — but I am a demon assembler.

Like modern American Christmas, modern American Thanksgiving is an event celebrated with food, companionable gatherings, and pageantry, but Christmas also has tons of music, in a variety of genres. Which Thanksgiving largely lacks. A fact that led Laura Whitton Bonnett to post on Facebook on the day itself:

We were trying to find Thanksgiving music to enjoy during cooking.

LWB then offered a few suggestions for appropriate Thanksgiving music, taking the search into two genres; and I ventured into two more. Suggestions that are no longer of much use this year, so save this posting for next November.

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Posted in Dutch, Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and food, Music | 5 Comments »

By their remnants you shall know them

November 29, 2025

It’s penultimate November and the day after Black Friday, and the leftovers from Thanksgiving — my leftovers, being quirkily Korean, are surely not much like yours, but I have them and they are wonderful — will live again in other meals for several more days. And familiar old tv shows will be re-run as a background of pleasant memories.

Today’s re-runs are from the early days of the American police-procedural tv series NCIS. This morning, in the S4 E1 program “Shalom” (from 9/19/06), came a moment described in the episode summary as:

Tony remarks that Sacks is a self-centered, egotistical jackhole

You don’t need to know who Tony and Sacks are, because my interest in the summary is entirely in its notable final word, boldfaced above. A way of calling someone a jackass and an asshole without using a dirty word. The ass is silent. Twice. Only the respectable remnants of the insults are left over.

Now, jackhole isn’t a fresh discovery, even on this blog — though 2006 is 10 years earlier than the cite that set off an earlier posting of mine, “jockhole”, from 9/28/16 (which makes today’s posting “jockhole 2”). Return with me now to that posting.

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Posted in Holidays, Insults, Lexicography, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Penguin games

November 28, 2025

Briefly noted. In the latest New Yorker issue (of 12/1/25), cartoonist Meredith Southland suggests a solution to the puzzle of what penguins are doing when they waddle around waving their wings in the air:


(#1) They are playing Charades! Well, life on the ice floes of Antarctic imagination offers few interesting diversions, but this communal game can occupy plenty of dark cold time

The all-time favorite penguin game, however, is Hide and Seek, a spheniscid take-off on Where’s Waldo? Sometimes known as Lost in the Crowd. Though ice-sliding and egg-rolling races are both tremendously popular. Never a dull South Polar moment.

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Posted in Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins, Toys and games | 2 Comments »

Red, red wine

November 27, 2025

From the annals of eccentric wine naming, the remarkable

Vampire® Coffin & Cape Red Wine Trilogy

from Vampire Vineyards.

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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Names, Trade names | 2 Comments »

A seasonal affliction

November 26, 2025

As soon as the sun rose on November 1st — All Saints Day — the Christmas music began. All of it, including the two monumentally maddening hammer-stroke repetitive songs “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and “The Little Drummer Boy”.  My first thought for a remedy — a bullet to the brain to everyone who plays either song in public (everyone is welcome to play them behind closed doors, with effective acoustic insulation in place, of course; I am not an uncivilized monster) — turns out to be not only illegal, but also immoral; no matter what the provocation, aesthetic violence, especially of the fatal variety, apparently offends the sensibilities of our society.

So I propose a different remedy: removing miscreants from the public sphere, cordoning them off where their songs can no longer disrupt people of good will, while meting out a punishment that truly fits the crime. Not aesthetic execution, but aesthetic imprisonment:


A Mick Stevens cartoon, from the 8/17/81 issue of the New Yorker

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Posted in Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Music | 2 Comments »

Service record

November 25, 2025

The background, from my 11/24 posting “Work weeks”:

Back when I still had an academic life, 60 hours a week was the absolutely standard work week, combining teaching, teaching prep, research, publication, preparing and delivering public lectures (see the alarming record of these in yesterday’s posting “Scholarly communication”), and extensive service to the university and the profession.

This is about that extensive service to the university and the profession. Which is chronicled in my giant c.v., along with the teaching and public lectures; once again, the record of enormous amounts of real work, especially reviewing applications for grants from the NSF, NEH, and the Fulbright Program:

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Posted in Academic life, My life, Work | Leave a Comment »

Work weeks

November 24, 2025

Briefly noted. Lynneguist on Facebook today tracked her work weeks: typically 45 hours, rising to 60 at this point in the fall. I reported:

Back when I still had an academic life, 60 hours a week was the absolutely standard work week, combining teaching, teaching prep, research, publication, preparing and delivering public lectures (see the alarming record of these in yesterday’s posting “Scholarly communication”), and extensive service to the university and the profession. My man Jacques took on himself the burdens of seeing that I kept close to the 60-hour week; of preventing me from allowing commitments to take me towards 70- and 80-hour weeks (which he viewed, probably correctly, as dangerous to my health); and of acting as my helpful assistant. That was a great gift of love, offered in the gentlest way — but with an iron fist inside that velvet glove.

 

Posted in Academic life, My life, Work | Leave a Comment »

Quiet Piggy

November 23, 2025

11 … 2 … 3 it’s Fibonacci day today; the omens foretell 5 in your future, and then 8, and then 13, and then 21, leaping upward in ever-greater jumps, in an elegant spiral of numbers (I used to be a mathematician, and still have a license to chatter enthusiastically about numbers and abstract patterns). This is today’s moment of wonder and delight, the only protection I can offer against what comes next.

A moral monster of great power, dripping corruption and careening into dementia, is the stuff of unbearable nightmare; we are all living in it. Even worse: behind this demonic figure stand cool-headed engineers of death and dominion. But today I talk about the figurehead of their plots, Our Overlord Grabpussy. In two of his recent forays with the press, which I report on here  from a New York Times story of 11/18 by Michael M. Grynbaum (which I believe to be the most accurate and detailed account of these two episodes — which I’ll call Saudi and Pedo); the NYT is behind a paywall for me, but three friends managed to get copies of the text for me.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Insults, Language and politics, Language in social life, Mathematics, Monsters, Morality, Music, Public and private | 2 Comments »

Scholarly communication

November 22, 2025

In an old NCIS episode (“Bikini Wax”, S2 E15, 3/29/05), the chief medical examiner Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard (played by David McCallum) recollects that he’d considered a career in teaching but didn’t find the idea of lecturing on esoteric subjects attractive. Chacun a son goût and all that, but (resisting every digression beckoning me to another profession) I happily signed up to do just that when I was a graduate student at MIT, and went on to appointments at three universities (UIUC, OSU, and Stanford), with visiting teaching gigs at dozens of other institutions over the years.

With the responsibility of teaching, my positions came with a parallel responsibility to engage in research — and to report on that research, not only in writing but also in public presentations, where work in progress can gather useful critiques, and where completed work can be broadcast to new audiences. Face-to-face interaction, in a classroom or in a lecture room, is irreplaceable for scholarly communication, because it’s interactive and can be adjusted on the spot to fit the needs of the moment.

For years now, these interactions haven’t been available to me, so I’ve had to find interactive forms of scholarly communication in different modes: blogging on the internet (inviting commentary) and using social media. More popular and less esoteric, but still in their own ways pedagogical.

Thanks to Ducky Mallard for spurring me to go back to my great big c.v. that has everything in it, to look at the summary of what I did by way of scholarly communication in my previous life. I find it incredibly hard to believe that I was that person, but here’s the evidence.

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Posted in Academic life, My life, Teaching | Leave a Comment »

Yesterday’s found poetry

November 22, 2025

Yesterday, a news story (from an Ohio site) with this summary of its subject, Madelyn Varela:

Ohio’s viral lesbian cheesemonger

This builds in sound from its onset to its cheesemonger climax, which was something of a surprise (just on likelihood, I was expecting goatfarmer); and its content comes across like a series of random pings: Ohio; then a lot of followers (viral here means, roughly ‘widely circulated, with many followers’); then, whoa, a dyke; and, who would have guessed, a seller of cheese (in a word, a cheesemonger). A lovely bit of found poetry.

So, of course, I gilded it.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and sexuality, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

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