Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🐇🐇🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August, with a leporine shout-out to remember 1291, the traditional date of the formation of the Swiss federation: Hail, Helvetia!

Now to dive into today’s topic in medias res, with this 7/30 Facebook greeting from Pietro Giovanni to Aaron Broadwell on the occasion of AB’s 64th birthday, somewhere around that time:

Many returns of the day to my favorite linguist

AB is George Aaron Broadwell (known as Aaron Broadwell), Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the Univ. of Florida (Gainesville). PG is AB’s husband Peter Marino under the pseudonym Pietro Giovanni. For further complexity, since there are a regrettably large number of men named Peter Marino, some of them famous in their fields, Peter Marino uses the nickname Piet as his professional name; Piet Marino is the author of young adult novels (Dough Boy and Magic and Misery):

(#1) The Piet Marino logo

Accompanying PG’s birthday wishes was this wonderful photo of AB:

(#2) Yes, that’s Paris. AB was chercheur invité at Université de Paris-Cité for two weeks in May this year, and PG took this photo of him at one of their breakfast spots.

(AB and PG have been together for 30 years and were in the earliest group of gay people who got married in Massachusetts, in 2004, wow.)

Now you have the setting. And then some motivation for further posting on AB: as a diversion from facing my mortality (see my 7/30 posting “turning point”), I’m unearthing some projects I started long ago and left with promises to finish; in particular, I now return to AB as a subject.

From my 4/3/25 posting (yes, 16 months ago) “The world is too much with me”:

I have tons of stuff to say and feel overwhelmed. But I intend to move on to Aaron Broadwell, and try to distill many pages of a remarkable c.v. into something digestible … Then [I wrote, hopefully] to get back to the larger topic, with other examples of gay male linguists of substantial accomplishment [there are many] and some words on why people should care about us, especially during a time when concerns about DEI mask a concerted attack on (among many other things) LGBTQ people and our rights [an excellent goal, one I care passionately about, but now probably out of my grasp; please do not tell me I’ll just have to work harder].

Basic information from AB’s website at the University of Florida:

education: BA, Harvard (1983) in Linguistics and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; MA, UCLA (1986) in Linguistics; PhD, UCLA (1990) in Linguistics

personal statement: My primary research agenda focuses on endangered languages, primarily Native American languages of the United States and Mesoamerica. I am interested in the issues of integrating language description and documentation with contemporary work in linguistic theory. I am also committed to working with Native American communities to provide dictionaries, texts, and other materials that are useful in language revitalization and maintenance.

My long-term descriptive commitments have been to grammatical and lexical descriptions of Choctaw, contemporary Zapotec (San Dionisio Ocotepec, Macuiltianguis, and Sierra Juarez varieties), Colonial Valley Zapotec, Copala Triqui, and Timucua. I have also worked on grammatical issues in a number of other languages around the world (Mon, Kaqchikel, Kiche, Yucatec, Turkish, Crow, Muskogee).

I am interested in theoretical problems that include word order, causative structures, lexical semantics, negation, diachronic morphosyntax, and syntactic typology.

I teach, advise, and am a member of the graduate faculty in both the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Linguistics at University of Florida. I am particularly interested in working with graduate students who are interested in a combination of linguistic and anthropological training. I believe that Anthropology and Linguistics both have an important contribution to make in doing good research on the languages of the world.

Plus, of course, extensive documentation of his research and the many recognitions of his work.

Personal notes. It should by now be clear that I think that AB is a mensch, with a firm sense of what is right and responsible, and that this shines out in his research and teaching, and indeed in his conduct as a publicly visible gay man (not saintly, but good). He is also a friend of mine. As it happens, he’s someone who’s provided me with a form of interaction that I find especially valuable; I’ll get into the topic in steps. (After noting that, yes, I will analyze anything, even my pleasant talk with friends.)

— from my 4/1/25 posting “Unbuttoned chat”, in which I first approach this interactional form:

That’s unbuttoned ‘relaxed, less inhibited’. There will be no removal of clothes.

This is a little human-interest piece reproducing postings (three of them) from past years reporting on Aaron Broadwell and me chatting as two gay men about cultural matters (pretty much negligently folding Gay Interest into everyday chat). The genre is a type of Friendly Conversation, in this case between two gay men who share a fair amount of background knowledge, have trust in and regard for each other, and are not pursuing any explicit goal beyond maintaining the bond of friendship, keeping in touch; it’s “just talk” — but it’s still structured in complex ways (which would become obvious if I offered parallel exchanges with other people of other sorts in different social contexts, and more strikingly, if I showed you exchanges that ran aground).

— from my 8/31/25 posting “Gay banter: great big green beans”, in which I identify a more specific interactional form, gay banter:

Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27, … a biliteral delight, in G+B:

graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty

A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:

(#3) AZ>AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!

This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship.

(But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances.)

— What I didn’t post about is the great value of these interactions for me personally: as someone who generally is tagged as way too gay for straight people but also perceived as way too straight for many gay people, I belong nowhere (hence my sympathy for Marjane Satrapi, which I share with Hana Filip; see my 7/26 posting “Marjane Satrapi”). But having guys I can do gay banter with (Aric Olnes, Gadi Niram, and AB, for example) is a great gift. because there’s a place where I’m accepted for who I am and truly belong.

Linguistics was for me a breath-taking life-changing discovery, something that fit me intellectually like bespoke tailoring — but it was also a social world that took me in virtually without reservation, and that was indescribably satisfying.

This entry was posted on August 1, 2026 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Academic life, Conversation, Events and occasions, Friendship, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Indigenous peoples, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguists, Logos, Marriage, My life, Phallicity, Professional names, Pseudonyms, Speech acts, Switzerland and Swiss things, Teaching. 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.