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Je suis Monsieur Pantoufles

November 19, 2025

Today’s morning name (pure playfulness after a long night of uneasy sleep fragmented by joint pain): from the Cambridge French-English dictionary, the noun

pantoufle (fem.): slipper;  a loose, soft kind of shoe for wearing indoors


(#1) An array of pantoufles (from the Cambridge dictionary)

Considered as a nonsense word, it’s silly-sounding in French, or when borrowed into English as /pæntúfǝl/, which sounds like a cousin of kerfuffle.

But then the things it denotes are often indulgences — playfully pleasurable in design, material, or color (as in #1), so that the word comes with an air of the ridiculous, both in sound and in meaning.

An air that carries over to uses of pantoufle as a name. Two of which I now explore: an imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, from the world of fiction; and me as Monsieur Pantoufles, the woolly moccasins guy. (more…)

Posted in Books, Clothing, French, Morning names, Movies and tv, Names, Shoes, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

Koi Palace takeout

November 18, 2025

Today’s food adventure was to satisfy a yen for Chinese dumplings, at which point I discovered Koi Palace, which is apparently a local dim sum institution, with restaurants in Daly City, Dublin, Milpitas, and Cupertino, plus a takeout site in Redwood City, only a couple of miles from my house. You get to the takeout site via DoorDash on-line, and then pick up your order or (if you are me) have it delivered by DoorDash.

(I have a local wild-favorite dim sum restaurant, Tai Pan in Palo Alto (with previous mentions on this blog), but its dinner service times are uncongenial to my current daily schedule (though they do now deliver by DoorDash), so I thought I’d try something new.)

(more…)

Posted in Language and food, My life | 2 Comments »

What’s your number?

November 18, 2025

My excellent sister-in-law-in-law Virginia Transue, widow of a mathematician who was the son of a mathematician, mused on Facebook this morning about the extraordinarily prolific and collaborative Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös:

Paul Erdös collaborated with so many people that mathematicians are often asked what their ERDÖS NUMBER is. If you wrote a paper with him your number was 1. If you wrote a paper with somebody who had written one with him it was 2…  My Bill’s Erdös number was 2, his father’s was 3

From my 7/27/09 Language Log posting “Erdös?”:

There are linguists with Erdős numbers of 2 (András Kornai), 3 (Geoff Pullum, via András), and 4 (me, via Geoff)

 

Posted in Mathematics, Numbers | 3 Comments »

Pressure Drops and Itchy Spots

November 17, 2025

Yesterday’s set-up (“Two afflictions”) for today’s more detailed report:

I have largely lost the last few days to afflictions

…. One of [them] comes with rapid descents into very low barometric pressures [pressure drops] (as has happened twice in the last three days, as sea storms sweep through coastal California). The other is a mystery ailment that has variously annoyed and plagued me for many years: intensely itchy spots over most of my body, but especially my limbs, sometimes maturing into actual pustules; I have taken to referring to this condition as the itchies. On the night of the 14th/15th, I had the worst attack of the itchies in my life

So today I bring you a report on the Days of Pressure Drops and the Itchies. You hope for days of milk and honey, cakes and ale, wine and roses, beer and skittles, but sometimes you get days of pressure drops and the itchies. Both of which hurt, both of which exhaust you.

(more…)

Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life, Weather | 1 Comment »

Two afflictions

November 16, 2025

I have largely lost the last few days to afflictions, poleaxed by pain of several varieties, immobilized by exhaustion, escaping into sleep, into music that delights me, and into familiar old tv dramas with moral lessons that satisfy my desire for order in the world.

One of the afflictions comes with rapid descents into very low barometric pressures (as has happened twice in the last three days, as sea storms sweep through coastal California). The other is a mystery ailment that has variously annoyed and plagued me for many years: intensely itchy spots over most of my body, but especially my limbs, sometimes maturing into actual pustules; I have taken to referring to this condition as the itchies. On the night of the 14th/15th, I had the worst attack of the itchies in my life, all over my body, too many to count, indescribably awful.

But … the barometric pressure rises to something tolerable, or even delightful, within a few hours. And the Assault of the Itchies tale has a delightful denouement. So I am worn out but happy. And in the midst of this, my vital signs have been splendid, in particular very low blood pressure and a stunningly good resting pulse rate.

Alas, the day has wound down — I am in good shape, and happy, but worn out —  so I will put off all the exciting details for tomorrow: Pressure Drop and the Itchies.

 

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

Taking Goat to lunch

November 15, 2025

Today’s Pearls Before Swine, in which Rat lives up to his name:


The crucial point: take you to lunch in the context of birthday greetings to Goat — in this context, clearly an instance of the phrasal idiom I’ll label take someone to (‘host someone at (an event), treat someone to (an event)’), and so understood by Goat (and, I think, by all readers of this strip); but then, in a kind of lexicographic bait and switch, Rat maintains that he meant only the caused-motion verb take (‘convey something to (an event at) some place’) and takes no responsibility for paying for the occasion

Then, in an appendix to this main discussion, I expose my bafflement at the treatment of the phrasal idiom take someone to in dictionaries: I can’t find one that lists it (while treat someone to is well covered).

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Implicature, Language change, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics | 1 Comment »

Eric Swalwell and his facial scruff

November 14, 2025

The US congressman, in today’s news because his pointed criticisms of Our Overlord Grabpussy have netted him a retributive charge of mortgage fraud, but I was about to post about him as an exemplar of liberal political critique (along with, among others, Rachel Maddow, Pete Buttigieg, and Joyce Vance) and also of nice-guy masculinity (masculinity being one of my perennial topics), with a note on a presentation of himself that employs both informal dress and facial scruff — the latter being a conventional advertisement of masculinity and toughness.

(more…)

Posted in It's Just Stuff, Language and dress, Language and politics, Language and the body, Masculinity, This blogging life | 5 Comments »

Lynneguist, MD

November 13, 2025

On Facebook today, a report on a Google AI search on “Lynneguist hospital” that inspired the bot to satisfy the search term by giving Lynne Murphy a medical degree:


[LM:] Adding medical qualifications to my cv.
I mean, here’s the evidence.

(more…)

Posted in AI, Dialects, Linguists, Music, Parody, Pseudonyms, Variation | 1 Comment »

Things left undone

November 12, 2025

From my 9/19 posting “An eventful day”:

On one front, considerable unease about the long, all-consuming, and physically debilitating project of dispossession of things in my condo. So I sent out a request (reproduced below) for leads on people who have accomplished what I hope to get out of all of that.

From that request:

I need some information about assisted living facilities (NOT retirement communities). Specifically, I need to hear, in detail, about anyone who has gone into an alf while maintaining a professional, academic, or artistic career. What I really want is to talk to such a person about how they managed that.

And then from the 9/19 posting:

The short answer is that, yes, people like me have indeed carried on their careers in an alf. I have direct leads to several of these people. (Of course, everybody’s story is different, but this outcome is clearly possible.)

(more…)

Posted in Age, My life | 1 Comment »

Yummy grub from around the planet

November 12, 2025

In full:

Thanks for all the good conversation and yummy grub from around the planet

My first report on a two-day visit from my old friend Ellen Kaisse, who flew in from Seattle to San Jose. Intended as help in my preparing to move to an assisted living facility — and we got some of that in — but for me it became mostly a wonderful time talking about our lives these days and trying to recover accurate memories of our pasts (so that there will be at least one more posting about the fragility and pliability of memory) — a vacation from my anxieties and sorrows, punctuated by three breaks for food (two lunches and one dinner), carefully chosen to be favorites of mine — I am now an experienced browser of restaurants for home delivery — that I was pretty sure Ellen had never had before and would also fit her dietary constraints (she doesn’t eat mammals).

This is the food report.

(more…)

Posted in Friendship, Language and food, Memory, My life | Leave a Comment »

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