arnold zwicky

Author Archive

Celebratory day

September 6, 2020

Today, September 6th, is both National Coffee Ice Cream Day — my favorite flavor — and also Lafayette’s birthday (1757), a most satisfying confluence of occasions. Meanwhile, it has brought me some extraordinarily warming good wishes from people appreciating things I have said and written over the past roughly 60 years, on my own celebratory day. Today I become an old man.

(Is there a ceremony for this? Would I have to do it in Hebrew? That would make it a deeply serious ritual, but totally out of my range, as a lapsed Episcopalian, formerly Lutheran. The Book of Common Prayer, alas, lacks a rite for this occasion. On the other hand, the Lutherans and Anglicans (and many other Christian denominations) have music for it; see below.)

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Posted in Holidays, Language and religion, Music, My life | 9 Comments »

More for the birds

September 5, 2020

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky arrived this morning with a collection of astonishing bird-related birthday presents for me: a ground-hugging bird bath, a Water Wiggler for the bird bath, and a hanging metal mesh bird feeder in the shape of a penguin. (There’s always something penguin-related.)

None of these is a standard item for the yard or patio, but Elizabeth has been cultivating birds in her own backyard and now knows a lot about bird gear. (Oddly, though she lives only about six blocks from me, she has bird visitors I do not: hummingbirds, chickadees, and parakeets, in particular).

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Posted in Etymology, French, Language and animals, My life | 1 Comment »

The rainbow party dog

September 5, 2020

Arrived yesterday, from Rose Cart Florist in Sunnyvale CA, a rainbow variant of their Another Year Rover floral arrangement, as a present for my 80th birthday (tomorrow). Their basic item:

(#1) Their ad copy: “Turning another year older is a lot more fun with our signature birthday a-DOG-able®! This party pooch arrives wearing a festive hat, surrounded by a mix of colorful blooms to liven up their celebration. A great gift idea for any age, he’s here to deliver your best wishes in truly original style.”

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

Working men 2020

September 5, 2020

(Well, it’s a gay porn ad, so of course there’s plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so it’s inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest.)

On AZBlogX yesterday, the posting “Labor Day 2020”, a Falcon Studio gay porn ad for Labor Day, with two smiling affectionate men (playing construction workers). The ad, cropped here to make it penis-free for WordPress and to focus on their physical affection:

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Posted in Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and the body, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

candy-ass faggots

September 4, 2020

(Tons of abusive and offensive language; some sex talk, but only in passing.)

Another posting from the back files, which somehow got disregarded. Investigating the slang candy-ass, I was taken back to this tale of invective from Peter Cavanaugh’s WordPress blog entry “Rocket to Stardom” from 3/26/09 about radio station WNDR in Syracuse NY (the crucial bit is boldfaced):

WNDR’s News Director was Bud Stapleton, a good “friend of the Judge”. He was tough and mean, a former Marine. Bud was a World War Two vet who spent several serious years “island hopping” in the South Pacific and to whom a peaceful return to civilian life was “a fucking pain in the ass”. He was a certified American hero.

… Syracuse, New York is also the home of Syracuse University and the celebrated Newhouse School of Communications.

The Newhouse faculty regarded “WNDR Action Central News” as professionally falling somewhere in between pig semen and rat vomit. They went out of their way expounding with exhausted exasperation upon the degrading, disgusting, depraving journalistic waste product available every hour on the hour at good old 1260 on their AM dial.

It was a classic case of unbridled mutual contempt.

Bud Stapleton characteristically categorized the Newhouse professors as “Candy-ass faggots who can suck my cock on the 6-0-Clock News”. He made frequent reference to “shoving their fucking ivory tower right up their baby-boy butts”.

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Posted in Insults, Lexical semantics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Semantics of compounds, Slang, Slurs | Leave a Comment »

Last-naming professors

September 4, 2020

Most of this posting is in effect a guest column by Ben Yagoda: a re-posting of a thoughtful column of his from, omigod, 2017, from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog on language and writing in academe, Lingua Franca, which was discontinued in (apparently) December 2018, and is currently inaccessible.

I’d saved Ben’s column because it dealt with one of my long-term interests, address terms — there’s a Page on this blog with an annotated inventory of my postings on address terms — but now that you can’t get to it on-line, I think it’s important to give it an audience, even without further commentary from me.

From 11/13/17, Yagoda on Last-Naming Professors:

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Posted in Address terms | 4 Comments »

Take me, please (supine version)

September 3, 2020

(Men’s bodies and mansex discussed in street language, so not at all appropriate for kids and the sexually modest.)

An e-mail ad from Daily Jocks today, which turns out to be the second of a pair. The ad copy for this one:

Welcome to The Daily Jocks Backroom, from harnesses to wrestling suits, check out some of the most intimate products from your favourite brands including Cellblock13, Nasty Pig & many more.

What’s for sale here is some brightly colored festishwear, what could fairly be described as hot garments (harnesses, jockstraps, socks) to get fucked in)

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Posted in Language of sex, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

wingman, winger

September 3, 2020

In a NYT Magazine piece on Grabpussy Jr., an arresting mid-page teaser quote:

I searched my mental banks for relevant senses of winger, working my way through wingman first, eventually discovering that the intended sense was the one I came to last. You really have to have the context: in particular, who is speaking, for what purposes.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language in politics, Sociocultural conventions | 2 Comments »

Onomatopoeia and program music

September 2, 2020

On 8/31, e-mail from fellow shapenote singer Peter Ross, asking

whether onomatopoeia might apply to songs like the City of New Orleans, Bill Staines’s song River, the Carter family song Winding Stream, etc., where the music fits the meaning of the lyrics

These are wonderful, incredibly moving songs, and I’ll write about them below, but what Peter’s talking about is a relationship between the form of pieces of music (including their lyrics) and the images or stories the music might evoke — while onomatopoeia is a specifically linguistic relationship, having to do with an association between linguistic elements — lexical items — and their referents, turning on the phonetics of the lexical items and perceptible characteristics of the referents.

So they’re clearly related concepts, but not the same thing.

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Posted in Music, Onomatopoeia, Style and register | 1 Comment »