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“a home run is a high fly that goes out of the park”

May 13, 2025

The first thing you need to know about this sentence from Baseball English —

a home run is a high fly that goes out of the park

is that I said it. If you know me at all well, you know that I am deeply, fabulously ignorant of sports — because I am deeply, fabulously uninterested in sports. And yet I uttered this Baseball English sentence, and I understood that it was, in fact, a pretty good definition of the technical term of baseball home run, and I was stunned. This stuff has seeped into my very being.

But why, you ask was I, of all people, defining home run. In fact, I was defining it for someone who turns out to be a genuine baseball fan, someone who knows tons of stuff about the game. But, alas, all in Baseball Spanish, which, despite the fact that the game is called beisbol (a transparent borrowing from English) in it, has an almost entirely home-made vocabulary, so that Baseball English might as well be Quechua or Mixtec.

Ok, you persist in asking, why was I trying to talk about baseball at all, never mind the English vs. Spanish thing.

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

The last days of spring

May 13, 2025

Locally, the signs that spring is coming to an end here in Palo Alto CA accumulate around this time; I suggest that Fred Astaire’s (1899) birthday, on 5/10, would be an appropriate occasion for looking forward to the arrival of summer. The plants in my immediate environment have sent the signals:

— the magenta Pelargonium peltatum (“ivy-leaved geranium”) plants by the entrance to my condo are suddenly covered with blossoms

— the cat’s-claw creeper vine / cat’s claw trumpet vine, Dolichandra unguis-cati, on the arbor over the entryway went from a few bright yellow flowers to a solid bank of yellow overnight (which will drop to the ground in a few days, to be replaced, eventually, by long seedpods)

— the calla lilies on the street, a few doors north of me, have finished blooming and are now dying back, to go into dormancy until next spring

— on my patio, the last cymbidium orchids are still blooming, for maybe a few more weeks, when their blossoms, too, will drop off in the summer heat and the plants will go into dormancy

— and also out there in the container garden, the first big-leaved hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla) flower cluster is about to open into bright pink, in two or three days (that cluster, on a great big plant in a great big pot, now stands at my eye level)

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

Resonant twanginess

May 13, 2025

… or, maybe, twangy resonance. In any case, the sound of a family of stringed musical instruments of varying appearance, but united by the quality of the sound they produce. Two of them historically situated in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, one in the Appalachian region of the US.

Together they are the topic of the remaining section of my 5/11 posting “Zimbalist, accompanied by Satie”. That first part was about the occupation noun zimbalist ‘player of a cimbalom / cimbal‘ (an instrument especially associated with Hungary and its capital Budapest, and the most muscularly twangy of the three instruments). The second part, yesterday’s posting “Zimbalistics”, was about the artistic family the Zimbalists (none of whom actually played any of these instruments, despite their family name). Today, I’m onto that instrument (also known as the hammer(ed) dulcimer) and its relatives the seriously twangy zither (especially associated with Austria and its capital Vienna) and the mid-twangy Appalachian / mountain dulcimer (not now associated with central or eastern Europe, whatever its ultimate origins might have been).

These three instruments then tail off into the more sonorous or plinky fiddle (as a folk instrument), banjo, and guitar. As a linguist I’m inclined to think of the twangy instruments as analogous to affricates and the sonorous / plinky instruments as analogous to fricatives (sonorous ones voiced, plinky ones voiceless), though I realize that these comparisons — a kind of synesthesia — might just confound many of you. (Ok, for me, cimbalom music is deep purple, zither music is bright orange, and mountain dulcimer music is a dark yellow. Your colors might vary.)

In any case today you’ll get YouTube videos that show you the instruments and let you listen to their wonderful twangs. I have a sentimental attachment to cimbaloms and zithers, from pleasant times spent in Vienna in years long gone; I’ve had to restrain myself from bombarding you with endless cimbal and zither performances. In fact, today’s presentation will be (again) compressed, under pressure of time.

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Posted in Music, Names, Perception | 2 Comments »

Zimbalistics

May 12, 2025

Zimbalistics, the study of the artistic Zimbalist family, in the three generations from Efrem through Stephanie, following up on my report yesterday, in “Zimbalist, accompanied by Satie”, of this morning name. I wrote:

I understood the [morning] name to refer to Stephanie Zimbalist, most famously (with Pierce Brosnan and Doris Roberts) a star of the American tv show Remington Steele. But then the topic branched wildly in many directions, in a way I couldn’t imagine organizing into a single posting. So, today, just one piece of that network of topics, the surname Zimbalist.

… [plus a promise of] more on three generations of talented Zimbalists, on their religious affiliations, and on Zimbalistic tv shows.

No doubt Stephanie would not have been your first association to the surname, but she was mine yesterday morning; that’s just an observation about how my mind was working in the fog of coming out of sleep. Sometimes I have no idea where a name in my head comes from. Sometimes it’s associated with a specific referent that I realize was in my mind from something that happened recently. Sometimes, as here, I’m baffled as to where an association comes from; it just is. (I once got Goethe as my morning name, except that — surprise! — it referred to the street in Chicago, locally pronounced /góθi/. I have no idea why I slighted the great German writer, but there it was.)

On to the Zimbalist family — a brisk and abbreviated tour, since I’m overwhelmed with things today. (There are decent Wikipedia entries for Efrem, Efrem Jr., Stephanie, and Alma Gluck.)

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Posted in Actors, Morning names, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »

And now: a real award

May 12, 2025

Just posted on, a fabricated award from Google Gives Back, and then an announcement from the Linguistic Society of America, seeking nominations for its actual awards, a list that now begins, in alphabetic order (so for once the last shall be first):

Nominations due on June 30, 2025:

— Arnold Zwicky Award: recognizing LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community.

— C.L. Baker Award: recognizing mid-career scholars in syntactic theory.

The description of the award (now in its fifth year) named after me has been slightly altered (to satisfy current law); but I continue to be moved that an award on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community was established in my name, and while I was still alive. My joking description of this honor is that I am now officially a Famous Faggot; in the circles I care about, that’s a great honor indeed.

I included the second award from the list because it has a special meaning for me: Lee Baker was my first PhD student, some 60 years ago: a sharp and thoughtful linguist, a remarkable teacher, and a good man, taken from us way too young.

 

Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »

The Google grant

May 12, 2025

Junk and spam e-mail and blog comments continue to stream in, but the automated resources filtering these out for me (and leaving me with some considerable residue to judge by hand) have altered. I’m now getting versions of the Nigerian prince scam, in languages the filters don’t know what to do with (German, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic). And then, in my Junk mailbox (where the filters put stuff they judge might be junk, but leave the final judgment to me) on the morning of 5/6, this fabrication:


(This is a photograph of the mailing, so you can’t link to the Google.org site on it)

There’s a lot of real stuff alluded to in this mailing: the Google address is correct; there is a Google.org charitable arm of Google; that’s a passable reproduction of the Google.org logo; Google.com does give awards (the Google Cloud Partner Awards); “Google Gives Back” was the title of one of Google’s charitable efforts (though the name doesn’t seem to be used any more); and Sundar Pichai is indeed the CEO of Google.com. Some details follow below. But all of this anyone could have looked up. In any case, it smells bad, and the current filters picked up on that, I’m not entirely sure how.

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Posted in AI, Awards, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Zimbalist, accompanied by Satie

May 11, 2025

Today’s morning name was Zimbalist, which came to me at 4:10 am to the accompaniment of the delicious, very French, piano music of Erik Satie (to which it has no associations I can think of). I understood the name to refer to Stephanie Zimbalist, most famously (with Pierce Brosnan and Doris Roberts) a star of the American tv show Remington Steele. But then the topic branched wildly in many directions, in a way I couldn’t imagine organizing into a single posting. So, today, just one piece of that network of topics, the surname Zimbalist.

Zimbalist looks like zimbal + ist, an association surname, possibly an association to an occupation, and so it is: it’s a Slavic Jewish surname meaning ‘cimbalom / cimbal player’ (so it’s parallel to the common nouns pianist, violinist, accordionist, trombonist, clarinetist, etc.).

(The initial letter c of cimbalom represents a voiceless dental affricate [ts], spelled with a c in Russian, a z in German; because of the spelling with c, the name cimbalom is pronounced in English with an [s], and because of the spelling with Z, the name Zimbalist is pronounced in English with a [z] — yes, this is a multilingual, multiorthographic mess, but don’t blame me, I’m just the reporter.)

Now, briefly, to the instrument.

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Posted in Actors, Derivation, Morning names, Morphology, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Spelling | 6 Comments »

Morning name with scorpion

May 10, 2025

My morning name on 5/6 was a misremembered word — I report to you, regularly, on the fragility of memory, including my own — that evoked an excellent political portmanteau from the autumn of 2016, as the Presidential elections (HC vs. DT) were heating up, these words together taking me to a bit of prescient song-writing by Gilbert & Sullivan in 1882 — involving loud braying, vulgar display, and open contempt for their inferiors — a character sketch of the moral monster of 2016, who has over the ensuing decade transfigured into a foolish but vindictive scorpion, with a deadly sting in its tail and no control over its instincts.

Now come with me back to the morning of 5/6. As I woke, what dinged in my mind was the repeated:

tarentara tarentara

which I recalled with pleasure as a chorus of peers from G&S’s Iolanthe, imitating the sound of brasses, specifically of trumpets, as they marched. I went to the net to recover the rest of the chorus, only to discover that I had misremembered the marching noise; it was actually

tantantara tantantara

And so began the journey that ends with all of us embrangled in the animal tale The Frog and the Scorpion.
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Posted in Language and poitics, Memory, Mistakes, Morality, Morning names, Music, Nicknames, Portmanteaus, Quotation, Stories | 6 Comments »

Invasion of the superb birds

May 9, 2025

Yesterday, a greeting card from Ann Burlingham, written on 5/5 in Pittsburgh (mostly about the University of Pittsburgh graduation on 5/3, featuring graduate Opal Armstrong Zwicky among the crowd of about 5,000), arrived in Palo Alto on 5/8, with a note beginning:

Another Superb Bird! How many can Australia have?


(#1) [from the Ikonink cards website:] Original Artwork: Superb Lyrebird (Menura superba), illustrated by Elizabeth Gould for John Gould’s Birds of Australia (1840-1848). Currently displayed at the Australian Museum.

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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »

The message in the sand

May 9, 2025

(This posting is mostly about sexual acts, mostly discussed in street language, so it’s entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest; I know, I know, that sucks)

Yesterday’s posting “Bill, it is the scribbling of a gigantic scoundrel” was about the wonderful absurdity of a Benjamin Schwartz New Yorker cartoon exploiting the Desert Island meme, with everything turning on the message in the sand of the tiny island Bill and his companion share with their ratty palm tree — who could possibly have left it there? —


Of three principal senses of suck, this was intended to be suck-C, an intransitive slang verb of denigration; the ingestion verb, suck-A, is irrelevant to the context; finally, the sexual verb, suck-B, was probably not on BS’s mind (though young men on a small island might turn to fellatio for sexual pleasure), but was certainly on mine

I have written extensively on this blog on these senses of suck, their uses, and their sociocultural contexts — compact summary coming soon — because in my gay male world (one of a number of worlds I inhabit), sucking cock is, simply, everyday sex, and consequently the verb suck has been elaborated and played on in that world, and all of that is of interest to me as a linguist (linguistics being another of the worlds I live in).

But I thought to steer clear of the gay stuff yesterday, so as not to distract readers from the intricate delights of the cartoon (which still makes me laugh every time I look at it). But I have a friend who is named Bill, who is gay, and who was moved to comment (on this blog) on yesterday’s cartoon:

I guess I DO suck, or at least would like to.

So then Bill sucks ‘Bill sucks dick’ was on the table. And we’re off for a holiday in Blow Job City.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

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