Author Archive

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Tradenaming

October 20, 2016

… choosing words as trademarks. NOAD2 on trademark:

a symbol, word, or words legally registered or established by use as representing a company or product

Such words often come with associations to existing words, or parts of words, in the language, and sometimes there are official origin stories that invoke these associations, though the official stories often just scratch the surface of the full set of associations.

Which brings me back to my posting of the 16th on the Parisian home furnishing company FLEUX’ (and its mascot, Zwicky le Chat): where does the company name come from? (and why is the cat named Zwicky?)

(more…)

Posted in Innovations, Language and animals, Language of advertising, Names, Phonology, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

Là ci darem la mano pianoforte

October 20, 2016

(About music rather than language.)

Woke briefly in the middle of the night to the glorious sound of Alexis Weissenberg playing the piano part (which is to say, the bulk) of Frédéric Chopin’s Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” for piano and orchestra, Op. 2 (yes, 2; Chopin was 17). It brought me great joy: I delight in the Mozart and I love variation pieces, especially for the piano (Mozart wrote piles of variations). It’s always seemed to me that Chopin got Mozart down perfectly here (including both the simple tuneful, even bubbly, side representing Zerlina and the darker side representing Don Giovanni, with his designs on Zerlina’s body), except that Chopin’s version is really really showy — like Mozart with all the stops out.

(more…)

Posted in Music | Leave a Comment »

Five sets of gay collages

October 19, 2016

Continuing to scan in (mostly) XXX-rated collages, set by set. Five more AZBlogX postings in the last three days, in a variety of styles and tones:

10/17/16: “Baskets of Joy”: 2 sex-heavy collages based on a photo of a basket store

10/18/16: “ALL CAPS”: 11 collages, many powerfully sexual and elaborately staged, using a set of big all-caps letter stickers for their main texts

10/18/16: “Fossils on a field of purple”: 8 collages; background fossil images; lots of body dislays and man-man sex; texts from various sources and artfully arranged stickers

10/19/16: “French lessons”: 10 collages, in pairs, based on Tom of Finland and Bob Mizer images; silly pairings of word and defnition, whimsical animal stickers, but most collages with at least one significant dick in them

10/19/16: “Spanish lessons”: 10 homoerotic collages, most of them simple, and most of them homo-suggestive rather than explicit

Posted in Collages, Gender and sexuality | 1 Comment »

Triple-play pun

October 19, 2016

From correspondent RJP, this image that’s been making the rounds on Facebook:

(#1)

A nine-word sentence with only three content words, all of them punned on; all the puns are imperfect, the last pretty distant. Starting from the song line

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

with the substitutions:

dawning > awning, age > cage, Aquarius > Asparagus

Much as I admire the punning, I have to point out that the plant in the chicken-wire cage isn’t asparagus; it looks like a legume, a pea or bean.

(more…)

Posted in Language and plants, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Journalist Fred Zwicky

October 18, 2016

Many notices on Google Alert for Fred Zwicky, always on the occasion of a story he’s written for the Peoria (IL) Journal Star (with photos of the subject of his piece). He has a portfolio on the journalists’ site Muck Rack, where he’s identified as the “Visual Assignment Editor” on the paper. The identifier combines two journalistic terms, one (assignment editor) that’s been around for some time, one (visual journalist) that seems to combine the traditional roles of reporter, photographer, and photo editor.

(#1)

(more…)

Posted in Language in the media, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

More Zwicky postings

October 17, 2016

There’s now a Page on this blog for things Zwicky (besides me): postings about people named Zwicky and things named Zwicky. In recognition, an assortment of things not already posted: on muesli, a fanciful derivation of the surname (on a t-shirt), a low-budget mystery film, a Quebec eco-activist, and a Zwicky cheese man who’s moved from America’s Dairyland to serving the Big Apple.

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Language and food, Movies and tv, Names, Portmanteaus, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

Nick Cave and the Soundsuits

October 17, 2016

Today’s news from Stanford included “Nick Cave exhibition at Stanford challenges artistic conventions”:

A new exhibition at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University blends the visual arts with performance. Nick Cave’s Soundsuits are part sculpture, part costume [and part musical instruments]. Made of a myriad of discarded and disused materials, they are designed to be worn and moved in, concealing the wearer’s race, gender and age. The exhibition runs through Aug. 14, 2017.

There’s an accompanying video.

Note: not the Australian musician Nick Cave, fascinating though he is, but the artist Nick Cave.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Music | 1 Comment »

Workin’ Blue at the Car Wash

October 17, 2016

Clay Colwell on Facebook today:

I just saw a guy holding a sign saying “HAND JOBS $10”. He was outside a car wash, so I’m sure it was for hand-wash service, but ya never know.

We’ve visited the world of deliberately provocative hand job before, on 3/22/16 in “Annals of dubious commercial names”, referring to a spa named Hand Job (referring to manicures) on Castro St. in San Francisco. But the expression is widespread at car washes to refer provocatively to hand-washing. In both cases playing on vulgar slang hand job ‘masurbation of a man’.

(more…)

Posted in Double entendres, Language of advertising, Language of sex, Slang | 2 Comments »

Dog massage

October 17, 2016

Today’s Bizarro:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

In case you didn’t know that Shih Tzu is the name of a breed of dog, you can infer that from the cartoon, and you can see that the little dogs are (absurdly) being used to give a massage here. That’s funny in a way, but to really appreciate the cartoon, you have to know that there’s a type of massage known as shiatsu. Cultural knowledge looms again.

(more…)

Posted in Borrowing, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Names | Leave a Comment »

Zwickys of New York: Chuck the mixmaster

October 17, 2016

Following on yesterday’s appreciation of artist Calder Zwicky, I was led to check out Zwickys in New York City. There aren’t a great many, at least from the Swiss migrations to America in the 18th through early 20th centuries; Swiss immigrants from those days went first primarily to farm country (some details below), and their descendants (like me, and Calder Zwicky) then moved to seek new lives in urban areas. However, among the Zwickys of New York I did come across sound mixer Chuck Zwicky.

(more…)

Posted in Events and occasions, Music, My life, Names, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »