Author Archive

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

This is the day which the Lord hath made

August 6, 2024

So begins Psalm 118:24, in the KJV; the verse in full:

24 This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

Two things: one, the way in which the restrictive relative clause (with non-human antecedent) is marked — here with the relativizer which rather than that, or, unmarked, with no relativizer (in a so-called zero relative); two, the framing of the new day, in which we are exhorted to rejoice, as a gift of God (versus viewing it simply as the welcome granting of another day of life).

I take this up because the late Ann Daingerfield Zwicky was accustomed to greeting the new day by reciting the whole verse, made personal by a shift from 1pl to 1sg, but also with the morphology and syntax altered to fit her own dialect and style — with has instead of the archaic form hath; and with the which relative replaced by the shorter zero relative:

(ADZ) This is the day the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it

but maintaining her Episcopalian / Anglican creedal commitments; from the Book of Common Prayer (1662):

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord …

I admired her custom, followed her on the grammar and style, but altered the text to suit me as a non-believer:

(AMZ) This is the day I have been given; I will rejoice and be glad in it

(more…)

Posted in Language and religion, My life, Relativization, Syntax, Usage advice | 5 Comments »

Bijlert, Leonardo, parody magnets, and the Priapic-Apollonian opposition

August 5, 2024

The July 26th opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympic games included a tableau — of drag queens posed as presiding over a banquet — that vaguely resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting:


(#1) The Olympic drag pose


(#2) The Leonardo original

(more…)

Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Metaphor, Myths, Parodies, Poetry, Pop culture | 1 Comment »

Lament for Manfred

August 4, 2024

Ich weiß wohl, was soll es bedeutenDass ich so traurig bin

An anguish of old age is living immersed in death — of family, friends, loves, colleagues, mentors and models, students, people who have entertained, enriched, and illuminated you — while laboring just to get from day to day yourself. I have failed to memorialize many of the departed, I cannot cope any more, and I am ashamed of all of that. And now comes the death of Manfred Bierwisch, not exactly a surprise, since he was a full decade older than me, but then he was one of the few who should have been granted a life forever. And with a special role in my life.

Martin Haspelmath on Facebook this morning:

RIP Manfred Bierwisch (1930-2024, in the middle of the picture).


(MH:) The picture shows [MB] with his close friends Paul Kiparsky and Dieter Wunderlich (taken from Kiparsky’s 2023 memoir in the [Annual Review of Linguistics])

He was the GDR’s most prominent linguist, but he made no compromises with the regime. When some people were doing “Marxist linguistics” because it was good for their careers, he kept pursuing “structural linguistics”. Unlike some of his friends from the 1950s (e.g. Heinz Vater and Ewald Lang), he did not try to leave for the freer West Germany, but he stayed in the East. In 2005, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Leipzig University, where he had studied in the 1950s (and where he was jailed for 10 months for possession of illegal writings).

(more…)

Posted in Academic life, Death notices, German, Linguists, My life | Leave a Comment »

The Banana Bread Song

August 3, 2024

Day-old bread, an’ we wan’ go home, as this Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 3/1/24 has it:


day-old as a pun on day-o, which then licenses the full-out substitution of day-old bread for daylight come

And so the Jamaican dock-workers’ Banana Boat Song — famously recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1956 — is hijacked for baked goods.

(more…)

Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parodies, Puns | 5 Comments »

Four models and a film-maker

August 3, 2024

It begins with an arresting photo on Pinterest yesterday showing two beautiful young men in each other’s arms:


(#1) From the Fashionably Male website, “STOP & STARE Alexan Sarikamichian New Work: Agus & Adriel” on 9/26/17 — a fashion spread by the film-maker AS featuring two beautiful young models, Agustin Bruni and Adriel Pino, presented as in a bromance in which the young men “experiment with new feelings about sex, brotherhood, camaraderie”

AS is then the thread leading to the third male model, Severiano Astrada, a hunky young man projecting a tough-guy exterior as the main character in AS’s short film Severiano (2018); and to the fourth, Roman Stubrin, sometimes playful, but mostly offering an unsettling gimlet stare, intense and riveting — in an AS / Benjamin Baccetti film project (in progress) focused on him, and in an extraordinary 2024 fashion piece about him on the Spanish fashion site Fucking Young!

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Photography, Shirtlessness, Spanish, Underwear | 1 Comment »

Private Magritte’s disavowal

August 3, 2024

It’s been a while since we contemplated a Magrittean disavowal, in the tradition of the Belgian surrealist’s paradoxical Ceci n’est pas une pipe, so today’s absurd Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip is a welcome addition to the genre:


(#1) Surrealistic clandestine warfare (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

(more…)

Posted in Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Paradoxes, Quotations | Leave a Comment »

The eminence grise of underwear models

August 2, 2024

(Underwear model leaving only a bit to the imagination, with a sprinkling of the F-word in the text, so not to everyone’s taste)

The story begins with 7/23 e-mail from Bill Stewart (a friend who frequently appears as a character on this blog), asking me, about this photo of a silvering model hawking GYM brand jockstraps on Jockstraps.com:


(#1) BS > AZ: Do you know who this hot guy is? — to which BS followed up on 8/2: Brain fog has cleared —  Colby Melvin

Oh daddy, hot silver daddy,
I love you in that deep blue jock
And I need you so bad

Indeed very hot; Bill suspected at the outset that the guy was too expensive for him, and that was surely the case when he was available as a rent boy, back when he was a feature at gay parties; and probably still now, when he sells himself virtually on the OnlyFans site while continuing to act in gay porn: 16 episodes of Raw Fuck Club and in such videos as Power Play (2022), Big Load Movers (2022), Sweat. Fuck. Repeat (2023), and Fan Male (2023). He’s an admirably hard worker, thoughtful and self-reflective, and he’s turned himself around after an incandescent youth fueled by drugs and alcohol; he’s still a sex worker, not always an easy career, but he seems to be on top of things. He’s even engaged to another man, Todd Wing, who is (like CM) also an amazing muscle-hunk (photo to come).

(more…)

Posted in Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Underwear | 1 Comment »

The feminine gaze on brute masculine power

August 2, 2024

Encountered on Pinterest this morning, the photographer and film-maker Jem Goulding. A characteristic photo:


(#1) A powerful male body, photographed as if in a chance snapshot of everyday life (with an inscrutable backstory)

(more…)

Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Lexical semantics, Masculinity, Photography | Leave a Comment »

Fresh Cream Tasting

August 2, 2024

(Utterly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

E-mail this morning from the Gay Empire site with a video on demand sale, including, from the Fuckermate video site, the kitchen-sex scene “Fresh Cream Tasting” (2021) — that is, of course, cream ‘semen, cum’ — pairing Gianni Maggio and Jonas Brown, with this arresting ad:

(more…)

Posted in Effeminacy, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A.

August 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August (inaugurust?) — and 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 for Swiss National Day (yes, I am wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts): happy 733rd birthday, Helvetia! — Uri! Schwyz! Unterwalden! — plus the Zwicky family canton: Glarus! — imagine the bunnies of August bounding over the Alpine meadows of the three Urkantone from 1291

But now for something completely different. A cascade of puns on names in the joke form I’ll call WoF?, abbreviating Who’s on First?, after the exemplary Abbott and Costello comedy sketch. In a Pearls Before Swine strip of 7/31/22, revived on Facebook yesterday (another 7/31):


(#1) WoF? now transported from baseball to football — in the NFL, with the four wh-question words of the gridiron: Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A. (while Pig takes the role of the calmly explanatory Abbott and Rat the role of the increasingly confused and enraged Costello)

I’ll take an amused look back on WoF? cartoons on this blog in a moment. But first some notes on the comedy sketch that’s the model for this strip — noting that the cartoons have to achieve their effects through static text and drawings, while the comedy sketch is performed in real time by human actors deploying a rich stock of vocal and gestural resources. So on the one hand, though you might think of the comic strip as just a frozen, stripped down version of the live sketch, you could also view the strip as a highly artful joining of text and image using minimal resources (inspired by the live sketch but not attempting to reproduce it), as the comic counterpart of a graphic novel.

(more…)

Posted in Chemistry, Holidays, Jokes, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Puns, Switzerland and Swiss things | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »