Yesterday on this blog, the posting “LSA news bulletin: awards” on (among other things)
Kira Hall — of the University of Colorado, Boulder — as the 5th recipient of the … Arnold Zwicky Award, intended to recognize LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community.
Now, some basic information about KH, from Wikipedia and from the University of Colorado website; I might add some further information about her in a while.
First the depths of bleak mid-winter, in the third week of January, then a string of luminous birthdays in the last week, to bring the promise of a rising spring.
(Not for kids or the sexually modest)
A particularly well-made ad in my e-mail on 6/8, which I’ve cropped so as to split off two aspects of the composition:
(#1) The Band of Four, who I’ll refer to unimaginatively as Man1 though Man4 (they’re actors, of course, posed for this ad; I’ll give you their stage names below); the first three apparently have their gaze fixed on Man4 (possibly their leader, but certainly their conduit to the world outside their little group, as his gaze is to the side, on us, the viewers of the photo)
#1 shows the four men in close conference with another, the suggestion being that they’re what I’ve called a male band (more on this to come); they could be a sports team, a singing group, a smash-and-grab robbery gang, a police unit, frat brothers, a band of musicians, a street-corner gang, a faculty committee, a religious study group, an improv troupe, and so on, or just a bunch of buddies who hang out together.
But wait. They’re all shirtless, or quite possibly naked. And seriously buffed. They’re also racioethnically diverse. Who are these guys? What is this group? What are they conferring about? And, while we’re puzzling, where are they? In the midst of yellow-focus tropical foliage, it seems. (That’s obviously a stage setting, but it’s undeniably tropical in intent.)
The characters are in Brazil, in multiethnic Rio de Janiero, where the actors were filmed in one episode of the recent gay porn flick Muito Quente:
(more…)
The title of the first book of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s monumental 4-volume work Mythologiques — a title that served as the model for the title of my posting yesterday, “The hairy and the smooth” (referring to male body types) — one of three conceptual oppositions treated in that posting, the other two being raw – refined (referring to crudeness, naturalness, or simplicity vs. artfulness, in the presentation of these bodies in underwear ads) and authentic – synthetic (referring to natural materials, like leather, vs. various imitations, mostly based on plastics, in the garments the models are wearing).
(#1) A cover for a French edition
On the Linguistic Typology mailing list recently, David Gil (Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany) relayed a query from a friend:
Teknonymy is the phenomenon in which a parent is referred to by the name of his or her children. For example, my father was addressed and referred to by his Arabic-speaking friends as “Abu Daud”, or ‘father of David’. Teknonymy is attested in many different cultures around the world.
In at least some Arab societies, teknonymy interacts with gender in the following way. Whereas men, once assigned a teknonym, may still be addressed or referred to by their original name, women who are assigned a teknonym [like Umm Malik ‘mother of Malik’] may no longer be addressed or referred to by their original name — their original name is simply lost.
My question: Is anybody familiar with similar cases of gender asymmetry in teknonyms in other languages/societies?
I was familiar with the phenomenon, but didn’t have a name for it. Now I have several.
