Architecture | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Architecture’ Category

Jacques and Arnold’s presidential adventure

October 4, 2021

More notes on the 1993 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, at the Biltmore Hotel (now the Millennium Biltmore) in Los Angeles, at which I gave (on 1/9/93) my 1992 presidential address to the society, “Mapping the ordinary into the rare: Basic/derived reasoning in theory construction”.

The setting. The hotel is a landmark building of downtown Los Angeles (on Pershing Square).

(#1) The exterior, viewed from Pershing Square; you will have seen bits and pieces of the exterior and (especially) the interior in numerous movies and tv shows (Business Insider photo)

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Posted in Architecture, Gender and sexuality, My life | 3 Comments »

Chips on the west, Chip’s on the east

May 17, 2021

Yesterday’s (5/16) Zippy strip shows a Zippy-like Pinhead actor playing the Zippy role in the comics; Zippy strips often advance the unsettling view that characters in the comics are, or at least can be, just roles that are played by actors, who have lives of their own, outside the strips their characters appear in. But then (as here) these Zippy strips sometimes feature such actors as characters in the strips, hence as roles that can themselves be played by actors. And so on down the surrealistic rabbit-hole.

(#1)

So much for the content of the strip. My attention was immediately caught by the diner, Chips, that the Zippy-actor is studying his script in, and its arresting architecture, which cries out “L.A.!” So it is.

But a search for “Chips diner” pulls up as its first hit a set of 5 east-coast eating establishments, the Chip’s Family Restaurants located throughout Connecticut — equally offering old-fashioned diner fare, but architecturally crying out “New England!”

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Posted in Architecture, Diners, Linguistics in the comics, Surrealism | Leave a Comment »

The columnist

April 15, 2021

Today’s Zippy strip, with an unconventional sense of columnist:

(#1)

Not someone who writes a column for publication, but a collector of columns, the architectural features — like a philatelist, but with pillars.

But then the suffix –ist is extraordinarily multifunctional.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Architecture, Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Style and register | 2 Comments »

A Byzantine bulge and Byzantine buttocks

July 24, 2020

Plus, the bulge is male and the buttocks are female — well, of course, that’s just projection vs. concavity — though both are imperial.

That would be the Byzantine boxer shorts, recently listed on Etsy, from source TheOldNorth:

(#1) Front view: the Emperor Justinian, in a mosaic of his time

(#2) Rear view: the Empress Theodora, ditto

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Posted in Architecture, Art, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Pedaltecture

August 18, 2019

Saturday’s Zippy takes us to southeastern Pennsylvania, the land of my childhood:

(#1)

Not in escrow, but in Hellam Township, in York County PA. Specifically, in the Haines Shoe House. Which is a house in the form of a shoe (rather than a shop that sells shoes, or a storage place for shoes, or …).

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Posted in Architecture, Art, Compounds, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Puns, Semantics, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »

groins

November 19, 2018

From Charlie Doyle on ADS-L on November 10th:

According to two different ESPN commentators, a University of Georgia football player has had surgery on “both groins.” Doesn’t that sound odd?

Others agreed that it did — the problem being that, in their reckoning, each person has only one groin.

Then still others quoted anatomists, and dictionaries, supplying evidence of a usage in which everyone has two groins, one on each side. This is apparently the older usage, though for a great many, metonymy has shifted the everyday meaning to cover the entire crotch region, with (for them) the older usage surviving only as a technical term in anatomy.

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Posted in Architecture, Language and the body, Metaphor, Metonymy | Leave a Comment »

The Gay Village, Swiss Chalet, poutine

August 8, 2018

Further notes on the 31st motss.con in Montréal (which came to an end with a stragglers’ breakfast on Monday); background in my 8/3 posting “The rainbow pillars of Montréal”. And further explorations of things Swiss, or at least things called Swiss, in particular that Canadian institution, the Swiss Chalet restaurant chain. Motssers on holiday in Québec, food: that means poutine, (by report) consumed often and by many during the con.

Brief visual background on the con’s location, the Gay Village of the city:

(#1) Aerial view of Rue Ste-Catherine E. in the Gay Village, with its overhead rainbow-colored balls (from Chris Ambidge)

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Posted in Architecture, Dialects, French, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and society, Rainbow, Switzerland and Swiss things, Variation | 1 Comment »

More Pride events

June 27, 2018

Two items for this week: an unofficial day of judicial celebration in the U.S., rainbow architecture as part of Barcelona Pride.

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Posted in Architecture, Art, Holidays, Homosexuality | Leave a Comment »

At the Little Tavern in Laurel

November 11, 2017

Yesterday’s Zippy goes out for sliders:

(#1) Zippy chats with counter man Sid at the Zipworld counterpart of the Little Tavern, 115 Washington Blvd. in Laurel MD, where donuts now roll alongside the sliders

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Posted in Architecture, Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names | Leave a Comment »

Zipparchitecture on two coasts

October 30, 2017

Two recent Zippys offer remarkable vernacular architecture on the US coasts: a great rocky pile of a fantasy home, created by a performer of enormously popular entertainments — a castle on the Connecticut! — on the east, restaurants in the shape of a parasol — SoCal novelty architecture! — on the west:

(#1) Castle built a hundred years ago by actor William Gillette; reminiscent of the house in the Flintstones animated tv series; topped by the Carvel soft ice cream symbol