Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

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Everyone’s a crinoid nowadays

June 9, 2025

We filter stuff flowing past us, consider this material, and evaluate its worth. As here:


(#1) Neocrinus, a stalked living crinoid species similar to those found in the Paleozoic (from Brian N. Tissot’s website, “Curious Creatures of the California Coast: Crinoids”, from 12/31/13); from Wikipedia:

Crinoids are marine invertebrates that make up the class Crinoidea. Crinoids that remain attached to the sea floor by a stalk in their adult form are commonly called sea lilies, while the unstalked forms, called feather stars or comatulids, are members of the largest crinoid order, Comatulida. Crinoids are echinoderms in the phylum Echinodermata, which also includes the starfish, brittle stars, sea urchins and sea cucumbers.

… Crinoids are passive suspension feeders, filtering plankton and small particles of detritus from the sea water flowing past them with their feather-like arms.

Oh, not crinoid, silly man; on Facebook, commenting on my posting from yesterday, “Today’s  bilingual jest”, Gadi Niram seemed to think it was clitic, but that was just a joke; really, the saying is that everyone’s a critic nowadays (or some similar piece of wisdom about the prevalence of unfavorable opinions coming from all quarters).

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Posted in Books, Clitics, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Stock expressions | Leave a Comment »

Adventures in AZ-land

June 2, 2025

That’s the land of maze and Shiraz and similar AZ things, those whose names have the letter-sequence AZ in them; Aslan is something entirely different (see below). I was taken to AZ-land yesterday on Facebook by Aric Olnes (who is, among other things, a floral artist), in one of a series of alphabetic flower photos from Casa Thomas / Olnes in Pioneer (Amador County) CA — where Aric and his husband Mike Thomas live these days — which come with lengthy alliterative captions, in this case for the letter A:


(#1) The photo, of a Pioneer Azalea; the caption:

Astonishingly attractive Azaleas arrest acrimonious assumptions ascending aloft angelic amiability

(Look, Aric wasn’t aiming for elegance or poetic facility, just alliteration playfully carried to ridiculous lengths; otherwise, all it has to do is make some sense)

And my response, also on Facebook, taking things in a direction Aric probably didn’t anticipate:

— azaleas are from AZ-land, like azure, azimuths, and azithromycin, in a region that embraces Azerbaijan, the Azores, and Azusa [but not Anaheim or Cucamonga] — and is next to the Plaza Hotel, the Amazon River, and Jason Mraz‘s recording studio (among many many other things)

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Posted in Alliteration, Art, Books, California, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Language play, My life | 6 Comments »

J.R. Ross and his cowboy poetry

May 17, 2025

In memoriam John Robert Ross (May 7, 1938 to May 13, 2025). The news of Haj’s death came in my morning e-mail on Wednesday 5/14, right next to a Bizarro cartoon with a cowboy joke / restaurant joke, turning on an absurd pun on ranch dressing that Haj (who was a walking library of jokes) would have appreciated, and so with a synchronicity that Haj would have delighted in.

J.R. Ross was an outsized figure in linguistics, whose ideas (beginning with his 1967 MIT dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax) altered the field. Haj Ross was a literally outsized person physically, a large, blocky man (he really did play football for Yale as an undergraduate) with a big presence. And Haj, no surname needed, had an outsized personality — endlessly imaginative, enormously funny, astonishingly empathetic and gentle, “big and sparkly” (me on Facebook), with “an amazing facility for the intricacies of English” (John Beavers on FB) and “an innocent sense of wonder about language, poetry, and the world” (Susan Fischer on FB). And resolutely counter-cultural (often barefooted, and rarely standing on ceremony), also attuned to all the Zen-inflected frequencies on your radio dial.

He was a good friend of mine, and an inspiration to me, from 1963 on. So this posting is hard to write. I will collect myself and pick out some facts, some assortment of outrageous anecdotes, a small selection of his poetry and artwork, and even (since, like Haj, I’m hopelessly a linguist) a note about a neglected feature of his work on syntax that I think is important in the intellectual history of the field. I will do all that in another posting, I hope tomorrow.

Today I’ll start the way Haj often started his public presentations. With a joke, that Bizarro cartoon (remember the cartoon?). From which a Google AI Overview search then led me, goofily, into a strange dusty canyon of verse, Jim Ross’s self-published Pull Up a Chair: Cowboy Poetry. Truly, Haj would have loved that.

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Posted in AI, Ambiguity, Books, Clothing, Compounds, Data points, Jokes, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Poetry, Puns | 2 Comments »

Vending-machine objects of desire

April 19, 2025

[Naked men making love, so not to everyone’s taste (but so carefully done it can appear on a book cover, so no alarm bells)]

Briefly noted: a clever photo (attributed on Pinterest to male photographer Tom Bianchi) that pairs the two primary objects of gay desire with two soft drink vending machines: a Pepsi butt and a Coke basket:


(#1) And Coke Man offers a bonus of oral pleasure

Pinterest shows me this photo roughly once a day. It’s far from a typical Bianchi: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Bianchi in which his (male) subjects are completely clothed (his Wikipedia entry just describes him as “an American writer and photographer who specializes in male nude photography”).

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Posted in AI, Art, Books, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

“… and a shallow nonstick skillet”

April 19, 2025

[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]

“… and a shallow nonstick skillet”: Wayno’s title for today’s Bizarro egg-related cartoon:


(#1) Humpty Dumpty has fallen and can’t get up; it’s omelet time in Wonderland (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

Ordinary chicken eggs are currently going for $12 a dozen at my local Safeway, so HD would be worth a small fortune.

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Posted in Art, Books, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Poetry, Puns | 1 Comment »

Sonja Lanehart

April 14, 2025

[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]

A little tribute to the linguist Sonja Lanehart, because I admire her work, but also — current relevance in my country — because she’s a vivid embodiment of the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion in research, teaching, and writing. She’s a distinguished authority, so she’s the editor of the 2021 Oxford Handbook of African American Language and similar authoritative works. She’s also the author of the 2002 Sista, Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy — a remarkable piece of narrative anthropology from personal experience (a variety of participant-observer sociology / anthropology that I have ventured into myself, but in the gay male world rather than the Black female world).


(#1) SL in a recent photo (from the Univ. of Arizona)

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Posted in Books, Language and gender, Linguists, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

The light hand and the hammer

April 6, 2025

On Easter egg quotations — the light hand — vs. ostentatious allusions — the hammer — in the Economist. From the issue of 3/15/25 in the Culture section, a review of Righting Wrongs, by lawyer Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, with main headline

How to shame a dictator

(vague echoes of titles whisper in your head) and just one section head (in bold face)

The gripes of Roth

(clang clang clang and you groan at the outrageous pun).

And now I’ll riff on these two allusions. But first, the background.

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Posted in Allusion, Books, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns, Quotations, Rhyme, Titles | 4 Comments »

GBTQ guys

March 28, 2025

[In this posting, among many other things, sex between men discussed in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest]

The background is complex. From 3/26, in my posting “A gay life”:

A re-play of some material about my first male lover, Larry [Schourup], as background for two other postings: one about him right now (well, as of yesterday); and one about GBTQ guys and how they fold their sexual desires, practices, and identifications into lives of accomplishment, as Larry has done — and as the linguist Aaron Broadwell (celebrated in the second posting) has done.

But then my attention was diverted by the firehose of appalling actions by my government, so that I wrote on 3/27, in my posting “You were dead, you know”:

My intention was talk about integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment (like LS’s teaching and published research in linguistics) and value, with a bow to the poet Frank O’Hara (who LS introduced me to many years ago … [but] I’ve trimmed this post down to its other aim, which is to report on the last year or so of the LS/AZ correspondence

culminating in the joyous discovery that, contrary to my fears, LS had not died, hence the Candide quote in the title of that posting.

But now to start that first posting, of two, all over again, with material from my 3/1/24 posting “The grace of lovers”:

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and politics, Language of sex, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Streets of Genui Neska

March 25, 2025

On Facebook on 3/23, Mike Pope passed along this book cover (from Raspberry Bow Press in 2024):


MP: Someone thought this was a good design for a book title

I had an immediate response:

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Posted in Books, Music, Parody, Silliness | 3 Comments »

Good morning, good morning

March 23, 2025

I woke at 3:30 am, after 8 hours of good sleep, to the sound of Scott Ross playing Soler keyboard music on his power harpsichord — the Fandango and an assortment of sonatas — which filled me with delight and promised a good day to come. Eventually I worked my way to my computer, and found one odd surprise and one very sorrowful one.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Death notices, Language and animals, Music, My life, Quotations | Leave a Comment »

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