Archive for the ‘Events and occasions’ Category
August 13, 2026
Coming up in about three weeks, my birthday of doom:
2026 – 1940 = 86. A bad omen. As in NOAD:
verb eighty-six (also 86): [with object] North American English informal 1 eject or bar (someone) from a restaurant, bar, etc.: they were accused of cheating, and eighty-sixed from their favorite casino. 2 reject, discard, or cancel: the passwords will be 86ed by next October. ORIGIN 1930s (as a noun, used in restaurants and bars to indicate that a menu item is unavailable or that a customer is not to be served): perhaps rhyming slang for nix ‘nothing’.
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Posted in Death and dying, Events and occasions, German, Lexical semantics, My life | Leave a Comment »
August 3, 2026
Very briefly noted:
double lucky: Eleanor Severin Houck, the youngest of the 12 grandchildren of Melchior Arnold and Bertha Waelti Zwicky (hence the youngest of my cousin cohort), is 77 tomorrow
Eleanor’s older siblings, Wilma and Ted, served as stand-in older siblings for me when I was a child. In particular, despite the fact that Ted and I had almost no interests in common, he was a good man and a thoughtful and supportive brother-equivalent. Then, eventually, Eleanor came along, and we became adult friends; for years now, still back in the Pennsylvania Dutch farm country, she has borne the burden of being related to someone as outlandish as I am, with grace, good will, concern, and a healthy sense of humor. She also, significantly, keeps track of the family news.
I am pleased to be related to her, though still surprised at 77. On the other hand, the 9-year difference in our ages that was so enormous when we were kids is just a wrinkle now.
Posted in Age, Events and occasions, Family life, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »
August 1, 2026
🐇🐇🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August, with a leporine shout-out to remember 1291, the traditional date of the formation of the Swiss federation: Hail, Helvetia!
Now to dive into today’s topic in medias res, with this 7/30 Facebook greeting from Pietro Giovanni to Aaron Broadwell on the occasion of AB’s 64th birthday, somewhere around that time:
Many returns of the day to my favorite linguist
AB is George Aaron Broadwell (known as Aaron Broadwell), Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the Univ. of Florida (Gainesville). PG is AB’s husband Peter Marino under the pseudonym Pietro Giovanni. For further complexity, since there are a regrettably large number of men named Peter Marino, some of them famous in their fields, Peter Marino uses the nickname Piet as his professional name; Piet Marino is the author of young adult novels (Dough Boy and Magic and Misery):
(#1) The Piet Marino logo
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Posted in Academic life, Conversation, Events and occasions, Friendship, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Indigenous peoples, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguists, Logos, Marriage, My life, Phallicity, Professional names, Pseudonyms, Speech acts, Switzerland and Swiss things, Teaching | 3 Comments »
July 1, 2026
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit, the sultry bunnies of July! But they are no match for Mononga Hela, the monstrous snake that swallows fat Carnegie melons, prodigious feral boars, and of course entire railway trains whole — the fearsome creature that in popular lore is said to have consumed all of western Pennsylvania in a fit of pique. Mononga Monga Ooga Gila Hellmouth!
But first, the Zippy strip from 6/27:
Beyond spelling: Zippy appreciates the power of the name Monongahela; and of course potrzebie, but the word for the day is Monongahela
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Posted in Events and occasions, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras, Names, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »
June 30, 2026
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger to bring June to a close, anticipating the hot summer rabbits of July
In the days of the Arnold and Isaac Seminars on Belief that have animated my Ramona St. condo in recent months — Isaac’s a deeply pious fundamentalist Fijian Christian and I’m an amiable non-believer, with an excellent early life in mainstream, socially progressive American Lutheran and Episcopal churches — every so often we hit a note that resonates deeply for both of us. In my 6/24 posting “Jesus pyjamas, and a sweatshirt”, we discovered that we both found the parable of the lost sheep (told in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke) particularly moving.
A bit before this, I astounded Isaac by being able to (still) reel off great chunks of the Nicene Creed from memory, but broke up at one point in an excess of emotion over two words. And discovered that Isaac thought those two words were in fact the point of the creed, a distillation of transcendent faith in unseen marvels. Underlined in the extract below (there are variations in the text, so this might not be exactly as you remember it; and remember that this is a translation into English):
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Posted in Events and occasions, Language and religion, My life | Leave a Comment »
June 21, 2026
(about the holiday, and masculinity, and enough man-on-man sex to make this posting out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
First take: the long pan. From my 6/16/19 posting “On this day in 2019”:
(US) Fathers Day. For some of us, this is a day to remember our fathers with affection. I’m one of the lucky ones; I’ve written about mine several times, most extensively in my 1/30/11 posting “It Gets Better / Wonderful dad”.
It’s also an American commercial holiday that might better be labeled Masculinity Day, aimed at selling things stereotypically associated with high masculinity in either the upper middle class or the working class; elaboration on this point in my 6/10/18 posting “Gearing up for Fathers Day”. [AZ: I am largely alienated from American normative masculinity, have been as long as I can remember, so have gone my own way, on a path of homomasculinity, where both my sociocultural affiliations and my sexual desires take me off the broad highway and into the steamy jungle underbrush]
And then through its role as Masculinity Day and through complex associations involving gay men and fathers, Fathers Day is also a high holiday for gay porn, with at least three different themes: sex between father and son; Daddy-Boy relationships; and sex involving older men — called daddies — especially, very muscular ones. [AZ: of the three themes, only Daddy / Boy works for me, and that’s a recent discovery: in this world of sexual fantasy, despite my advanced age, I turn out to be, as we say there, a very good Boy; there is, apparently, always space for pleasant surprises]
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Posted in Events and occasions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life | Leave a Comment »
June 17, 2026
(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest)
Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26:
(#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our overlord Grabpussy now), through two different renditions of the song “Happy Birthday”: in 1962, in a potent haze of female sexual desire and sexual desirability (by Marilyn Monroe, in as close to naked as she should get while being in principle fully and elaborately clothed), but in this week’s cartoon, by a muscular machine of male aggression (who doesn’t look at all ready to deliver an adoring serenade to this particular President)
And now: backstory, tons of backstory.
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Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Understanding comics, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
May 31, 2026
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tier tiger for ultimate May, the gateway to the sultry rabbits of summer, those promiscuous creatures of the great queen, Juno (is it hot in here?)
A follow-up to my 5/29 posting “Three mishearings”, with yet another surprising slip of the ear, eco-terrorist heard as ego-terrorist: model utterance with /k/, variant with /g/, differing minimally, in voicing — setting up a relationship that can be exploited in an imperfect pun, a possibility that’s been ostentatiously realized in writing by Wayne Bradshaw
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Posted in Errors, Events and occasions, Mishearings, Phonetics, Phonology, Puns, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »
May 27, 2026
The Stanford linguistics AZ community — adjunct faculty Annie Zaenen and Arnold M. Zwicky, graduate student Anissa Zaitsu — is pleased to announce the PhD dissertation oral presentation of one of its little band:
The Landscape of Polarity-Sensitivity in African American English: Meaning and Structure by Anissa Rei Zaitsu: PhD dissertation oral presentation (Monday, June 8, 2026, 1:00-2:15pm). Committee: Vera Gribanova (co-chair), Cleo Condoravdi (co-chair), Boris Harizanov, Nandi Sims, and Gabriella Safran (Slavic Languages and Literatures, university chair).
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Posted in AAVE / Black English, Abbreviation, Academic life, Events and occasions, Linguists, Names, Negation, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
