Archive for the ‘Events and occasions’ Category

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Linguist Arnold Zwicky shuts down grammar Nazis

May 4, 2025

Not how I expected to begin Dave Brubeck Day (in 5/4 time, as was his pleasure) / Four Dead in Ohio Day (dreadful memories from 1970, which come with a CSNY soundtrack), but there it was, listed by Google Alerts for the morning: on YouTube, on the “Today I Found Out: Feed Your Brain” channel, the segment

“In which linguist Arnold Zwicky shuts down grammar Nazis”

with Simon Whistler reading with great relish a passage from a posting of mine and savoring its vocabulary.

First, Google identifies me as a Public Figure (not just some mook off the streets, but in a class with, oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson). And now the tireless YouTuber Simon Whistler, with an audience of 2.52m subscribers to Today I Found Out, admires my word-slinging.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Music, My life, Peeving, This blogging life, Usage attitudes, Variation | 11 Comments »

hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 2

April 30, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April; tomorrow the rabbit operatives of the revitalized Industrial Workers of the World will smash the tiger lackeys serving the corrupt octopus of big business and government; the Wobblies will, of course, dance onto the scene, tossing flowers to the audience (public service warning: do not eat the muguets; they are beautiful and sweet-selling, but toxic)

Previously on this blog. In yesterday’s “hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 1”, a Lynn Johnston For Better or For Worse strip, (re)published on 6/19/24:


(#1) There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented –illions words; and the thing [my correspondent Masayoshi Yamada] was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions

Yesterday, things 1 and 2; today, thing 3.

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Posted in Accent, Connotation, Events and occasions, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Nonsense, Poetic form, Pronunciation, Prosody, Rhyme, Semantics | 2 Comments »

Saint George and the superb fairy wren

April 23, 2025

🗡 🐉  4/23 St. George’s Day, celebrating the dragon-slaying patron saint of England, who (according to tradition) died on this day in the year 303 — the most martial of the British fab four (David, Andrew, George, and Patrick); meanwhile, thanks to Ann Burlingham, today I also celebrate the superb fairy wren, a colorful little bird of southeastern Australia

The little bird first, then the sword-wielding saint of legend.

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Posted in Art, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language and religion | 2 Comments »

Death comes for the appliances

April 14, 2025

💥💥 today is (Double) Disaster Day: (political disaster) Abraham Lincoln assassinated in 1865, (maritime disaster) the steamship Titanic striking an iceberg in 1912 (to sink the next day); and so the theme of today’s Bizarro cartoon is death, personified


A Grim Reaper cartoon meme made into a silly pun joke (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Comic conventions, Events and occasions, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Puns, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

Graphing and slavery

April 9, 2025

An upcoming Stanford Humanities Center lecture:

“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the Origins of Modern Data Visualization” by Lauren Klein of Emory Univ., on Tuesday 4/15, from 4–6 pm in Levinthal Hall and online

Summary: “The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” returns to the eighteenth-century origins of modern data visualization in order to excavate the meaning — and power — of visualizing data. Exploring two examples of early data visualization — the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and Description of a Slave Ship (1789) created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists — this lecture will connect Enlightenment theories about visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about personhood and race.

I’m posting this as an example of the sort of fascinating research supported by the SHC, looking in fresh and unexpected ways at events, practices, and conceptualizations from many times, places, and social settings.

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Posted in Academic life, Events and occasions, History, Race and ethnicity | 2 Comments »

Vito Corleone and Jimmy Hoffa walk into a formula pun joke

April 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the cruelest month; today is not only April Fools Day, but also noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday (in 1897), to be celebrated by a look at his work on Menomini / Menominee, an Algonquian / Algonkian language of Wisconsin

Revived on Facebook recently, this 3/31/22 Pearls Before Swine comic strip:


(#1) A Stephan Pastis specialty, the formula pun — or setup / payoff pun — joke

Two things here: the joke form, and the popular-culture knowledge needed to appreciate this specific strip.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Puns, Quotations | 1 Comment »

Hybrid portmanteaus

March 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate March, the day on which the tigers eat the lambs that the month proverbially goes out as; my posting for this morning begins with tigers, but only so I can slide into the real topic:

the hybrid portmanteau ‘a portmanteau (name) for a hybrid (creature)’ — as in the names liger (lion + tiger) ‘hybrid of a male lion with a tigress’ and tigon (tiger + lion) ‘hybrid of a male tiger with a lioness’, as opposed to unmixed names for hybrids, like mule ‘hybrid of a male donkey and female horse’ and hinny ‘hybrid of a male horse and a female donkey’. Hybrid portmanteaus are iconically satisfying: intimate name-melding (through the combination of word-parts) signifies intimate creature-melding (through mating).

From this beginning, I will rapidly descend to the hybrid portmanteau triceradoodle (the creature is a preposterous hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle) and eventually to the double hybrid portmanteau composite Gerberian Shepsky (an actual dog breed, a hybrid of a German shepherd and a Siberian husky)

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Posted in Cartoonists, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language play, Lexical semantics, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Semantics | 2 Comments »

Nosferatutu II

March 17, 2025

☘️ ☘️ ☘️ three shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day

On the WaynoBlog for 3/15/25, W commented on the Bizarro cartoon of his that I reported on in my posting yesterday, “Nosferatu en pointe”:

I recently saw another vampire cartoon with the caption NOSFERATUTU. Worse, it was done by a good friend, Teresa Roberts Logan, who has an excellent cartoon feature called Laughing Redhead. Worse still, she did her comic in 2021! At least the two aren’t precisely the same…

Fortunately, she was very understanding about this type of occurrence, which happens to all of us from both directions. It’s still embarrassing, though!

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Posted in Events and occasions, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Slices of pi(e)

March 15, 2025

π 🥧 π 🥧 π 🥧 for yesterday (mammoths lumber along majestically, and they are often regrettably late for appointments), 3/14, which was Pi Day in my country, and for some years now, also — delicious pun — Pie Day in many places (so inviting a cascade of formulaic word play: pie in the sky, a piece of the pie, easy as pie, even pie chart)

I’ll jump right into things with a charming and heartfelt Facebook message yesterday from my old friend Paula Stout, who many years ago lived in Palo Alto, but has since moved to the great American Southwest — on a ranch outside Greenville TX, east of Dallas-Fort Worth:

Happy Ecstatic Friday on Pi Day (3.14)

We were in town today, where every store treated the day as a celebration. They were giving away apple pies, chicken pot pies, [pizza pies,] and even eskimo pies. With big smiles, balloons and jubilation.

And it struck me that we are seeing history unfold.

1988 was the first “Pi Day” for a marketing campaign in SF, iirc. Before that, only we geeks and friends of the wonderful Kevin McHargue (who was born on this day) partied it up

And now, here we are. A national holiday of pies!

As David Mamet, renowned playwright, once noted, “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”

There’s enough stress brewing in the world, y’all, let us pray he is right and there is pie enough to combat it.

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Posted in Allusion, Events and occasions, Language and food, Language play, Mathematics, Movies and tv, My life, Parody, Puns, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »

Throw them a string of opals!

March 4, 2025

My grandchild Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky was born 3/4/04, so they’re 21 years old today, 3/4/25 — the final legal hurdle to adulthood in my country  — and, wonderful coincidence, today is Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, the last day of Carnival, etc.), so we should be tossing them a string of opals. I suggest something along these lines:


(#1) A blue Australian opal necklace (with an electroformed copper chain), jewelry by Anaika from Etsy (US$50)

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Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and religion, Rainbow clothing, Toys | 4 Comments »

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