Archive for the ‘Language and plants’ Category
March 30, 2026
Going past me yesterday morning, a tv ad for some remedy for, as I heard it, teeth stained by poppies (and other foods).
Yes, coffee. With blueberries, black tea, and red wine, a classic offender against dental whiteness. Granting that I have /a/ (in addition to /ɔ/) as an alternative accented vowel in coffee, poppies is a complex but phonologically unsurprising mishearing; coffee and poppies are in fact excellent half-rhymes / imperfect rhymes:
My morning coffee
By a field of poppies
(with two feature rhymes, both well-attested — (initial) p for k and (medial) p for f — plus a subsequence rhyme, with the final z of poppies against the absence of a final consonant in coffee; for the terminology, see my 1976 Chicago Linguistic Society paper “Well, this rock and roll has got to stop. Junior’s head is hard as a rock.”, available on-line here)
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Posted in Errors, Language and plants, Language play, Mishearings, My life, Poetry | 2 Comments »
March 17, 2026
A follow-up to my 3/16 posting “The breakfast walk”, in which I looked at a few of the businesses and offices on the walk
from 722 Ramona St., between Forest and Homer (my house) to 566 Emerson St., at the northwest corner at Hamilton (the Palo Alto Creamery, a standard place for Saturday breakfast with my daughter Elizabeth in the old days), along a route fixed in its details
with a promise that I’d do a separate botanical posting, about some of the flowers and trees along the way. Necessarily much more selective — there are many hundreds of plant species in those two and a half blocks — and sensitive to date as well as location (customarily, my first example blooms and my last example fruits around now, in the Ides of March / St. Patrick’s Day period); and so it is this year)
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Posted in Language and plants, Names, Palo Alto | 2 Comments »
March 17, 2026
In yesterday’s posting “The breakfast walk”, one notable feature of that walk was what is now the elegant Nobu Hotel Epiphany, which preserves (from the earlier Casa Olga hotel) the 6-story-tall mosaic mural of El Palo Alto, the coast redwood tree for which the city of Palo Alto is named:
(#1) The Casa Olga mural
(#2) The mural on the much-expanded Nobu Hotel Epihany
I remind you that this is a short distance from my house, but has just become part of the urban landscape, taken for granted — as indeed we take for granted the many actual coast redwoods growing companionably on our streets (reaching straight into the sky, towering over a hundred feet, easily hundreds of years old). (There’s one such tree only about 50 feet from my front door.)
And I remind you that the tree in #1 and #2 is not an abstract or imagined coast redwood, but a specific Sequoia sempervirens — El Palo Alto — that grows in a little urban forest park, alongside the railroad tracks (originally Southern Pacific, now Caltrain) at the border between Palo Alto (in Santa Clara County) and Menlo Park (in San Mateo County), only abut 7 blocks from my house.
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Posted in Etymology, Language and plants, Logos, Mascots, Names, Palo Alto, Signs and symbols, Spanish, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
March 2, 2026
(Firmly located in men’s crotches and inclined to silliness, though without the bodyparts illustrated and without the street talk — so clearly not to everyone’s taste)
From WOIO tv channel 19 in Shaker Heights OH (serving the Cleveland area as a CBS affiliate — covering news, weather, sports, and a ton of racy / raunchy content): a report on a guy whose impressive genital package turned out to be a huge stash of narcotics, inspiring me to some musical silliness on Facebook.
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Posted in Language and medicine, Language and plants, Language and the body, Movies and tv, Music, Silliness | Leave a Comment »
March 1, 2026
Out in my walker recently, getting some exercise, accompanied by my helper Isaac, showing him places in the neighborhood (with some history of those places) and opening up the landscape around us by identifying plants, giving him their names (common and taxonomic) and explaining plant families, showing him the scents of the plants, their structures, and how they are used in the neighborhood streets and gardens. From little ground-cover plants to the huge coast redwoods that tower above us. What was once just background becomes a rich, engaging tapestry, full of things to see and talk about.
Isaac has a keen eye for detail and tons of curiosity, and he brings a rich and astonishing life history to our walks: to start with, he’s Fijiian (his native language turns out to be jam-packed with interest for the linguist: its word-order type is the rare VOS, and it has a fabulously intricate suite of personal pronouns).
There’s much more to say, but on to a very specific puzzle from our walk a few days ago, which took us past a number of privacy hedges made from a plant I don’t recall ever having noticed before, but was inescapable because it was covered with bright-red spiky flowers:
The plant in question, growing as a small shrub (photo from the Cambridge University Botanical Garden website )
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Posted in Fijiian, Gay porn, Language and plants, Language of sex, My life, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »
February 26, 2026
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip for 2/25: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead with their Potatohead dog:
The toy: Mr. Potatohead and his detachable-bodypart family; the potato: the russet; the dog: the Jack Russell terrier (note russet as a potato-pun on the dog name Russell) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize it as an instance of the potatohead cartoon meme, based on the toy. Now, some details.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Toys, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
November 1, 2025
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate November; it’s a beautiful bright fall day here in Palo Alto, the day after the costumes and candy of Halloween, and also The Day of the Dead, to honor those who have died before us
This posting is a continuation of yesterday’s “Medicine Day”, a list — an alarming inventory — of the medically significant conditions of my life, very roughly in chronological order. I admitted that the list was surely incomplete, and in fact I was driven to get up in the middle of the night to construct a second list, almost as big as the first.
But I will hold that recital of afflictions off for a bit, to entertain you with a note on one of my grand-child Opal’s favorite Halloween candies and one on yellow-orange marigolds for Mexican remembrances of the beloved dead.
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Posted in Art, Events and occasions, Folk beliefs, Holidays, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and plants, Language and religion, Language and the body | Leave a Comment »
October 12, 2025
An Ellis Rosen cartoon that came by on Facebook recently:
(#1) The hybrid creature the pomeranian-nimbus, being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner — so being presented as an extraordinary dog, a cloud canine; note that the woman’s dog recognizes the p-n as a dog, and appears to want to play with it (see the wagging tail)
(The name of the dog breed is standardly capitalized, because it’s a proper name denoting a creature originating in the geographical region of Pomerania, and I’ll use Pomeranian from here on.)
The compound Pomeranian-nimbus is a copulative N1 + N2 compound (like Swiss-American or hunter-gatherer), denoting a thing or things of both the N1 type and the N2 type. But in fact the creature is not just a mix of Pomeranian dog and nimbus cloud, but is actually a nimbus Pomeranian ‘Pomeranian dog that is (also) a nimbus cloud’ (your standard N + N compound in English is semantically modifier + head) — rather than a Pomeranian nimbus ‘nimbus cloud that is also, or at least resembles, a Pomeranian dog’. A nimbus Pomeranian, or, more compactly, a nimbopomeranian, a nimpom for short.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Meteorology, Music, Names, Poetry, Portmanteaus, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Word attraction | 3 Comments »
September 29, 2025
It was already a difficult day, and then in my mail:
To whom it may concern at Arnold Zwicky’s Blog,
Copyright Agent US, Inc. works with professional photographers and leading image agencies across the globe to protect their copyrights on the internet.
We hereby draw your attention to an image used on the following link: [https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/06/26/from-south-america]/ (herein after the “Image”). [this is my 5/26/2012 posting “From South America”, with pictures of a flowering Jacaranda mimosifolia tree in South Pasadena CA and a florist’s assortment of Alstroemeria cultivars in various colors (both originally found on Wikipedia, I believe, but that was 13 years ago)]
Our Partner, Visions Video & Photography, holds the rights to represent the Image in question and they are unable to find a license purchased under your company’s name or domain. Accordingly, we are contacting you to ensure that the appropriate license was obtained. It is possible that you have acquired the correct license for the Image, for example, from the photographer themselves or your creative agency under a written sub-contract. If that is the case here, we ask that you provide evidence of proper licensure to allow us to review your case.
Infringement is unauthorized use of intellectual property. In essence, it deprives the rights holder of the benefit of their original creation. If no evidence that a license was purchased is provided, then a payment claim would be required to resolve and compensate for the illegal use of the Image. This will also avoid the need for judicial intervention if the matter is not resolved.
You can log in directly and pay this claim here: [URL]
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Posted in Language and plants, Language and the law, My life, Photography, This blogging life | 1 Comment »
September 26, 2025
In today’s Bizarro cartoon, a hybrid portmanteau, a portmanteau name for one kind of hybrid referent, a referent with an assortment of features drawn from the referents of the contributing expressions; think of triceradoodle (referring to a hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle cross) = triceratops + doodle ‘a poodle cross’ (to be illustrated below):
(#1) Venus flytrap + bear trap = Venus bear trap: the appearance of a giant Venus flytrap leaf, with the bait of a foothold bear trap (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
To come: details about the two contributing referents, the Venus flytrap and the (foothold) bear trap; then a factor that makes this portmanteau especially rich and satisfying, in contrast to the less complex (but far more preposterous) triceradoodle.
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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
