Archive for the ‘Language and religion’ Category
June 30, 2026
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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 26, 2026
(fellatial fun — and disrespectful of religion as well — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday on the Facebook group soc-motss (for same-sex-inclined folk and their friends), Ellen Evans forwarded a 6/24 FB posting from Derekh Baruch Von Geiger on Facebook:
The ultimate source for this image is not identified; it could just be an invention, but it looks like a Christian church service borrowing from Jewish practices, in particular what’s customarily translated into English as the blowing of the shofar
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Posted in Jokes, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Metaphor, Puns, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »
May 6, 2026
Three plants — all old favorites of mine — that have recently caught my helper Isaac’s attention on our walks around downtown Palo Alto: two because of their striking foliage and flowers, one because its multitude of yellow flowers seem to thrive everywhere, even in the most unlikely wastelands.Ā Then the first two have remarkable — and, alas, similar — names: acanthus, agapanthus. While all three have odd common names: bear’s breeches / britches, lily of the Nile (not a lily, and from South Africa, far from the Nile), daylily (again, not a lily — Ā and why day?).
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Posted in Clothing, Language and plants, Language and religion, My life, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | 2 Comments »
May 2, 2026
In this cartoon from the latest (5/4/26) New Yorker, Ms. Duck and Ms. Rabbit mourn their versatile paramour, Mr. Shimmer the duck-rabbit (or rabbit-duck); see my 8/24/25 posting “Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping”, and reflect on versatile gay men, who are bottoms or tops, depending on how you approach them:
(#1) The widows weep for their bi-stable beloved; meanwhile, the famous illusion that lies at the very center of their world turns out to be a lifelong preoccupation of the cartoonist
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Posted in Ambiguity, Cartoonists, Death and dying, Illusions, Language and animals, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Parody, Perception, Work | Leave a Comment »
May 1, 2026
Resting yesterday alongside 819 Ramona St. on an afternoon walk, my helper Isaac and I noted once again that the building started life as Ā Palo Alto’s first Black church. Black meaning African American, one of a number of uses for the racioethnic designator BLACK. As it happens, Isaac, from Fiji, is a Polynesian black person, with BLACK used to refer to people from the Polynesian islands (Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, etc.) with dark skin, curly hair, and broad facial features. It then occurred to me to wonder if Isaac was misidentified as African American on the basis of his BLACK features, as I am misidentified as JEWISH on the basis of my prominent nose and my body language. So this morning I asked him.
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Posted in Architecture, Language and religion, Palo Alto, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »
April 2, 2026
In the spirit of the Passover season, a Frank Cotham cartoon in the 4/6/26 issue of the New Yorker:
A gentle jab at the stereotypical Jewish inclination to public disputation, alluding to the saying two Jews, three opinions or three Jews, four opinions
Even Moses, parting the waters of the sea (to enable the Israelites to escape the Egyptians pursuing them) was not immune from second guessing, at least in Cotham’s telling (though the event somehow escaped recording in the Pentateuch).
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Posted in Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
March 28, 2026
From the latest New Yorker issue, of 3/30/26, this cartoon by Daniel Kanhai:
The energetic angelic figure of Moses, with his rather dubious angelic assistant (his brother Aaron? his successor Joshua? just an angel off some random cloud, pressed involuntarily into the frog toss?), lobs jumbo frogs down onto the Egyptians, meting out punishment to them for their Pharaoh’s offenses against the Lord and the Lord’s chosen people, the Israelites
It’s the Biblical second Plague of Egypt — not the disastrous swarming frogs of the book of Exodus, overwhelming entire cities, doomed to die in great stinking heaps; but instead adorable, perky frogs from children’s books and the cartoons (surely they are a pretty green). Moses gets them by the barrel.
In any case, the incongruity of the appalling — literally Godawful — frogs from Exodus and the cute frogs in the New Yorker made me laugh out loud.
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Posted in Humor, Language and animals, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
March 9, 2026
On 3/7 (on this blog) I posted “The travails of etymology”, about the sources of some phrasal verbs meaning ‘to die’. Which elicited from Troy Anderson friendly but anxious e-mail on 3/8:
dai sāla (hello friend/cousin, in Miluk),
Your last post on Facebook makes me think youāre thinking youāre about done? Iām sad we havenāt kept the conversation going.
Know Iām here rooting for you.
(The reference to the language Miluk will get clarified eventually, when I tell you more about TA.)
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Posted in Death and dying, Etymology, Etymythology, Humor, Language and religion, Lexicography, Music, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
