Archive for the ‘Language and religion’ Category

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Musical Millbrooks

October 13, 2025

The trigger was singing the shapenote hymn Millbrook, 484t in the 2025 edition — yes, the latest revision, successor to the 1991 revision —  of the Sacred Harp yesterday; I was at home, following along via Zoom with the Palo Alto singers (who were at the UUC church in southern Palo Alto). Four connections here:

— 1, the song comes from the 2013 Shenandoah Harmony book (where it’s 264b), which I’d sung from on occasion (so it was in fact already a favorite); I don’t know why it’s named Millbrook (from Millbrook AL? Millbrook Village NJ? from some specific millbrook?)

— 2, the song has the same name as the much more widely known utterly secular composition “Millbrook” (1998), by singer / songwriter Rufus Wainwright, referring to the very tony New York village of Millbrook — so, two musical Millbrooks

— 3, the village of Millbrook is the home of the Millbrook School, a private boarding school that’s interesting in its own right; and there’s a connection to Rufus Wainwright, who’s a 1991 graduate of the school

— 4, Bill Richardson — a friend from a boys’ summer camp (ca. 1950) / Princeton (ca. 1960) / Wyomissing PA (vs. my West Lawn PA, a couple miles away), now Golden CO vs. Palo Alto CA — is a much earlier graduate of the school (in 1958)

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Posted in Education, Friendship, Language and religion, Music, My life, Poetry | 1 Comment »

Holy Romaine Empire

October 11, 2025

🏳️‍🌈 👨‍❤️‍👨 🏳️‍🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)

The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:


(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)

The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, History, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and politics, Language and religion, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Puns | 9 Comments »

September 29th

September 29, 2025

29 September: penultimate September, and also Michaelmas (the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael; the Feast of the Archangels; or the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels). Brief notes about the day; and then, in the midst of very difficult times (during which I am failing at almost everything, and in great pain), a report on some moments of pleasure that help to get me from day to day.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and religion, Music, My life, Signs and symbols, Singing | Leave a Comment »

5786

September 24, 2025

Today: Rosh Hashanah ends, and it’s the year 5786:

Originally published in ReadTheSpirit.com (Rabbi Roy Furman’s Read the Spirit site)

 

 

Posted in Holidays, Language and religion | Leave a Comment »

Walking on water

August 22, 2025

In the New Yorker issue of 8/25/25, a typically goofy-clever cartoon by Sam Gross, offering SG’s proposal for how Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee:


(#1) No miracle!  But, wait! SG’s account relies on a different kind of miracle — the Octopus of God, gliding supportively underwater, foot to foot, carrying Christ across the sea; that’s the goofy part, God’s really mysterious ways, as the fish have it

(I especially admire SG’s depiction of Jesus as a magical Jew, deep in thought as he navigates.)

Now, for background, the account of Jesus’s aquambulation in the Christian Bible, a collection of texts Christians think of as the New Testament. (I note that SG, a Jew, assumed his readers would be familiar with the story, as part of the common culture of our society; for this, no one involved here has to believe anything.)

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Posted in Cartoonists, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »

Of money, class, and prejudice

July 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 Three tigers for ultimate July, while we anticipate the inaugural rabbits of August and the cheese and chocolate of 🇨🇭 Swiss National Day🇨🇭 — we await the edelweiss-bedecked Helvetia!

The territory. Meanwhile, I’ve been re-establishing an old friendship, one that goes back to childhood: Bill and I met at Camp Conrad Weiser, a YMCA-sponsored summer camp in the hills of Wernersville PA (some of these details will become relevant). We were later at Princeton together, and in the summer of 1961 (after my parents had moved on to California, while I continued my job as a reporter on the Reading (PA) Eagle and needed a place to stay), he offered a guest room in his family’s big house on Reading Boulevard in the suburb of Wyomissing —


(#1) An aerial shot of some big houses on Reading Boulevard (a stock photo from an article on Wyomissing as a planned community); there was housing for the rich on the boulevards, with workers’ housing in separate sections of Wyomissing (one of which my father grew up in) and on the side streets along the boulevards, in the adjacent boroughs of West Wyomissing, West Lawn (where I grew up), and West Reading, and in Reading itself

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Posted in Language and religion, My life, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

St. Sebastian without the arrows

July 12, 2025

A surprise on my Pinterest  this morning: a sinesagittal St. Sebastian from Texan artist RF. Alvarez (who offers tender, communal gay machismo, which is Tex-Mex to boot):


(#1) Alvarez, St. Sebastian (2022), aka “Meet me under the pomegranate tree, St. Sebastian” (a self-portrait of the strikingly handsome RFA in the St. Sebastian pose, with a vulnerable but unharmed body, and steadily meeting the viewers’ gaze, conveying neither agony nor ecstasy); the figure here is hooking up with St. Sebastian, and he’s also mirroring St. Sebastian (with his hands behind his back, perhaps tied to a tree, only a bit of drapery barely covering his genitals)

But why a pomegranate tree (not part of Christian legend)? And the deep orange suffusing the figure’s entire body and filling all the background behind him and the tree — another pomegranate allusion (though pomegranate fruits and juice are garnet-red, not citrus-orange)? An allusion to the Greek myth of Persephone and her pomegranate seeds?

I’ve now looked at quite a lot of RFA’s paintings, and this one stands out from all the others, including his other self-portraits (for instance, Self-Portrait with Grandfather’s Hat (2023)). So it cries out for some explication.

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Posted in Art, Color, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and religion, Language and the body, Male art, Myths, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

The printing plate

July 9, 2025

A message to SF-peninsula Sacred Harp singers today, in the midst of a morning of complex life arrangements:

Some years ago I was given the printer’s plate for SH99 Gospel Trumpet in the 1991 Denson Revision (and have it on a display stand). A very touching gift from my singing community. I am now obliged to dispose of almost all my belongings, to reduce them to a small collection that will fit into a small assisted living facility apartment, saving just those things I need to continue the essays I post on my blog. This task is taking months, involving many thousands of objects; it is emotionally devastating; and it goes slowly because I am so disabled, and have become more so each day as the work damages my hands further. But, bit by bit, I am eroding the mountain of things. The plate for SH99 must go; I hope that some singer would love it as much as I have. Would come and take it.

A very few items shimmer with personal meaning for me; for them I’ve tried to find a truly suitable donor just for this one thing, and I’ve had some great successes. Now this, going to a married couple of long-time singers.

Now, for you, some of the back story, starting with a photo.

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Posted in Language and religion, Music, My life | 1 Comment »

The raunchy verse of biblical manhood

June 17, 2025

(Consider the title; totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

Yesterday, on a closed group for lgbt+ folk and their friends:

— MP relayed a posting from Gloryview Ranch, “Embrace biblical Manhood”

— SC: Yeehaw! “Biblical manhood”. Wtf is that?

— EH > SC: Seems to have a lot to do with horses and bacon. Just like in the Bible, where Jesus broke bacon with his disciples.

— AZ > EH, breaking into raunchy verse, “The Cowboy’s Plea”:

Oh! Sweet buddy broke my bacon,
Made me sizzle with his fork;
I keep my bacon hot and greasy,
Pray he’ll give me more fresh pork!

I note that “The Cowboy’s Plea” contains no taboo / vulgar lexical items, but manages to be deeply raunchy by referring indirectly to sexual or excretory bodyparts and to sexual acts, all through the miracle of metaphor (some of it lexicalized, some of it fresh, but mostly — as with the nouns fork and pork ‘penis’ and the verbs fork and pork ‘fuck’ — skittering between the two).

The central metaphor, in break someone’s bacon ‘pop / bust someone’s cherry, break someone in sexually, have sex with someone who is a virgin’, is a fresh one; it achieves some degree of offensiveness through echoes of breaking Communion bread and the friendly sharing of meals. Meanwhile the central metaphor incorporates the freshly metaphorical bacon ‘fuckhole (vagina or anus)’, elaborated on in greasy, alluding to lubes as aids in fucking.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Poetry, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

The Vouch Joke

May 22, 2025

(Warning: this will end up with a naked man on all fours, in a display that’s meant to be sexual rather than jocular)

I had occasion this morning to vouch for Scott Schwenter (Ohio State professor of Hispanic linguistics) having gotten a PhD from Stanford, and in doing so alluded to the Vouch Joke, which I heard many years ago from Paul Benacerraf (Princeton professor of philosophy, especially the philosophy of mathematics, and the director of my senior thesis in mathematics back in 1962). PB told the joke as Alonzo Church’s only known joke (AC, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Princeton, was another of my professors and was on my thesis committee); relevant to PB’s telling of the joke, AC was one of the most earnest, least playful people I have ever known (but he was good-hearted and not without his quirks, one of which was a passion for murder mysteries, another a meticulous enthusiasm for atlases and gazetteers), and he was an American WASP Christian, a lifelong Presbyterian, while PB was a Jew, a genuinely cosmopolitan one, with an early life in Paris and Caracas before establishing firm roots in New Jersey as a teenager.

All this religious stuff is important because the joke as AC told it was thoroughly whitebread. It has two main characters (both male): the vouchee, the subject of the joke, who is interrogated by some kind of authority about his status (“Who are you?” and “Why are you here?”); and the voucher, the person the subject offers as someone who can vouch for him — two characters that AC gave WASP names to (an ordinary name like Harold for the subject and Richard for the voucher). In telling me the joke, PB prefaced it by giving the names AC used, but then actually performed the joke as a Jewish joke, in which the subject was called something like Abie and the voucher was named Moishe.

“Moishe will vouch for me; get Moishe!”

In my opinion, this makes it funnier — as a general principle, Jewish jokes are funnier than other jokes, because Jewish jokes originate as stories told by Jews for other Jews, and they are affectionate or self-deprecating or instructive or some combination of these, neither aggressive nor contemptuous — and even more delightful as a kind of commentary on AC’s whitebread version.

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Posted in Jokes, Language and religion, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, My life, Ohio State, Princeton, Stanford | 2 Comments »

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