Archive for the ‘Language and religion’ Category

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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 »

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 »

Vacations

April 1, 2025

[I wrote this while watching Cory Booker speak on the floor of the US Senate for a record of over 25 hours straight, passionately speaking against the wickedness of the president and his sidekick and in favor of (among other things) diversity, equity, and inclusion; calling repeatedly on my hero John Lewis; and cleansing the nastiness of the previous record-holder, Strom Thurmond, who was filibustering against the Voting Rights Act of 1957. I wept, I cheered, I was moved to hope, at least for a few moments.]

Two triggers for this posting:

— the Zippy strip for 9/30 (so, something close to hot news) in which Zippy and Zerbina reminisce about their fabulous vacation at the Diet of Worms in 1521 (yes, Martin Luther is involved)

— 2022 e-mail from my old friend and linguistics colleague Elizabeth Closs Traugott (who’s a year older than I am but in vastly better shape), about a trip for pleasure she was about to take to (the) Pinnacles, south of here, which reminded me of a similar trip my guy Jacques made years ago. Which then took me to a vacation J and I took together. (Yes, this topic has been simmering on my desktop for three years; I have a prodigious backlog.)

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Posted in Academic life, Art, German, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Understanding comics | 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 »

A coat of arms

February 19, 2025

Unus pro omnibus
Omnes pro uno

This display came by me on my Facebook feed this morning; as a grandson of Switzerland I found it offensive (and, by the way, inaccurate):


(#1) From the Holy Roman Empire Association, the coats of arms of “European Kingdoms, Duchies and Principalities in 1519”

Switzerland is a confederation, with no ruler — not king nor duke nor prince — and has been (with occasional hiccups) since its founding in 1291. Like the Friends / Quakers, it is (in principle) radically egalitarian, as am I personally (though I concede that every person, and every human institution, is imperfect, flawed; but that’s a core principle of radical egalitarianism).

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Posted in Address terms, Flags, History, Language and class, Language and religion, Signs and symbols, Switzerland and Swiss things, Titles | Leave a Comment »

Another gay Saint Sebastian

February 4, 2025

(saintly male bodies seen through worldly eyes and treated in sometimes very plain talk, so not to everyone’s taste)

From Susan Benson Hamel yesterday:

Thought of you yesterday when I was in the Auckland art gallery and came across this delightfully coy St Sebastian by Guido Reni:


(#1) There are an astonishing number of St. Sebastians out there; this Reni really is wonderful (I said to SBH), in its dreamy gaze welcoming death, and all done with a single mortal arrow (plus, Reni dwells lovingly on the saint’s body, giving what many have seen as a homoerotic cast to the painting; and his private parts are just barely concealed, as in a cock tease)

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and religion, Language and the body, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

From my e-mail: two male nudes

December 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate December; it’s New Year’s Eve, so tomorrow’s rabbits will accompany the enfant terrible 2025, while my end-of-the-year e-mail brings me two male nudes, of very different resonances, to ride the wild tigers of 2024 off

First, on the soc-motss private group on Facebook on 12/26, for Hanukkah, a piece of digital art by Vadim Temkin that’s a playful sexual tease, like the Warwick Rowers calendar photos. Then, a male nude sculpture, in the Western tradition of heroic statuary, exhibited very publicly (in a prominent location on a college campus).

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Posted in AI, Art, Holidays, Language and religion, Language and the body, Male art, Photography, Toys and games | 2 Comments »

Melchior

December 30, 2024

The 12 days of Christmas click by as we advance to Twelfth Night — Epiphany Eve — and then on 1/6 to Epiphany itself, the day of the Three Magi, or Three Kings, conventionally each the king of a distant land, each with a characteristic appearance, each with a name, and each with his gift for the Christ Child in Bethlehem. In one tradition, Melchior (alongside Caspar / Kaspar and Balthazar) is King of Persia, the oldest of the kings (a graybeard), and the giver of gold (rather than frankincense or myrrh).

The thing is, I am Arnold Melchior Zwicky, son of Arnold Melchior Zwicky and grandson of Melchior Arnold Zwicky, the last of whom, oh yes, had brothers named Kaspar and Balthazar. I have the name, the age and the gray beard, but lack the kingdom and the gold. Yet for a brief period in January each year, I am Melchior as well as Arnold, I am resplendent, I am a king.

For this period, I rise above the fact that in my country all three parts of my name are seen as strange and foreign, none more than Melchior (for the rest of the year, when I have to clarify my middle initial, I say “M as in Michael”, leading many people to think that my middle name is in fact Michael, so they could call me Mike). Only this year did it occur to me that I should add Michael / Mike to my alter ego’s name Alexander / Alex Adams: ALEXANDER MICHAEL ADAMS, the weighty A. M. Adams, the amiable Alex “Mike” Adams, hookup name Alex, just Alex.

Now, two things. First , an alternative view of the royal Melchior, from a 2022 posting in which he’s depicted as, wow, not only young and virile but also as the (mythic) king of France. And then another 2022 posting that starts out being about okapis and somehow ends up with “M as in musk ox” for my middle initial (plus “O as in okapi” for the O of ARNOLD).

Meanwhile, Epiphany is coming and my royal robes need fluffing.

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and religion, Music, My life, Myths, Names, Spelling, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

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