Archive for the ‘Language and the law’ Category

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Scam rounds 2 and 3

October 20, 2025

Background: scam round 1. From my 9/29/25 posting “Today’s scam”:

Let’s summarize. Copyright Agent (CA for short) assumes my blog is a company, with a staff. They refer to an image on an arnoldzwicky.org link — which contains two images, and I have no idea which they’re referring to. They then say that the image is under copyright to their partner company, which does business under various names (I’ll just call them Visions here); that I have violated these rights; and, cutting to the chase, that I must now pay a claim for illegal use of the image or be subject to lawsuit. The claim amount is nowhere stated. CA provides a URL for paying the claim. I am not rising to the bait.

Checking out the Visions company …, I see that it’s a botanical image database (apparently very large), providing images for advertising and other commercial uses.

… On some previous occasions, I have been notified that some image I used in a posting was under copyright, and had the choice of removing it from the posting or paying a fee. Since I live on a small fixed income and provide my writings for free (and in fact pay to have my postings free of ads), I can’t afford such fees and so just delete the images. (More recently, images mostly come with statements about their copyright status; I’m then increasingly unable to find usable images to illustrate many ordinary things.) But CA offers me no such choice; I have already broken the law and must now pay up.

I am not compliant.

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Posted in Language and the law, My life, Photography | Leave a Comment »

Comforting and commiserating

October 16, 2025

Follow-ups to two of the three parts of my 10/14 posting “… that I am precious to them”.

[1] in the advance health care section [of my draft legal documents] was a Treat with Dignity section that begins:

If I should suffer serious disease, injury, or illness, I desire that those who love and care for me touch me and tell me so, demonstrating that I am precious to them.

And then I burst into tears at the delicate intimacy of the wording, even though it’s probably boilerplate text these days.

[2 about the Stanford Linguistics department’s 50th anniversary celebration]

[3] .. Sally Thomason just reported:

Steve (Stephen R.) Anderson [of Yale University] died last night, October 13, after a diagnosis last month of aggressive stage 4 esophageal cancer

Damn! And I owed him e-mail [in response to his of 8/5]. An old friend from the 1960s (he was just 3 years younger than me), a true scholar, an extraordinary general linguist, a good guy, and a sturdy friend (he sent me remarkable cheeses from Switzerland when I was sick and downcast!).

Now: on 1, about comforting the sick and dying; and on 3, about Steve Anderson’s commiserating e-mail from August).

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Posted in Death notices, Friendship, Language and the law | Leave a Comment »

… that I am precious to them

October 14, 2025

I have been going over about 50 pages of draft stuff for my lawyer: revisions of my trusteeship, my will, the advance health care instructions, and a durable power of attorney — the product of a session with the lawyer last month.  Oh my. Well, it all seems to say what I said I wanted, but of course, in careful legalese and with provisos for all sorts of circumstances I had never even contemplated.

And there in the advance health care section was a Treat with Dignity section that begins:

If I should suffer serious disease, injury, or illness, I desire that those who love and care for me touch me and tell me so, demonstrating that I am precious to them.

And then I burst into tears at the delicate intimacy of the wording, even though it’s probably boilerplate text these days.

(more…)

Posted in Death notices, Events and occasions, Friendship, Language and the law, My life | 1 Comment »

Today’s scam

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 »

Morning has broken

June 7, 2025

Praise for the singing!
Praise for the morning!
— “Morning Has Broken”

Today, Saturday, awaking officially at 4:52, but lying for maybe 20 minutes in that wonderful half-waking state, with genuinely useful ideas chasing around my head, while an Istomin / Stern / Rose recording of the Brahms trios for piano. violin, and cello (for some reason, in reverse order, ending with No. 1) played on my Apple Music — fabulously passionate, exuberant in bursts, and musically complex. The Brahms is Morning A.

One thing that I worked on in my head was a kvetch from Michael Newman (on Facebook on 6/1, with a response from me) that I didn’t get to post on yesterday, because yesterday was largely a great trial, following on the events reported in my 6/5 posting “An indescribable day”. But now I will introduce Michael and show our exchange; that’s Morning B. Which comes with the promise of a future posting celebrating Michael, singing his praises.

Then, after morning cleanup, I went to my worktable, to turn off the Apple Music, check my vital signs (good), and turn on the tv to MSNBC, which immediately presented me with this panel:

Harvard University Professor Maya Jasanoff and Ankush Khardori join The Weekend to discuss why President Tr**p keeps losing in his war against the nation’s oldest college

In which I was once again impressed with Khardori, who came across as extraordinarily bright, incisive, tough and down-to-earth, and surprisingly charming. Also, to my famously queer eye, definitely sexy; he’s Morning C.

After him, Bob Eckstein’s newsletter The Bob popped up, in a special French edition yesterday, to cap things off with a wonderfully silly cartoon — Morning D.

Morning was then broken, and the day shambled on, with variously astonishing, distressing, and alarming news breaking in one wave after another.

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Posted in Academic life, French, Gender and sexuality, Language and politics, Language and the law, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

The anole of Palo Alto

October 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate October, aka Halloween; by the pricking of my fingers, something wicked this way lingers

Specifically, my fingers pricked out the name Anold for Arnold a little while ago, as they do with regrettable regularity (Gorgo finger not work right), but this time it was in a link on Facebook to this blog, so not self-correcting. But George V. Reilly caught the error and pointed it out to me, so that I could fix it. And then today, I had an inspiration, which I posted as a response (somewhat revised here) to George:

— AMZ > GVR: It has occurred to me to take up Anold the anold as another identity. The anold is a brightly colored arboreal lizard — a type of anole — in its rare and precious Swiss variant. Characterized by its curiosity (in several senses — “Look, Bruce, what a curious lizard!”) and its remarkable, um, snout.

This is the anold’s organ sometimes known jocularly as a Swiss nose. All noses are phallic, but some are considerably more phallic than others. (A lexical note on the noun snout, from NOAD: ‘the projecting nose and mouth of an animal, especially a mammal’.)

Meanwhile, while noses and snouts are phallic symbols, lizards (and dinosaurs and dragons) as wholes are much more impressively so. From GDoS on the noun lizard:

7 (Aus./US) the penis [1st cite 1969], with phrases meaning ‘to urinate’: bleed / drain / flog / squeeze the lizard; and phrases meaning ‘to masturbate’: bleed / gallop / pet the lizard and choke / stroke / whip one’s lizard

So now we’re deep into phallicity. Well, it’s my blog. Phallicity happens.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and animals, Language and the law, Lexical semantics, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Switzerland and Swiss things, Typos | 3 Comments »

Murky days in the bureaucracy

September 28, 2024

Murky, but gratifying. This is a hot-news followup to my 9/20 posting “Annals of bureaucracy: the jury summons”, about my summons to jury duty in Santa Clara County, which sent me to a website where I registered as a potential juror and went on to the Request for Hardship Excusal page, where I checked the box:

I have a physical, psychological, or emotional condtion that makes it impossible for me to serve and no assistance or accommodation will help. If you are under the age of 70 or seeking a permanent excusal, you must submit a recently dated, signed recommendation from your doctor on official letterhead.

Then from my earlier posting:

I was willing to get a hardship excusal just for this occasion, so I submitted this form. Immediately, a response:

Your Request for Hardship Excusal was successfully submitted on 09/20/24.

And then [grrr] almost immediately after that:

You are checking too early. To receive your instructions for your assigned week [the week of 10/14], you will need to return to this web page the weekend (Saturday or Sunday) prior to 10/14/2024. [that is, on 10/12 or 13]

This is Act 1.

(more…)

Posted in Language and the law, My life | 1 Comment »

Annals of bureaucracy: the jury summons

September 20, 2024

Or: how I spent my Friday morning.

On Wednesday I got this mail notice from the Superior Court, County of Santa Clara Office of the Jury Commissioner:


(#1) with some of my information deleted

This morning I went to the website, registered by providing my personal information and went to the Request for Hardship Excusal page, where I completed this section:


(#2) Where I made the crucial error: I was willing to get a hardship excusal just for this occasion, so I submitted this form

Immediately, a response:

Your Request for Hardship Excusal was successfully submitted on 09/20/24.

(more…)

Posted in Language and the law, My life | 7 Comments »

Pleasantly gay and deeply serious

June 29, 2024

Noticed for the first time yesterday, on Alex Wagner Tonight on MSNBC, 6/28, in “‘Republicans in robes’: Supreme Court critics see politics behind action on [the Grabpussy] immunity case”, on-line here: commenter Mark Joseph Stern (a senior writer covering courts and the law for Slate Magazine), in his pleasantly gay persona — an engaging fem (vs. butch) presentation of himself — while, with deep seriousness and evident passion, picking apart the Supreme Court’s behavior in the immunity case.

What came to my consciousness for the first time was the gayness of his persona, a collection of his specific variants of fem characteristics, including his particular gay voice and his particular gay eye gestures (eye widening, some flirtation with eye roll and slant-eye). Wonderful that he doesn’t edit out these behaviors, even if many people take them to be indicators of a superficial mentality (just like a dumb broad”, they think to themselves).

I had somehow not attended to any of this the day before, 6/27, when MJS was again on Alex Wagner Tonight, in “‘A seismic shift’: Supreme Court Chevron ruling radically alters U.S. government with power grab”, on-line here; or in his earlier appearances on her show, explaining the intricacies of various US courts to the MSNBC audience. But now I’m a fan, of his brand of a fem persona, combined with visible playfulness and enjoyment in his own performance, and of his elegant explanations of complex legal and political matters, in which his expertise is combined with visible, urgent, commitment to a system of moral values.

I see lot of this in my gay world: pleasantly gay and deeply serious, in tandem. In a while I’ll pull up, from my earlier postings, another example of this pairing, with all the details wildly different from MJS’s case.

But first, more about MJS.

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Posted in Effeminacy, Facial expression and gesture, Gay porn, Gay voice, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language and the law, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

The headline writer’s dream story

March 21, 2024

Yesterday’s news from East Sussex (the old original Sussex, in southern England), a Sussex News story (by Jo Wadsworth) that kicks off with this juicy summary sentence:

A handyman who masturbated over a tenant’s knickers has been acquitted of criminal damage. 

The story is pretty much unavoidably raunchy, given the nature of the offense; nobody writes stuff like commit an obscene act these days. The reporter used the technical and punchier masturbated in the intro, I’d imagine because it was compact, but then opted for the euphemistic pleasured himself in the full story, which continues:

Simon Lawrence, 55, had been called to fix a faulty washing machine when he entered Joanna Hatton’s bedroom at the cottage she rented with her partner Thomas Jones.

But he didn’t realise the couple had installed a motion sensor camera there to watch their cat.

The couple were driving to Somerset for Christmas when Joanna got an alert on her phone that the camera had been activated on 19 December, 2022.

She watched in horror as Lawrence laid out her underwear on the bed and began pleasuring himself.

The reporter must have yearned to use the British slang wanked, which is vulgar but what ordinary people say in the UK. But you can’t talk like that in a respectable newspaper (though the tabloids can go pretty far).

But there would be room to veer towards vulgarity in the head; in fact, this is a dream story for an alert headline writer, who while casting about for alternatives to masturbated, to knickers (which is kind of giggly slang but not vulgar, and which doesn’t have to get into the head), and to be acquitted (which is legalese), might hit on the possibility for a somewhat rude pun on ‘masturbate’ vs. ‘be acquitted ‘, via the phrasal verb get off.

Or, of course, a headline writer might go for get off rather than be acquitted just because it’s a bit shorter (writing heads is sometimes like solving a devilishly complicated puzzle), in which case they could come up with the actual Sussex News headline in all innocence (until the laughter rolled in):

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Posted in Ambiguity, Headlines, Language and the law, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

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