Archive for the ‘Languages’ Category

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Multicultural birthday greetings

September 7, 2026

You say it’s your birthday / We’re gonna have a good time
— the Beatles, Birthday (1968, from The White Album)
[evoked for me in e-mail by Brian Joseph]

đŸ’ȘđŸ»đŸ’ȘđŸ»đŸ’ȘđŸ» for (US) Labor Day, the flexed biceps of a manual worker (like my two grandfathers: Bethlehem Steel (maternal), Textile Machine Works (paternal); Melchior Zwicky doubled as a small-farmer as well). I’m two generations down and have ascended, as a professor and writer, to  the status of scholar and artist rather than worker and peasant — socioculturally if not financially in the upper middle class. With a thick veneer of high culture, but also fiercely egalitarian. It’s a balancing act.

Birthday greetings. I now veer onto something completely different (but hang on; things will come together): amidst the great avalanche of well-wishing for my birthday, #86, yesterday, an especially charming pair that came as a package. (more…)

Posted in Academic life, Bilingualism, Events and occasions, Language and culture, Languages, Linguists, Music, My life, Names, Ohio State, Social class, Social life, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »

Chinese vignette

September 1, 2026

8/31 e-mail from me to Li Li, “senior executive director at Palo Alto Commons and The Avant” (lightly edited):

Talking with you briefly about your path from China to Palo Alto brought back a gigantic flood of memories of my teaching at what was then the Beijing Language Institute in 1985 (under a program of country exchanges of college professors — I was exchanged by Fang Li of BLI, and then sponsored his time a bit later at Stanford).

(more…)

Posted in Chinese, My life, Social class, Stereotyping, Teaching | Leave a Comment »

Fresh beginnings, rebirth, resurrection

August 27, 2026

Some weeks back, in midsummer, I sat at my worktable as night drew to an end, when sunrise broke out magnificently in my window wall (see photo #1 in my 8/25 posting “Where I live”) and filled me with joy at the gift of a new day. Also triggering an avalanche of musical associations — conveying fresh beginnings (as here), or rebirth (both of them in Schubert lieder, to come below), or (as in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, also to come below), resurrection. (There’s more, lots more; I’ll list only a tiny sampling, from the odd trio of Haydn, Grieg, and GrofĂ© — ok, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, they’re not))

(more…)

Posted in German, Language and religion, Music, My life, Poetry | 2 Comments »

Why we teach

August 26, 2026

A brief exchange on Facebook a while back (5/27/26) that I think is worth bringing to a wider audience. From Lynne Murphy (University of Brighton, in the UK), testily:

Hey, students who thought they could skip seminars after they “knew” what they were going to write their essay about.

You were wrong, and I’m taking some pleasure in pointing out all the connections you missed between different aspects of our module.

A pleasure I would have been happy to forego if you’d only come to class …

(more…)

Posted in Language, Languages, My life, Spanish, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »

Some Latinity

August 25, 2026

Material I’m stashing here for future reference. It’s about death and grief, approached in an elegant way, so indirectly as to be soothing in terrible times.

First from Suetonius, then from Catullus.

(more…)

Posted in Death and dying, Latin, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

Stanford in the Floating World

August 22, 2026

From Ryan Tamares, on a postcard arriving yesterday (8/21) at my place (it was mailed much earlier at Stanford, passed for some reason through San Francisco, and then shunted back down to Palo Alto; the ways of the USPS are sometimes inscrutable), this extraordinary artwork by a Redbubble.com artist using the name UkiyoCities:


“The Scholar’s Path at Stanford”

Yes, Stanford in the Floating World, simultaneously in the California of today and in the Tokyo of more than 200 years ago.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Japanese, Stanford | 3 Comments »

Los Futbolitos

August 18, 2026

Encountered a while back via Facebook, this YouTube video:


[text:] Los Futbolitos, es un dĂșo de youtubers dominicanos, compuesto por Ángelo ValdĂ©s, alias “Will” y Vincent PerĂ©z, en el que se dedican a hacer videos sobre fĂștbol y debatiendo sobre esto ultimo. [ValdĂ©s and PerĂ©z make videos about soccer / football and debate about it]

So: we’ve got the noun (el) futbolito ‘football / soccer guy’, a derivative of (el) fĂștbol ‘football, soccer’, with the diminutive suffix –it-; immediately, there’s the question of how this noun gets this sense.

And I note that Spanish has another noun (el) futbolito ‘foosball’ — which, startlingly, is also alluded to in the photo: that’s a foosball game just under the title. How does this noun get its sense?

And then that Spanish has another derived noun denoting foosball: (el) futbolĂ­n, with another diminutive suffix, -Ă­n (for the musically inclined reader, it’s the Spanish counterpart of Italian –Ă­n-: from Marriage of Figaro, Se vuol ballare, signor Contino ‘if you want to dance, my little count, …’)

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Italian, Language and sports, Lexical semantics, Metonymy, Spanish, Variation | 2 Comments »

frags

August 16, 2026

No, not hand grenades, but (portmanteaued) fag frats, sexually specialized college fraternities. A topic that sprung out of my Sundance interview posting, in a comment by Gijs Doorenbos:

F.A.G. fraternity -> ΩAΓ ? (Should be available as a T shirt somewhere)

And then we strolled down fraternity row.

(more…)

Posted in Greek, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Social life | 2 Comments »

Yesterday’s metromanteau

August 13, 2026

The Wayno / Piraro 8/12 Bizarro: “The Metromorphosis”:


metro- [the libfix, representing the noun metrosexual] + metamorphosis [the abstract noun meaning ‘transformation’] = metromorphosis ‘transformation to metrosexuality’ (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

Two contributors:

(more…)

Posted in Books, German, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

The birthday of doom

August 13, 2026

Coming up in about three weeks, my birthday of doom:

2026 – 1940 = 86. A bad omen. As in NOAD:

verb eighty-six (also 86): [with object] North American English informal 1 eject or bar (someone) from a restaurant, bar, etc.: they were accused of cheating, and eighty-sixed from their favorite casino. 2 reject, discard, or cancel: the passwords will be 86ed by next October. ORIGIN 1930s (as a noun, used in restaurants and bars to indicate that a menu item is unavailable or that a customer is not to be served): perhaps rhyming slang for nix ‘nothing’.

(more…)

Posted in Death and dying, Events and occasions, German, Lexical semantics, My life | Leave a Comment »

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