Archive for the ‘Chinese’ Category

A gyro bowl from Nick the Greek

November 20, 2025

Another chapter in foraging for food by restaurant delivery. I had a desire for some gyros, an old favorite in the wide world of demotic cuisines, in this case Greek: from Merriam-Webster online (considerably amended):

noun gyro (plural gyros): /jíro/ [North American] a sandwich especially of lamb and beef [roasted on a spit and sliced], tomato, onion, and yogurt sauce [tzatziki] on pita bread [AZ: the name comes originally from Greek, but has been thoroughly Anglicized, so that the phonology and morphology of the Greek name are no longer relevant to the American name]

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American Chinese and Italian-American

August 19, 2025

The trigger was the wonderful mixed seafood with tofu soup 海鲜豆腐汤 from the Amazing Wok in San Carlos, a couple weeks ago (and then several times since). which sent me back to lunches on my own in Reading PA roughly 75 years ago, after I was finished with the program of Saturday morning for boys at the Reading YMCA. I was then on my own in the city (browsing in stores, just walking the city, sometimes going to a movie, mostly ransacking the Reading Public Library), until late in the afternoon, when I went to my parents’ store on N. 5th St. — the Memo Shop, high-end costume jewelry — and the family did a little grocery shopping and my dad drove us the 4 miles home to West Lawn.

The lunches were sometimes sandwiches or other diner food at one of the lunch counters in town, but usually were Chinese (American) or Italian (American), at two little restaurants that I remember as being in basements on S. 6th St. (but these physical details are quite likely to have been altered in memory). There wasn’t room for a lot of menu adventure at either place. Typical lunches:

Chinese: egg drop soup or hot and sour soup; plus beef and broccoli, chow mein, or egg foo young

Italian: spaghetti and meatballs most often, sometimes veal parmesan or fettuccine Alfredo or a lunch special of the day

I had money from my parents to cover these cheap lunches, plus a 15% tip.

I don’t remember the decor at the Chinese place (probably minimal), but the Italian place had an impressive painting of what I recall as the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the background.

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lx and g&s

August 6, 2025

(Not lox and Gilbert & Sullivan, though that’s a charming idea for a matinee; I’d prefer to think of lx (linguistics) and g&s (gender and sexuality studies) as two gay linguists, Lex and Gus, who go together like, oh, politics and poker (from Act I of the 1959 Broadway musical Fiorello!) — or, more relevantly, like mind and body)

A non-academic friend, new to my net presence, wondered what the things I said my blog is mostly about — lx and g&s — have to do with one another. My immediate, overly glib, reply:

Nothing intrinsic, but they happen to come together in me, along with gardening, Sacred Harp singing, an interest in food and cooking, Mozart and Haydn, and more. Various accidents of history and outgrowths of different parts of my make-up.

Strictly true, but in fact my postings about lx tend to have a lot of g&s content, and my postings about g&s very often end up illustrating points of lx. And sometimes they meld together — as in my recent (from 7/26/25) posting “F-lexicography”, on the semantics of the sexual verb fuck.

So now a quick visit to Lex and Gus’s world, just picking out things from here and there in work by me and my colleagues. Not a systematic survey, just the odd snapshots.

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Sunday’s pseudonym synchronicity

May 27, 2025

(Well-endowed porn actors and masturbation sleeves are on the menu, so this posting is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

On Sunday, my e-mail once again brought me, by happy accident, two mailings (as it happened, back-to-back this time) on a theme (AMZ pseudonyms this time). As reported in that day’s posting, “Gigantic cylinders”, the earlier fortuitous confluence had to do with two gigantic solid-cylindrical things: one raunchy — porn actor Sir Peter’s gigantic penis — and one innocent — White Giant calla lilies — while Sunday’s pseudonymy theme involved, first a raunchy name — Baxxx, the name of a fitness model and gay porn actor (aka Baxter Linn), who’s now the spokesperson for the Fleshjack masturbation sleeve — and then, in the very next message, an innocent name — BigAlex, the trade name for a fancy walking cane that my friend Bonnie Bendon Campbell uses.

Both of these names fortuitously allude to AMZ pseudonyms. I am sometimes Alex Adams, or just Alex, and I am sometimes ba (for biiig arnold, a playful spelling for the jocular Big Arnold). I am also the creator of XXX-rated comic homoerotic collages, so I could be said to be baXXX. And then from Big Arnold and Alex for Arnold, we get Big Alex / BigAlex.

Knowing the history of my pseudonyms, Bonnie was entirely aware of the significance of the name BigAlex, so sent me a photo of her cane. Fleshjack’s guy being called Baxxx, however, was just a wonderful surprise — an onomastic windfall.

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Fortuitous soup

March 16, 2025

This is a third Kharkiv Opera posting, about a pleasant, playful, joyous event staged in the face of terrible times. Previously on this blog:

on 3/9, “The dandelion caper”, about the enjoyment of the plants and flowers around us

on 3/11, “Music of the night, about the enjoyment of music

Today, it’s about the enjoyment of food, in particular a 2/17 soup* I contrived from things I happened to have in the house — leftovers from a Chinese food delivery; some leftover crunchy salad greens; rice sticks (maifun), which are staple household supplies in my kitchen cupboard; beef broth in a carton, ditto; and some fine chili power that I got as a gift a while back.  The result was fabulous, and there was enough for three meals. Amazing Wok duet mushroom beef, Taylor Farms Mediterranean crunch salad, Dynasty rice vermicelli, and Penzey’s medium hot chili powder: I salute you.

[*The mills of the mammoth grind exceedingly slowly.]

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Chinese Signs

March 5, 2024

Recently I’ve been getting  lot of e-mail from former students (at Ohio State and Stanford, both undergraduates and graduate students, from all periods of my roughly 50-year teaching career), mostly just saying hello and asking how I’m doing. They’re also mostly people who don’t read this blog or follow me on Facebook, so they really don’t know how I’m doing, and require a thoughtful response, one by one — and then I’ll want to hear how they’ve been doing, and the exchange takes a lot of time, so I’m perpetually way behind on maintaining these relationships. Which is where I am right now, somewhat desperate.

Now I take the coward’s way out, going first with the easy thing, responding to e-mail from a former student — Zheng-sheng Zhang, 1988 Ohio State PhD (Tone and tone sandhi in Chinese, for which I was the Doktorvater) — who does in fact follow this blog and was writing mostly to announce his latest book:


Zhang, Chinese Signs: An Introduction to China’s Linguistic Landscape (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2024)

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A high-theatrical digital collagist

November 29, 2023

That’s Hector de Gregorio, whose fantasist digital collage Love of Hermes came past me on Pinterest recently:


(#1) The male figure’s face is (a version of) de Gregorio’s own; the composition is packed with symbols and allusions of many kinds. only a few of which I can identify

Some of the iconography in #1 might be understood from information in the Wikipedia article on the Greek god Hermes:

Hermes is an Olympian deity in ancient Greek religion and mythology considered the [emissary and messenger] of the gods.

… his main symbol is the caduceus, a winged staff intertwined with two snakes copulating [sometimes crowned with a pair of wings and a sphere]

[AZ: Among the many female objects of his love was the love goddess Aphrodite, with whom he fathered the god Hermaphroditus — born a handsome boy, then transformed into a hermaphrodite, with a name compounded of the names of the two parents]

… Hermes also loved [many] young men in pederastic relationships where he bestowed and/or taught something related to combat, athletics, herding, poetry and music

Now, four more of de Gregorio’s dream-like, often highly theatrical, body-focused compositions — two relatively spare ones, two densely symbolic ones. Then some words about the artist.

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The Dickson Poon School of Law

July 24, 2019

(As you might guess from the title, this posting treats several English expressions of varying degrees of offensiveness, so some readers might want to avoid it.)

A message from Gadi Niram a month ago:

I can’t get past the name of this school: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/law
The Dickson Poon School of Law in the University of London

— and wondering if poon doesn’t have the meaning in BrE that it does in AmE. (And then there’s the dick in Dickson.)

Briefly, the answer is: no, the lexical item poon ‘vagina, pussy’ is largely unknown in BrE. But it is an estimable Chinese name, especially in Hong Kong. If they had known about the crude offensiveness of poon in AmE, Dickson Poon’s family might have chosen another variant of their name in English, say Pan. Or maybe not; they might have decided that it’s their family’s English name and they’re proud of it. (I will compare it to the Hindi surname often spelling Dikshit in English.)

Then there’s the question of why the University of London has anything named after Dickson Poon. That’s where I’ll start.

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The Chinese diner

June 5, 2019

Today’s Zippy takes us to a bit of now-vanished Camden NJ, the Elgin Diner Restaurant, and, next to it, a fantasy Chinese diner, an amalgam of two items of demotic culinary Americana: the classic diner (an Art Deco railcar where people meet to eat plain, familiar food); and the little Chinese (that is, American-Cantonese) restaurant:

(#1)

This will take us on the road to Ardmore PA, Wheeling WV, and Idaho Falls ID. For the trip, choose a diner classic — tuna melt, patty melt, club sandwich, meatloaf, macncheese — from column A; and a Chinese-restaurant classic — hot and sour soup, chow mein, garlic eggplant, General Tso’s chicken, sweet and sour pork — from column B. And then wok this way.

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