The sinus-infection background, from yesterday’s posting “Chair-ridden”:
The [long-running, like for weeks] sinus infection isn’t contagious, and I don’t run a fever, But it’s fiercely painful, produces prodigious amounts of disgusting junk I cough up constantly, and is, alas, not much affected by nasal saline sprays. Mostly, it’s unbelievably tiring. Hence, my being chair-ridden (the analogue of bed-ridden).
Now I’m going to amble discursively through the rest of this story. Walk with me.
[Sex work, naked boys, nude statuary (classical in theme, but, yes, full frontal) — generally not suitable for kids or the sexually modest]
Das wäre Ihr Mädchen, Herr Jakob Schmidt
… Ach, bedenken sie was man für dreißig Dollar kriegt— Weill & Brecht, Havanna Lied (from the 1930 opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny)
How is a man to choose? He could have that one for $30. But then the other one looks eager to please. And the third one looks really hot naked.
That was Jakob Schmidt in the imaginary city of Mahagonny — part America, part Weimar Germany — but then this morning Pinterest brought me another man, call him Alex, picking one of three for sexual services, under the watchful eye of an arranger, the clever and mischievous H, in a painting by Cornelius McCarthy:
[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.)
🦉 🦉 🦉 three wise owls for Superb Owl Day, an annual American Sunday holiday devoted to the relaxed enjoyment of uncrowded public places — (weather permitting) in sight-seeing, strolling on city streets, visiting parks and zoos; or (indoors) shopping in stores, exploring museums, attending concerts and theatrical performances (when I was much younger, Superb Owl Day was an excellent occasion for a visit to the gay baths; no doubt you have your own spots that can provide relaxing pleasures)
Meanwhile, back at Ramona St. …
Playing on the Apple Music in my bedroom during my 2:30 whizz break: a ravishingly joyous soprano concert aria, or (as it turned out) Lied (with a warm and playful piano trio accompaniment), with some vocal figures worthy of the Queen of the Night. I thought of it as the Queen of the Day’s Song. In some Germanic language I couldn’t quite comprehend.
Ah, obviously one of Beethoven’s folksong compositions; when I actually got up, at 3:30, I went to my computer to track the song down:
“Wann i in der Früh aufsteh” (‘When I arise in the early morning” — celebrating morning on a Tyrolean dairy farm), Beethoven WoO 158a/ 4 — that is, #4 in his 23 Lieder Verschiedener Völker (‘Songs of Different Peoples / Various Nationalities’); from a 1997 Deutsche Grammophon recording; Janice Watson is the soprano; and the language is Tyrolean, a High German variety spoken in the western Austrian state of Tyrol (where it’s the majority language) and areas of northern Italy (in any case, in a region south of Bavaria and east of the part of Switzerland where the Zwickys come from)
You can listen to this very recording here.
Links from Wayles Browne (a regular visitor to this blog from far above Cayuga’s waters), attached to my Ancho Rabbit posting from yesterday, which I will now expand into a posting for Groundhog Day (2/2):
The BBC reports on Groundhog Day: it’s six more weeks of winter.
And of linguistic interest: a Pennsylvania Dutch poem about the groundhog and his, or rather her, day [the BBC report “How the Pennsylvania Dutch created Groundhog Day”; in PaDu, it’s die Grundsau ‘the groundsow’] (as read by Cornell’s old grad student Mark Louden).
Very briefly noted.
Passed on back on 11/9 by Michael Palmer on Facebook, this fine reworking of the map of Austria as an ostrich:
MP came across it on the Language Nerds Facebook site, but I don’t know who created the image in the first place
In English, Austria (a Latinization of the German name Österreich ‘eastern realm’) and ostrich (from a compound of the Latin avi- stem meaning ‘bird’ and the Greek struth– stem meaning ‘ostrich, big sparrow’) have only medial /str/ as clearly shared material, so are very distant puns, if they count as puns at all. Much the same is true of Spanish Austria and avestruz. Things are even more distant in Italian (Austria and struzzo) and of course German (Österreich and Strauß).
But in French, as I pointed out on Facebook, by the accidents of phonological change, Latinized Austria > Autriche and the avi– + struth– compound > autruche, yielding a truly fine pun: Autriche is an autruche!
So Austria not only looks like an ostrich, in French it sounds like one too. This makes me happy.
From Benita Bendon Campbell back on 11/1, a joyous diversion from painful times (“Something funny, we need something funny”): Rowan Atkinson playing “distinguished British baritone” Robert Bennington singing the Ode to Joy … until things go awry and he has to improvise a German text to Beethoven’s soaring tune. You can watch the YouTube video here.
And now, much more detail, from the Classic FM site (“the most relaxing music”), “The time Rowan Atkinson ‘forgot’ the words to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in hilarious skit” by Maddy Shaw Roberts on 5/11/21:
The Ode’s progress (picture: YouTube)
Ich weiß wohl, was soll es bedeutenDass ich so traurig bin
An anguish of old age is living immersed in death — of family, friends, loves, colleagues, mentors and models, students, people who have entertained, enriched, and illuminated you — while laboring just to get from day to day yourself. I have failed to memorialize many of the departed, I cannot cope any more, and I am ashamed of all of that. And now comes the death of Manfred Bierwisch, not exactly a surprise, since he was a full decade older than me, but then he was one of the few who should have been granted a life forever. And with a special role in my life.
Martin Haspelmath on Facebook this morning:
RIP Manfred Bierwisch (1930-2024, in the middle of the picture).
(MH:) The picture shows [MB] with his close friends Paul Kiparsky and Dieter Wunderlich (taken from Kiparsky’s 2023 memoir in the [Annual Review of Linguistics])He was the GDR’s most prominent linguist, but he made no compromises with the regime. When some people were doing “Marxist linguistics” because it was good for their careers, he kept pursuing “structural linguistics”. Unlike some of his friends from the 1950s (e.g. Heinz Vater and Ewald Lang), he did not try to leave for the freer West Germany, but he stayed in the East. In 2005, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Leipzig University, where he had studied in the 1950s (and where he was jailed for 10 months for possession of illegal writings).
Perfecto Fancy-Boy, the Dingburg psychoanalyst, analyzes the appeal of Helmet Grabpussy in today’s Zippy the Pinhead strip:
(#1) Grabpussy’s real name is suppressed above, as too indecent to mention, even on this blog; but what grabbed me first in this strip was the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy for the psychoanalyst — a name that is most unlikely to have ever been given to any actual person, but is instead a pure creation of Zippy‘s cartoonist Bill Griffith
Zippy is a savorer of words and phrases. (He is also the playful lord of nonsensicality, call him Absurdo.) He has favorite names — Ashtabula, Estonia, Valvoline, Ding-Dongs, taco sauce, and more, treasured just for the way they sound, not for what they refer to; the Talking Heads album Stop Making Sense could have been named in his honor.
And he’s forever latching onto random expressions whose sound enchants him, so that he repeats them for pleasure, like mantras — what Griffy, the cartoon avatar of Bill Griffith, calls onomatomania. (There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania.)
Then there’s Griffith’s choice of names for his characters — like Perfecto Fancy-Boy. No doubt intentionally crafted to some degree, but also to some degree pulled out of thin air, from Griffith’s subconscious, picked because they “sounded good”. I’m in no position to say which part is which, so here I’ll just unearth some possible ingredients in the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy, specifically in this name referring to a psychoanalyst.
In recent days, I’ve been exchanging e-mail with my (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi) linguistics colleague Luc Baronian about ethnic and linguistic history, with special reference to the Welsh (and the Welsh language, Cymraeg) in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Dutch (and their language, Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch); and about tracing ancestral history. Three pieces of background here:
First, Luc is an Armenian-Canadian, the way I’m a Swiss-American. Luc is by recent paternal ancestry Armenian (as you can tell from his surname), by upbringing French Canadian; I am by recent paternal ancestry Swiss (as you can tell by my surname), by upbringing (and maternal ancestry) Pennsylvania Dutch (a descendant of primarily 18th-century immigrants to southeastern Pennsylvania, mostly from the Palatinate region of southern Germany).
Second, some years back, Luc — whose ancestry-search competence is vastly better than mine — helped me trace connections on my mother’s side and correct my misrecollections of several facts.
Third, Luc had gotten interested in the history of the Welsh language in Pennsylvania, which begins in colonial times, with late 17th-century negotiations over the Welsh Tract as a landmark event, and then apparently vanishes, leaving only place-names in its wake.
