The news from gay Switzerland, in headline form: ‘Swinger [Swiss swing wrestler] outs himself as gay’. From the Outsports site: “Swiss wrestler Curdin Orlik comes out as gay, first out active male athlete in nation: The Swiss wrestler competes in an [un]usual version of the sport, but his coming out as gay is universal”, by Jim Buzinski on 3/10/20:
(#1) Orlik in ceremonial regalia, wearing a victor’s wreath and a jacket with edelweiss embroidered on the lapels
Archive for the ‘German’ Category
Schwinger outet sich als schwul
March 11, 2020
Medical news not for penises
January 30, 2020(Plenty of talk about male genitals. Not particularly salacious, but some might prefer to avoid this material.)
The term is osteopenia, which I briefly had hopes would combine the stems osteo– ‘bone’ and peni– ‘penis’ and so mean something like ‘hard penis, erection, boner’ (As I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, I’m fond of penises. For some guys, it’s sports cars; for me, it’s penises.) . But alas, no. From NOAD:
noun osteopenia: reduced bone mass of lesser severity than osteoporosis. ORIGIN 1960s: from osteo– and Greek penia ‘poverty’.
Der Migros-Sprecher Gabriel Zwicky
October 9, 2019In the Swiss German-language daily Blick, a 10/6 story by Marc Iseli, “Neues Gastro-Konzept kommt nach Zürich: Migros bringt den Metzger zum Anfassen” (‘A new gastronomic concept comes to Zürich: Migros makes the butcher accessible’), about a new program — some combination of Retail, Gastronomie und Event — that is somehow supposed to bring the consumer closer to the producers of food (the butcher, the baker, the fisherman, the farmer), at least in the giant supermarket by the main railway station in Zürich:
(#1) From the butcher’s hands to yours, in the new “Meet Food” (yes, with a name borrowed from English) program (note: I didn’t choose this photo; Blick did; I will, however, inventory it in my files under “Phallicity: The Wurst”, where it deserves some sort of vividness trophy)
The story is about this still not fully defined program, but its primary interest for me is that it comes from der Migros-Sprecher (‘the Migros spokesperson’) Gabriel Zwicky, who gets his name in the news quite a lot, Migros being a very big thing in Switzerland. Zwickys, we are everywhere.
Conventional and creative metaphors
July 24, 2019In a recent comics feed, the 6/27 One Big Happy, with an exchange between Grandma Rose and the grotesquely smiling Avis
(#1)
In panel 2, the baggage of emotional baggage is a conventional metaphor, one no longer requiring the hearer to work out the effect of the figure and so now listed in dictionaries. But then Rose immediately brings it back from dormancy to life in a long riff of creative metaphor (in panels 2-4), composed on the spot and calling up a complex and vivid scene for the hearer.
We use the same term, metaphor, for both phenomena, and the mechanism is the same in both — but one is a historical phenomenon (whose figural character is usually out of the consciousness of speaker and hearer), while the other is a phenomenon of discourse production and comprehension in real time.
The hand that cradles the tree
May 3, 2019… and the monster that guides the elderly. Both pieces of outdoor art in Switzerland, the first in the town of Glarus (in my ancestral canton of Glarus), the second in the city of Zürich.
(#1) The Caring Hand in Glarus
Swiss spin-off: Züricher Geschnetzeltes
June 27, 2018While searching on Züricher (and its variant Zürcher), as part of a look at men named Peter Zwicky in the Zürich area, I came across Züricher Geschnetzeltes, a characteristic Swiss dish that I did not experience as a child, but in fact first encountered at a little restaurant on Limmatstraße in Zürich — in September 1972, almost 46 years ago. A very simple veal dish, served on freshly made noodles, but absolutely perfect: melt-in-the-mouth strips of veal in a sauce that was both brown and creamy, elegant yet intense. Julienned carrots sauteed in butter. A crispy white wine. A plain green salad.
Something along these lines, but with noodles:
(#1)
(A style of food that is, unfortunately, not particularly photogenic.)
Swiss spin-off: Wallisellen
June 27, 2018The town of Wallisellen in Canton Zürich, Switzerland, has just come up again on this blog (in the posting “Three Züricher Peter Zwickys”), as the site of the Zwicky silk-thread company and now the Zwicky construction and real estate company. Two notable things about the place (from its Wikipedia page): the etymology of its name, which looks like a compound (and is), but without easily identifiable parts; and a Swiss German nonsense rhyme that incorporates the town’s name.
Lexical adventures in the Sacred Harp
February 23, 2018Two explorations in the vocabulary of The Sacred Harp, 1991 Denson revision, provoked by songs called at shapenote singings in Palo Alto: most recently, the occurrence of dragon(s), serpent(s), and hurricane(s) in Florence #121 (all of them unique in the book, according to Chris Thorman’s 1992 Concordance to the songbook); and a while back, the striking use of vice in Mission #204’s “luring scenes of vice” (one of two occurrences in the book, the other being in Columbus #67). Elsewhere, there’s Cambridge #287, a hymn of resistance to temptation; and O Come Away #334, a rousing temperance hymn (with a history in German student drinking songs).
Adventures in alcohol
February 21, 2018A recent Pinterest e-mail with boards on food and drink offered a number of remarkably named drinks, including two that were new to me: the Purple Fuck (powerfully alcoholic and powerfully sweet) and the German drink Gockelsperma ‘cock’s cum’, lit. ‘rooster sperm’ (made with Waldmeister syrup, from the sweet woodruff plant).
Herons in the garden
October 30, 2017Came by on Pinterest some considerable time ago, a photo billed as “Gartenkeramik Reiervogel – ein Designerstück von Brigitte Peglow”, showing a ceramic bird posing in a luxuriant garden, much like this:
(#1) Ceramic bird among variegated vinca, hostas, ferns, and more
Certainly looked like a heron, but I was puzzled by the German noun Reier.