Archive for the ‘Morning names’ Category

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Spillville

January 27, 2024

A small town (population 385 in the 2020 census) in northeast Iowa, and today’s morning name. I have never been to Spillville, but in my world it’s a famous place, and when the name came into my head on awakening, I knew exactly why: as I came to consciousness, my Apple Music had just been playing Dvořák’s String Quartet in F, Op. 96 (“American”), so of course Spillville came to mind; it’s almost as good a Spillville trigger as his Symphony No. 9 in E minor (“From the New World”).

I will explain. Meanwhile, let me recommend the Wikipedia article on Dvořák, for its detailed telling of a remarkable life, of great talent, a lot of pluck, a fair amount of luck, generous humanity, and the benefit of champions, advocates on your behalf (in this case, primarily Johannes Brahms).

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Posted in Morning names, Music | Leave a Comment »

Morning names: kelp and skulk

January 15, 2024

Immediately, I thought: Kelp and Skulk, Attorneys at Law, famously slimy and devious. But what came into my head on awakening was just the noun kelp, for the algae; and the verb skulk, roughly ‘lurk’. Suspiciously similar to one another phonologically. If you combine them, you get the name of a common fish, the scup. And each of them spins off a huge range of phonologically similar and possibly thematically related words.

I did have an idea of how kelp and skulk got into my head — through a proper name that’s phonologically similar to both of my morning names: the surname Delk. The last name of a character on the American tv show The Closer, which I’d watched two episodes of last night: Thomas “Tommy” Delk, a fictional Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (beautifully portrayed by Courtney B. Vance).

Scup the fish and Delk the cop:


(#1) Stenotomus chrysops, a porgy; and (#2) Tommy Delk, a chief

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Posted in Actors, Language and animals, Language play, Lexical semantics, Morning names, Movies and tv, Names | Leave a Comment »

Morning name: urticaria

December 24, 2023

Today’s morning name, the nettlesome noun urticaria: the medical name for an allergic rash commonly known as hives. This time, I knew exactly why my morning name was in my head, and it had nothing to do with the Philip Glass music breaking in waves over me as I woke: it came right out of an re-run episode of the tv show Rizzoli & Isles that I had seen the day before.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Morning names, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »

Dalla sua pace

December 6, 2023

Today (12/6: St. Nicholas Day, Finnish Independence Day, and Mozart’s death day) my morning name was the Italian phrase dalla sua pace ‘on his / her peace’. From a Mozart opera. The music playing on my Apple Music when I awoke was indeed from opera in Italian, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, so if the phrase had come from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro — Figaro being the barber in question — the appearance of that phrase in my morning mind would have been easy to explain. Alas, Dalla sua pace (On her peace) is an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, quite a different plot, entirely barber-free and Figaro-free.

It is, of course, possible that my unconscious mind is not as up on the details of opera in Italian as my conscious mind, so it made this distant operatic association. Or maybe I was just reviving an interest in the preposizioni articolate ‘articulated (i.e., articled / arthrous) prepositions’ of Italian, of which dalla — combining the versatile preposition da (expressing source ‘from’, location ‘at, on’, and goal ‘to’) with the fem.sg. definite article la — is a prime example; here it is in a display of the articled prepositions (versions of this chart are found on many sites):


Prepositions down on the left, definite articles across at the top

(Articled prepositions are found in many European languages, as in French du = de ‘of’ + le (masc.sg.) and German zur = zu ‘to, towards’ + der (dat.fem.sg.), with very different details in each language.)

But the aria from Don Giovanni, what of that?

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Posted in French, German, Holidays, Italian, Morning names, Morphology and syntax, Morphophonology, Music, Quotations | 2 Comments »

Morning wood word

September 18, 2023

(Brief but penis-dense, so not to everyone’s  taste; there are, alas, no images)

My morning name today — a natural for someone as phallically oriented as I am — was pillicock, according to the OED (revised 2006), an archaic BrE word for the penis. A penis word that actually vanished, as a reference to the male organ or any semantic development from that. This despite the fact that it truly contained cock ‘penis’ (the pilli part is etymologically obscure).

(Irrelevantly, my mind went on a dactylic jaunt — pillicock, petticoat, billygoat, jerry-built, marzipan — and from there to a delicious double dactyl, marzipan pillicock. A majestic almond-candy phallus; no doubt someone actually makes these. Or perhaps a sweet-tongued prick, that lying seducer Don Juan in his guise as Captain Marzipan Pillicock.)

I would have expected pillicock to have gone the way of pillock (entirely of obscure etymology), which the OED (revised 2006) tells us started out as

Originally Scottish. The penis. Now English regional (northern) and rare. [1st cite 1568]

But mostly went the way of prick and dick and putz and others in various languages, which went bad, went downhill semantically: pillock has ended up as

Chiefly British colloquial (mildly derogatory). A stupid person; a fool, an idiot. [1st cite 1967]

(And yes, morning wood word is an odd portmanteau of morning wood and morning word. Leading, I suppose, to thoughts of morning wood word and burn stein, morning burn being a novel alternative to razor burn. Ok, I’ll stop.)

Posted in Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Morning names, Poetic form, Portmanteaus, Puns | 1 Comment »

Dream songs

May 17, 2023

… in two movements — starting with a dream from April 21st as I described it to Ellen Kaisse (where her role as a talented amateur choral singer and friend of musicians was especially relevant). And then, having separately posted, on April 19th, about the newly appointed fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, focused on Elizabeth Traugott and Hazel Simmons-McDonald (distinguished as academic administrators as well as scholars), I turned to EK in her long-time role as an academic administrator at the University of Washington (as chair of Linguistics and then as a dean) and was moved to muse about women in linguistics who have demonstrated real talent as academic administrators.

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Posted in Academic life, Gender and sexuality, Morning names, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

Notions, novelties, curios

March 23, 2023

Today’s morning names: notions in the sense ‘cheap, useful articles (especially for the household)’ (and then later specializations to sewing materials); which suggested novelties in the sense ‘small, inexpensive, ornamental items’; and curios ‘rare, unusual, or intriguing objects’.  All three concrete plural nouns arise from abstract nouns: notion ‘impulse or disposition to act’; novelty ‘newness, originality’; and curiosity ‘desire to know or learn things’.

I’ll consider the three concrete plurals in succession. I’m hoping that there’s some literature on the historical development of notions, but, given my very limited search abilities I haven’t been able to discover any of it.

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Posted in Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Morning names, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Breasts on buckwheat groats

December 19, 2022

Or something like that. In yesterday’s (12/18) morning name, which beats anything I’ve come up with before all hollow: the truly bizarre name I’ll spell Tits Varnishke, where the LN is pronounced /várnɪški/. Even more bizarrely, in whatever fever-dream fantasy gave rise to the name, it referred to a gangster.

Background. I’m in day 3 of what I think of as sick-day leave, when my usual responsibilities are lifted (though I try to do at least one small useful thing each day) and, because the illness is respiratory, I am even further isolated than before (and live behind a mask when people are obliged to be near me).

This is on top of all the other afflictions affecting me; at first it was just a very bad head cold, but then it took in my chest as well, so it hurts to breathe. I sleep sitting up in my recliner chair and I feel really crappy, but it’s just a cold. (My 02 stays at 97% or better, despite all the junk I cough up, and I have only occasional periods of a little bit of fever. I’m an old acquaintance of bronchitis and pneumonia, which I would recognize, but all I have now is a wretched cold. It will pass. There’s no reason to think it’s COVID, but I’ll check tomorrow.)

Mostly the rule is: if you have a respiratory virus, STAY HOME; don’t go to work or wherever and expose other people to your virus. Especially now, when respiratory illnesses are at very high levels.

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Posted in Language and food, Morning names, My life, Names, Nicknames | Leave a Comment »

Agador, and his flagrant Guatemalan-ness

August 14, 2022

Agador, today’s morning name, which I quickly expanded to Agador Spartacus. Calling up wonderful images of Hank Azaria’s character in the comedy film The Birdcage:


In the movie, Agador is male couple Armand and Albert’s flamboyantly gay Guatemalan housekeeper / maid, who poses as a Greek butler named Spartacus for the purposes of a family charade on behalf of Armand’s son Val; you can watch a short clip of  a bewigged Agador dancing while feather-dusting here

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Posted in Actors, Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Morning names, Movies and tv, Names | 3 Comments »

Panjandrumery

July 19, 2022

My morning name of 6/5, which came to me, not in my head on awakening (the way morning names usually do), but on Facebook upon my firing up my computer, from John Wells, who was exclaiming with surprised delight: “I’m now a panjandrum“.

JW had just come across a 1/29/19 piece on Tony Thorne’s language and innovation site, “Mockney, Estuary — and the Queen’s English”, in which Thorne referred to “the Linguistics and Phonetics department at UCL [University College London] under the panjandrum of phonology Professor John Wells”.


(#1) Not JW, but the Great Panjandrum of Randolph Caldecott’s 1885 picture book, on its cover (on the book, see below)

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Posted in Books, Language play, Linguists, Morning names, My life, Nonsense, Quotations | 2 Comments »

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