Archive for the ‘My life’ Category

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Opening cans and jars

May 6, 2025

(I was hoping to get one little posting done, a tiny thing I started working on yesterday morning, just to show that I could finish something, however trivial, before tackling the mountain of more ambitious postings sitting in my queue; and to then be able to get out in an anomalously hot and beautiful day, maybe take my walker around the block. And then, roughly every 30 minutes, something new came in to take me away from my minuscule task, some of it alarming and disastrous, but all requiring my attention. At the very end of the day (having left the house only to get my mail) I finished the playful “Sol is secretly queer”.

By then, I had another, even more minuscule, task to do today. And it’s been like a replay of yesterday. While I was describing yesterday to my caregiver, a pair of contractors — surprise! — appeared, seeking the water shutoff valve for my condo and the one above it, so that they could get on with repair work in the condo above me. Half an hour of complex negotiations followed, then my water was off for several hours while workmen trooped in and out. While this was going on, I was obliged to do complicated advance sign-ins on-line for upcoming medical appointments. And now I return to my bit of domestic trivia.

I have not wept. I have not raged. I am, inexplicably, in a good frame of mind (and my vital signs are wonderful). I created an excellent soup for lunch out of random leftovers. I haven’t been able to work my weekly shower into the schedule (well, there was the 7 am grocery delivery, not expected until 10), but what the hell, there’s always tomorrow. I am wearing my FAGGOT t-shirt; I am faggot, hear me roar. I will, somehow, be able to do this.)

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Linguists, My life | Leave a Comment »

Sol is secretly queer

May 5, 2025

🇲🇽 It’s Cinco de Mayo today, but this posting has precious little Mexican content; don’t let that keep you from your celebrations, whatever they are.

I had intentions to cook up a homey Mexican pozole  (any occasion is a good one for pozole, in my book, and I always have a can of white hominy in the cupboard, just in case I want to assemble the materials for one), but the main fresh ingredient I had on hand was an big order of Chinese (mung) bean sprouts, so I chopped them up; added a can of lentils (another household staple), with their liquid; splashed in a dose of sriracha sauce; thickened the broth with a container of hummus (ground up chickpeas); and produced a rich, spicy, and crunchy  Chinese / Middle Eastern / Southeast Asian three-legume soup, heated in the microwave. It was fabulous. I might do it again, on purpose this time.

But this posting is a reaction to a card I got from Kathryn Burlingham in Portland OR roughly a month ago — I move sloth-like through my social responsibilities —  about (among other things) the toll of the closet for queer people. Trying to write out and then mail a physical card is, however, gravely difficult for me, while typing at my computer’s keyboard is merely somewhat painful, so this is my response to KB, which turns not so much on the closet — coming out, accepting myself, was heart-breakingly difficult for me, but I spent almost no time in the closet — but on the actual card that KB sent me, the Jahna Vashti greeting card (“vibrantly printed in [yes!] Portland OR on a sturdy, uncoated card stock”) “Brother Sun”:

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Music, My life, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | 5 Comments »

Linguist Arnold Zwicky shuts down grammar Nazis

May 4, 2025

Not how I expected to begin Dave Brubeck Day (in 5/4 time, as was his pleasure) / Four Dead in Ohio Day (dreadful memories from 1970, which come with a CSNY soundtrack), but there it was, listed by Google Alerts for the morning: on YouTube, on the “Today I Found Out: Feed Your Brain” channel, the segment

“In which linguist Arnold Zwicky shuts down grammar Nazis”

with Simon Whistler reading with great relish a passage from a posting of mine and savoring its vocabulary.

First, Google identifies me as a Public Figure (not just some mook off the streets, but in a class with, oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson). And now the tireless YouTuber Simon Whistler, with an audience of 2.52m subscribers to Today I Found Out, admires my word-slinging.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Music, My life, Peeving, This blogging life, Usage attitudes, Variation | 11 Comments »

Rest day

April 25, 2025

🐧 🐧 🐧 whoop whoop whoop it’s World Penguin Day, 4/25, and I have been pleasantly besieged with penguiniana from friends; as my contribution to the day, I offer a t-shirt with a double strength gayguin on it;


The bird’s coloration is rainbow-gay, and then it’s waving a rainbow flag as well

And then there’s the reductive mid portmanteau gayguin (gay + penguin), like liger, brunch, or smog — but with a whole word, rather than an initial word-part, as its first contributor (see my 4/22/25 posting “The tin portmantax man” on types of portmanteaus)

Today was supposed to be a rest day, in between a Thursday visit from my caregiver J (in which we got lots of housework done) and weekend work on a ton of blog stuff that has piled up dramatically. And a chance to tell you about the improvements in many small but significant aspects of my medical state, which my pedicurist and my caregiver (who observe me closely) have commented on with some amazement and delight. But all that was blanked out by endless hassles in trying to fix business stuff, by emergency academic matters, and by really foul weather (including a long spell of low barometric pressure that made it hard to use my hands at all).

Despite my not being able to get around to doing any of the things I’d planned for the day, I found pleasure in other, unexpected activities. Apparently, unreasonable equanimity in the face of unpleasantness goes along with the mysterious improvements in my physical state (J thinks that the attitude shift caused the physical improvements, and he might be right). But now I really have to get dinner and go to bed.  See you tomorrow.

 

Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, My life, Penguins, Portmanteaus, Rainbow | 1 Comment »

Me lookee, no findee

April 16, 2025

A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “One of these things is not like the others”, in which my (now AI-enhanced) Google search for

“African American linguists”

produced a display of 9 people (plus a further display of 4 others) which was instantly remarkable because the person in the position of pre-eminence in the first display, Walt Wolfram, was not (unlike all the others) African American / Black, but notably German American / white. WW is an amazing, prolific scholar of African American English and its uses and of African American communities, and he is a champion of those communities, certainly deserving of huzzahs and celebratory parades and official recognitions with laurel wreaths and gold-embossed certificates and all that stuff, but he’s unquestionably white — as, in fact, the photo accompanying his name in that display makes clear. (I’ll add that he doesn’t “talk Black” either. His everyday variety of English is working-class white Philadelphia, tenaciously maintained throughout years of formal education; it’s one of his badges of identity.)

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Posted in AI, Linguists, My life, Names, Race and ethnicity, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

An anecdote

April 12, 2025

… which will plug into two topics being developed in my posting queue (which is totally unmanageable in the face of recent events in my life and in the world): rich people, and the death in January of the Princeton philosopher Paul Benacerraf (who was my senior-year adviser in mathematics). I will have a lot more to say about both of these topics in future postings, but today I’ll just give you the zinger.

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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Mathematics, My life, Philosophy, Princeton, Science, Stories, Teaching, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »

The Cymbidium Lecture

April 7, 2025

During our monthly soc-motss zoom meeting yesterday, I mentioned my cymbidium orchids, and everyone fell into mild amazement that in my physical condition I managed to grow orchids, orchids were so fussy and difficult to grow, and on and on, with stories about people they knew. With some asperity, I explained that cymbidiums were different and protested that I had been posting about them for years, with descriptions and lots of photos, over and over, but apparently no one had noticed.

So here is my Cymbidium Lecture, with this photo of what I see out the window (through some blinds, which create a somewhat Impressionist image of the scene) from where I sit as I work at my computer. What I see this very day, 4/7/25:


Five plants in bloom today (one with two flower stalks); two others in this cluster have already finished blooming for this year; and there are two other clusters of plants (visible out of other windows); behind the cymbidiums, a wall covered with English ivy, Hedera helix

Here’s the lecture. I’m only going to say this once, so listen up.

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Posted in Language and plants, My life | Leave a Comment »

Another day at the Kharkiv opera

April 6, 2025

A comment on today’s little posting “The light hand and the hammer” from Chi Hang Cheung on Facebook, with my response:

— CHC: Glad to see that you can remain calm with the drastic political changes in the US!

— AZ > CHC: I am not calm. These little postings — more are in preparation — are a kind of therapy for me while I channel my alarm and anger on other fronts against the outrages of the government as it attempts to institute total control over public life and suppress or destroy significant parts of the population. But it’s absolutely essential to preserve art and play and human connection of every kind; we need a whole lot of Kharkiv opera. I’m doing what I can to sing.

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Posted in Language and politics, Music, My life, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Heart rates

April 4, 2025

Yes, I know I’m in the middle of several posting series, but I’ve fallen behind, so here’s a little thing about my medical state that I’ve found puzzling. But recently pleasing.

It’s about my pulse rate — my resting heart rate, or RHR for short. Which was close to 60 beats per minute for most of my life, gradually extending, as I aged, to reliably between 60 and 70 bpm, with a very occasional excursion to the low 80s. Standard reference sources tell me that normal RHR lies between 60 and 100 bpm and rises within these limits as you age (though the tables I’ve seen only take people up to the age of 70; I am 84, pushing 85).

For several years now I’ve been taking my vital signs (usually just RHR and blood pressure) right after washing up on arising in the morning. My first morning RHR has been as above, not really interesting. Until 3/13, when my RHR was 95, then 97 an hour later (while my blood pressure was stunningly good). My RHR then continued to hover close to 100 during 3/14 to 3/17, all day long, while my blood pressure continued to be in the good to splendid range. I felt nothing, no chest pain, no faintness or tiredness or any other symptom; in fact, I felt fine, and energetic.

I consulted with my daughter, and together we decided not to call any medical people (and I was responsible for allaying my caregiver J’s worries when he took my RHR). It went down to 83 on 3/18, then on 3/19 back up to 91 , then down to 63 20 minutes later. It was 61 on 3/20; then on 3/21, 93, but 20 minutes later it was 61. This new zooming up and down (admittedly, within the normal range, but the highs were a new phenomenon) continued through the beginning of April, with high days on 4/1 through 4/3, yesterday, when I did a long and tiring visit to Stanford, enlivened by substantial conversations with Stanford folk. Last night I had an especially satisfying sleep, with delightful dreams. My first morning vitals, at 5:35 am, were, whoo-ee:

blood pressure 115/66, resting heart rate 58

And I felt wonderful. Be happy for me.

No idea what tomorrow will be like.

 

Posted in Language and medicine, My life | 1 Comment »

Vacations

April 1, 2025

[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.)

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Posted in Academic life, Art, German, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

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