I had somehow missed this Wikipedia page until I stumbled on it this morning:
Zwicky is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Archive for the ‘Names’ Category
Notable Zwickys
April 29, 2026Stylish? Or in costume?
April 25, 2026(lots of discussion of men’s bodies in street language and similar references to sex between men, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Stylish? Or in costume? There can be a fine line here, often crossed flagrantly — in my opinion, at any rate — in high-fashion shows. And then also in the far reaches of premium underwear for men, especially from the raunchily named Breedwell company — whose name includes the sexual verb breed ‘pedicate a man bareback (without a condom) to orgasm’.
(Translation in plain, but seriously vulgar, language: pedicate is a Latinate verb for engaging in insertive anal intercourse — fucking someone up the ass — and breed is the related slang achievement verb for bareback man-on-man sex — conveying that the fucker comes (shoots his load) in the other man’s ass.)]
Living tubes, no sex
April 4, 2026Walking the neighborhood with Isaac brought us to resting by a planter of weird plants — tall, stiff, hollow tubes in sections, living green things with no hint of flowers or seeds — outside Joe and the Juice at 240 Hamilton Ave. (at Ramona St., a block and a half from my house). I noted how tough the plants were (with some moisture, they grow ferociously, and their stems are naturally coated with silica, so that the stems can actually be used to scour pots and pans). Unfortunately, I forgot the evocative names of the plant — common name horsetail, botanical name Equisetum (Latin for ‘horse bristle’) — or the significant fact that the plants had neither flowers nor seeds because (like ferns) they were modern plants surviving in much the same form as their ancestors from prehistoric times, before the invention of sex in plants, and produced spores rather than seeds.
An impressive stand, in the wild, of the species Isaac and I rested by at Joe and the Juice, Equisetum hyemale:
The prehistoric plants included gigantic horsetail trees
A moment with my mates Baz and Hazza
March 20, 2026As a Z-person, I was immediately pulled into Bert Vaux’s query to his “British and Antipodean friends” on Facebook this morning: Bert is collecting examples of -Z(ZA) nicknames (what I’ll call znicknames), like Baz for Barry and Hazza for Harry. The -Z(ZA) (phonetically -z / -zǝ) replaces an intervocalic r following what is, in the varieties in question, an accented short / lax / open vowel: ɪ ɛ æ a ʌ ɔ. Some more conversions of model names to znicknames from Bert’s collection:
Carrie, Carol → Caz
Darren, Darryl → Daz, Dazza
Jerry, Jeremy → Jez, Jezza
Karen → Kazza
Larry → Laz, Lazza
Mary → Maz, Mazza
Animated families
March 18, 2026In the Wayno / Piraro Bizarro for 3/16/26, two characters from Disney animation commiserate in a bar: Dopey (the least of the Seven Dwarfs in Disney’s telling of the Snow White tale from the Brothers Grimm) with a mug of beer, Goofy (the canine companion of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in a long series of short features) doing shots. If you don’t recognize who they are and what their names are, the cartoon is incomprehensible, because the dwarf and the dog are sharing their regret at the names their parents gave them:
What kind of parent would name their son Dopey or Goofy? Those are epithets, not ordinary names, and while the names of all seven dwarfs are actually (evocative) epithets, Goofy hangs with his buddies Mickey and Donald (who have alliterative, but not epithetic, names), so he can feel especially aggrieved (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
The Seven Dwarfs are a band of miners, in both the Grimm and Disney telling of the tale of Snow White, and though they all must have had parents, we know nothing about them; the dwarfs just materialize in their little house, in need of a housekeeper’s touch. The Disney comic animals have vaguely delineated, largely unseen families; about them we know little. Goofy appears to be the screw-up child in his family. And ended up getting called by an epithet.
Well, Goofy began life as Dippy Dawg, again with an unflattering epithet. (My father, with whom I shared a name, sailed through his adult life addressed by an epithet, not his name: the positive-vibe epithet Zip, alluding to his pleasant energy.)
Neighborhood walking: botanical notes
March 17, 2026A follow-up to my 3/16 posting “The breakfast walk”, in which I looked at a few of the businesses and offices on the walk
from 722 Ramona St., between Forest and Homer (my house) to 566 Emerson St., at the northwest corner at Hamilton (the Palo Alto Creamery, a standard place for Saturday breakfast with my daughter Elizabeth in the old days), along a route fixed in its details
with a promise that I’d do a separate botanical posting, about some of the flowers and trees along the way. Necessarily much more selective — there are many hundreds of plant species in those two and a half blocks — and sensitive to date as well as location (customarily, my first example blooms and my last example fruits around now, in the Ides of March / St. Patrick’s Day period); and so it is this year)
El Palo Alto
March 17, 2026In yesterday’s posting “The breakfast walk”, one notable feature of that walk was what is now the elegant Nobu Hotel Epiphany, which preserves (from the earlier Casa Olga hotel) the 6-story-tall mosaic mural of El Palo Alto, the coast redwood tree for which the city of Palo Alto is named:
(#1) The Casa Olga mural
(#2) The mural on the much-expanded Nobu Hotel Epihany
I remind you that this is a short distance from my house, but has just become part of the urban landscape, taken for granted — as indeed we take for granted the many actual coast redwoods growing companionably on our streets (reaching straight into the sky, towering over a hundred feet, easily hundreds of years old). (There’s one such tree only about 50 feet from my front door.)
And I remind you that the tree in #1 and #2 is not an abstract or imagined coast redwood, but a specific Sequoia sempervirens — El Palo Alto — that grows in a little urban forest park, alongside the railroad tracks (originally Southern Pacific, now Caltrain) at the border between Palo Alto (in Santa Clara County) and Menlo Park (in San Mateo County), only abut 7 blocks from my house.
Name sharing
March 11, 2026The Zippy strip for today, 3/11, all about sharing a personal name (with some intrusions of the name Melvin):
The large generalization is that mentioning two people together implicates some special relationship, even more so if they share a name (personal name or family name)
In the first panel we start with two authors, from widely separated times, in different genres (plays vs. fiction), and with hugely different styles — but both with the personal name William.
The personal-name sharing goes on with wildly different characters, oddly yoked to one another: Oscar Wilde the writer and Oscar the Grouch the Muppet; Jackson Pollock the painter and Jackson Browne the rock musician (whose career started with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band); Mona Freeman the actress (and painter) and the Mona Lisa (the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting).
My hedge is a blood-headed beautiful man
March 1, 2026Out in my walker recently, getting some exercise, accompanied by my helper Isaac, showing him places in the neighborhood (with some history of those places) and opening up the landscape around us by identifying plants, giving him their names (common and taxonomic) and explaining plant families, showing him the scents of the plants, their structures, and how they are used in the neighborhood streets and gardens. From little ground-cover plants to the huge coast redwoods that tower above us. What was once just background becomes a rich, engaging tapestry, full of things to see and talk about.
Isaac has a keen eye for detail and tons of curiosity, and he brings a rich and astonishing life history to our walks: to start with, he’s Fijiian (his native language turns out to be jam-packed with interest for the linguist: its word-order type is the rare VOS, and it has a fabulously intricate suite of personal pronouns).
There’s much more to say, but on to a very specific puzzle from our walk a few days ago, which took us past a number of privacy hedges made from a plant I don’t recall ever having noticed before, but was inescapable because it was covered with bright-red spiky flowers:
The plant in question, growing as a small shrub (photo from the Cambridge University Botanical Garden website )
