It’s Labor Day weekend in my country — unofficially serving also as the end of summer — and we are supposed to be celebrating ordinary working people (OWP). Eventually, I’ll grind into the tangled mass of sociocultural attitudes and practices clustered around the concept of OWP in America, but today I’m starting with the small and personal.
Archive for the ‘Names’ Category
Labor Day 2026 #1
September 5, 2026My name
September 2, 2026I’m attached to my FN Arnold — because it comes from my father and grandfather, who I am pleased to honor. But (as I’ve written about many times on this blog) in the modern US, it comes with a load of awkward associations, and people are inclined to see it as somewhat weird, funny — maybe, ugh, foreign. So they misremember it, as something more palatable to them.
Just this morning alone, in quick succession, I was addressed as:
Albert, Harold, and Donald
I could start a law firm for us.
(Correcting people just annoys them — legitimately, because it breaks whatever kind of everyday interaction we were having.)
This is the sort of thing that led me to develop my alter ego Alex Adams (more postings on that). But Alex is there for (various) special occasions, not for everyday use. I do treasure Alex, but he’s a different guy.
Meanwhile, I have had to learn that I might be expected to respond to pretty much any trochaic male name (there are more: Arthur and Herbert, especially, but I’ve occasionally gotten Aaron and Henry, too). You learn to be flexible. But this morning I felt the powerful surge of anti-Albert revolt. When it came to Donald, I wanted to snap back: CALL ME ISHMAEL, the outcast.
(My father, in these very circumstances, just took his college nickname, Zip (an admirable name for him), and used it for everyday purposes all of his life; everybody, including my mother, called him Zip, and when my man Jacques came into the family as a second son for him, Jacques called him Zip too. Of course.)
Blues for Mr. Arnold
August 11, 2026It’s happening again. The staff where I live now have mostly taken to addressing me as Mr. Arnold — because to lots of Americans (of whatever origins), Mr. Zwicky seems to be simply unpronounceable, a hurdle too high. This produces a twinge of sociolinguistic distress in me, because of the regrettable history of the American address form Mr. FN [that is, FirstName], as in Blues for Mr. Charlie.
Aaron Broadwell, the sequel
August 1, 2026🐇🐇🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August, with a leporine shout-out to remember 1291, the traditional date of the formation of the Swiss federation: Hail, Helvetia!
Now to dive into today’s topic in medias res, with this 7/30 Facebook greeting from Pietro Giovanni to Aaron Broadwell on the occasion of AB’s 64th birthday, somewhere around that time:
Many returns of the day to my favorite linguist
AB is George Aaron Broadwell (known as Aaron Broadwell), Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the Univ. of Florida (Gainesville). PG is AB’s husband Peter Marino under the pseudonym Pietro Giovanni. For further complexity, since there are a regrettably large number of men named Peter Marino, some of them famous in their fields, Peter Marino uses the nickname Piet as his professional name; Piet Marino is the author of young adult novels (Dough Boy and Magic and Misery):
(#1) The Piet Marino logo
Mononga Hela!
July 1, 2026🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit, the sultry bunnies of July! But they are no match for Mononga Hela, the monstrous snake that swallows fat Carnegie melons, prodigious feral boars, and of course entire railway trains whole — the fearsome creature that in popular lore is said to have consumed all of western Pennsylvania in a fit of pique. Mononga Monga Ooga Gila Hellmouth!
But first, the Zippy strip from 6/27:
Beyond spelling: Zippy appreciates the power of the name Monongahela; and of course potrzebie, but the word for the day is Monongahela
On the AZ watch at Stanford linguistics
May 27, 2026The Stanford linguistics AZ community — adjunct faculty Annie Zaenen and Arnold M. Zwicky, graduate student Anissa Zaitsu — is pleased to announce the PhD dissertation oral presentation of one of its little band:
The Landscape of Polarity-Sensitivity in African American English: Meaning and Structure by Anissa Rei Zaitsu: PhD dissertation oral presentation (Monday, June 8, 2026, 1:00-2:15pm). Committee: Vera Gribanova (co-chair), Cleo Condoravdi (co-chair), Boris Harizanov, Nandi Sims, and Gabriella Safran (Slavic Languages and Literatures, university chair).
The legions of BD
May 23, 2026(genitals and sex acts discussed in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
From the Monty Python fandom wiki:
Biggus Dickus is a fictional character in the Monty Python film Life of Brian, portrayed by Graham Chapman. He is a Roman nobleman and officer. He is married, according to his friend Pontius Pilate, to Incontinentia Buttocks.
BD’s sexual-onomastic legions have advanced throughout modern media, where they have a particularly powerful role in gay male pornography; some productions are staffed almost entirely by raunchily named performers, their names travesties on those of masculine icons; louche plays on vivid everyday words; and vocabulary smeared with the X, XX, and XXX of obscenity.
Two striking examples that have come by me recently: a man who does business as Feral Fux or Feral Fuxxx; and another who performs as Fabio Stallion or Stallion Fabio.
Latino meat baskets
May 10, 2026Yesterday’s dinner order (big enough for that meal and today’s lunch): the Meat Basket Salad from Tacos El Grullense #1, in Redwood City:
(#1) The meat basket at El Grullense #1 (the Tacos El Grullense Grill in Redwood City is the first in a Bay Area family-owned chain of taquerias): beans, choice of meat (grilled chicken for me), rice, onions, cilantro, salsa, lettuce, tomatoes, guacamole, cheese, and sour cream in a crispy tortilla basket
Three plants
May 6, 2026Three plants — all old favorites of mine — that have recently caught my helper Isaac’s attention on our walks around downtown Palo Alto: two because of their striking foliage and flowers, one because its multitude of yellow flowers seem to thrive everywhere, even in the most unlikely wastelands. Then the first two have remarkable — and, alas, similar — names: acanthus, agapanthus. While all three have odd common names: bear’s breeches / britches, lily of the Nile (not a lily, and from South Africa, far from the Nile), daylily (again, not a lily — and why day?).