Back on Thursday 11/6, amid the hour-long marathon of signing and notarizing documents, the jaunty house notary remarked, with surprise and delight, that she’d never had an A.Z. before, never in 25 years on the job. (There are a fair number worldwide, but, it seems, very few in the US — and there have apparently only ever been two Arnold Zwickys, the other being my father.) On a quick ramble through my memory, I found only three Americans:
Archive for the ‘Names’ Category
A.Z.
November 8, 2025A World Postcard
October 21, 2025In my mail yesterday, 10/20, a World Postcard Day postcard from my old friend and Stanford colleague Ryan Tamares, mailed from him (in Mountain View CA, a few miles from my place) on 9/22, to go through the World Postcard Day site in College Station TX on 10/1 (the day itself) and then wend its way to me (whether by intention or misadventure) as if had come by surface mail from the place in the card’s picture, Vienne en Isère, France (note: not the much better known Vienne en Autriche / Vienna in Austria / Wien in Österreich).
I’ll put off the occasion and its sponsoring organization to an appendix to the main posting, which is about the card itself: the town pictured in it, the shop in that town pictured in it, and its source.
Jessica Hagedorn
October 19, 2025[warning: female full frontal nudity at the end, plus a beheading, so not to everyone’s taste (note that this is an actual Penguin Books cover, and it counts as art; certainly it’s not intended as, shudder, pornography]
My morning name on awaking on 10/15 — almost surely the result of subliminal perceptions during sleep, through some story broadcast on KQED-FM during the night (I’m now doing talk rather than music during the night). From Wikipedia:
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn [AZ: Tarahata is her birth surname, Hagedorn her (Filipino) husband’s surname; Hagedorn is a surname of Germanic origin (MHG hagedorn ‘hawthorn’)] (born May 29, 1949) is an American playwright, writer, poet, and multimedia performance artist.
Hagedorn is an of mixed descent. She was born in Manila, Philippines, to a mother of Scots-Irish, French, and Filipino descent and a father of Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese heritage. Moving to San Francisco, California, in 1963, Hagedorn received her education at the American Conservatory Theater training program. To further pursue playwriting and music, she moved to New York City in 1978.
In 1978, Joseph Papp produced Hagedorn’s first play, Mango Tango. Hagedorn’s other productions include Tenement Lover, Holy Food, and Teenytown. Her mixed media style often incorporates song, poetry, images, and spoken dialogue. From 1975 until 1985, she was the leader of a poet’s band — The West Coast Gangster Choir (in SF) and later The Gangster Choir (in New York).
… [And she wrote] the novel Dogeaters, which illuminates many different aspects of Filipino experience, focusing on the influence of America through radio, television, and movie theaters
The Pomeranian-nimbus
October 12, 2025An Ellis Rosen cartoon that came by on Facebook recently:
(#1) The hybrid creature the pomeranian-nimbus, being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner — so being presented as an extraordinary dog, a cloud canine; note that the woman’s dog recognizes the p-n as a dog, and appears to want to play with it (see the wagging tail)
(The name of the dog breed is standardly capitalized, because it’s a proper name denoting a creature originating in the geographical region of Pomerania, and I’ll use Pomeranian from here on.)
The compound Pomeranian-nimbus is a copulative N1 + N2 compound (like Swiss-American or hunter-gatherer), denoting a thing or things of both the N1 type and the N2 type. But in fact the creature is not just a mix of Pomeranian dog and nimbus cloud, but is actually a nimbus Pomeranian ‘Pomeranian dog that is (also) a nimbus cloud’ (your standard N + N compound in English is semantically modifier + head) — rather than a Pomeranian nimbus ‘nimbus cloud that is also, or at least resembles, a Pomeranian dog’. A nimbus Pomeranian, or, more compactly, a nimbopomeranian, a nimpom for short.
Holy Romaine Empire
October 11, 2025🏳️🌈 👨❤️👨 🏳️🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)
The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:
(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)
The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.
The FY restaurant
October 5, 2025Following on my 9/27/25 posting “From the annals of remarkable commercial names” (about the Chew Chew Grill / Chew Chew’s Diner in Toronto), Sim Aberson wrote on Facebook on 10/3:
— SA > AZ: While discussing commercial names, a very good Vietnamese restaurant in Miami, Phuc Yea — of course it’s pronounced fook yeh. [I omit commentary on the well-deployed SPAR (aka dangler) and the NP (topic-introducing) sentence fragment]
— AZ > SA: Oh my. No doubt intentional. Though I’ll point out that the enthusiastic intensive-modifier use of the F-word in Fuck yeah! is pretty much as low on the raunchiness scale as the F-word gets.
As it turns out, definitely intentional. And cheeky.
Eggcorns, innocent and deliberate
August 26, 2025From a reader on 8/24:
Are you involved in collecting eggcorns? In case you are, I thought you might be interested in a potential one that I’ve encountered “in the wild” (i.e., a Reddit post). This person wrote jig solve puzzles instead of jigsaw puzzles:
I should have been diagnosed [with ADHD] as a child but it was the early 90s in a poor rural area. Special ed at my school didn’t diagnose me with anything specific … they just told my mom I needed to spend time doing jig solve puzzles. So, I forced my way through. (Reddit posting)
My response:
I certainly have been involved in collecting eggcorns. But there are only so many balls you can juggle at one time, and I am now a old man with not a lot of time left, so I’ve been pretty much out of the eggcorn business. But you will be pleased to hear that jigsaw > jig solve isn’t in the eggcorn database and hasn’t come up in the eggcorn forum, so I might post on it.
And now I am.
Yo soy Johnny Peso
August 23, 2025In the 8/22 Bizarro strip, Wayno presents us with Johnny Peso, an intricately constructed Mexican-Spanish and Mexican-culture counterpart to Johnny Paycheck as a performer on the Grand Ole Opry stage. If you don’t know about Johnny Paycheck and the Grand Ole Opry, you’re doomed; the cartoon will be incomprehensible. If you know who they are, you’ll get the joke; and the more you know about them, the more you’ll see in Wayno’s cartoon (I suspect there are still more things that I’ve missed). And then there’s a lot to say about the way Johnny Peso introduces himself. The cartoon:
(#1) The joke in the cartoon comes the two bilingual puns: Spanish peso punning on English paycheck, Spanish olé punning on English vernacular ole; the puns are, in addition, what I’ve called (semiotically) satisfying puns (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
And then there’s a lot more.
The discontinuous groin
July 23, 2025(About male crotch care, carefully phrased, but still deeply into male crotches, so not to everyone’s taste.
From a morning some time ago, after a pleasant long sleep that ended with a hot sex dream that turned into a sweet romantic dream, from which I awoke feeling especially refreshed. Got to the morning wash-up portion of the program (scrub hands, refresh face, wash crotch); if you take quick whizzes every hour during the night, bedside, then your hands and all of your crotch, from pubes to perineum, need a serious washing (and your damp briefs go into the laundry basket, to be replaced by fresh dry skivvies). Normally the crotch wash is a brisk businesslike affair, pleasing but in no way sensuous — but on this morning my body was singing along with my spirit, and I experienced the cleansing as a delicate, luxurious massage of my guy parts. It was delightful.
I began humming the tune to “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja / Stets lustig heissa hopsasa!” (I find Papageno inspiring) while I went through the routine: pubes and the belly just above them; penis shaft and base; testicles; the clefts on either side of the genitals, alongside the thighs; and the perineum. Along the way, I idly wondered what those clefts — roughly analogous to armpits — were called. When I got to my computer I quickly discovered that the compound thigh pit (analogous to standard armpit and informal elbow pit ‘the inside of the elbow’ and knee pit ‘the back of the knee’; this is the world of paired bodily concavities, or clefts) was moderately common (a few cites below); that crotch pit seemed to be used only for the perineum; and that the noun groin ‘thigh pit’ was also common (a few cites of both groins below).
Then, since there’s a use of the noun groin for the whole area (in kick him in the groin and the like) I went to see what NOAD said about the paired concavities. And was mightily surprised to find that it seemed to maintain that the groin was a spatially discontinuous region of the body, not unlike the nation of Pakistan at the time of the partition of British India into separate nations of India and Pakistan, with Pakistan coming in two widely separated pieces: West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). For the groin, one region, two sides; not two paired bodyparts. This view of the semantics of groin is shared by the Wikipedia entry. But not, it seems, by most speakers.
A careful look at the OED (in an entry still in revision) suggests that it’s the source of the confusion, since it attempts to treat the bodypart noun (in things like along with my armpits, both my groins are sweaty and in need of deodorant) and the body region, or place / location, noun (in things like the glands in my groin, on both sides, are swollen) with just one definition (despite their different semantics and distinct syntax), and mixes examples of both types.
On the Z … Y watch
July 21, 2025I am ever alert for words, especially names, with initial Z, even more with initial ZW or Z … W … And then of course Z … Y, for which ZIPPY (the Pinhead) is the standout name. And then the restaurant name Z & Y flashed by me in a Facebook ad (before it got deleted, like all ads). Not just a restaurant, but an excellent one, and in San Francisco’s Chinatown. From the street:
Z&Y, opened in 2008 by married couple Lijun Han and Michelle Zhang; Z and Y are the initials of Michelle’s last name and Chinese first name
