Archive for the ‘Names’ Category

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Day of the bed scorpions

July 11, 2025

On Facebook yesterday, George V. Reilly passed on an assortment of Joe Dator cartoons that the artist is selling the originals of. From these, one instantly made me laugh out loud at its preposterousness:


(#1) Plagued by pests? Bring in a predator to kill them off! | Got bugs? Scorpions zap bugs! | Bed bug infestation? Bed scorpions will do the trick!| It’s just common sense, right? (cartoon from The American Bystander)

No, wait, wait! That’s not what we had in mind! Dator just took simple reasoning and followed it wherever it led, even to an absurd situation, like scorpions in a bed.

Two more. I expect bed scorpions to give me the willies for some time to come. Meanwhile, two more of Dator’s offerings, now from the world of dining out.

Who gets which order? The framing event is the everyday one of a server in a diner connecting each customer to the dish they ordered. The absurdity lies in neither customer being from our everyday world and each being most unlikely to be eating in a diner, and then in there being no establishment, anywhere, in which these two would be eating together:


(#2) The nominal odd couple, the Tower of London yeoman and the formicavore edentate — the beefeater and the anteater — united by the form of their names (indicating their presumable preferences in comestibles), but nothing else (unpublished cartoon)

Not my order! The framing event is again an everyday one, a server who’s gotten an order wrong. But, well, nobody expects the Great Wall of China:


(#3) Of course he should send it back — but you can’t help wondering what the service platter was like (published in the New Yorker on 12/23/24)

There are more, equally preposterous. But I vowed to stop at three.

(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings on Joe Dator cartoons.)

Posted in Cartoonists, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Names | Leave a Comment »

RESIST

July 7, 2025

The message from my fellow QUESTer — another Queer University Employee At Stanford — Ryan Tamares, on a postcard mailed to me on 6/19, in the middle of Pride Month:

Happy Pride !
Pride always ! !
— RESIST —

The holiday moment has passed, but now we’re in a world where we have to actively resist, on a daily basis, against the brownshirts and blackshirts serving our overlords. And join with the drag queens and thrown-away club kids who, in one of our foundation tales, fought back against the cops who came to ruin their lives, and ours.

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Posted in Art, Biology, Categorization and Labeling, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, My life, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Stanford, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

The out@in shirt

July 5, 2025

From yesterday (for me, a long 4th of July work day, 6 am to 6 pm) on my Facebook page (somewhat edited):

In going through stuff in my closets, I came across a t-shirt (one that fits me, so I put it on) that has a logo on the front: a (portrait) rectangle with horizontal stripes of the rainbow flag in it and the word IN in white letters superimposed on the rainbow stripes. The back of the shirt identifies it as from out@in, which is presumably some sort of gay organization, but I don’t recognize the name or remember how I came to have the shirt.

My attempts to search for the organization and the logo came to nought, as did my attempts to scan the t-shirt logo into my scanning printer, so I appealed to readers to supply me with information about the organization and with a copy of the logo. (Given the precarity of my current life, I did not take well to people who, instead of giving me the information I sought, explained to me how I should have done the searches.)

(more…)

Posted in Academic life, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Logos, My life, Names, Rainbow, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

I am the rose for Sharon

June 22, 2025

Yesterday, a brief and multiply allusive birthday poem for my friend Sharon (“A rose for Sharon”, on this blog here), along with the birthday gift to her of a big spathiphyllum plant, which should soon send up some of its sexy flowers. Various associations floated in my mind along with the plants and their symbolic eroticism.

Molly Bloom and her soliloquy of yes, but directed to a woman. And, overwhelmingly, the singer of the Song of Solomon 2:1, a woman who declares that she is (figuratively) the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys and goes on into (heterosexual) erotic verse from the woman’s point of view (which can of course be repurposed as directed to a woman), ending with a surprising celebration of spring (in places where winter is the rainy season), suggesting a springtime of her body as well as the season:

My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone.

And from that I’m taken to shapenote music and to factual questions about the plant the rose of Sharon and about Sharon the place from which this plant (and the Sharons of this world) got its name.

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Posted in Figurative language, Gender and sexuality, Hebrew, Language and plants, Language and the body, Music, Names, Placenames | Leave a Comment »

A rose for Sharon

June 21, 2025

An occasional poem (in free verse) for my friend Sharon on her recent birthday, wrapped up in the calendar, the female body, and plants and their sexual symbolisms, with photos. The poem first, then remarks on its form, then a bit of background information.

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Posted in Art, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language of sex, Names, Phallicity, Poetry, Signs and symbols, Taxonomic vs. common, Tongue twisters, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »

Zapf, Zagat, and Zimmerman

June 16, 2025

The morning names of 6/14, all Z names — well, I’m a Z-person, and I notice — all of which were in my mind from recent mentions on Facebook

of Zapf dingbats (named for the typeface designer Hermann Zapf)

of the Zagat restaurant guides (now taken over by Google)

and of the singer-songwriter Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing MN (who became famous as a very young man in NYC under the name Bob Dylan and is more or less constantly in the news)

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Posted in Design, Language and food, Morning names, Music, Names, Professional names, Typography | Leave a Comment »

From 6/10: creamy-white blue-eyed grass

June 13, 2025

Among Tuesday’s crowd of events (it’s now Friday, and life has been stressful and unpleasant, but I’m trying to produce at least one pleasant thing): a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden, taken there by Sharon Gray of Bay Area Geriatric Care Managers. Too much in bloom or getting ready to bloom (or harvest, in the case of food plants) for me to post on more than a little bit. I’ve picked out two plants I admired but didn’t know. One is still a mystery (there was a label, but it clearly applied to a plant that had already bloomed and gone dormant, not to this ornamental grass with pretty bell-shaped purple-blue flowers), but the other had a label that applied to it (and not to some other plant in its neighborhood), so I can tell you that it’s an especially vigorous Sisyrinchium striatum — the creamy-white blue-eyed grass of my title.

There will be photos, including one of me sitting in the garden; this one will require a fashion digression, on the tank top I’m wearing in the photo, a recent acquisition for summer wear.

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Posted in Clothing, Labels Are Not Definitions, Language and plants, My life, Names, Semantics of compounds, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

Sunday’s pseudonym synchronicity

May 27, 2025

(Well-endowed porn actors and masturbation sleeves are on the menu, so this posting is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

On Sunday, my e-mail once again brought me, by happy accident, two mailings (as it happened, back-to-back this time) on a theme (AMZ pseudonyms this time). As reported in that day’s posting, “Gigantic cylinders”, the earlier fortuitous confluence had to do with two gigantic solid-cylindrical things: one raunchy — porn actor Sir Peter’s gigantic penis — and one innocent — White Giant calla lilies — while Sunday’s pseudonymy theme involved, first a raunchy name — Baxxx, the name of a fitness model and gay porn actor (aka Baxter Linn), who’s now the spokesperson for the Fleshjack masturbation sleeve — and then, in the very next message, an innocent name — BigAlex, the trade name for a fancy walking cane that my friend Bonnie Bendon Campbell uses.

Both of these names fortuitously allude to AMZ pseudonyms. I am sometimes Alex Adams, or just Alex, and I am sometimes ba (for biiig arnold, a playful spelling for the jocular Big Arnold). I am also the creator of XXX-rated comic homoerotic collages, so I could be said to be baXXX. And then from Big Arnold and Alex for Arnold, we get Big Alex / BigAlex.

Knowing the history of my pseudonyms, Bonnie was entirely aware of the significance of the name BigAlex, so sent me a photo of her cane. Fleshjack’s guy being called Baxxx, however, was just a wonderful surprise — an onomastic windfall.

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Posted in Chinese, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Names, Nicknames, Professional names | 2 Comments »

The 5/26 New Yorker

May 24, 2025

The latest issue of the magazine has two cartoons I want to pick out for comment, one (by Mick Stevens) because it’s an addition to Arnoldia, the domain of things with the name Arnold; the other (by David Sipress) because it’s a pointed comment on this alarming and dangerous time in my country.

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Posted in History, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Poetry, Slurs | 6 Comments »

J.R. Ross and his cowboy poetry

May 17, 2025

In memoriam John Robert Ross (May 7, 1938 to May 13, 2025). The news of Haj’s death came in my morning e-mail on Wednesday 5/14, right next to a Bizarro cartoon with a cowboy joke / restaurant joke, turning on an absurd pun on ranch dressing that Haj (who was a walking library of jokes) would have appreciated, and so with a synchronicity that Haj would have delighted in.

J.R. Ross was an outsized figure in linguistics, whose ideas (beginning with his 1967 MIT dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax) altered the field. Haj Ross was a literally outsized person physically, a large, blocky man (he really did play football for Yale as an undergraduate) with a big presence. And Haj, no surname needed, had an outsized personality — endlessly imaginative, enormously funny, astonishingly empathetic and gentle, “big and sparkly” (me on Facebook), with “an amazing facility for the intricacies of English” (John Beavers on FB) and “an innocent sense of wonder about language, poetry, and the world” (Susan Fischer on FB). And resolutely counter-cultural (often barefooted, and rarely standing on ceremony), also attuned to all the Zen-inflected frequencies on your radio dial.

He was a good friend of mine, and an inspiration to me, from 1963 on. So this posting is hard to write. I will collect myself and pick out some facts, some assortment of outrageous anecdotes, a small selection of his poetry and artwork, and even (since, like Haj, I’m hopelessly a linguist) a note about a neglected feature of his work on syntax that I think is important in the intellectual history of the field. I will do all that in another posting, I hope tomorrow.

Today I’ll start the way Haj often started his public presentations. With a joke, that Bizarro cartoon (remember the cartoon?). From which a Google AI Overview search then led me, goofily, into a strange dusty canyon of verse, Jim Ross’s self-published Pull Up a Chair: Cowboy Poetry. Truly, Haj would have loved that.

(more…)

Posted in AI, Ambiguity, Books, Clothing, Compounds, Data points, Jokes, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Poetry, Puns | 2 Comments »

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