Archive for the ‘Narrative’ Category

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The chronicler of lives

June 28, 2025

From  6/19 on Facebook, an exchange between Aaron Broadwell and me (somewhat expanded in this version):

— AB > AZ: Arnold, I wonder if you knew Miriam Petruck, who died about two months ago. [with the link below:]

Linguist List 36.1873, 6/17/25, “In Memoriam Miriam R.L. Petruck (1952-2025)”: by Hans C. Boas, dated 6/14/25

[beginning:] Dr. Petruck was born April 11, 1952. She received her B.A. in Linguistics from Stony Brook University in New York in 1972 and her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. In 1986, she received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, with Prof. Charles J. Fillmore as the head of her dissertation committee. Her dissertation on Hebrew body-part metaphors combined two of her lifelong interests, the scientific study of the Hebrew language and Cognitive Linguistics. Her dissertation was the first one to apply Frame Semantics to linguistic analysis. She became involved in the major research projects which Prof. Fillmore and his colleague Prof. Paul Kay undertook in the 1990s, developing the twin theories of Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar. She participated in the discussions leading to the creation of the FrameNet project (the practical implementation of Frame Semantics) in 1997, helping to define frames and to annotate some of the data in the FrameNet database.

For the rest of her life, she continued to publish and speak about both theories (particularly about Frame Semantics and its application to NLP), at conferences and seminars around the world.

— AZ > AB: I did indeed. Through my regular association with the Berkeley Linguistics Society in the old days. The death notice by Hans Boas on Linguist List focused on her position as a kind of international ambassador for FrameNet.

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Posted in Constructions, Gender and sexuality, Linguists, My life, Narrative, NLP, Semantics | 2 Comments »

The half-disaster

February 24, 2025

An antic tale of medical misadventure — in the sprit of yesterday’s posting “The knuckle nick” — from a while back on Facebook, but not chronicled here. Now I have a lot to say about the half-disaster of the time and the responses to my original report, but I’ll start with that report verbatim, because it was crafted as an account of unpleasant experiences in a maximally upbeat and entertaining fashion, to match my frame of mind at the time.

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Posted in Humor, Language and medicine, My life, Narrative, Pragmatics | Leave a Comment »

The knuckle nick

February 23, 2025

Or: who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

A report from Monday 2/17, when in the morning, while getting breakfast, I must have knocked my right hand against something with a sharp edge to it and nicked it (without any pain, so I didn’t realize it had happened) — because, when I looked down at the first knuckle, a bright bead of blood had welled up and was about to run down my hand. I grabbed some kleenex, wrapped it around the wound, and went to the bathroom to get a bandaid to cover the wound until the blood had clotted. (Clotting takes a while because I take a blood thinner — for atrial fibrillation, which seems to have vanished — which also means I have tons of bruises where I knock up against things with one bodypart or another. Medical treatments, side effects, it’s a balancing act.)

The day ticked on. Late in the afternoon, checking my Facebook page before getting up to assemble some dinner, I looked down, and my right hand was entirely covered with blood, which was streaming onto the pad under my keyboard. Onto my mousepad. And onto the tabletop. Blood everywhere, Jesus fuck. I must have knocked the scab loose against something, again without any warning pain, it was so minor. (No, I had not lost sensation in my fingers, that would have been truly scary.)

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Posted in Formulaic language, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Language play, My life, Narrative, Quotations | 2 Comments »

The fox plays in many memes

January 22, 2025

A Mark Thompson cartoon in the 1/20/25 issue of the New Yorker offers a foxy goulash of cultural forms: cartoon memes, joke forms, story formats, and conversational routines:


(#1) The Dog in Bar cartoon meme (with a fox instead of a dog), the Walk Into Bar joke form (a fox walks into a bar,…), the Fox Eludes Hound(s) story format, and the Tell Them I’m Not Here conversational routine

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Conversational formulas, Jokes, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Movies and tv, Narrative, Routines and rituals, Stories | 2 Comments »

Major Crimes

October 29, 2024

Well, I fell into this. In this morning’s posting “Removed!”, I reported myself as at the end of several tethers, one of which I addressed in this observation:

I’m not sure whether I can bear watching the news any more, and I’m not sure whether I can bear not knowing about what’s happening. For the moment, I’ve retreated into letting all six seasons of Major Crimes (which I’ve seen several times) go past me in the background while I work.

Ellen Kaisse then wondered about the show, and I embarked on an appreciation of it. And ended up with something worth expanding on a bit and posting on this blog.


(#1) An early poster for the show (+ marks characters I’ll discuss below): +Sharon Raydor in the upper right; then in four rows, left-to-right: in each row — 1st row: Detective Lieutenant Andy Flynn (Tony Denison), Detective Lieutenant Louis Provenza (G. W. Bailey); 2nd row: +Rusty Beck, +Fernando Morales; 3rd row: Civilian Surveillance Coordinator (videographer for crime scenes and interrogations) Buzz Watson (Phillip P. Keene), Detective Amy Sykes (Kierran Giovanni), Detective Lieutenant Michael Tao (Michael Paul Chan); bottom right corner: Assistant Chief Russell Taylor (Robert Gossett)

I’m not going to give you an account of the whole show, which ran for six years in hourlong episodes, but just notes on a few of the characters and a few bits from some of the story lines.

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Posted in Actors, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv, Narrative, Stories | 3 Comments »

Annals of diminutive /li/

July 26, 2024

Just two days ago, it was (piecrust) crumblies. Now, Benita Bendon Campbell has sent me e-mail connecting crumblies to (garment) greeblies — which, as it turns out, I posted about on this blog way back in 2012. My personal experience with the two terms dates to the 1960s, and is bound up with my history with my late wife, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (1937 – 1985); Bonnie (BBC) was Ann’s best friend (and has been a close friend of mine since 1960).

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Posted in Memory, My life, Names, Narrative, Onomatopoeia, Playful morphology | Leave a Comment »

Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja

November 20, 2023

Or, in rhyming colloquial English:

I’m Papageno, that’s my name,
And catching birds, well, that’s my game!


Nathan Gunn as Papageno, clutching his magic bells

And he more or less literally animates the Mozart / Schikaneder (think: Sullivan / Gilbert, Rodgers / Hammerstein, McCartney / Lennon) opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) — since he’s on the scene and in the action during most of the opera’s duration; and since he brings common, earthy, fallible, playful, humane depth to the work. The other characters are mostly otherworldly beings of one sort or another, or the presumed central human characters Tamino and Pamina (“a prince on a quest” and “a princess in distress”, according to the screen characterizations in the 2006 abridged video version of the fabulous 2004 Julie Taymor production at the Metropolitan Opera Company), who are earnest but rather cardboard idealizations of humanity (though they are humanized as much as possible in the Taymor production’s performances).

Zauberflöte is a fairy-tale opera with a familiar schematic story line, in which someone achieves a much-sought goal (love; entrance into the adult world; admission to some desirable association, band, or circle; whatever) by enduring probative tests, trials, or ordeals. T&P do that, but kids nevertheless seem to think — as I do — that the opera is about Papageno, who brought T&P together in the first place and then gets dragged along with them, serving as an unwilling hero in their ordeals but in the end failing to undergo the trials of fire and water (instead he gets his mate, Papagena). I doubt that any child seeing the video identifies with either T or P; but Papageno is a great kid, one of them: silly, error-prone, adorable, sometimes scared shitless, a sturdy friend, and a hell of a lot of fun.

It also has two prominent subtexts, which work together to support the theme of brotherhood that runs through the opera: Freemasonry and the Enlightenment ideal of the brotherhood of all humanity.   Many people will experience a performance of the opera without appreciating either element of its late-18th-century European intellectual and political context, and children will surely not get any of this (they will instead have their own understanding of what’s going on, and that’s fine; after all, there can be 17 ways of looking at a blackbird), but it’s especially relevant to the Taymor production because that production is richly overloaded with symbolism for both subtexts — which children will experience as the ways and forms of a strange but delightful imaginary world (imaginary worlds being a central element of childhood experience).

I write this after having watched the video again, twice, and of course seeing lots of things I hadn’t seen before, thereby complicating my intentions of reporting a lamentable memory lapse on my part. But I’ll press on.

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Posted in Actors, Books, German, Music, My life, Narrative, Poetry, Signs and symbols, Translation | 2 Comments »

On the plot of Die Zauberflöte

November 19, 2023

(Side material for a posting in preparation about Julie Taymor’s Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte)

Opera plots are notoriously packed with preposterous and incomprehensible details, but at least at first glance, The Magic Flute would win some sort of grand prize in the problematic plot department. But some of it makes sense when you understand it as a fairy-tale (so accommodating many of the fantastical elements) in which someone (the prince Tamino, with whom the opera opens) undertakes a quest and undergoes an ordeal to achieve some prize (admission into the wizard Sarastro’s (S’s) Brotherhood of the Sun); it’s also a love story, with Tamino (T) falling in love with the princess Pamina (P) — daughter of the otherworldly Queen of the Night (Q) — through seeing a portrait of her brought to him by his quest-companion (acquired in the early scenes of the opera), the bird-catcher Papageno (Pg); T&P become a couple, undergo the trials together, and so join S’s band.

Summing up this much, there are five central characters:

three ordinary mortals (in the order of their appearance): T, Pg, P (T&P become a couple; Pg picks up a mate along the way, instead of undergoing the trials)

two otherworldly mortals, S and Q

More of the details become comprehensible if you know that the opera is full of allusions to and symbols of Freemasonry; Mozart and his librettist Schikaneder were both active Masons, and they seem to have viewed Die Zauberflöte as their “Masonic opera”. The Taymor production is way overloaded with Masonic symbolism. But unless you’re a Mason or read analyses of the opera, you’ll miss all this.

But we’re still left with two sources of audience bewilderment: the nature of S and of Q, which appears to shift dramatically between the two acts of the opera; and a sixth character, Monostatos (M), a third otherworldly mortal character, who keeps cropping up in a creepy subplot that stretches through a considerable span within the opera. A Moor in the original, in the Taymor production M is white but bizarre, hawk-beaked and grotesquely fleshy (with a troupe of Turkish followers). But the question is what M’s intrusions are doing in the opera at all; they might just be Mozartean effusions of dark and dangerous Turkishness, with M replaying the character Osmin from Mozart’s earlier German Singspiel opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). A bit more below.

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Posted in Acting, Actors, German, Music, Narrative, Translation | 4 Comments »

MARCIA M Zwicky

November 15, 2022

That’s who the postcard was addressed to. The postcard announcing the annual holiday fair of the artifactory / The Artifactory in Palo Alto:


(#1) Arnold M Zwicky has been getting these announcements for a couple of decades, but I believe that this is the first time MARCIA M Zwicky got one and I didn’t (it’s possible that I didn’t notice for a couple of years, because COVID-19, but my replacement by MARCIA M is surely a recent thing)

I suspect that this address is incorrect — it should be MARCIA M M Zwicky, because her full name is MARCIA MARCIA MARCIA Zwicky. As in The Brady Bunch.

Back in the real world, there’s the question of where MARCIA came from, and for that I have no idea, beyond the possibility that the Artifactory’s address database somehow mingled two different addresses, MARCIA + X and Y + M Zwicky.

In the world of consensus reality, there’s the Artifactory cooperative and the tv series The Brady Bunch (though I have to point out that we’re interested in the series for the (fictive) narrative in it, for the stories it tells). And then the fantasies and inventions I’ll spin out will use some other established fictive narratives: the story of the Three Magi and the tales of the Archangel Michael. With a side reference to the comics and graphic novels of Alison Bechdel.

In fact, Bechdel will serve as the entry point into the (real-world) story of the Artifactory cooperative.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Narrative | Leave a Comment »

No-name cats, cats of dubious art, monstrous cats

August 7, 2022

Cats 3: Cats Ripped My Flesh. The previous installments were about the names people choose, or might choose, for their cats:

— Cats 1, my 8/4/22 posting “The Complete Book of Cat Names”, about Bob Eckstein’s new book, with lots and lots of names, arranged in entertaining categories, plus of course Bob’s own cat drawings and cat cartoons

— Cats 2, my 8/5/22 posting “Cats, names, art”, with the names (Russian, Sanskrit, Estonian) of my cats; with Bob’s musings on Roman names for cats, with a side trip to Egypt, and his own cartoon art; and with the Swiss-thread poster by graphic artist Donald Brun depicting Silken Cat.

Earlier (on 7/26), in what I guess I’ll have to call Cats 0, “O tasty Tweety! O Tweety, my prey!”, I looked at a few familiar cartoon cats — all with names, of course — casting a side glance, in the cat Sylvester’s comic attempts to capture and devour the canary Tweety, at the predatory and destructive aspect of cats, including the little Felis catus, which dispatches billions of birds and small mammals.

Meanwhile, on Facebook (on 8/5), cinephile Tim Evanson explored the dark side of cats in pop-cultural art: murderous cats, cats en masse, cats without names, cats in badly made movies. All of these together in Night of a Thousand Cats.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Narrative | Leave a Comment »

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