Mail from me to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (who is, in principle, away on holiday with Opal Armstrong Zwicky for the Independence Day weekend), sent at 6:06 am on 7/4 (hugely expanded here):
Archive for the ‘Semantics’ Category
A Catch-22 of sorts
July 5, 2026Overnegation strikes the USPS
July 3, 2026In today’s mail, a big card from the United States Postal Service; the crucial sentence is bold-faced:
Official Change-Of-Address Validation
The Postal Service has received a Change-Of-Address order asking us to forward mail from this address for ARNOLD MELCHIOR ZWICKY …
The Postal Service utilizes two-factor authentification to verify Change-Of-Address requests. The purpose of this notification is to provide additional opportunity to confirm this request to forward mail is correct.If you are not ARNOLD MELCHIOR ZWICKY no further action is required.
If the person listed did not ask the Postal Service to forward their mail, please dispute this Change-Of-Address [details of dispute schemes follow]
It could hardly be clearer from the context that the bold-faced sentence should read:
If you are ARNOLD MELCHIOR ZWICKY no further action is required.
(Well, if you are ARNOLD MELCHIOR ZWICKY and you intended to submit a Change-Of-Address order. It’s a genuinely complex situation; there are people who attempt to harm and harass others by filing malicious Change-Of-Address orders.)
I’m a big gooner
June 8, 2026(plenty of raunchy sex talk, not for kids or the sexually modest)
(#1) That’s gooner ‘someone who masturbates a lot, enthusiastically’ — one of a family of senses for this noun — and it’s a fair cop (on the song, see the footnote at the end of this posting)
But that’s not how I got wrapped up in goonerology (and what Mickey Dolenz sang in 1966 — back in pre-gooner days — was, of course, I’m a believer). That I blame on the Peachy Kings 30%-off Memorial Day sale on (100% polyester) mesh football jerseys with sexual or sexualized identity labels on them, among them:
(#2) At $40 a pop; the labels include GOOD BOY [Boy for Daddy], EVIL GAY, TRASH [‘slut’], STUD, HO HO HO [with ho(e) ‘slut’ (etymologically ‘whore’)], PORN STAR, DEMON TWINK, WOOF, SIR — and, as above, GOONER
Now, it turns out that a sexual verb goon, agent noun gooner, and activity noun gooning are all, according to Merriam-Webster online, recently coined (with goon‘s first known uses from about 2005). As is common with recent coinages, especially of markedly slangy or taboo nature, these items are highly variable in their reference (people play with them), taking in a range of uses — in this case, at least 5 distinguishable uses, all having to do, in some way or another, with masturbation. The result is that I have no idea of what a guy would intend to convey by wearing the shirt in #2. (I am a gooner-3 and gooner-4, definitely not a gooner-1 or gooner-5, and will disavow gooner-2.)
to collab
June 4, 2026(high sexual content, not for kids or the sexually modest)
Lexicographic notes from Young America, heard on Facebook reels from bros in their 20s discussing sexual matters in a mostly bantering way: the verb to collab. Collected this morning (6/4), one bro to another:
When I collabed with Pepe, I was doing something I’d never done before … we were tossing each other’s salad
(to toss someone’s salad ‘to rim someone’ — verb rim-2: [with object] vulgar slang lick or suck the anus of (someone) as a means of sexual stimulation (NOAD) — seems to be a recent slang idiom: in Urban Dictionary in this century, but not my other sources)
Three mishearings
May 29, 2026(the third mishearing takes us, in street language, into fellatio-land, a place not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Recently logged, three mishearings of televised reels, two from commercials, one from a joke reel on Facebook, all easily verifiable as to what was said (vs. what I heard when I wasn’t looking at the tv, so didn’t get visual information about the text):
I’m not sure which substance offering body pain relief item 1 came from, but the expression is common in ads of many kinds; Muddy Mat commercials (item 2), for easily washable doormats (especially valuable if you have dogs tracking in mud and dirt), are all over the place; item 3, with BJs (referring to food from a restaurant chain, ostentatiously playing on an abbreviation for fellations), comes from a joke Facebook reel about giving BJs to homeless people, which you can watch here
All three mishearings are surprising if you’re watching the reels they come from; it’s crucial that I was looking away from the tv when I heard paint instead of pain and money instead of muddy and DJs (disc jockeys) inead of BJs (blow jobs) — because in all three cases, the intended words appear on-screen.
But still, but still… all three are preposterous; who needs relief from body paint, a mat for the money the dog tracks in, or disk jockeys to give to homeless people? And worse: the first two items came from commercials I had heard a number of times before, with no mishearing.
And then once I had that first mishearing, it was inclined to be sticky: on later repetitions, even looking at the screen, my mind very briefly dredged up the mishearing, triggering a startled moment during which I corrected course. A kind of information-retrieval earworm, very annoying. I have no explanation for this effect, and suspect that most people have experienced nothing of the sort, but there it is.
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.
Toxic, resilience, Rizzler
May 19, 2026Whoa: toxic, resilience, Rizzler — all cry out to Zippy as he makes his critical way along a forest path, deprecating — despite their (respective) colorfulness, exactness, and freshness — the way these expressions are overused:
In the Zippy strip of 5/17, the forest is alive with the sound of lexical lamentation — with 14 such sounds, to be specific
For each of them, you might feel that you’re legitimately complaining that you’ve been hearing the expression often in recent times, though this impression is obviously going to depend a lot on who you hang out with (Rizzler has a minuscule role in my life. and my bad not much of one; consequently, I find them notable, but not because they seem to be used too much).
Now, people choose — mostly tacitly, not through conscious planning — to use certain expressions for reasons; people choose them because they have some function in the speakers’ and writers’ lives. The usual critique of overuse amounts to the claim that people are making their choices entirely on the basis of stylishness, choosing certain expressions merely because they are fashionable, stylish, with-it, what (they believe to be) the cool people are saying; and that this is reprehensible, because people are making choices just to show off that they’re in whatever counts as the in crowd for them and not on the basis of some more abstract goodness of fit of expressions for conveying particular meanings.
But talking this way just puts things back onto the question of where these styles come from. There’s room there for a certain amount of historical accident, but there are also reasons why certain expressions might get some social traction, through their values or virtues. Specifically, the values of colorfulness, exactness, and freshness. I will ilustrate all three from Zippy’s 14.
Hang free or peter out
May 14, 2026Today’s adventure in analyzing the jokey allusions in my postings. The target allusion is the one boldfaced in this passage from my posting yesterday (5/13), “The pocket bulge”:
[The DJX bulge booster] provides a soft but protective pocket in which a man’s package (of whatever size) can be unconstrained (hang free or peter out, as the slogan goes)
I explained half of the joke in a comment about my raw materials for this posting:
“Live Free or Die”, the official state motto of New Hampshire
But then there’s peter out, a verb of fading (before coming to an end), so ‘fade to death’ here, framed with a pun on peter, with a covert allusion to the penis hanging unconstrained within the bulge booster.
assless (also: amply assed)
May 8, 2026(much talk of men’s bodyparts and some of man-on-man sex, much of it in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Background: from Benjamin Dreyer on Facebook yesterday (5/7), about assless:
— BD: My gosh, I’m in the dictionary.
(#1) From Merriam-Webster online
And my comment:
— AZ: why do I find no citations (anywhere I can see) of hyperbolic bodypart assless ‘having minimal buttocks’, esp. in assless Irishman (used ruefully by some Irish American men I know)?