Whoa: 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.
Variability in language — from person to person, and for any particular person, from context to context — is all around us. It’s a routine aspect of our mental lives, amazingly complex in its details, but in no way surprising as a phenomenon. Similarly for variability in factual and procedural knowledge: impressively intricate, but familiar.
But now it turns out that more and more of our mental lives is open to variation. As a way into the topic, consider an NPR Radiolab segment from 2024 that came by me on KQED-FM a while back, on the phenomenon of aphantasia.
Yesterday on this blog, the posting “LSA news bulletin: awards” on (among other things)
Kira Hall — of the University of Colorado, Boulder — as the 5th recipient of the … Arnold Zwicky Award, intended to recognize LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community.
Now, some basic information about KH, from Wikipedia and from the University of Colorado website; I might add some further information about her in a while.
(Not lox and Gilbert & Sullivan, though that’s a charming idea for a matinee; I’d prefer to think of lx (linguistics) and g&s (gender and sexuality studies) as two gay linguists, Lex and Gus, who go together like, oh, politics and poker (from Act I of the 1959 Broadway musical Fiorello!) — or, more relevantly, like mind and body)
A non-academic friend, new to my net presence, wondered what the things I said my blog is mostly about — lx and g&s — have to do with one another. My immediate, overly glib, reply:
Nothing intrinsic, but they happen to come together in me, along with gardening, Sacred Harp singing, an interest in food and cooking, Mozart and Haydn, and more. Various accidents of history and outgrowths of different parts of my make-up.
Strictly true, but in fact my postings about lx tend to have a lot of g&s content, and my postings about g&s very often end up illustrating points of lx. And sometimes they meld together — as in my recent (from 7/26/25) posting “F-lexicography”, on the semantics of the sexual verb fuck.
So now a quick visit to Lex and Gus’s world, just picking out things from here and there in work by me and my colleagues. Not a systematic survey, just the odd snapshots.
Very briefly noted. In my e-mail today, Update No. 608 from the Linguistic Society of America, announcing the slate of candidates for its upcoming elections, with one nominee for vice-president / president-elect: the sociolinguist and creolist Tracey Weldon (University of South Carolina). A great pleasure for me, since TW’s time as a graduate student at Ohio State (culminating in her PhD in 1998) was my final time at Ohio State (I moved permanently from Columbus in 1998). A photo of TW in mid-speech:
A shot from the documentary Talking Black in America (2017), since expanded to a 5-part series
This morning, for complex reasons that shouldn’t concern you here, I did a Google search on “African American linguists”, not reckoning on what might happen with Google’s AI-guided search. This astonishing result, a page with the first 9 of 13 items retrieved:
2 historical figures, 7 living linguists; of those living linguists, 4 are women, 3 are men; of those men, two are African Americans, but the linguist in the position of greatest prominence, at the top left, Walt Wolfram, is not like the other 8 linguists: WW is a strikingly European — specifically German — American
Now, if there were a gold medal for wokeness, WW would surely have retired it for life, but he doesn’t belong in a display of African American linguists.
Thing is, Google hasn’t answered the question that I (implicitly) asked, Who are some linguists who are African American? (which might have pulled up, say, Ken Naylor, who studied the dialectology of what was then called Serbo-Croatian), but instead answered a somewhat similar question it had the answer to, Who are some linguists who have studied African American English? (which should pull up at least Bill Labov, Roger Shuy, and WW, all of whom are white).
Wokeness. From NOAD:
adj. woke: alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism … (1960s: originally in African American usage)
Expanded on in a Wikipedia article:
used since the 1930s or earlier to refer [AZ: especially by African Americans of other African Americans] to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke.
… By 2019, the term was being used sarcastically as a pejorative among many on the political right and some centrists to disparage leftist and progressive movements as superficial and insincere performative activism. [AZ: heavy sigh]
Encomia. I was sure that I had posted an encomium to WW and his remarkable career studying the language of, and supporting the communities of, African Americans (and Appalachians and Carolina Tidewater folk too), with all the passion he has devoted to sports (he played basketball, baseball, and football at Olney High School in north Philadelphia many years ago, and seems never to have met a sport he didn’t like). But I can’t find it in my files. Well, you can see the outlines of it from what I just said; he’s been a model of engagement and energy for the rest of us.
It’s probably a garrulous-codger thing, but I’ve been into encomia recently (see my previous posting, on Sonja Lanehart); well, it’s a great pleasure to write encomia for living people, rather than elegiac death notices.
One of these things. Music by Joe Raposo, lyrics by Jon Stone for Sesame Street (1968):
One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?
Of course you can.
The 11/12 Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange strip takes us to the Merriam-Webster company gym, where the lexicographers get defined:
(#1) It’s pun day at the definition factory, with bodybuilders’ definition punning on lexicographers’ definition
Confronted with a pun strip, I’ll usually go on to cite definitions from NOAD (or similar sources) for the punning expression and its model, and I’ll do a version of that here, getting at the expression well-defined by starting from the verb define, going on to the adjective defined (modified by the degree adverbial well ‘thoroughly’ in well-defined), and then steaming on to the noun definition and the conceptually related verbs cut and shred.
But what I find on this little trip has nothing at all from the vocabulary of bodybuilding. Not in NOAD, where I start (because I can access this dictionary on my computer with a few keystrokes); not in the OED (no surprise; its on-line version for this vocabulary is still antique); not — oh wonderful irony — in the on-line Merriam-Webster; not in AHD5; and not (to my astonishment) in GDoS. So for the bodybuilding vocabulary, I’ve cobbled together definitions from various bodybuilding sources. But apparently bodybuilding is so esoteric a world that its vocabulary has not yet reached mainstream lexicography. (A surprise to me. I’m not part of the bodybuilding world, but I have, yes, bodybuilder friends, also friends who are into bodybuilding competitions, and friends who have a taste for bodybuilders; and meanwhile, the gay male world and the world of physique magazines have long been intertwined, so I’m familiar with the bodybuilding world.)
It is my annual November pleasure to discourse some on the just-revealed winner of the AZ Award from the Linguistic Society of America; the minimal announcement from the LSA:
This award … is intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in linguistics and is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.
Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics in congratulating Robert J. Podesva on receiving this prestigious award! A Stanford Associate Professor, he researches phonetic variation and identity while actively mentoring LGBTQ+ students to promote inclusivity in academia.
Rob is the fourth awardee — preceded by Kirby Conrod for 2022, Rusty Barrett for 2023, and Lal Zimman for 2024 — and will be officially feted at the LSA’s annual meetings in January. I always provide some encomium material for the awardees on this blog, but this year is special, because Rob is an old friend; a former student of mine (his PhD dissertation committee was Penny Eckert (chair), John Rickford, and me, which is about as socioculturally diverse a committee of three as you could concoct in the academic world); and a valued colleague of mine at Stanford. So there are four reasons for me to write this posting, and I will take some liberties in digressing into personal remarks along the way.
From the Economist‘s 8/24/24 issue, under the characteristically jokey head Beneath the (ap)peal, the informative subhead
South Asia’s long love affair with mangoes
(yes, about the appeal of the fruits in South Asia, incorporating –peal as a pun on peel ‘outer covering of a fruit or vegetable’)
Which stopped me in my tracks, because I would have written mangos rather than mangoes. It turns out that there’s real variation on this point; both mangos and mangoes are well attested (and have occurred in postings on this blog, though all the instances of mangoes are in quoted material, not from my hand). And, entertainingly, published lyrics for the song titled “Mangos” (made famous by Rosemary Clooney) come in two different versions, from different sources: one with mangos, one with mangoes.
