The US congressman, in today’s news because his pointed criticisms of Our Overlord Grabpussy have netted him a retributive charge of mortgage fraud, but I was about to post about him as an exemplar of liberal political critique (along with, among others, Rachel Maddow, Pete Buttigieg, and Joyce Vance) and also of nice-guy masculinity (masculinity being one of my perennial topics), with a note on a presentation of himself that employs both informal dress and facial scruff — the latter being a conventional advertisement of masculinity and toughness.
Archive for the ‘This blogging life’ Category
Eric Swalwell and his facial scruff
November 14, 2025It’s a jungle out there
November 12, 2025Yesterday’s most puzzling item that turned up on my e-mail Junk site for my moderation (a small but significant amount of stuff is incorrectly labeled as Junk and has to be rescued; the rest I hand-delete):
headers (items with embedded links are underlined):
Outreach Team
Are you accepting paid guest post on arnoldzwicky.org
To: arnoldzwicky.org
Reply-to: Outreach Team
body of text (in its entirety, verbatim):
Hello,
I hope you are doing well.
I’m reaching out to explore the possibility of contributing a guest post to your website, along with a permanent do-follow link.
Could you let me know the available opportunities and relevant details?
I look forward to your response.Best regards,
Thank you!
My first response was astonishment. I get an enormous number of requests to do guest postings on my blog, but most of them have some bit of credibility, and some are very cleverly framed. But this one is essentially a detail-free message. Does anyone ever reply to such messages?
Ah, but then I looked at the links and investigated further.
Memory, fragile and pliable
November 4, 2025It’s about two memories of mine.
One is from decades ago, about a phone call from Monique Serpette Transue, my man Jacques’s mother, confessing that her mother had pushed her into having the infant J baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, weeping that she had done something awful to J’s soul (fiercely anti-clerical, Monique was startlingly ignorant of the beliefs and practices of the church she didn’t adhere to). Or so I recalled the event in a 2022 posting.
The other is from reports in 2016 and 2025 of a 1970 visit to the linguistics program at what was then the University College of North Wales in Bangor, which had several members with the same, characteristically Welsh, name.
As I write here every few weeks, memory is fragile and undependable; from the beginning, in which our very perceptions are selective and skewed, influenced by expectation and experience, and then through years of fragmentation and loss and further skewings and extraneous intrusions from a host of sources; our memories are not only fragile, but also pliable. If we tell the same story every time — hardly anyone does — that’s because we’re producing a memorized performance (and it’s probably inaccurate). If we’re dead certain that we have the facts right, we’re almost surely getting them wrong. The literature is immense, and sobering.
So: two examples, with reflections on them.
Penultimate October
October 30, 2025💀 💀 💀 three days in October: Halloween Eve, Halloween, Day of the Dead — with today’s Bob cartoon for the second of these occasions; and then the Day of the Dead is also a significant day for me personally — my (Path to) Sobriety Day, the day I took my last drink, 5 years ago now
Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas
October 25, 2025Or, more exactly, cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy, as celebrated by Nelson Minar in “Tex Mex Gravy” on his weblog Some Bits yesterday. A stunning sociocultural contrast to my food posting on this blog yesterday, “Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine”, about Fernand Point’s dacquoise cake La Marjolaine, both elegant and extravagant.
I’ll give you NM’s food take first, then some words about NM, whose interests (all represented on his blog) also include gay activism and queer studies, and software engineering too. A gay foodie techie, who could have imagined such a thing! (And he’s been a friend since he was an undergraduate at Reed College.) Then I will return to les dacquoises, for yet another pass.
Today’s scam
September 29, 2025It was already a difficult day, and then in my mail:
To whom it may concern at Arnold Zwicky’s Blog,
Copyright Agent US, Inc. works with professional photographers and leading image agencies across the globe to protect their copyrights on the internet.
We hereby draw your attention to an image used on the following link: [https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/06/26/from-south-america]/ (herein after the “Image”). [this is my 5/26/2012 posting “From South America”, with pictures of a flowering Jacaranda mimosifolia tree in South Pasadena CA and a florist’s assortment of Alstroemeria cultivars in various colors (both originally found on Wikipedia, I believe, but that was 13 years ago)]
Our Partner, Visions Video & Photography, holds the rights to represent the Image in question and they are unable to find a license purchased under your company’s name or domain. Accordingly, we are contacting you to ensure that the appropriate license was obtained. It is possible that you have acquired the correct license for the Image, for example, from the photographer themselves or your creative agency under a written sub-contract. If that is the case here, we ask that you provide evidence of proper licensure to allow us to review your case.
Infringement is unauthorized use of intellectual property. In essence, it deprives the rights holder of the benefit of their original creation. If no evidence that a license was purchased is provided, then a payment claim would be required to resolve and compensate for the illegal use of the Image. This will also avoid the need for judicial intervention if the matter is not resolved.
You can log in directly and pay this claim here: [URL]
Another hunker
September 13, 2025(A little posting at the end of a ghastly week, just to show I’m still alive.)
Blogging brings with it a variety of unexpected tasks — notably, dealing with vast amounts of spam, malicious comments, faked commenters, and the like, but also coping with the fact that my blog postings are publicly available from way back (and should be, because they’re complexly intertwined and cross-referential, as I develop and pursue ideas, and exemplify them in fresh ways, creating a dense fabric of postings — about 15,000 of them now, going back decades on a number of different blogs), with the result that a reader will comment on an individual posting, even from long ago, as if it had just appeared — because, of course to that reader the posting was indeed a fresh discovery. So I need to respond to such a comment in the same spirit.
Invariably, I have to re-read the old posting (I often have no recollection of it at all) and, usually others linked in it (to get the context), so responding to such comments takes a fair amount of time and thought. This effort is just simple respect for my readers, but it’s also gratifying, because it comes with the suggestion that my writing lives on, has an audience, was worth the sweat it took. That means a lot to me, because this endless stream of postings is the single work of my late life, the product of my profession. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at intellectual entertainment and in fact resent the other demands on my time and energy that divert me from my calling.
Which brings me to a comment from one m. lewis (someone I don’t think I know, but whose reality and good intentions I have no reason to doubt) on 9/11, about my 8/11/13 posting “crouch, squat, hunker” (from only 12 years ago, so I had a vague recollection of the piece, but still had to research it):
lx and g&s
August 6, 2025(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.
Not in a bad mood, just smart
May 22, 2025The abbreviated form of a slogan, or tag line, that I came across on Facebook this morning, in what appeared to be a panel from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon (see the Watterson signature), or could be an extract from such a panel with the tag line added (we live in a world that has both old Photoshop and new AI, so such things are trivially easy to arrange):
(#1) I had a thought of using this as a visual distillation of my attitude towards the current US government, but I wanted to get the credit right; that became a problem I haven’t yet solved
Linguist Arnold Zwicky shuts down grammar Nazis
May 4, 2025Not how I expected to begin Dave Brubeck Day (in 5/4 time, as was his pleasure) / Four Dead in Ohio Day (dreadful memories from 1970, which come with a CSNY soundtrack), but there it was, listed by Google Alerts for the morning: on YouTube, on the “Today I Found Out: Feed Your Brain” channel, the segment
“In which linguist Arnold Zwicky shuts down grammar Nazis”
with Simon Whistler reading with great relish a passage from a posting of mine and savoring its vocabulary.
First, Google identifies me as a Public Figure (not just some mook off the streets, but in a class with, oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson). And now the tireless YouTuber Simon Whistler, with an audience of 2.52m subscribers to Today I Found Out, admires my word-slinging.