Things I probably should have known, but didn’t, and have just recently discovered: one linguistic (on a pronunciation in BrE), one botanical (on the identity of a plant growing on the street a block from my house).
As a Z-person, I was immediately pulled into Bert Vaux’s query to his “British and Antipodean friends” on Facebook this morning: Bert is collecting examples of -Z(ZA) nicknames (what I’ll call znicknames), like Baz for Barry and Hazza for Harry. The -Z(ZA) (phonetically -z / -zǝ) replaces an intervocalic r following what is, in the varieties in question, an accented short / lax / open vowel: ɪ ɛ æ a ʌ ɔ. Some more conversions of model names to znicknames from Bert’s collection:
Carrie, Carol → Caz
Darren, Darryl → Daz, Dazza
Jerry, Jeremy → Jez, Jezza
Karen → Kazza
Larry → Laz, Lazza
Mary → Maz, Mazza
The Pearls Before Swine strip by Stephan Pastis, for 1/9/26:
A difference between British English and American English over constructions with the definite article (arthrous) or without it (anarthrous) — putting aside British Bob’s touching belief in the primacy of BrE over AmE
(There is a Page on this blog with links to postings on Language Log and this blog on arthrousness)
Now for some scholarly observations on BrE vs. AmE practices in arthrousness with various prepositional objects, among them hospital and university. Here I take you to Lynne Murphy’s blog “Separated by a Common Language: Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the US” — in her posting “(the) menopause, (the) flu, (the) hospital” from 4/17/2007:
On Facebook today, a report on a Google AI search on “Lynneguist hospital” that inspired the bot to satisfy the search term by giving Lynne Murphy a medical degree:
[LM:] Adding medical qualifications to my cv.
I mean, here’s the evidence.
Very briefly (it’s been a hellish day). In my comics feed for today, penultimate July, Mark Parisi’s off the mark cartoon of 7/16/25, in which an AmE football and a BrE football fail to hook up with a sportsball of their own kind — next to one another in a bar.
In the RomCom version, of course, they go on to find satisfaction in hooking up with (aka dating) one another, in the thrill of the new and different.
Otherwise, you see the pitfalls of dating through text only; if they communicated by voice, they’d get nationality information. (Though in the real world, a British football would know that such a brown sportsball was called a football in the US. Whether an American football could be depended upon to know that a soccer ball was called a football in the UK is not so clear to me.)
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.
🦉 🦉 🦉 three wise owls for Superb Owl Day, an annual American Sunday holiday devoted to the relaxed enjoyment of uncrowded public places — (weather permitting) in sight-seeing, strolling on city streets, visiting parks and zoos; or (indoors) shopping in stores, exploring museums, attending concerts and theatrical performances (when I was much younger, Superb Owl Day was an excellent occasion for a visit to the gay baths; no doubt you have your own spots that can provide relaxing pleasures)
Meanwhile, back at Ramona St. …
Playing on the Apple Music in my bedroom during my 2:30 whizz break: a ravishingly joyous soprano concert aria, or (as it turned out) Lied (with a warm and playful piano trio accompaniment), with some vocal figures worthy of the Queen of the Night. I thought of it as the Queen of the Day’s Song. In some Germanic language I couldn’t quite comprehend.
Ah, obviously one of Beethoven’s folksong compositions; when I actually got up, at 3:30, I went to my computer to track the song down:
“Wann i in der Früh aufsteh” (‘When I arise in the early morning” — celebrating morning on a Tyrolean dairy farm), Beethoven WoO 158a/ 4 — that is, #4 in his 23 Lieder Verschiedener Völker (‘Songs of Different Peoples / Various Nationalities’); from a 1997 Deutsche Grammophon recording; Janice Watson is the soprano; and the language is Tyrolean, a High German variety spoken in the western Austrian state of Tyrol (where it’s the majority language) and areas of northern Italy (in any case, in a region south of Bavaria and east of the part of Switzerland where the Zwickys come from)
You can listen to this very recording here.
Another Rabbit Day item in the stew (see my earlier posting today “Rabbit stew 1: Asian soup spoons”), taking off from this Facebook posting by Greg Morrow yesterday (with some editing by me):
In sort of an opposite of the pen–pin merger [AZ: in which syllable-offset /ɛn/, as in pen, and /ɪn/, as in pin, are both realized as [ɪn]], local dialect (including mine) has [vǝnɛlǝ] vanella as the pronunciation of vanilla [vǝnɪlǝ].
(Heard it today in the grocery, and I was like, yes that’s right, wait a second…)
A further comment went on with the idea that this ɪ > ɛ (before l) that gives widespread US vanella was in some way the opposite of the ɛ > ɪ (before n) shift that gives us US midlands inkpin [ɪŋkpɪn] ‘(ink)pen’.
