Archive for the ‘Zwickys’ Category

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LSA news bulletin: awards

October 27, 2025

Today turned out to be the annual awards announcement day for the Linguistic Society of America. Two awards of special interest to readers of this blog, in e-mail from the LSA (both announcements edited, rearranged, and expanded here):

The Bloomfield Book Award Committee, recognizing a volume that makes an outstanding contribution of enduring value to our understanding of language and linguistics, congratulates George Aaron Broadwell — Aaron Broadwell, of the University of Florida, Gainesville — as an award finalist (there are two finalists) on his book The Timucua Language: A Text-Based Reference Grammar, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2024. The award is named after Leonard Bloomfield, author of the influential textbook Language (1933), one of the founding members of the LSA in 1924, and its president in 1935.

Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) in congratulating Kira Hall — of the University of Colorado, Boulder — as the 5th recipient of the prestigious Arnold Zwicky Award, intended to recognize LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community. The award is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first openly LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.

So it’s LSA President’s Day (Bloomfield and me), and also LSA Pride Day (Aaron, Kira, and me).

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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Books, Gender and sexuality, Linguists, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

Valentine birthdays

February 20, 2025

I have long noted the happy coincidence of Valentine’s Day and my daughter Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s birthday (for me, stirring memories of Boston Lying-in Hospital — now part of Brigham and Women’s Hospital — in 1965), but this morning  I got a Facebook posting on one of the websites devoted to memorializing the astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky and his work, somewhat delayed in transit, celebrating FZ’s birthday, on VDay in 1898! Let’s just call it Zwicky Birthday.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Holidays, Switzerland and Swiss things, Zwickys | 1 Comment »

Melchior

December 30, 2024

The 12 days of Christmas click by as we advance to Twelfth Night — Epiphany Eve — and then on 1/6 to Epiphany itself, the day of the Three Magi, or Three Kings, conventionally each the king of a distant land, each with a characteristic appearance, each with a name, and each with his gift for the Christ Child in Bethlehem. In one tradition, Melchior (alongside Caspar / Kaspar and Balthazar) is King of Persia, the oldest of the kings (a graybeard), and the giver of gold (rather than frankincense or myrrh).

The thing is, I am Arnold Melchior Zwicky, son of Arnold Melchior Zwicky and grandson of Melchior Arnold Zwicky, the last of whom, oh yes, had brothers named Kaspar and Balthazar. I have the name, the age and the gray beard, but lack the kingdom and the gold. Yet for a brief period in January each year, I am Melchior as well as Arnold, I am resplendent, I am a king.

For this period, I rise above the fact that in my country all three parts of my name are seen as strange and foreign, none more than Melchior (for the rest of the year, when I have to clarify my middle initial, I say “M as in Michael”, leading many people to think that my middle name is in fact Michael, so they could call me Mike). Only this year did it occur to me that I should add Michael / Mike to my alter ego’s name Alexander / Alex Adams: ALEXANDER MICHAEL ADAMS, the weighty A. M. Adams, the amiable Alex “Mike” Adams, hookup name Alex, just Alex.

Now, two things. First , an alternative view of the royal Melchior, from a 2022 posting in which he’s depicted as, wow, not only young and virile but also as the (mythic) king of France. And then another 2022 posting that starts out being about okapis and somehow ends up with “M as in musk ox” for my middle initial (plus “O as in okapi” for the O of ARNOLD).

Meanwhile, Epiphany is coming and my royal robes need fluffing.

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and religion, Music, My life, Myths, Names, Spelling, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

Zwicky Weiss

November 2, 2024

In the Google Alert for Zwicky on 10/31, a link to the Falstaff (wine agent’s) site advertising Zwicky Weiss. From Switzerland.

So, a brief visit to St. Gallen, to view this wine:

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Posted in Art, Language and food, Switzerland and Swiss things, Zwickys | 1 Comment »

Namesakes and surnamesakes

October 12, 2024

This is going to take us surprising places. Our guide will be the distinguished Slavist Wayles Browne, in (edited) excerpts from e-mail he sent me on 10/9:

I discovered your blog when [WB’s Cornell colleague] Michael Weiss wrote about early attestations of the term ruki rule [in Sanskrit and elsewhere: see the 4/22/24 posting “On the transmission of ideas: RUKI gets around”]. Since then I’ve been looking at older postings as well as your day-to-day ones. On 1/9/14 [in the posting “A recent birthday”, on the birthday of Nikolai Marr], you wrote, after quoting this from Wikipedia:

Marr earned a reputation as a maverick genius with his Japhetic theory, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and Basque languages. In 1924, he went even further and proclaimed that all the languages of the world descended from a single proto-language which had consisted of four “diffused exclamations”: sal, ber, yon, rosh.

that

Marr eventually fell out of favor with Stalin.

Quite true, and there’s more to the story than that. After Marr died, his follower Ivan Meščaninov and others managed to get Marrism accepted as the official Marxist approach to linguistics, but finally in 1950 a Georgian linguist went to his fellow-Georgian Stalin and persuaded him that it was all fatuous and bad for the whole science of linguistics. Stalin then published an article in Pravda with essentially common-sense views of language. The name of the Georgian linguist? He was a namesake of yours: Arnold Chikobava.

In Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, the language(s) that I work on the most, ‘name’ is ime, ‘namesake’ is imenjak, ‘surname’ is prezime, and a person you share a surname with is, quite logically, prezimenjak. It would be nice to introduce surnamesake into English too.

So we start in Ithaca NY (with the Cornell Indo-Europeanist scholar Michael Weiss), pass through Ancient India (and the Sanskrit language, which was the topic of my PhD dissertation, back in the Cretaceous Period) on our way to the Soviet Union under Stalin, where we encounter the nutcase linguist Nikolai Marr, who takes us to Soviet Georgia (in the Caucasus) and the linguist Arnold Chikobava, whose name, coupled with mine, reminds WB that the Slavic language(s) BCS (in the Balkans) have the eminently useful term prezimenjak ‘surnamesake’. In this is concealed a good bit of complexity in the notion of namesake (which I have, in fact, posted on, so we’ll get to that eventually), plus a wonderfully sly choice of wording in WB’s reference to BCS as

the language(s) Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian

(which will require some explanation for readers who are not entirely up to date on the linguistic situation in the Balkans).

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Posted in Dialects, Linguists, My life, Names, Naming, Serbo-Croatian, Variation, Zwickys | 4 Comments »

JKZ on a short snorter

March 9, 2024

AMaZing Mail Department, from yesterday: this object:


(#1) A short snorter whose signers include John K. Zwicky (across the very right edge of George Washington’s face); JKZ, of Coalinga CA, is a familiar — as well as familial — character on this blog

#1 came in surprise e-mail yesterday from James A. Downey, who’s been researching the names on the short snorter and so was led to this blog. So, two things: JKZ and short snorters.

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Posted in Slang, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

Two tennis-playing Zwickys

September 12, 2023

My old friend Ellen Sulkis James, musing on my name, e-mailed today:

I just read about someone else whose last name is Zwicky —  think it was someone involved with tennis.

Memories are often fugitive and hazy. Perhaps that’s what’s going on here. My searches for people named Zwicky with a tennis connection pulled up only two, both of them most unlikely to have come to ESJ’s attention: the investment banker Daniel Zwicky, who’s billed as an avid tennis player now and, when young in Switzerland, competed at a national level; and the Molson Coors IT specialist Michelle Zwicky, who was a notable tennis player in college two decades ago.

Brief notes on the two of them, for the Page on this blog on my postings about Zwickys of note.

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Posted in Language and sports, Zwickys | 1 Comment »

Houcks at WHS

June 10, 2023

… as some of the AMZ Fan Club (as Eleanor put it), in, omigod, October 2021, how could I have failed to post about this for almost two years? (note that everyone has a mask, temporarily off for the photo):


(#1) My cousin Eleanor (the youngest of my first-cousin cohort: Eleanor Severin Houck, daughter of Bertha Zwicky Severin); my cousin-in-law Dick Houck; and their son, my first cousin once removed Rich Houck — at Wilson High School in West Lawn PA

They are standing in front of my Distinguished Alumni plaque in the WHS Hall of Academic Fame — from, oh dear, almost 20 years ago; I gave a little talk then at the National Honor Society induction, a talk that included a brief encomium to my dad and how he coped with having such a “different” kid.

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Posted in Art, Awards, My life, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

Henry Arnold Zwicky, of Greensboro NC

May 25, 2023

HENRY ZWICKY OBITUARY, published by the Greensboro News & Record on May 24, 2023.


Henry as a young man.

Henry A[rnold] Zwicky, 82, passed on to his permanent home in heaven on Friday, May 19, 2023.

He is survived by nieces; Cathy (Joseph) Burton, Marian (David) Bookhart, Alison (Mark) Claudy, Virginia (James) Ansell, mother of nieces Jean Zwicky Day, special cousin Debby McGann; and many great nieces and nephews.

Henry is predeceased by his parents, Fred and Lucille Cole Zwicky, brother; Fred Zwicky; sister Eleanor Zwicky Justice.

Henry attended Lindley Junior and Greensboro Senior High School. He graduated from N.C. State University and served as a member of the NCSU Rifle team, concert and marching band. He enjoyed golf, hunting, fishing and photography. He spent over 35 years of his career working as an HVAC engineer at AC Corporation. He also worked for M.L. Eakes Company, the Bahnson Company and completed many major projects for Guilford Mills. Henry was a life time member of ASHRAE [the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers] and [the] N.R.A.

The last of the North Carolina Zwickys (in my family), almost exactly my age but quite different from me; he was a guy guy and something of a loner.

His father Fred was the oldest of the five children of Melchior and Bertha Zwicky, and gave his younger son the middle name of his little brother (12 years younger), my father Arnold.

We’re talking considerable time depths here. Henry’s father was born just after the turn of the 20th century (over 120 years ago), my father (and mother) in the year World War I began (109 years ago), Henry and I in 1940, at the beginning of World War II (82 years ago).

So this truly is a Mary, Queen of Scots, not dead yet, posting.

Posted in Death notices, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

Zwicky on the Art of the Skateboard

February 28, 2023

Notified via Google Alert on Saturday: on the Jenkem Magazine (skateboarding) site, “Allies: Calder Zwicky of MOMA” (with a YouTube video) by Alexis Castro & Ollie Rodgers on 10/2/18. Another chapter in the story of artist Calder Zwicky — previously reported on in this blog back in 2016, so this is an update, but not actually up-to-date (though it gets skateboarding into CZ’s story, which is a good thing).


(#1) Screen shot from the video: CZ talking about a work of his from the Lonely Thrasher series — slang thrasher, roughly ‘excellent skateboarder’, also the name of a skater magazine — showing a cover of this magazine with the skater removed, to yield an image that, CZ argues, is still a skateboarding image, of the huge space and the complex physical structure that offers a challenge to a serious skateboarder; the skater is implicit in the image

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Posted in Actors, Art, Facial expression and gesture, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language play, Portmanteaus, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

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