The balloon trainee

November 12, 2025

Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro shows us a budding balloon artist at the very beginning of his career, where he creates the simplest of balloon animals, before advancing to the balloon dog:


(#1) The raw material of balloon sculpture is cylindrical balloons, which can then be twisted and tied together; this trainee has the cylindrical balloons, but as yet has had no practice in manipulating them, so he offers for sale the unprocessed balloons, which the buyer just has to imagine as different roughly cylindrical animals — here an earthworm, here a snake, here (where we break up in laughter) a lowly nematode (most nematodes are tiny, less than 2.5 mm long) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »

It’s a jungle out there

November 12, 2025

Yesterday’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.

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Posted in These terrible times, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Like a Spanish cow

November 11, 2025

Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French:

parler français comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’

I heard this first from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and our good friend Benita Bendon Campbell, It’s vivid and silly, and then English like a Spanish cow can be adapted as a critique of someone’s linguistic abilities in French or English or, I assume, any language. Cows being linguistically quite limited, and Spaniards being one of the nationalities French people are inclined to mock (though I would have expected the cow to be Italian, Dutch, or German; or of some exotic despised nationality, like Turkish or Chinese).

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Posted in Etymology, Formulaic language, French, Idioms, Insults, Morning names, Pragmatics, Stock expressions | 2 Comments »

Gods and tables

November 10, 2025

In e-mail from Tony Velasquez on 11/8:

your 11/7 blog post about category errors and the potential for making jokes with them … reminded me of something I’m reading, How God Becomes Real, by Tanya Luhrmann …, who argues that knowing  … that a god exists uses a different ontological attitude than knowing … that a table exists. She also points out that this attitude toward the spiritual has a lot of affinity with the sort of ontological attitude taken in play. It’s interesting to me to think that the attitude toward category errors you take that leads you to create jokes is opposed to a very different attitude to what could be called the category error, on Luhrmann’s thinking, that spiritual beings are real in the same sense that tables are real — an attitude that, instead of leading to play or jokes, often leads to violence and war.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Jokes, Language and religion, Language play, Lexical semantics, Philosophy, Semantics, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

A.Z.

November 8, 2025

Back on Thursday 11/6, amid the hour-long marathon of signing and notarizing documents, the jaunty house notary remarked, with surprise and delight, that she’d never had an A.Z. before, never in 25 years on the job. (There are a fair number worldwide, but, it seems, very few in the US — and there have apparently only ever been two Arnold Zwickys, the other being my father.) On a quick ramble through my memory, I found only three Americans:

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Posted in Abbreviation, Names | 8 Comments »

Two Bizarros

November 7, 2025

Yesterday’s Wayno/ Piraro Bizarro:


(#1) The coupled life, with cook and diner; cooks — I was  the diner and helper in Ann’s and my life, the cook in Jacques’s and my life, and I can say that the cook is often anxious about pleasing their audience, the diner (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

Now, highlights of an exchange between Wayno and me that starts out being about this cartoon.

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Posted in Cartoonists, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Marriage, Puns, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

Category errors as a joke form

November 7, 2025

Let’s dive right in, to a back-and-forth on Facebook yesterday between Gadi Niram and me:

— GN: Pick a color from 1 to 10. [AZ thinks: obviously, lavender 7 — something that’s both a color and also a number from 1 to 10]

— AZ [actual reply]: parsley [something from yet a third, hitherto unmentioned, category, herbs] … alternatively: Benjamin Harrison [US Presidents] [separately, continuing the Still Another Category theme, Sophie Silberpup suggested: antelope, in the animals category]

[now breaking out into the form of three-part solutions to the mystery in the board game Clue] titanium, in 753 BC, with a ball-peen hammer [titanium, located in 753 BC, killed the victim using a ball-peen hammer]

— GN: You crack me up, dude!

— AZ: Three more shots [each a triple: responsible person or thing, location in space or time, instrument or accompaniment], dude, and then I rest.

Minerva, in Flagstaff, with a night-blooming cereus … a jackalope, in Ursa Major, with John Waters … the ulna, in Narnia, with Moomins

I note that the responses seem to be crystallizing, developing some internal organization, over time. Starting to approach poetry, rather than pleasurable nonsense.

Not that there’s anything wrong with pleasurable nonsense.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Errors, Jokes, Language play, Nonsense | 2 Comments »

Affordability

November 6, 2025

I had much more interesting things to post about, after my adventure at the lawyer’s, endlessly signing my name, dating and locating my signature, and then having it all notarized. But I’m the go-to guy on the Recency Illusion — surely not the first to notice the phenomenon, but I gave it a name and talked it up, so I come with a small but bright aura of Recency fame.

Which brings me to Grifterissimo Grabpussy, who in the past two days has burbled on about becoming aware of the word affordability. Who would have thought that so many Americans would be so deeply concerned about the cost of living?

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Posted in Illusions, Language and politics | 2 Comments »

Mammoth walkies

November 5, 2025

The Gary Larson Far Side cartoon of 12/27/82, posted on Facebook on 11/4 by Evan Randall Smith because it spoke to him:


Caveman enthusiastically taking a deeply grumpy mammoth for a walk; mammoths are not notably biddable creatures

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Mammoths | 1 Comment »

Memory, fragile and pliable

November 4, 2025

It’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.

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Posted in Memory, My life, This blogging life, Welsh | 6 Comments »

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