Pronouncing my name

December 13, 2022

A little posting, something I can get done in the time I have. I should explain that since 7 pm yesterday, I have slept 14 hours (and it’s not yet 2 pm). I don’t feel feverish, don’t have a fever, do have periodic crippling joint pain and muscle cramps in my hands and arms, but mostly narcolepsy rules; as the days roll on, it is, however, becoming less ferocious and more bearable.

Meanwhile, in my waking moments, while I practice muscle relaxation, I’ve had time to think about stuff. Thoughts that have expanded today’s intended Big Posting, on name mockery and Benedict Cumberbatch, into something even more ambitious. And random thoughts inspired by stuff that’s come in my mail, including an old topic: what (American) English speakers do with the somewhat challenging pronunciation of my family name, especially that word-initial consonant cluster [zw].

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Two Liz Climo cartoons

December 12, 2022

Very much a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, opening up a variety of themes, some of them deeply personal for me. But here I just present two delightful Liz Climo cartoons that moved me.

The first is recent, posted by Climo on Facebook on 11/29 and apparently at the moment available only on her FB page. The characters are Bunny and Bear, who have forged a mutually supportive friendship in part by surmounting the natural inclinations of bears to devour rabbits, and of rabbits to dig up the landscape for burrows (thus ruining the lawns that are Bear’s great pride).

The second is from a continuing series of cartoons involving the polar creatures Penguin and Polar Bear. The cartoons:


(#1) My title: One Trip — a delight for me, since my man Jacques was an extreme advocate of the One Trip, approaching Bear levels; as annoying as this was (I played the Bunny part in our One Trip drama), now that he’s been gone for 20 years, the cartoon slashed open a moment of real grief, in which his masculine pigheadedness now seems endearing


(#2) My title: Margarita Snowman — this one is to send to cartoonist Bob Eckstein, author of the marvelous The Illustrated History of the Snowman (2018); see the digression on the book in my 12/3 posting “In the mail: The sleep of reason produces snowmen”

The penguin Christmas card

December 11, 2022

In the mail, from Mary Ballard, this penguin Christmas card (from Fantus Paper Products), featuring the conventional schematic cute penguin, which can be seen in many variants all over the place, not just at holiday time:


(#1) I get a penguin, because the penguin is one of my totem animals; but penguins, stereotypically from cold and snowy lands, are in general associated with holiday time in the Northern Hemisphere, so penguin Christmas cards are something of a thing

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make the naked pretzel

December 10, 2022

Today’s very brief Not Dead Yet posting, in an interim between narcoleptic episodes (which still crowd out most of my days): letting old episodes of the sitcom Cheers run past, soothingly, in the background, I heard the horndog Sam Malone character (played by Ted Danson) exult about the possibility of making the naked pretzel with a target woman. A colorful sexual metaphor with a modest number of cites on the net.

I note in passing that naked pretzel is also a name for an unsalted pretzel, and a number of firms sell them. Something to look out for if you’re trying to restrict your intake of salt.

And then we wander into the Sex On The Beach Dunes, the rich and complex nexus between sexual expressions and the names of cocktails. Because there is, of course, a Naked Pretzel cocktail. From the Smirnoff vodka folks:

I have surely posted somewhere about watermelons (with a round opening cut into them) as objects of sexual gratification for men; there might conceivably be some association here between the ingredients of the cocktail — the melon liqueur giving it its green color — and making the naked pretzel.

 

Today’s verbing

December 9, 2022

From WIRED magazine’s Plaintext web column by Steven Levy today (with the notable verbing bold-faced):

This week the social media world took a pause from lookie-looing the operatic content-moderation train wreck that Elon Musk is conducting at Twitter, as the Oversight Board [of Meta] finally delivered its Cross Check report, delayed because of foot-dragging by Meta in providing information.

The verb lookie-loo (more commonly looky-loo), in this example roughly ‘stop to look at something out of curiosity’ (it can also mean roughly ‘view something for sale without intending to buy’), occurs here in its PRP (-ing) form lookie-looing, used in a nominal gerund phrase (which is the object of the preposition from). Finally, the verb lookie-loo here is transitive (with the NP the operatic content-moderation train wreck that Elon Musk is conducting at Twitter as its direct object); most occurrences of this verbing seem to be intransitive — examples to come below — though transitive uses are also attested.

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That highfalutin sonofagun from Arizona

December 8, 2022

That would be “Ragtime Cowboy Joe”, in the western novelty tune from 1912 — with many variations in the wording in different performances, but all using the adjective highfalutin (in some spelling), which is why I bring it up here, as a follow-up to my 12/6 posting “highfalutin”, on that bit of characteristically American jocular slang.

My attention was drawn to highfalutin, scooting, shooting / rootin’ tootin’ RCJ by Benita Bendon Campbell, whose father danced with her to (a version of) the song when she was a small child, and who has his version firmly in her memory even now, over 75 years later. She offered to sing it for me, but now I have unearthed quite a range of recorded versions, from which I’ve selected one to subject you to.

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Stick with me, baby!

December 8, 2022

A brief bulletin from the medical-care wing of my daily life, letting you in on some of the events unfolding there, outside of your notice (because you really don’t want to hear about me whining about them).

Today’s unpleasant symptom is weeping sores (described by some as open wounds), on my lower legs and feet. Try not to be concerned about the causative factors, which are complex, and focus on the care, which for the moment I’m handling on my own, through what amounts to elaborate first aid: drying the sites, applying Bacitracin antibiotic ointment to them, and covering them with adhesive surgical dressings, held firmly in place by self-adhering stretch wrap, a truly wonderful medical invention — originally developed for the 3M corporation and sold under the trade name Coban (for cohesive bandage), with a variety of competitors made by other firms (Andover’s CoFlex, MEDca’s self-adherent cohesive wrap bandages).

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Coalinga Zwicky goes to war

December 7, 2022

Just a tease — it’s been another awful day, with very little time in it for blogging — for a Zwicky family posting on Pearl Harbor Day (side note: best wishes to my cousin Lynda Zwicky Hood, born 12/7/41!). Arriving in my mailbox by happy coincidence this morning: in the mildly lubricious Our Armed Forces at Play genre, Army Air Force Lt. John K. Zwicky (hereafter JKZ) of Coalinga CA, sunbathing with two buddies in the Aleutian Islands in 1944:


This is a remarkable snapshot from the National Archives (in College Park MD), made in some haste by researcher Aubrey Morrison, who’s been tracking down JKZ (the photo reproduced here with his permission). I can report that after the war, JKZ went right back to Coalinga and stayed there, with his wife and three kids (a girl and two boys), working in the local oilfields and living a very long life (into his 100s).

But Coalinga rang a little bell in my head, well, because of the oddness of the name but also, I eventually realized, because it was where photographer Jill Ann Zwicky, the subject of my 7/29/22 posting “The life she lived”, grew up: a place in the middle of the Central Valley, in between US Route 101 and I-5, out in the middle of nowhere (to my mind), but a place she remembered with tremendous affection.

Yes, Jill was JKZ’s daughter.

Well, then I have a lot to say about JKZ and Coalinga and the Swiss diaspora in the US, and Aubrey is still unearthing more stuff.

This posting is just today’s proof that I am Not Dead Yet. Stay tuned.

 

 

highfalutin

December 6, 2022

Today’s Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, some diversion from the difficulties of daily life. I take my cue from Ann Burlingham, posting on Facebook on 12/4:

Last night I was watching Nick Cave being interviewed on the BBC when he used the word highfalutin. I looked it up to confirm my sense that that is a word Americans came up with, and it is, and it’s wonderful.

Now, you need to know, first of all, who this Nick Cave is and why it might be notable that he used the slang adjective highfalutin ‘pompous, pretentious’. Then on to the word and who uses it, with two wonderful bonuses, one supplied by OED3, the other by a winery in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.

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Tailored advertising

December 5, 2022

This is very much a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting — it’s been a truly terrible day, but I’m still kicking (though I have no speaking voice and have already slept 13 unhappy hours since going to bed last night).

Random discussion on FB about the odd ‘sponsored’ ads that appear there, one contributor baffled by a flood of products (things she had no interest in) with jokey names. Well, of course, everybody else got different sponsored ads, most of them relatable to items they’d been searching or had actually ordered, but some of them mysterious. The selection of ads is done by algorithm, in ways that simple mortals cannot divine.

And then, as if on cue, I got an ad for this pullover hoodie:


(#1) IT’S A N THING – YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND: available in various patterns, where N is a proper name: either a personal name or a family name, chosen from a large stock of available names — a stock that includes the personal name ARNOLD (see below), but apparently not the rare family name ZWICKY, so that in Google-search fashion, if it can’t find the POUTINE you asked for, it offers you instead something whose name is close in spelling to POUTINE: photographs of people POUTING, or, in this case, the family name WICK

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