Former Gifted Child

September 22, 2025

Now coming by me on Facebook every so often, this mock ad for a cosplay costume:


There is of course no Spirit costume supplier; the ad is a total invention, serving as a vehicle to heap scorn on adults who were gifted children / (child) prodigies — I’ll call them g/ps for short —  in one of the four ways Americans spew hostility towards these kids and the adults they become

I was a g/p, and I need to trust someone pretty solidly before I’ll expose my childhood to them. I’m adept at dealing with hostility towards me as a faggot, but the hostility towards me as a former gifted child is hard to cope with; it feels like a contemptuous assault on a defenseless little kid, the one who became the me I am now. But I’m working on unearthing the skeletons in my life history, including this one, in the hope that my openness will help others.

Now: the topic of g/ps is far too complex to do justice to in one posting. This is just a beginning. And, as always, there’s some background to get through.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Childhood, Costumes, My life, Psychology, Reading | 8 Comments »

Graduated consonants

September 21, 2025

From Andrew Garrett on Facebook today:

— AG: Glad to be in this (new, despite the ostensible date) issue of AL. The press perpetrated an amusing typo in Julie Marsault’s title:


(#1) Graduated consonants

I went right for the typo (quite likely to have been introduced by a spellchecker during the layout stage for the cover [but now see Michael Vnuk’s cogent critique of this idea, in his comment below]):

— AZ: Clearly, graduated consonants are like graduated pearls; they come in a series of sizes: bigger, louder, noisier. I can hear them now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Language and dress, Lexical semantics, Mistakes | 4 Comments »

The risks of pedantry

September 20, 2025

This Chris Hallbeck cartoon came by me on Facebook this morning — a strip packed with matters of science (paleontology, specifically), lexicography and usage (the senses of the noun dinosaur, and the contexts in which they’re used), and pragmatics (the way in which the noun is used in interactions, especially in language about language; in the enforcement of language norms; and, oh alas, in the relevance of things said to the interests of those participating in the speech context):


A Maximumble cartoon from 5/24/14, whose humor turns crucially on the pragmatic foolishness of the (now deceased) professor (in the face of a ravening monster, he stops to insist, irrelevantly in the context, that his companion must use the proper terminology, while the companion flees to safety); and which is based on the usage of the noun dinosaur — for a member of a clade of prehistoric reptiles bearing the zoological taxonomical label Dinosauria; versus, in non-technical American usage, for any dinosaurid creature, resembling the prototypical dinosaurs (many people have seen a family resemblance)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Context, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Relevance, Semantics, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »

An eventful day

September 19, 2025

On one front, considerable unease about the long, all-consuming, and physically debilitating project of dispossession of things in my condo. So I sent out a request (reproduced below) for leads on people who have accomplished what I hope to get out of all of that.

Meanwhile, Opal Armstrong Zwicky was at the ready to direct a team of haulers to cart away a mind-blogging [a really fine typo for mind-boggling: see EMK’s comment below], pile of furniture that I had emptied of its contents; for a grand finale, they moved the big desk then in my bedroom (where I had, over a long period of work, pared down four separate complete working desks from different rooms of the condo into one) into my workspace, so that everything desky would now be more or less at my fingertips (well, a short desk chair roll away).  (Granted, my printer is obstinately not working, but that has nothing to do with the haulers.)

I was of no help in any of this, because my hands are out of commission for most things; typing is only somewhat painful, so I can do that. But otherwise, this has been a day of obligatory rest (and deep, knocked-out sleep). I’m hoping they will heal some.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in My life | 2 Comments »

I also am of the ursine persuasion

September 18, 2025

Encountered in going through stuff on Facebook: the episode “Fozzie encounters a bit of a language barrier” from “Rocky Mountain Holiday”, a 1983 Muppet special; in the episode, Fozzie Bear describes himself to Gonzo (a character of ambiguous species) following on reports of a bear in their vicinity:

Have you not noticed that I also am of the ursine persuasion … I’m a bear too and I speak fluent bearish

A huge ferocious bear appears, the main characters flee to Kermit the Frog, and Fozzie explains:

Gonzo! Gonzo! Just a slight dialect problem … she speaks Grizzly and I only speak Paddington

You can watch the episode on YouTube here.

(Nice ellipsis of the BEAR in grizzly bear (the name of a type of bear) and Paddington Bear (the proper name, on the pattern of FN + LN, roughly like Stanford Linguist) of a fictional bear, discovered in London’s Paddington Station), as if they were structurally parallel.

The principal characters:


Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Ellipsis, Language and animals, Language change, Lexical semantics, Movies and tv, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »

A moment of renewal

September 17, 2025

Cast your mind back to 8/15, when I posted “CV time at Stanford” on this blog. Where I noted that

To maintain my adjunct status [at Stanford], I must periodically demonstrate that I am worthy, by submitting my CV for scrutiny by the relevant dean.

My previous appointment, for 2022-25, was to expire on 8/31; the CV was to be for a 2025-28 appointment. I prepared a statement (included in that posting) that was not a conventional CV, but a summary showing who I am, what I do, and what I have done. An experiment, on my part.

The summary did make it clear that I am, among many other things, a very visible and noisy LGBT+ figure. Someone who’s liable to get in trouble with the current American government, and to get Stanford in trouble too, and might be a barrier to Stanford’s raking in contributions. So the dean might well choose to terminate me.

August, and my appointment, came to an end. My department came to the rescue by paying for a month of the university services I need to do my work.

And then, yesterday, the offer of a new appointment came through, and today the resourceful Opal Armstrong Zwicky, armed with technical advice from her mother, stepped me through signing my name electronically to a .pdf document (accepting the offer) that could then just be e-mailed to my department’s administrator. Who will relay it to the dean’s office. Which will then issue a letter of appointment. In the house that Jack built.

Of course they could take it back. All sorts if things can happen. But I press on.

The new appointment greatly simplifies the task of getting me to Stanford Linguistics’ 50th anniversary celebration on October 10th. And that is a Good Thing.

(The rest of my life is in utter shambles, but you really don’t want to hear about it. Though I will mention that most of the furniture in the house will be carted away Friday afternoon. Sleek and spare, spare and sleek is the land where the mammoth grazes.)

 

Posted in Academic life, My life, Stanford | 2 Comments »

Someday he’ll come along

September 16, 2025

Calendrical intro. 3 … 4 … 5 … 📐 — once in every century the days are perfectly aligned, in the pattern of a 3-4-5 Pythagorean triangle:

9/16/25: 9 + 16 = 25, that is,  3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2

Today is Pythagoras Day for the 21st century; if you miss this bus, it will be a long wait till the next one.

But while you’re waiting, you can practice the song for the day,”Pythagorean Theorem”; from my 6/18/25 posting “The Pythagorean Impromptu”, about

a dream in which Danny Kaye sang the Pythagorean Theorem, in the form

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides

(which is the version the actual Danny Kaye sang in the 1958 movie Merry Andrew, and, yes, I do remember this from 1958)

… You can listen to Danny Kaye perform “Pythagorean Theorem” on YouTube here

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Mathematics, Movies and tv, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

A dog and his boy

September 15, 2025

Found in a mountain of boxes full of photos from all of my life, this sweet photo that I’m sure I haven’t posted before: of a fine collie (Blaze, by name, according to the note on the back) and Blaze’s boy, who looks like he’s sprung up some in a growth spurt — and his face has left soft childhood and developed fine adult features, though in size S — but hasn’t yet gotten the shot of pubertal testosterone that builds adult muscle mass:


(#1) A boyhood shot, taken ca. 1950, when the boy was 9 or 10

Here he is ca. 1978, plying his adult trade, teaching linguistics:


(#2) Now with a 70s haircut, and now more markedly a man of the south of France (with his mother’s features)

Someday he’ll come along
The man I love
And he’ll be big and strong
The man I love
— George and Ira Gershwin

Yes, my leanly muscular man, Jacques Transue, from before all the disastrous things that befell us.

 

Posted in Childhood, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Music, My life, Photography | Leave a Comment »

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):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Culture, Language and the body, This blogging life | 2 Comments »

Entertaining raunch

September 11, 2025

(Plain talk about male bodies and man-on-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest — though raunchification is pretty much the apex of funny for early-teen boys)

☹️ 😢 😡 sad weeping furious on the anniversary of 9/11/01 , also on the day after the assassination of Charley-Horst Kirk-Wessel, occasions whose stench can only be properly countered by the celebration of small everyday human experiences that bring moments of delight, joy, and pleasurable physicality — not to take us away from the wreckage falling around us, but to assert and nourish what’s best in us, and not in any grand gesture or powerful speech, but in simple, everyday, silly, and earthy acts. Kharkiv Opera, but on a more intimate scale. Darwin had considerable reverence for the earthworm and its doings; let’s look to Darwin.

Two Facebook exchanges from yesterday, in which I write innocent comments (boldfaced below) that can, if you have the mind for it, be raunchified — understood as a raunchy double entendre:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Seasons, Taboo language and slurs, Taste | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »