The mirror of the manatee

August 5, 2021

In today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s title: “The Mammal in the Mirror” (a play on the song title “Man in the Mirror”) — a manatee primps at his vanity, yielding the vanity + manatee portmanteau vanatee, and crossing genders as well as words (masculine manatee — “Man in the Mirror”, addressing himself as handsome, bristly body — at a conventionally highly feminine item of furniture, a vanity table, for applying makeup in the bedroom):


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

I’ll start with the two contributors to the portmanteau and follow them where they lead, which is many surprising places.

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Posted in Beheading, Gender and sexuality, Illusions, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Poetic form, Portmanteaus, Prosody | Leave a Comment »

O death, where is thy ka-ching?

August 4, 2021

From the annals of grotesque salesmanship, in the mail today:


Inside, Assurance IQ instructs: Read Carefully: You are Eligible to Apply for Medicare Advantage Benefits

In fact:

You are one of only 260,467 people in California that we have identified as eligible for this program. Don’t wait, call today.

But, alas, Ann Zwicky isn’t in California, never was, and won’t be calling in any case: her ashes have been one with the earth in Columbus OH since she died in 1985, 36 years ago. (She would now be 84 but didn’t live nearly long to enroll in Medicare, much less contemplate additional Medicare benefits on one of the Medicare Advantage plans that Assurance IQ is touting.)

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Posted in My life | 3 Comments »

Flying the flag of my people

August 4, 2021

The foreshadowing, from my 7/31 posting “If you squint, you can see Switzerland”:

I have not celebrated Swiss National Day [August 1st] with any sort of Carnivalesque disorder, though I did decide to acquire a mid-sized Gay Pride flag to display at my condo, now that one of my neighbors in the complex has somehow surmounted the HOA ban on such displays with a big rainbow flag on a balcony and a Black Lives Matter sign on the street.

My intention was realized yesterday, with the arrival of this excellent 2×3 ft product of the U.S. Flag Factory:


(#1) (photos, at dawn today, by Kim Darnell)

Just the size I wanted, to fit this particular space. Hanging from a nail once used for Christmas wreaths, when those were one of the few allowable public displays in the complex. The flag’s on the gate to my front patio (you can see the light from my workspace, through the window), along the short entryway to my condo from the street. So it is indeed a public display, visibly celebrating gayness to anyone who walks by on the street.

(I wonder if it’s too generically celebratory, like the rainbow flag that the local Pizzeria Delfina flies above its door — and unlike the rainbow flags flown by some local churches, which are signs of sanctuary and care. Maybe I should get a plaque made for the door: GAY INSIDE. I wonder if I could get a welcome mat made with that on it.)

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Posted in Flags, My life, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Twirly and girly

August 3, 2021

The One Big Happy from 6/5, in which Ruthie struggles, eggcornishly, to rationalize an unfamiliar name with familiar parts:

Mary, Susan, whatever.

Meanwhile, I now have “Honey Bun” from South Pacific in my head:

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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Phonetics, Poetic form, Variation | 4 Comments »

Beware the bucephalic serpent bearing a wheel of cheese

August 2, 2021

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with a fresh reading of Genesis:


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.) She found the tree with its serpent and cheeses on the Rindr site, a decidedly sketchy place

The story is about Adam, Eve, a serpent, and a piece of fruit (in Genesis in the KJV, it’s simply the fruit — in the Hebrew original, the generic term peri — but twice in Milton’s Paradise Lost it’s specifically an apple, Latin malus; the story is complicated, but I’m pretty sure Hebrew peri didn’t embrace cheese of any sort), and it’s always an apple in popular tellings of the story in English.

Then there’s the pun, which on the face of it is just the difference between the /n/ of Eden and the /m/ of Edam — a very high frequency pairing in imperfect-puns, especially after a vowel in syllable offsets, where the nasal is likely to be realized entirely as nasalization of the preceding vowel, with no closure for the nasal stop (making these two words potentially identical phonetically).

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Posted in Books, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 4 Comments »

A bit of Climo and a peek at Farazmand

August 1, 2021

🐇🐇🐇 Cartoonists Liz Climo (who specializes in animal characters) and Reza Farazmand (who has several animal characters), very briefly, in books recently arrived at my house. Climo already has a Page on this blog; she views her animal characters with affection; friendship and the actual physical characteristics of her animals are major themes in her work. Farazmand is new to this blog; his animal characters are essentially people in animal guise; his work is wry, tending toward the dystopian.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Homosexuality, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics | 3 Comments »

If you squint, you can see Switzerland

July 31, 2021

The last of my buzzcut photos: #5, in honor of Swiss National Day (August 1st), with occasion-appropriate t-shirt and athletic shorts:

The wearied old professor, squinting into the sun in Ramona Birdland (where the squirrels and, alas, roof rats also play), at the controls of his excellent — maneuverable and very sturdy — outdoor walker (photo by Kim Darnell)

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Posted in Clothing, Holidays, Homosexuality, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

It was thirty years ago

July 31, 2021

… well, not today, but this summer. From my 10/23/19 posting “OUTiL: a historical note”:

For LGBT History Month, some notes on a little piece of that history in linguistics, in the loose network of academic acquaintanceship that formed at the Linguistic Institute at UC Santa Cruz in the summer of 1991:


The t-shirt, once available in both pink and purple (design by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky)

OUT in Linguistics, OUTiL, OUTIL (the abbreviation pronounced /áwtǝl/, through some wags joked about its being French outil /uti/ ‘tool’, with the expected sexual slang use).

The group was primarily social, offering physical places for LGBTQ+ folk and their friends to gather, network, talk about linguistics and their lives — with a mailing list to coordinate these gatherings, and then also to offer a net-place for such talk. Over the years, it changed its mode of operation, ending up as a private group on Facebook, with me as its administrator. But now it’s been years since I was able to travel anywhere, and I’m now an old man in fragile health, not an appropriate administrator.

Meanwhile, OUTiL has served its purpose and ceased to carry any traffic. So, in the absence of anyone willing to take over from me and revive it, I have closed it down. I removed the newsgroup — with some difficulty — this Wednesday morning. Thirty summers after the first.

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Posted in Anniversaries, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality | 2 Comments »

Buzzcut 4: books and epithets

July 30, 2021

The last in the series of pairings of my new buzzcut with impudent gay t-shirts new to my wardrobe (earlier: BIG FAG on a pink shirt, rainbow FAGGOT in block letters, and, yesterday, a rainbow tyrannosaurus):


(#1) Posed in front of part of the Zwicky GSU (Grammar, Style, & Usage) collection, now housed in my condo, where the piano used to be, and supported by my indoor walker (which sports new purple walker balls, not illustrated here)

The t-shirt is a new version — bigger, bolder, more intense — than my first GAY AS FUCK shirt, below, which has worn over time until the colors are muted and delicate and the fabric is pleasantly soft. I see fatal holes in its near future.


(#2) Catalogue photo, not of me. With an (entertaining) asterisking strategy for taboo avoidance, unlike the flat-out FUCK of #1

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Posted in Clothing, Constructions, Gender and sexuality, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Buzzcut portrait 3: the gay dinosaur

July 29, 2021

(Sexually edgy topics — what do you expect from gay dinosaurs? — so you might want to exercise caution.)

Yesterday it was a rainbow FAGGOT in block letters (in the posting “Today’s garment faggotry”); today it’s all visual: a rainbow tyrannosaurus, a poignant symbol of gay obsolescence:


(#1) Yesterday I was standing in front of a bookcase, at the helm of my indoor walker; today I’m in my work nest with my Window on the World (on my plants, birds, and squirrels) behind me, sitting in my outdoor walker, which doubles as a sturdy chair (photo by Kim Darnell)

Behind me is a crocheted FUCK square, a tribute to Jesse Sheidlower and The F Word; and a postcard tribute to the male art of Tom of Finland. Just above them, not visible here, is a copy of Jump, Paradise Cove, 1987, a Herb Ritts photograph of four men disporting themselves on the beach (see my 9/9/16 posting “Herb Ritts”). Otherwise, it’s reference works on one side, my work table (with visible mouse, on its rainbow-Z mousepad) on the other.

On the shirt, see sense 2 in this NOAD entry:

noun dinosaur: 1 a fossil reptile of the Mesozoic era, in many species reaching an enormous size. … 2 a person or thing that is outdated or has become obsolete because of failure to adapt to changing circumstances.

Sigh.

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Posted in Clothing, Jokes, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

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