Pressure Drops and Itchy Spots

November 17, 2025

Yesterday’s set-up (“Two afflictions”) for today’s more detailed report:

I have largely lost the last few days to afflictions

…. One of [them] comes with rapid descents into very low barometric pressures [pressure drops] (as has happened twice in the last three days, as sea storms sweep through coastal California). The other is a mystery ailment that has variously annoyed and plagued me for many years: intensely itchy spots over most of my body, but especially my limbs, sometimes maturing into actual pustules; I have taken to referring to this condition as the itchies. On the night of the 14th/15th, I had the worst attack of the itchies in my life

So today I bring you a report on the Days of Pressure Drops and the Itchies. You hope for days of milk and honey, cakes and ale, wine and roses, beer and skittles, but sometimes you get days of pressure drops and the itchies. Both of which hurt, both of which exhaust you.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life, Weather | 1 Comment »

Two afflictions

November 16, 2025

I have largely lost the last few days to afflictions, poleaxed by pain of several varieties, immobilized by exhaustion, escaping into sleep, into music that delights me, and into familiar old tv dramas with moral lessons that satisfy my desire for order in the world.

One of the afflictions comes with rapid descents into very low barometric pressures (as has happened twice in the last three days, as sea storms sweep through coastal California). The other is a mystery ailment that has variously annoyed and plagued me for many years: intensely itchy spots over most of my body, but especially my limbs, sometimes maturing into actual pustules; I have taken to referring to this condition as the itchies. On the night of the 14th/15th, I had the worst attack of the itchies in my life, all over my body, too many to count, indescribably awful.

But … the barometric pressure rises to something tolerable, or even delightful, within a few hours. And the Assault of the Itchies tale has a delightful denouement. So I am worn out but happy. And in the midst of this, my vital signs have been splendid, in particular very low blood pressure and a stunningly good resting pulse rate.

Alas, the day has wound down — I am in good shape, and happy, but worn out —  so I will put off all the exciting details for tomorrow: Pressure Drop and the Itchies.

 

Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life | Leave a Comment »

Taking Goat to lunch

November 15, 2025

Today’s Pearls Before Swine, in which Rat lives up to his name:


The crucial point: take you to lunch in the context of birthday greetings to Goat — in this context, clearly an instance of the phrasal idiom I’ll label take someone to (‘host someone at (an event), treat someone to (an event)’), and so understood by Goat (and, I think, by all readers of this strip); but then, in a kind of lexicographic bait and switch, Rat maintains that he meant only the caused-motion verb take (‘convey something to (an event at) some place’) and takes no responsibility for paying for the occasion

Then, in an appendix to this main discussion, I expose my bafflement at the treatment of the phrasal idiom take someone to in dictionaries: I can’t find one that lists it (while treat someone to is well covered).

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Posted in Ambiguity, Implicature, Language change, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics | 1 Comment »

Eric Swalwell and his facial scruff

November 14, 2025

The US congressman, in today’s news because his pointed criticisms of Our Overlord Grabpussy have netted him a retributive charge of mortgage fraud, but I was about to post about him as an exemplar of liberal political critique (along with, among others, Rachel Maddow, Pete Buttigieg, and Joyce Vance) and also of nice-guy masculinity (masculinity being one of my perennial topics), with a note on a presentation of himself that employs both informal dress and facial scruff — the latter being a conventional advertisement of masculinity and toughness.

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Posted in It's Just Stuff, Language and dress, Language and politics, Language and the body, Masculinity, This blogging life | 2 Comments »

Lynneguist, MD

November 13, 2025

On Facebook today, a report on a Google AI search on “Lynneguist hospital” that inspired the bot to satisfy the search term by giving Lynne Murphy a medical degree:


[LM:] Adding medical qualifications to my cv.
I mean, here’s the evidence.

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Posted in AI, Dialects, Linguists, Music, Parody, Pseudonyms, Variation | 1 Comment »

Things left undone

November 12, 2025

From my 9/19 posting “An eventful day”:

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.

From that request:

I need some information about assisted living facilities (NOT retirement communities). Specifically, I need to hear, in detail, about anyone who has gone into an alf while maintaining a professional, academic, or artistic career. What I really want is to talk to such a person about how they managed that.

And then from the 9/19 posting:

The short answer is that, yes, people like me have indeed carried on their careers in an alf. I have direct leads to several of these people. (Of course, everybody’s story is different, but this outcome is clearly possible.)

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Posted in Age, My life | 1 Comment »

Yummy grub from around the planet

November 12, 2025

In full:

Thanks for all the good conversation and yummy grub from around the planet

My first report on a two-day visit from my old friend Ellen Kaisse, who flew in from Seattle to San Jose. Intended as help in my preparing to move to an assisted living facility — and we got some of that in — but for me it became mostly a wonderful time talking about our lives these days and trying to recover accurate memories of our pasts (so that there will be at least one more posting about the fragility and pliability of memory) — a vacation from my anxieties and sorrows, punctuated by three breaks for food (two lunches and one dinner), carefully chosen to be favorites of mine — I am now an experienced browser of restaurants for home delivery — that I was pretty sure Ellen had never had before and would also fit her dietary constraints (she doesn’t eat mammals).

This is the food report.

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Posted in Friendship, Language and food, Memory, My life | Leave a Comment »

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 »

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