The printing plate

July 9, 2025

A message to SF-peninsula Sacred Harp singers today, in the midst of a morning of complex life arrangements:

Some years ago I was given the printer’s plate for SH99 Gospel Trumpet in the 1991 Denson Revision (and have it on a display stand). A very touching gift from my singing community. I am now obliged to dispose of almost all my belongings, to reduce them to a small collection that will fit into a small assisted living facility apartment, saving just those things I need to continue the essays I post on my blog. This task is taking months, involving many thousands of objects; it is emotionally devastating; and it goes slowly because I am so disabled, and have become more so each day as the work damages my hands further. But, bit by bit, I am eroding the mountain of things. The plate for SH99 must go; I hope that some singer would love it as much as I have. Would come and take it.

A very few items shimmer with personal meaning for me; for them I’ve tried to find a truly suitable donor just for this one thing, and I’ve had some great successes. Now this, going to a married couple of long-time singers.

Now, for you, some of the back story, starting with a photo.

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Posted in Language and religion, Music, My life | 1 Comment »

RESIST

July 7, 2025

The message from my fellow QUESTer — another Queer University Employee At Stanford — Ryan Tamares, on a postcard mailed to me on 6/19, in the middle of Pride Month:

Happy Pride !
Pride always ! !
— RESIST —

The holiday moment has passed, but now we’re in a world where we have to actively resist, on a daily basis, against the brownshirts and blackshirts serving our overlords. And join with the drag queens and thrown-away club kids who, in one of our foundation tales, fought back against the cops who came to ruin their lives, and ours.

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Posted in Art, Biology, Categorization and Labeling, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, My life, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Stanford, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

Stoop labor

July 6, 2025

Earlier on this blog I’ve had occasion to celebrate the humane gravity of MSNBC commentator Jonathan Capehart, who happens to be both Black and gay. Now in JC talking about his 2025 book Yet Here I Am: Lessons From a Black Man’s Search for Home, an observation about the stoop labor historically done by Black folk in the American deep south (harvesting cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane):

“My cousin Rita and I are the first generation in our family to not have to pick cotton, and for people of a certain age, they will understand what that means,” Capehart said. “… It wasn’t until I was writing this book that I understood, when our parents were our age, they were working. They were working in the fields, picking cotton, picking tobacco. We did not have to do that.

So JC and his cousin Rita represent a shift in the fortunes of Black folk. Here’s JC informing us, explaining things, interviewing political and cultural figures, a figure of importance on national television — and a moving reporter on his own life history in that book. In what I see as the release of great abilities, drive, and insights that follow on opening up opportunity to everyone: excellent qualities that are in fact distributed widely across the population will flourish in new places (and since those who succeed first will have had to run through a lot of tough hoops, they will be seen to be especially talented).

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Posted in Books, Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Lives, Movies and tv, My life, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

The out@in shirt

July 5, 2025

From yesterday (for me, a long 4th of July work day, 6 am to 6 pm) on my Facebook page (somewhat edited):

In going through stuff in my closets, I came across a t-shirt (one that fits me, so I put it on) that has a logo on the front: a (portrait) rectangle with horizontal stripes of the rainbow flag in it and the word IN in white letters superimposed on the rainbow stripes. The back of the shirt identifies it as from out@in, which is presumably some sort of gay organization, but I don’t recognize the name or remember how I came to have the shirt.

My attempts to search for the organization and the logo came to nought, as did my attempts to scan the t-shirt logo into my scanning printer, so I appealed to readers to supply me with information about the organization and with a copy of the logo. (Given the precarity of my current life, I did not take well to people who, instead of giving me the information I sought, explained to me how I should have done the searches.)

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Posted in Academic life, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Logos, My life, Names, Rainbow, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Visual negations

July 3, 2025

This morning on Facebook, Otto Santa Ana added a temporary profile picture:


The X NO KINGS signage, taking us into the territory of  “double negation”, since both the X and the NO of NO KINGS convey a variety of negation, namely prohibition

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Posted in Negation, Signage, Signs and symbols, Symbols, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Prediction can override evidence

July 2, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate July, ok a day late, life has been difficult, here in the Dispossession Zone (I worked from 4 to 8 am today sorting stuff in this house to get rid of, this after coming back to life, solid food, and unsoiled clothing after three days of nasty intestinal affliction, so I am one weary bear — but clean, and looking forward to sushi for lunch), oh have I mentioned the construction workers tossing pieces of junk down from the sky (well, the roof), accidentally cutting off the electricity, and generally lobbing bombs into my daily life?

But enough of street entertainment. Time for a brief note from my correspondence, a query to AMZ the psycho/sociolinguist from someone — call them X — reporting on an odd experience that they had and hoping I could illuminate it, and give the phenomenon it illustrated a name.

The event: a speaker — call them Y — reached a point in their presentation where their audience would expect them to utter an expression E, but instead uttered an entirely different expression E′, which was, however, prosodically similar to E — E′ had, so to speak, the same melody, but not the same words, as E — but, with the exception of my correspondent X, apparently no one in the audience noticed what Y did; they seem to have understood Y to have said E, rather than E′, and so showed no sign of confusion or surprise (while X was astonished).

What happened there, and what was that called?

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Posted in Errors, Processing, Psycholinguistics | 2 Comments »

Playful offers: two bags of phallic figures

July 1, 2025

Things I can’t give away to local agencies as toys, because they’re adult toys, in particular figures whose reason for being is that they’re ostentatiously phallic. The figures are supposed to be funny rather than arousing, but there’s no denying that they’re displaying phalluses.

There are two bags, one of doubly phallic things in plastic, a whole lot of them; and one of gay male action figures (three of them, each paired with a superhero action figure — passion among the mighty). In detail:

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Posted in Language and the body, Language of sex, Offers | Leave a Comment »

An offer: cufflinks

June 30, 2025

A small thing that’s turned up among the thousands of objects I need to abandon so that I can move, eventually, to an assisted care facility: a small circular leather box (under 3 inches diameter) with a collection of cufflinks in it. Lovely cufflinks, several sterling silver (including a tiny abacus that works), several with semi-precious stones, all from a long-ago life with my man Jacques. But I haven’t been able to deal with cufflinks for decades, so it’s time to find someone who would actually cherish this collection (the silver needs polishing).

The box is small enough to be not much trouble to mail (within the US) — I could get my grandchild Opal to do this —  though if you could pick it up in Palo Alto that would be even better. It would please me, and honor J’s memory, to send it to a good home.

Send requests by e-mail to: arnold dot zwicky at-sign gmail dot com

 

Posted in Offers | 2 Comments »

The city treasurer

June 29, 2025

One little note from today’s San Francisco Pride Parade, where all manner of things passed by, including a great many politicians — most of them just showing their support for some slice of their voting public, though (since this is San Francisco and the occasion is one of queer celebration) some of them will be actual LGBT+-folk.

Which brings me to the long-time city treasurer of San Francisco, José Cisneros. Now, the city treasurer serves as the city’s banker and chief investment officer, and manages all tax and revenue collection for San Francisco. It’s hard to imagine a less frivolous, more earnest or more weightily responsible position. But, since this is San Francisco, it should elicit no surprise that the city treasurer is not only Latino (as you will gather from his name; but then the senior senator from California, Alex Padilla, is Latino) but also gay.

But he holds a weightily responsible, banker’s position. And has the requisite education and business background to qualify for it. And, in fact he absolutely looks the part of the city treasurer of a major US city; he could have been supplied from central casting:


His official portrait, which cries out: rock-solid dependable, and approachable too; of course we will trust him to handle our civic monies

This pleases me. We are everywhere, in all walks of life, presenting ourselves in any number of ways. And actively working for the good of the community, as JC does.

My days of marching in pride parades are long past; now I watch them on tv. But it’s definitely a day for standing up and standing out, so I wore my black GAY AS FUCK tank top. Happy Pride.

 

Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, My life | Leave a Comment »

Work

June 29, 2025

6/29, penultimate June, and 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ the day of the 2025 San Francisco Pride Parade (the 55th, theme: Queer Joy is Resistance), which I’ll be watching in another window while I’m working on posting, with breaks to assemble more of the thousands of objects I need to dispose of to move to assisted living months down the line; endless puzzlements, some of which I’ll soon be posting about. A move that serves as segue to the topic of work, thanks to this 6/26 note on Facebook from Heidi Harley, with my response:

— HH: the move will be a relief and potentially a joy, depending on the other residents and the nature of the place …

— AZ > HH: I’m actually doing just fine at home, with all sorts of workarounds, plus a helper / caregiver a couple times a week. But everyone’s worried about what will happen if I need intensive medical care. I’m determined to continue my writing, which I view as a profession and a calling (as you know).

An additional note: writing is real work — takes intense concentration, long stretches of rewriting and editing to make it better, and so on — but like many kinds of real work, it can be deeply satisfying, a source of genuine pleasure.

And from that I’m taken to the Reading (PA) Eagle newspaper (afternoon and Sunday), where I started my first real job (initially as a copyboy), beginning in June 1958, when I was 17; I was soon shifted to the editorial staff as a floater (I’ll explain), and worked full-time for three summers (and part-time during university breaks) while I went to Princeton. It was a dream job, combining experience with all kinds of writing; learning to work on one thing after another, all relentlessly on deadline; working with a huge cast of characters, of many different natures; and gaining detailed knowledge of the way the world works — gritty stuff, scary stuff, fascinating stuff, and uplifting stuff, all gemischt.

Some recollections of my Eagle days will then lead to Studs Terkel (who died in 2008) and to Calvin Trillin (who’s still alive, at age 89).

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Posted in Books, Events and occasions, My life, News, Writers, Writing | 1 Comment »

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