And now: a real award

May 12, 2025

Just posted on, a fabricated award from Google Gives Back, and then an announcement from the Linguistic Society of America, seeking nominations for its actual awards, a list that now begins, in alphabetic order (so for once the last shall be first):

Nominations due on June 30, 2025:

— Arnold Zwicky Award: recognizing LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community.

— C.L. Baker Award: recognizing mid-career scholars in syntactic theory.

The description of the award (now in its fifth year) named after me has been slightly altered (to satisfy current law); but I continue to be moved that an award on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community was established in my name, and while I was still alive. My joking description of this honor is that I am now officially a Famous Faggot; in the circles I care about, that’s a great honor indeed.

I included the second award from the list because it has a special meaning for me: Lee Baker was my first PhD student, some 60 years ago: a sharp and thoughtful linguist, a remarkable teacher, and a good man, taken from us way too young.

 

Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »

The Google grant

May 12, 2025

Junk and spam e-mail and blog comments continue to stream in, but the automated resources filtering these out for me (and leaving me with some considerable residue to judge by hand) have altered. I’m now getting versions of the Nigerian prince scam, in languages the filters don’t know what to do with (German, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic). And then, in my Junk mailbox (where the filters put stuff they judge might be junk, but leave the final judgment to me) on the morning of 5/6, this fabrication:


(This is a photograph of the mailing, so you can’t link to the Google.org site on it)

There’s a lot of real stuff alluded to in this mailing: the Google address is correct; there is a Google.org charitable arm of Google; that’s a passable reproduction of the Google.org logo; Google.com does give awards (the Google Cloud Partner Awards); “Google Gives Back” was the title of one of Google’s charitable efforts (though the name doesn’t seem to be used any more); and Sundar Pichai is indeed the CEO of Google.com. Some details follow below. But all of this anyone could have looked up. In any case, it smells bad, and the current filters picked up on that, I’m not entirely sure how.

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Posted in AI, Awards, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Zimbalist, accompanied by Satie

May 11, 2025

Today’s morning name was Zimbalist, which came to me at 4:10 am to the accompaniment of the delicious, very French, piano music of Erik Satie (to which it has no associations I can think of). I understood the name to refer to Stephanie Zimbalist, most famously (with Pierce Brosnan and Doris Roberts) a star of the American tv show Remington Steele. But then the topic branched wildly in many directions, in a way I couldn’t imagine organizing into a single posting. So, today, just one piece of that network of topics, the surname Zimbalist.

Zimbalist looks like zimbal + ist, an association surname, possibly an association to an occupation, and so it is: it’s a Slavic Jewish surname meaning ‘cimbalom / cimbal player’ (so it’s parallel to the common nouns pianist, violinist, accordionist, trombonist, clarinetist, etc.).

(The initial letter c of cimbalom represents a voiceless dental affricate [ts], spelled with a c in Russian, a z in German; because of the spelling with c, the name cimbalom is pronounced in English with an [s], and because of the spelling with Z, the name Zimbalist is pronounced in English with a [z] — yes, this is a multilingual, multiorthographic mess, but don’t blame me, I’m just the reporter.)

Now, briefly, to the instrument.

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Posted in Actors, Derivation, Morning names, Morphology, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Spelling | 6 Comments »

Morning name with scorpion

May 10, 2025

My morning name on 5/6 was a misremembered word — I report to you, regularly, on the fragility of memory, including my own — that evoked an excellent political portmanteau from the autumn of 2016, as the Presidential elections (HC vs. DT) were heating up, these words together taking me to a bit of prescient song-writing by Gilbert & Sullivan in 1882 — involving loud braying, vulgar display, and open contempt for their inferiors — a character sketch of the moral monster of 2016, who has over the ensuing decade transfigured into a foolish but vindictive scorpion, with a deadly sting in its tail and no control over its instincts.

Now come with me back to the morning of 5/6. As I woke, what dinged in my mind was the repeated:

tarentara tarentara

which I recalled with pleasure as a chorus of peers from G&S’s Iolanthe, imitating the sound of brasses, specifically of trumpets, as they marched. I went to the net to recover the rest of the chorus, only to discover that I had misremembered the marching noise; it was actually

tantantara tantantara

And so began the journey that ends with all of us embrangled in the animal tale The Frog and the Scorpion.
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Posted in Language and poitics, Memory, Mistakes, Morality, Morning names, Music, Nicknames, Portmanteaus, Quotation, Stories | 6 Comments »

Invasion of the superb birds

May 9, 2025

Yesterday, a greeting card from Ann Burlingham, written on 5/5 in Pittsburgh (mostly about the University of Pittsburgh graduation on 5/3, featuring graduate Opal Armstrong Zwicky among the crowd of about 5,000), arrived in Palo Alto on 5/8, with a note beginning:

Another Superb Bird! How many can Australia have?


(#1) [from the Ikonink cards website:] Original Artwork: Superb Lyrebird (Menura superba), illustrated by Elizabeth Gould for John Gould’s Birds of Australia (1840-1848). Currently displayed at the Australian Museum.

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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »

The message in the sand

May 9, 2025

(This posting is mostly about sexual acts, mostly discussed in street language, so it’s entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest; I know, I know, that sucks)

Yesterday’s posting “Bill, it is the scribbling of a gigantic scoundrel” was about the wonderful absurdity of a Benjamin Schwartz New Yorker cartoon exploiting the Desert Island meme, with everything turning on the message in the sand of the tiny island Bill and his companion share with their ratty palm tree — who could possibly have left it there? —


Of three principal senses of suck, this was intended to be suck-C, an intransitive slang verb of denigration; the ingestion verb, suck-A, is irrelevant to the context; finally, the sexual verb, suck-B, was probably not on BS’s mind (though young men on a small island might turn to fellatio for sexual pleasure), but was certainly on mine

I have written extensively on this blog on these senses of suck, their uses, and their sociocultural contexts — compact summary coming soon — because in my gay male world (one of a number of worlds I inhabit), sucking cock is, simply, everyday sex, and consequently the verb suck has been elaborated and played on in that world, and all of that is of interest to me as a linguist (linguistics being another of the worlds I live in).

But I thought to steer clear of the gay stuff yesterday, so as not to distract readers from the intricate delights of the cartoon (which still makes me laugh every time I look at it). But I have a friend who is named Bill, who is gay, and who was moved to comment (on this blog) on yesterday’s cartoon:

I guess I DO suck, or at least would like to.

So then Bill sucks ‘Bill sucks dick’ was on the table. And we’re off for a holiday in Blow Job City.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Bill, it is the scribbling of a gigantic scoundrel

May 8, 2025

… and your buddy’s on the case, we’ll get the miscreant, trust me! That’s the burden of this goofy Desert Island cartoon in the latest (5/12&19/25) issue of the New Yorker:


(#1) Bill’s priceless facial expression suggests that he’s not buying his companion’s attempt at deflection Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cartoonists, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »

Appliances in therapy

May 7, 2025

Today’s Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon done with common kitchen appliances: a tea kettle and a coffee percolator sit on a couch in couples therapy, with a toaster therapist:


(#1) Wayno’s title, “Mutual Irritation Society”, takes appliancehood for granted and focuses on the relationship issues (the annoying noises the two partners make); if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page

The cartoon identifies the percolator as male (presumably on the basis of its phallicity); if we stick to symbolic values, then the mammillary kettle is female (though it could be that the kettle is a pocket bear — a smaller, more compact man-oriented man who’s burly and hairy; the world of gender and sexuality is huge and diverse, full of surprises).

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Posted in Comic conventions, Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Mammillarity, Phallicity | 1 Comment »

Opening cans and jars

May 6, 2025

(I was hoping to get one little posting done, a tiny thing I started working on yesterday morning, just to show that I could finish something, however trivial, before tackling the mountain of more ambitious postings sitting in my queue; and to then be able to get out in an anomalously hot and beautiful day, maybe take my walker around the block. And then, roughly every 30 minutes, something new came in to take me away from my minuscule task, some of it alarming and disastrous, but all requiring my attention. At the very end of the day (having left the house only to get my mail) I finished the playful “Sol is secretly queer”.

By then, I had another, even more minuscule, task to do today. And it’s been like a replay of yesterday. While I was describing yesterday to my caregiver, a pair of contractors — surprise! — appeared, seeking the water shutoff valve for my condo and the one above it, so that they could get on with repair work in the condo above me. Half an hour of complex negotiations followed, then my water was off for several hours while workmen trooped in and out. While this was going on, I was obliged to do complicated advance sign-ins on-line for upcoming medical appointments. And now I return to my bit of domestic trivia.

I have not wept. I have not raged. I am, inexplicably, in a good frame of mind (and my vital signs are wonderful). I created an excellent soup for lunch out of random leftovers. I haven’t been able to work my weekly shower into the schedule (well, there was the 7 am grocery delivery, not expected until 10), but what the hell, there’s always tomorrow. I am wearing my FAGGOT t-shirt; I am faggot, hear me roar. I will, somehow, be able to do this.)

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Linguists, My life | Leave a Comment »

Sol is secretly queer

May 5, 2025

🇲🇽 It’s Cinco de Mayo today, but this posting has precious little Mexican content; don’t let that keep you from your celebrations, whatever they are.

I had intentions to cook up a homey Mexican pozole  (any occasion is a good one for pozole, in my book, and I always have a can of white hominy in the cupboard, just in case I want to assemble the materials for one), but the main fresh ingredient I had on hand was an big order of Chinese (mung) bean sprouts, so I chopped them up; added a can of lentils (another household staple), with their liquid; splashed in a dose of sriracha sauce; thickened the broth with a container of hummus (ground up chickpeas); and produced a rich, spicy, and crunchy  Chinese / Middle Eastern / Southeast Asian three-legume soup, heated in the microwave. It was fabulous. I might do it again, on purpose this time.

But this posting is a reaction to a card I got from Kathryn Burlingham in Portland OR roughly a month ago — I move sloth-like through my social responsibilities —  about (among other things) the toll of the closet for queer people. Trying to write out and then mail a physical card is, however, gravely difficult for me, while typing at my computer’s keyboard is merely somewhat painful, so this is my response to KB, which turns not so much on the closet — coming out, accepting myself, was heart-breakingly difficult for me, but I spent almost no time in the closet — but on the actual card that KB sent me, the Jahna Vashti greeting card (“vibrantly printed in [yes!] Portland OR on a sturdy, uncoated card stock”) “Brother Sun”:

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Music, My life, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | 5 Comments »

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