Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The 6-fold way

May 19, 2018

A fabulous design from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky yesterday:

(#1) “6-fold” (or: “The 6-fold Way”)

To come. On 6-fold symmetry: snowflakes (natural and in paper), many monocot flowers, Kekulé’s carbon ring for benzene, the major colors of the color wheel (reproduced in the rainbow flag for Gay Pride).

Then on number, color, and gender parallelisms, which will give us 6 as purple and queer. And how the opposition of the secondary hues green with purple in #1 parallels the opposition of the primary hues blue with red (and, in the background of #1, the opposition of the primary hues red with yellow).

And on the name 6-fold way, adapted from the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism and Murray Gell-Mann’s adaptation of the idea (under the name The Eightfold Way) to a theory organizing subatomic particles.

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Posted in Art, Color, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Language and religion, Numbers, Rainbow, Science, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

What have you done with your life? The LGBT department

May 18, 2018

It began a little while back with a request from the Daily Beast for an interview in a series about “unsung (or, at least undersung) LGBT heroes” — people of significance in both a professional field and the LGBT world. A daunting request, to which I’ve responded in three postings on this blog:

on 5/9, “The way I write now”: about my eccentric genre of flânerie

on 5/10, “What have you done with your life?”: about my contributions to linguistics, via a huge list of things I’ve worked on in my academic career, plus two lists of characteristic terminology I’ve used, some of which has become associated with me personally

and now this one, about my contributions to the lgbt community. There’s some straightforward institutional stuff, and then it runs off into the weeds about my speaking out in a way that makes me highly visible and so a possible model for others.

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

Balls on the N + N compound watch

May 18, 2018

In today’s Dilbert, Catbert persecutes Dilbert (as Alice looks on):

(#1)

N + N compounds are notorious for the wide range of interpretations available for them: what’s the semantic relationship between head N2 and modifier N1? As above, where the choice is between ‘ref(N2) relieves, reduces ref(N1)’ (the reading for a conventionalized compound stress ball and many others, like headache pill) and ‘ref(N2) causes ref(N1)’ (as in death ray) — where for an expression X, ref(X) is the referent of X.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics, Subsectivity, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »

Deshagged and pedicured

May 17, 2018

(This starts innocently enough, but quickly descends into male body parts and mansex, in very plain language. All this in text, no X-images, but, still, not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Last week, as usual around the beginning of each month, I had my moments of body care: a haircut, to get deshagged (as I think of it); and the services of a neighborhood nail salon, to get pedicured.

Then I thought: I get deshagged regularly, but I don’t get shagged, haven’t been since sometime in the last century, don’t even remember when. Also, I get pedicured, but I don’t get pedicated. I like the sweetly raunchy verb shag and the owlishly learnèd verb pedicate. So different in tone, but they both roll off the tongue. Two ways of dancing.

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Metonymy | Leave a Comment »

There oughta be a word

May 16, 2018

Darya Kavitskaya on Facebook yesteday:

This is sour cherry clafoutis. No more food for today.

I commented:

I think French needs a verb clafouter ‘to cook a clafoutis; to devour a clafoutis’.

Come to think of it, I could use an English verb clafoute /kla’fut/ with these senses:

I think I’ll clafoute for tonight’s dessert. Maybe plum.

Terry piggishly clafouted. Seven at a sitting!

To come: a reminder about what clafoutis is; about the forms of the invented French verb clafouter; on “having no word for” some concept; about needing — or at least wanting — a word for it; about the ambiguity of these invented verbs (both ‘to cook’ and ‘to eat’); about the source of such ambiguities in marker-poor combinations of elements (lacking explicit indicators of the semantic relationship between the elements — there’s nothing in French clafouter or English clafoute to indicate the semantic role of the referent of their subjects, as creator or consumer); and about the motivation for marker-poor combinations, in a drive for brevity (vs. clarity). French and English could be clearer, less ambiguous — I’ll illustrate with still more invented French verbs — but only at the cost of greater length and effort.

All this from (delicious) French sour cherry flan.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Brevity vs. Clarity, Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Conversion, Derivation, French, Language and food, Metonymy, Morphology | Leave a Comment »

Surreal beer

May 16, 2018

Today’s Bizarro/Wayno collaboration goes to the neighborhood taproom:

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

There’s the question of why Toper 3 can’t find his beer. That has a simple answer: the apple obscures his vision.

Then there’s the claim that Toper 3 is a surrealist — but actually he’s a surrealist character, not a surrealist (an exponent of surrealism). That does make the cartoon surreal, bizarre, because it juxtaposes two ordinary topers at a bar with a fictional character (one from surrealist art, to make the scene more delicious).

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Posted in Art, Derivation, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

The turquoise dish

May 15, 2018

Plant news from my house, a song in silver, gray, and blue (and of course green).

Off to the nursery yesterday to upgrade the pots for several plants: a much larger pot for the big Spathipyllum houseplant I call Spathy (see my 1/4/18 posting “Spathy in maturity”), which was grotesquely potbound; and a larger dish for a succulent garden I wrote about in a 4/26 posting “New on the patio”– #2 there:

(#1) Blue Curls, plus four other succulents, three of them quite blue, one green and juniper-like

Freed from the confines of their little plastic containers from Trader Joes, they all set out to bulk up and spread over their new world, and almost immediately needed a bigger territory. That led me, eventually to the Turquoise Dish, where they live now, with some new gray sedum ‘Cape Blanco’ companions.

Along the way I picked up a creeping lamium with silver leaves, which goes by the name ‘Lami Mega Purple’.

Variety in foliage color, beyond nature’s basic green, is a developing theme outside my window. Coleus with red and yellow in their leaves; a Cordyline (ti plant) hybrid with bronzy-burgundy leaves; and now the silver / gray / blue succulents and lamium.

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Posted in Language and plants, My life, Pronunciation | Leave a Comment »