Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Vacations

April 1, 2025

[I wrote this while watching Cory Booker speak on the floor of the US Senate for a record of over 25 hours straight, passionately speaking against the wickedness of the president and his sidekick and in favor of (among other things) diversity, equity, and inclusion; calling repeatedly on my hero John Lewis; and cleansing the nastiness of the previous record-holder, Strom Thurmond, who was filibustering against the Voting Rights Act of 1957. I wept, I cheered, I was moved to hope, at least for a few moments.]

Two triggers for this posting:

— the Zippy strip for 9/30 (so, something close to hot news) in which Zippy and Zerbina reminisce about their fabulous vacation at the Diet of Worms in 1521 (yes, Martin Luther is involved)

— 2022 e-mail from my old friend and linguistics colleague Elizabeth Closs Traugott (who’s a year older than I am but in vastly better shape), about a trip for pleasure she was about to take to (the) Pinnacles, south of here, which reminded me of a similar trip my guy Jacques made years ago. Which then took me to a vacation J and I took together. (Yes, this topic has been simmering on my desktop for three years; I have a prodigious backlog.)

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Posted in Academic life, Art, German, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Vito Corleone and Jimmy Hoffa walk into a formula pun joke

April 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the cruelest month; today is not only April Fools Day, but also noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday (in 1897), to be celebrated by a look at his work on Menomini / Menominee, an Algonquian / Algonkian language of Wisconsin

Revived on Facebook recently, this 3/31/22 Pearls Before Swine comic strip:

(#1) A Stephan Pastis specialty, the formula pun — or setup / payoff pun — joke

Two things here: the joke form, and the popular-culture knowledge needed to appreciate this specific strip.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Puns, Quotations | 1 Comment »

Hybrid portmanteaus

March 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate March, the day on which the tigers eat the lambs that the month proverbially goes out as; my posting for this morning begins with tigers, but only so I can slide into the real topic:

the hybrid portmanteau ‘a portmanteau (name) for a hybrid (creature)’ — as in the names liger (lion + tiger) ‘hybrid of a male lion with a tigress’ and tigon (tiger + lion) ‘hybrid of a male tiger with a lioness’, as opposed to unmixed names for hybrids, like mule ‘hybrid of a male donkey and female horse’ and hinny ‘hybrid of a male horse and a female donkey’. Hybrid portmanteaus are iconically satisfying: intimate name-melding (through the combination of word-parts) signifies intimate creature-melding (through mating).

From this beginning, I will rapidly descend to the hybrid portmanteau triceradoodle (the creature is a preposterous hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle) and eventually to the double hybrid portmanteau composite Gerberian Shepsky (an actual dog breed, a hybrid of a German shepherd and a Siberian husky)

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Posted in Cartoonists, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language play, Lexical semantics, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Semantics | 2 Comments »

Candidiana

March 30, 2025

Penultimate March, and today’s song from Candide is Cunegonde’s aria “Glitter and be gay” (from Act 1, right before “You were dead, you know”, the title subject of my 3/27 posting on this blog), in which she confronts her, um, suitors with the defiant quatrain:

Enough! Enough!
I’ll take their diamond necklace
And show my noble stuff
By being gay and reckless!

(Oh, honey, I am so with you!)

Candide is a remarkable theater piece that provides almost as many quotations suitable for random occasions as the Alice books, but with a sensibility that is some sort of compound of Voltaire’s satirical novella and the New York City intellectual and artistic world of the 1950s. But it works.

Now: the work, my 3/27 posting, and two responses from old friends about the show.

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Posted in Movies and tv, Music, My life, Theater | Leave a Comment »

Misleading

March 29, 2025

My note on Facebook on 3/26 about one small point in the Signal Chat affair:

Listening fairly carefully to testimony yesterday in the Signal fiasco, I realized that some of those questioned were not only dodging questions and not recalling stuff but also framing answers so that they were (arguably) accurate, but only with the wording understood in a particular technical way. So that they said there were no war plans — because the plans were, technically, attack plans, not war plans. And that there was no classified intelligence — because the classified information was, technically, plans, not intelligence.

It reminded me of a ritual performed by a Muslim friend at a wonderful dinner at Ann and Bonnie’s in Princeton some 65 years ago (Eqbal and Ann are long dead, but Bonnie in Colorado and I in California squeak by), during which glasses of excellent wine were poured. Eqbal took a napkin, dipped a finger in his wine and flicked a drop of wine onto the napkin, then raised his glass and led a toast to Ann. A while later, we asked him what the flicking was about.

“Oh”, he explained, “the Qur’an teaches us: Thou shalt not drink one drop of wine. I was merely obeying the injunction”.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Context, Pragmatics, Semantics | 3 Comments »

GBTQ guys

March 28, 2025

[In this posting, among many other things, sex between men discussed in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest]

The background is complex. From 3/26, in my posting “A gay life”:

A re-play of some material about my first male lover, Larry [Schourup], as background for two other postings: one about him right now (well, as of yesterday); and one about GBTQ guys and how they fold their sexual desires, practices, and identifications into lives of accomplishment, as Larry has done — and as the linguist Aaron Broadwell (celebrated in the second posting) has done.

But then my attention was diverted by the firehose of appalling actions by my government, so that I wrote on 3/27, in my posting “You were dead, you know”:

My intention was talk about integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment (like LS’s teaching and published research in linguistics) and value, with a bow to the poet Frank O’Hara (who LS introduced me to many years ago … [but] I’ve trimmed this post down to its other aim, which is to report on the last year or so of the LS/AZ correspondence

culminating in the joyous discovery that, contrary to my fears, LS had not died, hence the Candide quote in the title of that posting.

But now to start that first posting, of two, all over again, with material from my 3/1/24 posting “The grace of lovers”:

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and politics, Language of sex, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

You were dead, you know

March 27, 2025

The first follow-up to my posting yesterday “A gay life”, which had material about my first male lover, Larry Schourup, from earlier postings of mine. About 55 years of the loving friendship that succeeded our original relationship, a lifelong conversation carried on through enormous changes in our lives. LS ended up in Japan, with a long-time Japanese partner, Isao; they had to conceal their homosexuality and their relationship for many years, until recently it became possible for them to live openly, and to apply for domestic partnership in Kyoto (which I now have learned was granted on 5/29/24, wonderful thing).

My intention was talk about integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment (like LS’s teaching and published research in linguistics) and value, with a bow to the poet Frank O’Hara (who LS introduced me to many years ago). I am, however, overwhelmed by the firehouse of fascism being sprayed on a daily basis by the overlords in my country, which needs a variety of responses, all of which take time — so I’ve trimmed this post down to its other aim, which is to report on the last year or so of the LS/AZ correspondence.

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Posted in Death notices, Gender and sexuality, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

Yesterday’s news from my house

March 26, 2025

Yesterday morning was bright and warm. But the weather report said that in a day it would get cooler and then there would be several days of rain. Meanwhile, I had garden work — mostly, edging the garden strip to cut back the ivy sprawling from the strip onto the patio, which it clearly intended to vanquish — that I’d put off for weeks because of earlier rains, so this was my chance to clean things up.

It’s hard work for someone with my disabilities who gets around with a walker. A heavy long-handled lopper is involved, also a clever long-handled grabber tool to pick up the clipped stems and leaves and put them into a plastic bucket (so that I can take them inside to very slowly and methodically use sharp-edged hand tools to reduce them to short bits of stuff usable as compost back on the garden strip). The ivy trimming is demanding, sweaty work, but satisfying because the result is a handsome garden and then, eventually, a pile of excellent compost. But there’s a nice rhythm to the labor — and it sets my mind free to wander on other things, like the postings I’m always composing.

Very quickly I realized that it was in fact blazing hot — 85F, high-summer-hot — so I speeded up, and got considerably less fastidious as I worked along the strip. Retreated inside the house, did my slicing and chopping until I had a pile of compost bits.

By then my caregiver J had arrived. I gave him the bucket of bits to distribute in the garden, he came back to quiz me about my medical state. Looked anxiously at me, because I was flushed and speaking slowly, but he went on to ask some general medical questions. He asked if I’d weighed myself, adding that he’d seen in the bathroom the … umm … what do you call that in English? And I couldn’t think of the word. I went on haltingly to explain that I was having trouble finding the word, but not to worry, this was normal, I was just hot and tired, I wasn’t having a … what do you call it when you get a blood clot in the brain? or even that thing that Jacques had when he suddenly couldn’t talk or walk, it has a name with letters and another long technical name.

I know, I know, not being able to find words for not being able to find words.

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Posted in Language and class, Language and medicine, My life | 2 Comments »

A gay life

March 26, 2025

A re-play of some material about my first male lover, Larry, as background for two other postings: one about him right now (well, as of yesterday); and one about GBTQ guys and how they fold their sexual desires, practices, and identifications into lives of accomplishment, as Larry has done — and as the linguist Aaron Broadwell (celebrated in the second posting) has done.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Linguists, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »