AMaZing Mail Department, from yesterday: this object:
(#1) A short snorter whose signers include John K. Zwicky (across the very right edge of George Washington’s face); JKZ, of Coalinga CA, is a familiar — as well as familial — character on this blog
#1 came in surprise e-mail yesterday from James A. Downey, who’s been researching the names on the short snorter and so was led to this blog. So, two things: JKZ and short snorters.
Under the header “Howdy” (a folksy salutation I rarely encounter), this e-mail from 3/4 (somewhat edited):
I was in your syntax class at Stanford in the late 80s …
Recently had a colleague [who] said he was basing [a] clitics and circumclitics paper on your theories! So, thought I’d say hello and thank you for not flunking me.
Now, I get an unbelievable amount of ill-intentioned mail from trollers, spammers, and seekers of commercial deals; now that these annoying entities have access to impressive AI programs, their junk e-mail regularly makes reference to details of my published work and is generally pretty sophisticated in its attempt to gain my confidence. That “Howdy” really was a red flag; also, although Howdy Boy wouldn’t have been the first former student to thank me for not flunking him, it’s a rare event, and might just have been a clever stroke to catch my attention.
On the other hand, his colleague’s paper was said to be about the language Miluk (a language I don’t recall having heard of before; it’s an extinct Coosan language of Oregon), and his e-name was miluk — two things lending some verisimilitude to him. And then his signature was
Troy Anderson, ‘89/‘90
which would put him at Stanford when I taught my really big Intermediate Syntax course, Linguistics 121, in winter quarter 1989 (more on this course in an appendix to this posting; but it’s relevant here that enrollment in the course was unexpectedly gigantic, requiring the last-minute hiring of a raft of additional grading assistants, who I then had to co-ordinate and manage, and making my memory of individual students quite hazy). But then “Troy Anderson” is the sort of everyday name that trollers and spammers make up.
Alas, my net experience includes astonishingly inventive malicious trollers, whose only purpose is to demonstrate their cleverness by deceiving otherwise intelligent people and wasting their time; and, a few months back, being disastrously defrauded by people who did a remarkable job of creating detailed counterfeits of a series of commercial websites. So I’m really really cautious. (Yes, this is a truly grotesque way to have to live.)
Awoke this morning for a 12:50 whizz, with the line “‘Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave” (from “Hard Times, Come Around No More”) in my ear, causing me to think that if there were a memorial service or wake for me after my death, this is one of the pieces of music I would want played at it; death is a constant presence for me, so I muse on things like this.
But then I realized that there would be no memorial service for an old person whose surviving friends are spread all over the world; if they aren’t able to spend some moments with me while I’m alive, why would they gather to mourn my death? The song line for this is “Give me the roses while I live”, from Odem (Second), Sacred Harp 340 (more on this below). Come by and I will entertain you with random thoughts and stories from my life — and play for you my music of joy, or all the versions of “Hard Times” I have (listed below), or my favorite Mozart Operas (Figaro and Zauberflöte, but it’s a hard choice), or Sacred Harp songs, or the rock music I used to dance to (heavy on the Rolling Stones), or Haydn’s Missa in Tempore Belli, or Linda Ronstadt, or Louis Moreau Gottschalk, or Candide (the original one), or Company, or Heitor Villa-Lobos, or I can go on annoyingly for a really long time in this vein.
🩸🩸🩸 … on this day in 1965: NEVER FORGET
From my 4/15/22 posting “LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS BLACK WOMEN”, about the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, but also about James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (celebrating the Appalachian poor) and about the late US Representative John Lewis, who on 3/7/65 led the first of three Civil Rights marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma AL — an event now known as Bloody Sunday, because of the savage attack on the marchers by state troopers and police:
A carefully composed, subtle, and surprising ambiguity-driven cartoon by Mick Stevens in the New Yorker 1/1&8/2024 issue (on-line on 12/2/23):
Were we expecting a baby?, conveying not ‘Were we pregnant?” but the surprising ‘Were we expecting a baby (to appear at the door, to visit us, to be delivered to us, etc.)?’ — compare Were we expecting a special-delivery letter? Were we expecting the Spanish Inquisition? (meanwhile, there’s a Page about MS cartoons on this blog)
From NOAD:
verb expect: … [c] believe that (someone or something) will arrive soon: Celia was expecting a visit.
verb phrase idiom be expecting (also be expecting a baby): informal be pregnant: his wife was expecting again.
(Very heavy on gay content, with a number of raunchy allusions, so not to everyone’s taste.)
I’m well aware that Christmas was over two months ago, but this is a complex posting and my life’s been full of, um, challenges. In any case, I’m finally finishing up Dean Allemang’s series of AI-generated Christmas-card designs for the 12 days as in the carol, all of them sent as titillating presents for me. The early ones had one hot hunk, an object of gay sexual desire (Dino and I share a sexual orientation, and in fact a sexual history), as a central figure, with multiples of the gift of the day (birds or those golden rings) as accompaniments; but from there on it’s multiple men: for days 6 and 7, in my 1/11 posting “Hot Days of Christmas: geese and swans”, the dudes are figurative birds; for days 8 (maids a-milking) and 9 (ladies dancing), Dino just switched sexes (milkmen, laddies dancing); the last three days have male gifts in the carol (10 lords a-leaping, 11 pipers piping, 12 drummers drumming), but Dino has found fresh, jokey, interpretations for all three.
(Note: once things shifted to multiple hunks, Dino’s prompts for suitable images tended to turn up clone-like variants of the same basic guy, just differently posed and dressed. So we’ll be seeing a few of these studs again and again; some people find this effect creepy, some find it really hot, I toggle back and forth between the two reactions.)
Now: for background, a look back at the turning point in this carnival of images, the geese a-laying (day 6) and swans a-swimming (day 7). With some comments from Dino about the craft of prompting for suitable images (which can then be further massaged with image-processing software); there’s a lot of art in all of this.
On the other hand, exceptional vocabulary comprehension is not yet within the grasp of her exceptional vocabulary comprehension; Ruthie, in this One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed recently, does indeed know a lot of words, just not some of the 4- and 5-syllable killer items:
But you can bet that if we had the next few panels, we would see Ruthie quizzing her mother on those 2-dollar words — though by now they’re probably 10-dollar words — and incorporating them into her exceptional vocabulary, so that she can show them off.
From GDoS on two-dollar words:
(US) any language considered ‘difficult’ or ‘intellectual’, most likely by a speaker who claims to despise such locutions [with cites from 1929 on]
Recently I’ve been getting lot of e-mail from former students (at Ohio State and Stanford, both undergraduates and graduate students, from all periods of my roughly 50-year teaching career), mostly just saying hello and asking how I’m doing. They’re also mostly people who don’t read this blog or follow me on Facebook, so they really don’t know how I’m doing, and require a thoughtful response, one by one — and then I’ll want to hear how they’ve been doing, and the exchange takes a lot of time, so I’m perpetually way behind on maintaining these relationships. Which is where I am right now, somewhat desperate.
Now I take the coward’s way out, going first with the easy thing, responding to e-mail from a former student — Zheng-sheng Zhang, 1988 Ohio State PhD (Tone and tone sandhi in Chinese, for which I was the Doktorvater) — who does in fact follow this blog and was writing mostly to announce his latest book:
Zhang, Chinese Signs: An Introduction to China’s Linguistic Landscape (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2024)
That would be my grandchild, Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky — what a string of names! — who is (decimal) 20 today. For OEAZ on the occasion, this tiny poem:
One score for Opal
Vigesimal 10, the first day of
Her second score —
No longer a teen, now in
Her 20s —
The crowds cheer
Her breakthrough
Now, since I’m irremediably a linguist, a dip into the noun score in games and the measure noun score ’20 years; 2 decades’, which are listed together in dictionaries because, surprisingly, they have the same origin.
In today’s Bizarro, a dog park, with parking meters, where you can park your pooch by the hour:
Surprise! The strip exploits a possible sense of the N+N compound dog park — roughly, ‘an area or building where dogs may be left temporarily, for a fee’, the canine analogue of (largely British) car park ‘an area or building where cars or other vehicles may be left temporarily; a parking lot or parking garage’ (NOAD) — that you probably had never imagined.
Instead, you expected the everyday sense of dog park, ‘a park for dogs to exercise and play off-leash in a controlled environment under the supervision of their owners’ (Wikipedia) — a Use compound with the general meaning ‘park for dogs (to use)’, but coming with a sociocultural context that in practice conveys something considerably more specific.
Now, more details on everyday dog parks, and Bizarro dog parks too.
