Arnold Zwicky's Blog
Arnold Zwicky's Blog
Arnold Zwicky
A blog mostly about language from Arnold Zwicky, Adjunt Professor of Linguistics, Stanford University.
Latest Posts
A Pickleball Christmas: just one of the dozens of made-for-tv movies in the crop for this Christmas. I was dumbfounded when an ad for it came up repeatedly on the Lifetime network. What next?, I wondered, will there be A Grand Theft Auto...
Today’s Zippy strip shows us Bill Griffth’s superhero character Z-Man, the Pinhead Superman. Like Zippy, Z-Man is an onomatomane, luxuriating in a constant warm shower of remarkable words. Like Superman, Z-Man has magic eyes: Superman...
(thoroughly raunchy Christmas porn, in verse of sorts; not for kids or the sexually modest) Inspired by the appearance of gay porn actor Dean Young partnered with Joey Mills in Joey’s Surf Vacation (yesterday on this blog), I pulled out...
My morning name for 11/28: The Nairobi Trio (TNT). An instant trip back to my teenage years, the 1950s, when my friends and I were wildly entertained by Ernie Kovacs’s TNT skits on television. Today I’ll give you something like the basic...
A Glen Baxter cartoon in the latest — 12/8/25 — issue of the New Yorker: The scheduled event will go on, complete with umbrella to shelter the picnickers from the blazing sun, even in the snow; even when polar bears arrive (attracted by...
A short video that came by me this morning, with some guy’s idea (off the top of his head) of the top five things that men actually want for Christmas; you really don’t want to see the original source. The larger point is that such a...
(hard-core man-on-man sex action, so totally not for kids or the sexually modest) Yesterday, in my posting “Surfing like bunnies”: In this morning’s crop of gay porn ads, in a TitanMen store mailer, the charmingly titled (and apparently...
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is an advanced exercise in cartoon understanding: a wordless strip (no speech, no caption) in which a tuxedoed performer takes a bow, next to a toy piano: Ah, he seems to be a pianist, and the tiny piano,...
(deeply not for kids or the sexually modest: it’s all about man-on-man sexual acts, though the really hard-core stuff will come in a later posting; this one is mostly about lexicography, but even so, there’s a lot of guys pronging guys...
A tv commercial for the laundry detergent Tide, heard this morning: If it’s got to be clean, then it’s got to be Tide [1] (with the deontic modal of obligation have got to, roughly ‘must’). At this point, I’ll simplify the example...
… And glory shone all around So I sang this afternoon, immersed in the joy of the Christmas season, weeping with pleasure at being able to sing again (and exercise my lungs; my singing is supposed to be both pleasurable and therapeutic),...
rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the month of December and to begin a new work week Another lesson from a visit a little while back from an old friend and colleague in linguistics in which three meals (deliveries from local...
tiger tiger tiger for the outgoing month of November; and for the first Sunday in Advent, so the beginning of the religious Christmas season — focused on the Christ child — that ends on Epiphany, January 6th; and St. Andrew’s Day, 11/30,...
It’s penultimate November and the day after Black Friday, and the leftovers from Thanksgiving — my leftovers, being quirkily Korean, are surely not much like yours, but I have them and they are wonderful — will live again in other meals...
Briefly noted. In the latest New Yorker issue (of 12/1/25), cartoonist Meredith Southland suggests a solution to the puzzle of what penguins are doing when they waddle around waving their wings in the air: (#1) They are playing Charades!...