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
The sinus-infection background, from yesterday’s posting “Chair-ridden”: The [long-running, like for weeks] sinus infection isn’t contagious, and I don’t run a fever, But it’s fiercely painful, produces prodigious amounts of disgusting...
I’ve been sick for some time — a terrible sinus infection that makes sleeping lying down mostly impossible, so I’ve been sleeping, immense amounts of time, sitting up in the comfy chair in my living room — sleeping fitfully, with...
Today on Facebook, Hana Filip passed on a two-sentence poem in prose (an English translation from the German original): Jan Antonin Baťa, or Bata, the genius entrepreneur who founded the Bata shoe emporium, had in his main headquarters...
Yesterday on Facebook, Aric Olnes embarked on “14 days / Countdown [to Christmas] with Godzilla” with this especially arresting image: Godzilla, defender of Santa’s workshop A search on this image got me to a reference to: A Daikaiju...
According to the label on the can, it contains product from [in alphabetical order] Bolivia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, U.S.A, Vietnam It’s high in iron, vitamin E, niacin, magnesium, zinc, copper, and manganese; also...
From Bob Eckstein’s The Bob substack on 1/7/23, this delightful troupe of dancing Santas, created for the monthly comedy newspaper the Funny Times to sell on t-shirts (this year’s offer came to me by e-mail yesterday: (bob’s text) Funny...
Musings on three things — Nairobi, gorillas, and gorilla suts — en soi (as “just stuff:”) vs. those things serving as symbols, with various values / evoked associations, which are tyically conventional: cultural meanings. With specific...
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,...