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
… all fictional, unimaginably different, each one moving in its own way; welcome to the queen of the months, here in the northern hemisphere, where, on this celebratory day, the rabbits — — come to play Ir starts with a burlesque of the...
Hey, there, server lad, Have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, One alpaca full! This Drew Dernavich cartoon in the 6/1/26 issue of the New Yorker: A wonderfully absurd riff on the custom of restaurant servers offering freshly ground...
tiger tier tiger for ultimate May, the gateway to the sultry rabbits of summer, those promiscuous creatures of the great queen, Juno (is it hot in here?) A follow-up to my 5/29 posting “Three mishearings”, with yet another surprising...
(the third mishearing takes us, in street language, into fellatio-land, a place not suitable for kids or the sexually modest) Recently logged, three mishearings of televised reels, two from commercials, one from a joke reel on Facebook,...
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of 5/26: A Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with couples therapy in which the couples’s conflicts are referred to the attitudes of their inner children, one of whom is said to be infected with the dreaded...
The Stanford linguistics AZ community — adjunct faculty Annie Zaenen and Arnold M. Zwicky, graduate student Anissa Zaitsu — is pleased to announce the PhD dissertation oral presentation of one of its little band: The Landscape of...
(a dip into the rhetorical organization of texts and into figurative language, but getting its raw material from gay porn and so it’s going to be entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) In the opening of Raging Stallion’s...
(genitals and sex acts discussed in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest) From the Monty Python fandom wiki: Biggus Dickus is a fictional character in the Monty Python film Life of Brian, portrayed by Graham Chapman....
Yesterday, in my posting “Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience”, a Zippy strip in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It turns out that this strip is...
The crucial moment of today’s (5/21) Zippy strip, in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It’s hard to know where to start with this — and then it turns out...
Whoa: toxic, resilience, Rizzler — all cry out to Zippy as he makes his critical way along a forest path, deprecating — despite their (respective) colorfulness, exactness, and freshness — the way these expressions are overused: In the...
(by the time I’m just a bit of the way into revealing the themes of this posting, certainly once Jake Mathews appears, it should become entirely clear why this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest) A follow-up to my posting...
(men’s bodies and sex between men, sometimes described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) Two gay porn scenes in which the partners take evident pleasure in their sex, as shown by the exchange of...
Briefly noted: today’s Zippy strip has our Pinhead rowing to a half-rhyme: Zippy is keen on spleen (‘bad temper; spite’ (NOAD)) and is happy to vent his in a half-rhyme. In particular, the feature rhyme of /strim/ with /splin/, m – n...
Today’s adventure in analyzing the jokey allusions in my postings. The target allusion is the one boldfaced in this passage from my posting yesterday (5/13), “The pocket bulge”: [The DJX bulge booster] provides a soft but protective...