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
(some vulgar slang, but (I think) tolerable by kids and the sexually modest) Today’s (4/24) morning name, the final line of a quatrain I learned as boy lore about 1950: How’s your ma and how’s your pa And how’s your sister Sue? And while...
A report on an exchange between me and my UNC-Chapel Hill colleague Bruno Estigarribia about polypersonalism (explanation to follow). As it unfolded in e-mail between us, presented here with BE’s permission. This is one in a series of...
This is a complicated background to a mishearing posting that has itself turned out to be more complex than I first imagined — a mishearing of the title word in the song “Cardinal” as recorded in 2024 by Kacey Musgraves. This posting is...
Two things: in my e-mail, the list of the members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the 2026 class, including two linguists and two scholars of LGBTQ+ matters (I might have missed others); then through the USPS, the...
(lots of man-on-man sex, described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest) In yesterday’s (4/21) “Prodigious macrophallicity, contemptuous noblesse” on the g4p porn actor who performs under the name...
(all about man-on-man sex, described in street language, so entirely unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest) My latest gay porn DVD, ordered on sale and on spec, on the basis of Malik Delgaty’s brief appearance in a different MEN.com...
A brief notice. A recent issue of the New Yorker recommends an earlier piece in the magazine, on an aspect of our mental lives, on mental imagery (experienced in the phenomenon of phantasia) — with which we can compare mental sounds...
(man-on-man sexual encounters. described in street language, so totally not for kids or the sexually modest) Gay porn videos bring us depictions of a variety of sexual acts that few of us have actually encountered; one service of the...
Yesterday’s (4./17) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon shows two snowmen conferring: Left Snowman reassures Right Snowman that the frozen confection that they are eating in a cone (“fruit-flavored crushed ice” (NOAD)) is not in fact snow —...
As I regularly point out on this blog: if you look for it, ambiguity is everywhere; almost any expression can be understood in multiple ways, especially if you’re willing to entertain preposterous or unlikely ideas. So if you had a...
In two parts. First, an appreciation of a piece of intellectual history written by Geoff Pullum: Geoffrey K. Pullum, The prehistory of generative grammar and Chomsky’s debt to Emil Post, Historiographia Linguistica, October 2025 And then...
On 4/10/26 My USPS mail included a postcard showing penguins at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, with brief messages from three different people, each signed with a first name. So as not to get these people embroiled in this discussion, I’ll...
Yesterday (4/14), my helper Isaac and I took a walk around the block (Ramona to Forest to Emerson to Homer and back to Ramona), taking advantage of the end of days of rain. Officially we were visiting the oregano plant on Emerson St....
In today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro, a bank teller focuses on how quaint it is that a bank robber has written his demand on paper (the way they did it in old movies), while disregarding the pressing threat of the robber’s gun: (1) A...
Following up on my 4/13 posting “A host of voices”, on an enormous amount of variability in the way mental imagery and mental sounds work, in different people and for different purposes focusing on auralia, on hearing sounds in the mind,...