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
(alcoholic drinks and lots of condoms, so not for kids or the sexually modest) I put in a grocery order for delivery from Safeway (a bag of mandarins, 2 containers of yogurt, 2 cartons of milk, 4 boxes of Kleenex, and some Dijon...
In the spirit of the Passover season, a Frank Cotham cartoon in the 4/6/26 issue of the New Yorker: A gentle jab at the stereotypical Jewish inclination to public disputation, alluding to the saying two Jews, three opinions or three...
This is ultimate March: tiger tiger tiger, as the inaugural rabbits of April mass for April Fool’s Day, Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday, and this year at sundown tomorrow, the first day of Passover, as Good Friday and Easter Sunday are...
Going past me yesterday morning, a tv ad for some remedy for, as I heard it, teeth stained by poppies (and other foods). Yes, coffee. With blueberries, black tea, and red wine, a classic offender against dental whiteness. Granting that I...
Last night’s food-delivery surprise came through an offer on the Grubhub delivery service: for El Camaron RWC in Redwood City — which provides seafood dishes from the state of Sinaloa, plus tacos and (surprise!) Mexican-style sushi (the...
From the latest New Yorker issue, of 3/30/26, this cartoon by Daniel Kanhai: The energetic angelic figure of Moses, with his rather dubious angelic assistant (his brother Aaron? his successor Joshua? just an angel off some random cloud,...
In yesterday’s (3/27) Zippy strip, our Pinhead recognizes a dark service window in a generic roadside fast food place as an astronomical black hole: (#1) Zippy between two worlds, ordering food in space Two things: the service window;...
E-mail from Ellen Kaisse this morning, for the annals of mishearing: — EK > AZ: I got all bent out of shape this morning when I thought I heard an ad for a prescription drug called Vivaldi. How dare they appropriate the name of a beloved...
In my posting yesterday (3/26), “A fortuitous cold soup” Safeway’s house-brand tomato bisque combined with plenty of chopped clams (and some sriracha sauce for spiciness), served unheated (eventually, actually chilled): a (cold)...
Doing a regular grocery order yesterday,* the Safeway page for their excellent house-brand tomato bisque happened to show, among other things I’d ordered previously, small cans of chopped clams (which I used to use for pasta with white...
(well, yes, deeply about sex between men, considered analytically but described in the most direct street language, so entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest) Today’s topic combines the interests of my two previous...
From my 3/19/26 posting “Annals of derogation: homo”: fairy-boy was the primary verbal abuse directed (inexplicably) at me in childhood, along with (equally inexplicable) accusations that I wanted to be a girl The abuse was inexplicable...
(about gay porn performers, their bodies, their presentations of themselves, and their role preferences in sex with other men, all discussed in street language — so, way too raunchy for kids or the sexually modest) A TitanMen gay porn...
Two reports on abilities and disabilities in reading. One from my own experience in reading Finnish (a language I don’t speak, though I have a fair amount of linguist’s knowledge about the language, its structure, and its writing...
Coming by me yesterday (3/23) on public radio, a feature on, as I heard it, the illegal trade in baby seals. (referring, apparently, to the seal hunt on Canada’s east coast, in which thousands of harp seal pups are clubbed to death for...