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
adj. flamboyant: (of a person or their behavior) tending to attract attention because of their exuberance, confidence, and stylishness … [from NOAD] Last Saturday I made the acquaintance (in the first Crooked Media show on MS NOW) of...
The Zippy strip for today, 3/11, all about sharing a personal name (with some intrusions of the name Melvin): The large generalization is that mentioning two people together implicates some special relationship, even more so if they...
My main helper these days has lived and worked in the US for many years, but he’s a native of Fiji. I call him Isaac in my postings, but his actual personal name is the Fijian version of the name, Aisake, and the syntax of his native...
On 3/7 (on this blog) I posted “The travails of etymology”, about the sources of some phrasal verbs meaning ‘to die’. Which elicited from Troy Anderson friendly but anxious e-mail on 3/8: dai s’la (hello friend/cousin, in Miluk), Your...
Thoughts inspired by a comment by Robert Coren on my 3/6 posting “Checking out”, in which I responded darkly to the information from a grocery-delivery service that you can: Add items until your shopper checks out by understanding the...
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of 3/5, in which the effusive Cat in the Hat of Dr. Seuss / Theodor Geisel meets the elusive Waldo of Martin Handford’s Where’s Waldo? Under the sign of red stripes, in two styles (Wayno’s title: “Stylistic...
About the night of 3/4-5, last night, different from all other nights in my experience, in its schedule and in the content of my dreams, suggesting that I spent the night in the grip of feel-good hormones rather than stress hormones. And...
A standard notice from the Instacart home-delivery service about a grocery order in progress from the Safeway supermarket: You’ve still got time to shop Add items until your shopper checks out The intent is to convey the oldest...
From NOAD: noun sinecure: a position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit: political sinecures for the supporters of ministers. ORIGIN mid 17th century: from Latin sine cura ‘without care’. And...
I recently stumbled on the notion of an idiot plot on Facebook — a cultural category I had surely encountered before but must have forgotten about. In any case, I now had Wikipedia’s explanation, along with a notable example, the plot of...
A journal of the nights of 3/1-2, 3/2-3, and (last night!) 3/3-4, during which I experienced the deepest lows and the greatest highs of hormone-driven states of being. Meanwhile, somehow, the rest of life went on: washing up, getting my...
The phenomenon, from Wikipedia: The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. The term may also...
(Firmly located in men’s crotches and inclined to silliness, though without the bodyparts illustrated and without the street talk — so clearly not to everyone’s taste) From WOIO tv channel 19 in Shaker Heights OH (serving the Cleveland...
Out in my walker recently, getting some exercise, accompanied by my helper Isaac, showing him places in the neighborhood (with some history of those places) and opening up the landscape around us by identifying plants, giving him their...
My signal accomplishment for this day was an hour of singing Sacred Harp hymns along with the wonderful YouTube videos of All-Ireland Sacred Harp conventions of years past. Eventually, I’ll celebrate just one song, SH276 Bridgewater,...