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 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip for 2/25: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead with their Potatohead dog: The toy: Mr. Potatohead and his detachable-bodypart family; the potato: the russet; the dog: the Jack Russell terrier (note russet as a...
This is, first of all and primarily, the announcement of a dissertation oral presentation in Stanford’s Department of Linguistics: The role of syntactic structure, contextual information, and supra-contextual information in durational...
(Underwear models displaying their bodies, with allusions to various forms of intense man-on-man sex, so not to everyone’s taste) A Daily Jocks sale ad in my email today (2/25): [ad text:] Cellblock13 at Daily Jocks — buy 2 & save 30%...
(Well, all about penises and what men think about their own and other guys’, so edgy for many people — but mostly clinical in content and tone, not at all raunchy) Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine strip of 2/24, about what we might...
Reprinted on Facebook recently by Jeff Bowles, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon from 11/3/1988, in which Snoopy the writer upbraids an editor — someone I think of as the powerful but irrationally unappreciative son-of-a-bitch Ed — for...
Yes, yes, I am bombarded with blizzard warnings, for the terrifying storm now bringing NYC and the surrounding areas to a standstill. But, bafflingly, though I am fully aware that the warnings are about a blizzard, I keep hearing them as...
I come to celebrate two television performances by Jesse Jackson (who died a few days ago) that have made my day: one that totally broke me up in laughter and one that made me weep with his regard for and buoying up of the least among...
(Once more into man-on-man sex described in street language; kind of silly, and actually rather sweet, but way too raunchy for kids or the sexually modest) In my e-mail this morning (2/22), a gay porn sale ad from ASGmax: for Almost Real...
(This posting is all about man-on-man anal sex, with photos, in the plainest of street language (F-bombs will fall like snow), so it is utterly out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest; entertaining in its own grossly raunchy way,...
A note from my recent stay in Stanford Hospital: into the emergency room on Friday 1/30 in the afternoon, returning home late in the afternoon on Thursday 2/5. Not about the afflictions that brought me there, but about an odd experience...
From Ben Yagoda on Facebook today (2/19): [about] today’s Philadelphia Inquirer investigation of Philly Managing Director Adam “No Show Jones” Thiel, who was away from the office for nearly five months last year, including time in the...
The Pearls Before Swine strip by Stephan Pastis, for 1/9/26: A difference between British English and American English over constructions with the definite article (arthrous) or without it (anarthrous) — putting aside British Bob’s...
A step into greater complexity in my blog posting, after re-entry in two brief postings yesterday: “Zichichi” (here) and “Calvin Tompkins (here): two separate subjects, united by being cleverly stitched together in The Bob newsletters...
A note about a moving diary of unsparing self-reflection by the American writer Calvin Tomkins as he struggles through the year to the age of 100: in print in the New Yorker issue of 12/22/25: “Centenarian: A diary of a hundredth year”....
This is a brief return to posting on my blog, an experiment in re-learning how to use my computer, after a couple of months in a vale of great sicknesses (about which, more eventually); I am seriously damaged, but plucky. This is in...