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
A brief note to tell you I’m still alive, but in great misery, and doing the minimum just to get through the days. I’m sleeping about 16 hours a day, in 1-hour naps, mostly sitting up in a chair. Much of the time when I’m awake, my hands...
Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells — Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the...
Today’s Zits comic strip sets up a baffling list of ridiculous and raunchy-sounding things Jeremy’s father wants for Christmas — a Wiggly Pickle! Kinky Beavers! — and resolves the puzzle in the final panel. (#1) Fishing lures, kids,...
(This posting devolves fairly fast into oral sex between men, so it is, alas, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.) Musical overture: the chorus and verse 2 of the 1960s song “Chapel of Love”: [chorus] Goin’ to the...
I am reminded by Amanda Walker that today is DEC-20 Day — it’s the date, kids — causing me to recall times working at research labs that used DEC-20s as their shared workhorse machines. This DEC-20 brought me two cartoons, the first a...
Caught on tv this morning, one version of a Titanium Edge tv spot ad “Any Hair Anywhere”, released 7/31/25 (details on the iSpot site here); from this ad: Titanium Edge, the “2-in-one nose and ear groomer that goes wherever razors can’t...
Aric Olnes’s Godzilla countdown to Christmas on Facebook, #5 (10 days to go) on 12/15: Fighting to extract himself from the lights? Showing off his Christmas style? Swatting at the lights like those airplanes that sometimes bedevil him?...
Two cartoons from the New Yorker issue of 12/15/25: Michael Maslin with a phrasal overlap portmanteau tribute to the state of Vermont (land of covered casseroles, for covered-dish socials, and rustic covered bridges); and Roz Chast,...
The sinus-infection background, from yesterday’s posting “Chair-ridden”: The [long-running, like for weeks] sinus infection isn’t contagious, and I don’t run a fever, But it’s fiercely painful, produces prodigious amounts of disgusting...
I’ve been sick for some time — a terrible sinus infection that makes sleeping lying down mostly impossible, so I’ve been sleeping, immense amounts of time, sitting up in the comfy chair in my living room — sleeping fitfully, with...
Today on Facebook, Hana Filip passed on a two-sentence poem in prose (an English translation from the German original): Jan Antonin Baťa, or Bata, the genius entrepreneur who founded the Bata shoe emporium, had in his main headquarters...
Yesterday on Facebook, Aric Olnes embarked on “14 days / Countdown [to Christmas] with Godzilla” with this especially arresting image: Godzilla, defender of Santa’s workshop A search on this image got me to a reference to: A Daikaiju...
According to the label on the can, it contains product from [in alphabetical order] Bolivia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, U.S.A, Vietnam It’s high in iron, vitamin E, niacin, magnesium, zinc, copper, and manganese; also...
From Bob Eckstein’s The Bob substack on 1/7/23, this delightful troupe of dancing Santas, created for the monthly comedy newspaper the Funny Times to sell on t-shirts (this year’s offer came to me by e-mail yesterday: (bob’s text) Funny...
Musings on three things — Nairobi, gorillas, and gorilla suts — en soi (as “just stuff:”) vs. those things serving as symbols, with various values / evoked associations, which are tyically conventional: cultural meanings. With specific...