Today’s Pearls Before Swine, passed on to me by Susan Fischer and Lise Menn, in which giggling letters put themselves in order:

Note: they could have spelled ENLIST, INLETS, TINSEL — or in fact SILENT.

Not a typo. The man in question is the elusive David Dennison, a pseudonym of the notorious American sociopath Helmet Grabpussy (who is generally referred to on this blog as [REDACTED]). And his Dopelgänger is the distinguished David Denison, Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Manchester (on the other side of the Atlantic).

There’s the 2-n DD and the 1-n DD, and they are laughably, horribly, distinct. The 2-n DD is a creature, the 1-n DD is a teacher. (Apologies to Ogden Nash, llamas, and lamas.)

Multiple tips of the hat to Larry Horn, who wrote to David Denison (with a copy to me) on March 26th, with the hot news about David Dennison. And followed that up yesterday with a wonderful Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon on BoingBoing on the 17th (and the Dopelgänger label).

From the first e-mail from Larry, a link to a New Yorker piece “Does Stormy Daniels Have a Case Against [REDACTED]?” by Amy Davidson Sorkin on 3/7/18, which began:

“[REDACTED] a.k.a. DAVID DENNISON” is the first named defendant in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, in California, in which Stephanie Clifford, who is also known as Stormy Daniels, seeks to have what the suit refers to as her “Hush Agreement” over an affair with [REDACTED] declared invalid. That agreement is between “Dennison,” or “DD”; “Peggy Peterson,” or “PP”; and “EC LLC,” all of which, it notes, are “pseudonyms whose true identity will be acknowledged in a Side Letter Agreement.” (Both documents are helpfully included as exhibits to the suit, although Dennison’s true name is blacked out.) The agreement is dated October 28, 2016, eleven days before the Presidential election. The problem, Clifford says, is that [REDACTED], or Dennison, or DD, or whatever one wants to call him — let’s say the [POTUS] — never delivered a copy of the agreement with his signature on it. And so she no longer has to hush.

In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that Clifford had been paid a hundred and thirty thousand dollars for her silence — money that made its way to her via Michael Cohen, a longtime lawyer for the Trump Organization. Cohen has acknowledged paying the money but said that it was a “private transaction,” that neither [REDACTED]’s company nor his campaign “was a party to the transaction,” and that neither reimbursed him, directly or indirectly.

Larry wrote:

Note in particular the first line.  Yes, [REDACTED]’s pseudonym for the non-disclosure agreement (which he crucially failed to sign or initial when the NDA was drawn up just before the election) was David Dennison.  On the bright side, you’ll be reassured to know that a search for “David Denison” [n = 1] still brings [you] up as the first hit.  Still, I imagine it may have been disconcerting to discover that [REDACTED] is partial to substituting David Dennison’s name for his own (or, of course, vice versa, depending on factors we don’t need to review here) on Hush Agreements regarding with his dalliances with porn stars.  You may wish to ready yourself for office in case your alter ego is forced from office in the next month or two.  (More troubling would be the prospect of the other David Dennison attempting to conduct research on English historical linguistics…)

From that Wikipedia entry on the linguist:

David Denison FBA (born September 1950) is a British linguist whose work focuses on the history of the English language.

He was educated at Highgate School and St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied Mathematics and then Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, and he earned his doctorate at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was Smith Professor of English Language & Medieval Literature at the University of Manchester from 2008. Since March 2015 he has been Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics. He is a past president of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE).

Denison served from 1995-2010 as one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University. In 2014 he was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Selected publications:

D. Denison (ed.). Analysing Older English. 2011. Cambridge Univ. Press.

R. Hogg, D. Denison (eds.). 2006. A History of the English Language. Cambridge Univ. Press.

B. Aarts, D. Denison, E. Keizer, G. Popova (eds.) 2004. Fuzzy Grammar: a reader. Oxford Univ. Press.

D. Denison. “Gradience and linguistic change”. In Historical Linguistics. 1999. John Benjamins.

D. Denison. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. 1993. Longman.

On this blog, Denison is known primarily through his work on the development of argument structures for the verb substitute (summarized on this Page here).

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the 2-n Dennison front, there’s Dennison IL, Dennison MN, Dennison OH, and Dennison Township in Luzerne Couty PA. The Avery Dennison Manufacturing Co.

(#1)

Avery Dennison Corporation is a global manufacturer and distributor of pressure-sensitive adhesive materials (such as self-adhesive labels), apparel branding labels and tags, RFID inlays, and specialty medical products. (Wikipedia link)

And innocent men named David Dennison — as in this People magazine piece “The David Dennison Who Shares Donald Trump’s Alias Is Really Confused: ‘Who Came Up with My Name?'” by Diane Herbert on 3/7/18:

David Dennison loves playing jokes and making people laugh. But on Tuesday, he found himself in the unusual position of being the brunt of many wisecracks when porn star (and alleged former Donald Trump mistress) Stormy Daniels filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump — and revealed the former reality star went by the pseudonym “David Dennison.”

“Yesterday I started getting a deluge of people telling me on Facebook, in texts, some coming from people I haven’t spoken to in years that I am the alias for Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels,” says Dennison, a 58-year-old importer of automotive accessories from Mendham, New Jersey.

“I would love to know who came up with my name,” Dennison says. “If you are going to use an alias, isn’t John Doe or Fred Smith better than David Dennison?”

And before him, an American politician:

David Short Dennison Jr. (July 29, 1918 – September 21, 2001) was an American politician of the Republican party who served in the United States House of Representatives [representing Ohio’s 11th district] from 1957 to 1959. (Wikipedia link)

Then there’s the world of 1-n Denisons. Denison IA, Denison KS, Denison TX, Denison WA, and Denison Univ. in Granville OH. Denison Mines, a Canadian mining company. And also in Canada:

David F. Denison, OC is a Canadian businessman and the Chairman of Hydro One. He is the former President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. (Wikipedia link)

Plus the Denison smock, a combat jacket:

(#2) Canadian Sniper Sgt Harold Marshall wearing a Denison smock

The Denison smock was a coverall jacket issued to Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents, the Parachute Regiment, the Glider Pilot Regiment, Air Landing Regiments, Air Observation Post Squadrons, Commando units, and other Commonwealth airborne units, to wear over their Battle Dress uniform during the Second World War.

The smock was initially worn over the paratrooper’s webbing equipment, but under his parachute pack and harness, as its primary purpose was to prevent the wearer’s equipment from snagging while emplaned or during a jump. It was equally useful for camouflage and as a windproof garment that provided a method of carrying ammunition or equipment. Contemporary photographs show that airborne troops preferred to wear the smocks under their webbing once they had landed. (Wikipedia link)

Then back in the land of 2-n notoriety, Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon of the 17th:

(#3) Get Cohen on the Phone!

Yesterday’s Doonesbury, Mark Slackmeyer interviewing an Oklahoma teacher on the radio:

Um… misspell?

That’s teechers, dumands, adaquit, witch (for which), texbooks, leek (for leak), hour (for our), dayz. Apparently spelled out in the air, for Mark to see — or maybe he can see the speech balloons in the cartoon he’s in; that’s not an uncommon meta-move in cartooning.

The joke depends on a crucial piece of (widely held) belief about language: that when we speak, we are realizing written language acoustically — reading off pages in our heads, as it were. The idea is breath-takingly wrong, but lots of people take it to be a fundamental fact about the way the world works.

An anecdote from my colleague Chuck Fillmore, many years ago, struggling with a student who was having terrible trouble with the phonetics section of an intro linguistics course at Ohio State (which was required for English Education majors). The point at issue was the point of articulation of the fricative [š] (IPA [ʃ]) (as in ship and mush), as contrasted with [s] (as in sip and muss). (To way get ahead of the story, the answer is: palato-alveolar, or simplifying things, palatal.)

“Say [š] and then right after it, [s]”, Chuck said, “and tell me what your tongue is doing when it goes from the first to the second”.  (The answer: it’s moving forward along the roof of the mouth.)

The student tried this several times, and then the lightbulb came on. “It’s dropping the H!”

[š]  is SH and [s] is S (well, in city, [s] is soft C, and a fair number of students are prepared to explain to you that the consonant at the beginning of sit is different from the one at the beginning of city) — so going from the first to the second is going from SH to S.

Fillmorean facepalm.

…..

The doctrine that speech is writing read out loud is an illusion fostered by widespread literacy and schooling — it lives in the dark underside of writing as a great technological innovation.

Today’s Dilbert, in which the pointy-haired boss goes portmanteauing:

(#1)

boss + exercise (in a spelling variant with –ize) = bossercize, formed on the model of the name of the dance fitness company Jazzercise.

In my 8/5/16 posting “Ziplinguists”, #5 is a Zippy strip entitled “Jazzercize”. The inchoative / causative derivational suffix is (very roughly) spelled –ise in the UK, –ize in the US, but for the verb and noun exercise, only the –ise spelling is standard, even in the US.

(I personally enjoy the jazzercize spelling. You can never have too many Zs.)

As for Jazzercise, from Wikipedia:

(#2)

Jazzercise is a dance fitness franchise company founded by Judi Sheppard Missett in 1969 and headquartered in Carlsbad, California [in northern San Diego County].

Jazzercise combines dance, strength, and resistance training with popular music for a full-body workout. The company currently has over 8,300 franchisees worldwide in 32 countries.

Dance fitness classes are mostly taken by women (as in #2), though some men do take them — and many classes are led by men. If they were billed as callisthenics classes (seen as aiming primarily at strength rather than fitness or grace), they’d probably attract a lot of men and very few women. This despite NOAD‘s definition, which does not, in my opinion, capture current usage accurately:

noun callisthenics: [treated as singular or plural] gymnastic exercises to achieve bodily fitness and grace of movement. ORIGIN early 19th century: from Greek kallos ‘beauty’ + sthenos ‘strength’ + –ics.

Callisthenics in ancient Greece were a strictly male activity (aimed at developing strength and agility, to prepare men for warfare), and the association of the word with men — in gymnasiums and military training — continues to this day.

(Underwear and race / ethnicity / nationality / religion among gay men.)

News from Daily Jocks: a birthday for the Australian premium men’s underwear firms 2eros and Supawear (brothers in sexwear):

(#1) 2eros

(#2) Supawear

Notably, Asian models for the birthday celebration. Most sexunderwear firms are very light on black models, Latino models, Asian models (of all ethnicities and nationalities), and, for that matter, identifiably Jewish models. Andrew Christian is, on the whole, a stunning exception: his advertising reflects the use of “exotic” models in the fashion industry rather than the custom in the premium men’s underwear industry of relying on models whose looks are pumped-up mirrors of their customers’. The customers are mostly SAE-D — standard average European-descended — men (“standard average European” here is a little linguist’s joke, making reference to Standard Average European (SAE) languages, in Benjamin Lee Whorf’s terminology); the products either flatter their self-images or feed their fantasies of exotic men (for certain values of exotic).

More flesh. From Supawear itself, more images of the extraordinarily muscled model in #2:

(#3) Supawear’s Sprint line

(#4) Supawear sale

Meanwhile, 2eros has created a site — their Hunk Gallery — with information on its models. So far there are only four men on the site, but one of them is:

(#5) Jason Chee, doing a fine pitsntits presentation

Their puffery on the site (with some corrections to its text):

HUNK DETAILS: Jason Chee is Singapore’s heart throb

PROFILE: Jason is a b[o]dybuilder and personal trainer in Singapore and [has] been in many of Asia’s fitness magazine[s]. What a body!

Sexual politics. An immensely complex topic, but it starts from the fact that SAE-D gay men, reflecting wider prejudices, tend to wall themselves off socially from “minorities”, or even to be openly hostile to them — a situation that gave rise, among other things, to the defiant move to add black and brown stripes to the Pride flag, and the angry resistance to this move by many white guys.

At the same time, some of these minorities serve as powerful  figures of sexual fantasy: black men and Latinos and Arabs as stereotypes of rough working-class masculinity (the thug ideal), Asians as stereotypes of smooth-bodied boyishly playful masculinity (the twink ideal). Israeli men are idealized as tough military men (while other Jews suffer from anti-Semitism).

SAE-D gay men can deal with men from any particular minority separately in different spheres of life: socially, in friendships; sexually, in sexual encounters; intimately, in more enduring partnerships; and imaginatively, in fantasy sex. All sorts of configurations are possible. There are white guys who will have sex with black guys but will not consort with them socially, in friendships or romantic partnerships. There are white guys who won’t have anything to do with black guys at all in the real world (insofar as they can manage that), but use them to power jack-off fantasies. There are white guys who are X queens, where X picks out some minority that they are especially attracted to and seek out — for sex, for more enduring relationships, or as objects of sexual fantasy.

Many men are inclined to think of all this as merely an expression of tastes, in social, sexual, romantic, and imaginative contexts — preferences and dispreferences similar to other preferences and dispreferences in partner choices. Some men have a taste for blond men, or a distaste for redheads / gingers, as sexual or romantic partners. Such tastes can be quite idiosyncratic. On the other hand, they can also reflect much wider patterns of attitudes — think “no fats or fems” — in particular, the constellations of attitudes surrounding race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion. In which case, they can be decidedly edgy.

Look at things from the other side for a moment — from the side of a gay man in one of the minorities I’ve been talking about. Being viewed as an object of sexual attraction because you’re in a specific minority, when your minority status is socially  problematic in general, can be quite uncomfortable. You’re dogged by the idea that guys are coming on to you only as a representative of your kind, not as a person. Ok for a trick, but otherwise uncomfortable.

And you might well find the sexual objectification of your kind offensive and demeaning.

So I’m unsure of my response to images like #1-5 above. On the one hand, I find it refreshing to see models beyond the usual SAE-D ones, and in some numbers. (For one thing, it pleases me that such models can get work.) If they’re being displayed as just like the other models, as offering generally desirable bodies (which might sell some underwear), great. But if they’re being displayed as performing explicitly for our pleasure in their exoticism, like circus animals, then I’m troubled.

These are matters of performance and audience, intent and reception, and they can’t be judged just by looking. You need to know the social and cultural context, and here I’m largely ignorant. The initial audience for these images is Australian, and I just don’t know enough about how Asians, especially Chinese and Southeast Asians, figure in the Australian context, in particular in the world of gay male Australians.

My title. It combines two literary references: A.A. Milne’s Now We Are Six and the Ming-dynasty Chinese novel Journey to the West. (With Six changed to Nine in the first, to recognize the ninth birthday of 2eros/Supawear; and West changed to East in the second, to recognize that the models come from East or Southeast Asia.)The two titles are joined as subordinate and main clause, thanks to the now in Now We Are Nine, which can serve as a subordinator (a (subordinating) conjunction, in traditional terminology): ‘as a consequence of the fact that we are 9 years old, we are taking a journey to the East’. Then there’s a significant ambiguity in to the East that plays a role here: though China, Singapore, the Phillipines, etc. lie to the northwest, not the east, of Australia, they are located in the geographical region conventionally referred to in English as the East (embracing East Asia and Southeast Asia).

First, the literary sources. From Wikipedia on the Milne:

(#6) Cover of the first edition

Now We Are Six is a book of thirty-five children’s verses by A. A. Milne, with illustrations by E. H. Shepard. It was first published in 1927 including poems such as “King John’s Christmas”, “Binker” and “Pinkle Purr”. Eleven of the poems in the collection are accompanied by illustrations featuring Winnie-the-Pooh. These include: “The Charcoal Burner”, “Us Two”, “The Engineer”, “Furry Bear”, “Knight-in-armour”, “The Friend”, “The Morning Walk”, “Waiting at the Window”, “Forgotten”, “In the Dark” and “The End”.

And from Wikipedia on the Chinese novel:

Journey to the West is a Chinese novel published in the 16th century during the Ming dynasty and attributed to Wu Cheng’en. It is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. In English-speaking countries, Monkey, Arthur Waley’s popular abridged translation, is most commonly read.

The novel is an extended account of the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang who traveled to the “Western Regions”, that is, Central Asia and India, to obtain Buddhist sacred texts (sūtras) and returned after many trials and much suffering. It retains the broad outline of Xuanzang’s own account, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, but the Ming dynasty novel adds elements from folk tales and the author’s invention, that is, that Gautama Buddha gave this task to the monk (referred to as Tang Sanzang in the novel) and provided him with three protectors who agree to help him as an atonement for their sins. These disciples are Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie and Sha Wujing, together with a dragon prince who acts as Tang Sanzang’s steed, a white horse.

Journey to the West has strong roots in Chinese folk religion, Chinese mythology, Taoist and Buddhist philosophy, and the pantheon of Taoist immortals and Buddhist bodhisattvas are still reflective of some Chinese religious attitudes today. Enduringly popular, the tale is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a spring of spiritual insight, and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeys towards enlightenment by the power and virtue of cooperation.

The novel has been filmed a number of times, most successfully as a tv series. From Wikipedia:

(#7)

Journey to the West is a Chinese television series adapted from the classic novel of the same title. The series was first broadcast on CCTV in China on 1 October 1986. The series became an instant classic in China and is still being praised as the best and most authentic interpretation of the novel. Unadapted portions of the original story were later covered in the second season, which was released in 1999.

Linguistic notes 1: subordinating now. From NOAD:

conj. now: as a consequence of the fact: they spent a lot of time together now that he had retired | now that you mention it, I haven’t seen her around for ages.

The subordinator most often combines with a finite that-clause, but in informal style, Ø-marked complements are natural alternatives: they spent a lot of time together now he had retired | now you mention it, I haven’t seen her around for ages | now we are 9, we are taking a journey to the East.

Linguistic notes 2: clause truncation. Another feature of the title, with the interpretation ‘now (that) we are 9, we are taking a journey to the East’, is that the content of the main clause is conveyed by a NP, the clause fragment journey to the East, rather that by a full finite clause. Clauses truncated to NPs are in fact very common in speech, both within sentences and serving as sentences on their own:

Now (that) it’s 4 o’clock, ice cream for everybody!

It’s 4 o’clock. Ice cream for everybody!

It’s then up to the hearer to determine, from the context and background knowledge, how the NP is to be understood.

Linguistic notes 3: to the east/East. In the Chinese novel, the journey is both to the west, that is, in an westerly direction, and also to the West, to the region known as the West. In my title, the journey is not to the east, that is, not in an easterly drection (East and Southeast Asia lie northwest of Australia); but it is to the East, to the geographical region conventionally known in English as the East (because it lies east of Europe; from a Californian’s point of view, East and Southeast Asia lie to the west — but lexical items are as they are, whatever their historical origins.).

In speech, the two interpretations are indistinguishable. In writing, English orthography provides a way to distinguish them visually, as east vs. East. But in titles, all significant words are capitalized, so the two interpretations are again indistinguishable: the title Journey to the East is ambiguous.

The One Big Happy from June 6th:

— in which Joe eggcornishly re-shapes the name Tinkerbell (otherwise unfamiliar to him) into a name he knows well, that of the fast-food restaurant Taco Bell. The words tinker and taco share the consonant skeleton /t … k …/, but are not otherwise particularly close phonologically. But the following bell presumably facilitates the reanalysis.

Here, as elsewhere, Joe is portrayed as a speaker of a notably  non-standard dialect (with features of AAVE, in particular). In ths strip, he uses perfective done (+ a PST verb form), in I done hid her Taco Bell doll. From the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America section on perfective done:

Perfective done is a characteristic feature of African American (Vernacular) English (AAE), as has been documented since at least the 1970s (Labov 1972, Schneider 1983, Green 2002, among others).

This construction is also used by Southern speakers who are not African American, in at least Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina (Feagin 1979). However, perfective done in the speech of white Southerners may have slightly different properties than in AAE

Details in the entry.

Otherwise, Joe’s speech is represented with bits of eye dialect — non-standard spellings for variants that are in fact common in the informal spoken language, spellings used to mark the speech as belonging to a non-standard variety: ‘cuz for ’cause (for because), flyin’ for flying, an’ for and.

Background: this Facebook posting on the 18th by Chris Hansen:

My online friend Arnold Zwicky is a kind of chronicler of comic strips, from a historical and a linguistic perspective. A transit group to which I belong recently reprinted a large number of cartoon panels from the Toonerville Trolley series. Aside from the very exacting drawings, the hand lettering is a beautiful example of what lettering can be. Here’s the link to the website; there’s a lot of trolley stuff in front of the comics and some afterward, but these cartoons are an intriguing collection of history and comedy from the 1920’s.

From The Trolley Dodger site, “Never Too Late” on 7/18/18 by David Sadowski:

(#1) The 6/8/1927 strip, with lotsa eye dialect and a pun on punch the clock

In a time when trolley lines criss-crossed this country, and were a part of everyday life for Americans, there was even a railfan comic strip. Or, better put, a comic strip by a railfan, Fontaine Fox.

His “Toonerville Trolley” comic ran in newspapers from 1913 until he retired in 1955. Over time, he even grew to resemble the “Skipper,” his own creation. Fox even answered his voluminous fan mail using letterhead he had printed up for the Toonerville Electric Railway Company.

I remember the strip well from my childhood. And I also remember trolleys well from my childhood.

About the strip, from Wikipedia:

Toonerville Folks(a.k.a. The Toonerville Trolley That Meets All the Trains) was a popular newspaper cartoon feature by Fontaine Fox, which ran from 1908 to 1955. It began in 1908 in the Chicago Post, and by 1913, it was syndicated nationally by the Wheeler Syndicate. From the 1930s on, it was distributed by the McNaught Syndicate.

The single-panel gag cartoon (with longer-form comics on Sunday) was a daily look at Toonerville, situated in what are now called the suburbs. Central to the strip was the rickety little trolley called the “Toonerville Trolley that met all the trains”, driven in a frenzy by the grizzly old Skipper to meet each commuter train as it arrived in town. A few of the many richly formed characters included the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang, the Physically Powerful Katrinka, Little Woo-Woo Wortle, Aunt Eppie Hogg (The Fattest Lady in 3 Counties) and Mickey McGuire, the town bully.

And about trolleys:

A tram (also tramcar; and in North America streetcar, trolley or trolley car) is a rail vehicle which runs on tramway tracks along public urban streets, and also sometimes on a segregated right of way. The lines or networks operated by tramcars are called tramways. Tramways powered by electricity, the most common type, were once called electric street railways (mainly in the United States) due to their being widely used in urban areas before the universal adoption of electrification.

… Tram vehicles are usually lighter and shorter than conventional trains and rapid transit trains. Today, most trams use electrical power, usually fed by an overhead pantograph sliding on an overhead wire; in some cases by a sliding shoe on a third rail, a trolley pole or a bow collector sliding on an overhead wire.

From the Pennsylvania of my childhood:

(#2) Commuters pose with the last [Reading / Berks Co.] trolley, streetcar No. 807, which ran from Reading to Mohnton and back on Jan. 7, 1952 [I was 11]

From the Reading Eagle on 1/5/2012 by Ron Devlin, “Last trolley run was 60 years ago”:

The last trolley, or streetcar, reached the end of the line on Jan. 7, 1952: 60 years ago.

The final trip was made on the Shillington-Mohnton route, giving way to an era when streetcars were replaced by buses as the main vehicle of public transportation in Berks County.

“Rust in Peace: The Shillington-Mohnton Trolley Reaches End of Line Tomorrow” was the headline in the Reading Eagle on Sunday, Jan. 6, announcing an end of an era.

Reporter John Walsh’s opening paragraphs put the historic occasion into perspective.

“A streetcar named ‘Mohnton’ will reach the end of the line tomorrow, the era of the clanging trolley in Reading is dead,” Walsh wrote. “Patrons who remember the long, stormy and colorful past of the trolley cars will say: Rust in Peace.”

According to Walsh’s story, the last streetcar left Fifth and Penn at 2 p.m. Jan. 7.

Edwin R. Brunner, 69, who had been with the Reading Street Railway Co. for 50 years, piloted the last trolley, No. 807.

The streetcar, built by General Motors in 1949, had 44 seats. It ran from Reading to Shillington and Mohnton before returning to the car barn at 10th and Exeter streets.

Ten minutes after the trolley returned, the first Reading Bus Co. bus left on the same route.

The event brought to a close the 78-year history of the Reading Street Railway Co., which began in 1874 with horse-drawn cars. The trolleys were electrified in 1890, when Reading’s population was about 60,000.

Streetcars had ceased running routes within Reading on May 17, 1947, when riders boarded old No. 95 in center city en route to Albright College. The trolley continued its city-to-suburbs routes.

J.P. Costello, bus company president, heralded the new era of faster, more comfortable and cheaper public transportation.

A bus ride from Reading to Mohnton would cost 13 cents, 4 cents cheaper than the trolley. [For comparison, first-class letter postage was 3 cents, and the postcard rate had just gone up from 1 to 2 cents on January 1st of 1952. The US minimum wage was then 75 cents an hour, or $30 for a 40-hour work week.]

In Los Angeles, which had a huge system of streetcars (as befits a city sprawling over a gigantic area), the trolleys were abandoned in favor of freeways for cars, rather than in favor of buses.

The largest trolley line ran along Penn Ave., only a few blocks from the house I grew up in. It went east through the center of Reading and on to, among other places, Carsonia Park. From the Berks History Center site:

(#3) The Thunderbolt and the Pretzel at Carsonia Park, late 1940’s

Carsonia Park operated in Lower Alsace Township from 1896 to 1950. The park was constructed by the United Traction Company as a destination for its trolley service. Over the course of its existence Carsonia Park featured many rides and attractions. The roller coasters Jack Rabbit and Thunderbolt, The Airplane Ride, Dodgem Cars, Strato Ship, Castle of Mirth, The Pretzel, Shoot the Shoot, Cuddle Up, and a ferris wheel are just a few examples of what the park offered.

Part of the map of the Reading/Berks trolley system:

(#4) Carsonia Park is the labeled spot between Mt. Penn and Stony Creek

Going west from the city: Wyomissing, where my dad grew up; West Lawn, where I grew up; Sinking Spring, where my Swiss grandparents lived while I was growing up; Robesonia, where my cousin David grew up and still lives. To the southwest of Reading: Shillington, where John Updike grew up.

The fall special at Dan Gordon’s (on Emerson St. in Palo Alto), as it first appeared on the menu, about a month ago:

Summer Stew $16.95
smoked pork / cippolini onions / chic peas / prunes / red rice

(with the very notable spelling chic peas and with the misspelling cippolini for cipollini). But now the ingredients list reads:

smoked pork / cippolini onions / chickpeas / dehydrated plums / red rice

(with the notable dehydrated plums). Actually, all four ingredients have linguistic interest.

I’ll start with the gnarliest of the four, chic peas and cippolini onions.

chic peas. The reference is in fact to chickpeas (I have seen, and tasted, the stew), the cooked seeds of the legume plant Cicer arietinum. The word chickpea has a fairly extraordinary history (highlights below), but for the moment what’s important is that the chick part has nothing to do with chickens (at any stage of their development) — or with these borrowed lexical items pronounced /šik/ (rather than /čɪk/):

adj. chic: elegantly and stylishly fashionable. noun chic: stylishness and elegance, typically of a specified kind: French chic | biker chic. ORIGIN mid 19th century: from French, probably from German Schick ‘skill’.

More detail on chickpea, from NOAD:

noun chickpea [AZ: also chick pea]: 1 a round yellowish seed, used widely as food [AZ: among other things, it is the basis for the dipspread hummus]. Also called garbanzo. [added by AZ: 1x such a seed, cooked for food] 2 the leguminous Old World plant which bears chickpeas. Cicer arietinum, family Leguminosae.

A bowl of chickpeas in sense 1x:

(#1) Lebanese chickpea stew, from the Holy Cow! vegan recipes site on 4/7/16

So where did the chic spelling come from? Presumably, from the spelling of the ‘stylish’ items. Then the question is why the person who wrote the menu item chose that spelling.

One possibility is that they are among the small number of people who think, erroneously, that the spelling chic is associated with the pronunciation /čɪk/ — and that there are also the ‘stylish’ items (which they’ve learned from hearing people say them) pronounced /šik/ (and probably spelled sheek). That would make this case somewhat similar to the case of clique, for which both /klɪk/ (a pronunciation based on the spelling) and /klik/ (a pronunciation based on hearing other people’s productions) are current. And closely similar to the case of the noun epitome, which has an erroneous pronunciation /ˈɛpɪtˌom/ (from reading) and a correct pronunciation /ɪpˈɪtǝmi/ (from hearing).

But the writer of the menu could have been entirely aware of the chick /čɪk/ vs. chic /šik/ contrast but playfully chose the second spelling to represent the first pronunciation, presumably for the visual associations of the spelling with stylishness. That’s a decision that others have made: chic deliberately chosen to represent /čɪk/.

(You might be wondering why I didn’t dig up the writer of the original menu item and ask them why they chose this spelling. That would in principle be possible, but in my experience finding the original writer isn’t an easy task, and they are rarely able to introspect usefully on the reasons for their spelling choices weeks before.)

Two examples of intentional chic /čɪk/, one from Canada, one from Australia.

From Canada, Chic Peas Veg in Toronto:

(#2) “Eritrea-born Naza Hasebenebi is the proud owner and founder of CHIC PEAS VEG: a plant-based [in fact, vegan] company that offers catering, meal plans, cooking classes and in-school workshops in Toronto and the surrounding areas”

And from Australia, The Happy Snack Company‘s Chic Peas:

(#3) “The Happy Snack Company Chic Peas are nutritious, Australian grown chickpeas, slow-roasted to perfection and seasoned with all natural ingredients. A deliciously crunchy, wholesome snack the whole family can enjoy, chickpeas are 100% nut and gluten free and come with a 5 Star Health rating.”

A final chickpea / chic pea note, on the etymology of chickpea. From OED2:

In 16–17th cent. cich-pease, chich-pease, < cich , chich n. + pease n., after French pois chiche (earlier simply chiche); but in the 18th cent. altered (by some error) to chick-pea

That is, cich(e) (‘chickpea’ < Fr. < Lat. cicer ‘chickpea’) + pease (‘pea’ < Lat. pisum < Gk. pison; ModE pea is back-formed from pease, (mis)understood as a plural). Earlier English cich(e) pease was then a species-genus compound; see the section on these in my 2/23/17 posting “Morning: spanakopita”, with examples like spanakopita pie, collie dog, and matzo bread. Species-genus compounds have an air of redundancy or pleonasm about them, because the reference to a species in the first element suggests a reference to the genus including that species in the second: spanakopitas are pies, collies are dogs, matzos are bread.

In ModE, chickpea is a largely opaque N + N compound: it’s vaguely subsective (a chickpea is in the pea/bean family — the legumes, now Fabaceae — though most people would balk at saying that a chickpea is a pea, or for that matter a bean), and the first element is no longer identifiable as a meaningful unit (though it sounds like chick ‘young chicken’).

cippolini onions. Like chickpeas, the plural of a N + N compound: the plural of cippolini onion. Two questions about the first element here: its spelling (the easy bit), and its form (another tangled mess).

The spelling cippolini is a straightforward error for cipollini, but one that’s incredibly attractive. The first thing to note is that the error has the form of a very common kind of typo, the misplaced geminate: you know that some expression you’re about to type or write has a doubled letter in it, but you double the wrong letter. The geminate can appear too early, as in the error reported on in my 10/4/12 posting “Planning at an abstract level”:

[the Old] LOGG IN for [the Old] LOG INN

Or it can appear too late, as in the error reported on in my 12/14/14 posting “fagoot”:

FAGOOT for FAGGOT

CIPPOLINI for CIPOLLINI has the geminate too early.

But there’s more, which would help to explain why the Dan Gordon misspelling has persisted for weeks, through several printings of the specials menu. If you just saw the spelling CIPOLLINI, you might be tempted to put the primary accent on the second syllable, because of the geminate LL after the vowel letter O (crudely, the a sequence of two consonant letters attracts accent). That is,

/čɪˈpolɪni/ (or /čɪˈpolǝni/)

But you know that the actual pronunciation is

/ˌčɪpǝˈlini/

(with accents on the first and third syllables), and a geminate PP would predict that. So the typo doesn’t get corrected, because it “looks right”.

Ok, from here on I’m going to spell the word correctly, as CIPOLLINI. (And I’ll stop putting spellings in all-caps.)

Now to the actual edibles. From the Kitchn site on 7/9/10, in the enthusiastic “Sweet and Mild: What’s the Deal with Cipollini Onions?” by Emma Christensen (two expressions boldfaced for reference below):

(#4)

We’ve been seeing more and more of these little guys recently and we couldn’t be happier. Cipollini onions (pronounced chip-oh-lee-knee) were once a rare treat only to be found at fancy restaurants and the occasional gourmet market. We’re glad they’re finally getting their due attention … Now what exactly are they?

Their name literally means “little onion” in Italian, and indeed they are! Cipollinis are about the size of a golf ball with a slightly flattened appearance. They’re thin-skinned and have translucent white flesh with more residual sugar than your average yellow or white onion.

Which makes them incredible for roasting or caramelizing. Roasted whole in the oven or cooked in a little butter on the stove top, cipollinis become soft and practically melt in your mouth. Those residual sugars caramelize and concentrate, leaving behind none of the astringent raw onion flavor.

Ok, it starts with Italian. Some words and forms:

It. cipolla ‘onion’, pl. cipolle; dim. cipollina ‘chive’, pl. cipolline

Presumably at some point there was a masc. diminutive alongside the fem. diminutive above:

It. cipollino ‘type of (small) onion’, pl. cipollini

At this point, the word cipollini was borrowed into English to refer to a particular kind of small onion — borrowed as an English C[ount] noun with sg. cippolini, regular pl. cippolinis. Its previous history as an Italian plural is now beside the point. In English, it can serve as the first element in the species-genus compound (see above) cipollini onion, with pl. cipollini onions (as in the Kitchn quote). Or it can stand on its own as a noun referring to a cippolini onion: a cippolini, several cippolinis, bare pl. cippolinis (as in the Kitchn quote).

In the Kitchn quote, pl. cipollinis and cipollini onions. Cites for the sg. forms:

A cipollini is a super sweet onion that is available year round. (link)

What is a Cipollini Onion? (link)

Now to some less complicated stuff.

smoked pork. This has the

verb smoke: [with object] (often as adjective smoked) cure or preserve (meat or fish) by exposure to smoke: smoked salmon (NOAD)

— a culinary verbing of the noun smoke, much more specialized in meaning than the general ‘to treat sth. with smoke, to use smoke on/with/for sth.’

prunes. About the familiar foodstuff. From Wikipedia:

(#5)

A prune is a dried plum of any cultivar, mostly Prunus domestica or European Plum…

Most prunes are freestone cultivars (the pit is easy to remove), whereas most other plums grown for fresh consumption are clingstone (the pit is more difficult to remove).

More than 1,000 plum cultivars are grown for drying. The main cultivar grown in the United States is the Improved French prune [that is, the Improved French prune plum]. Other varieties include Sutter, Tulare Giant, Moyer, Imperial, Italian, and Greengage…

For me, the pleasures of fall fruits include especially Concord grapes, persimmons, and Italian prune plums, like these:

(#6)

Now, about the labeling change on the DG specials menu, from prunes at first, to dehydrated plums more recently. The label dehydrated plums was new to me; it appears to be a fancied-up version of the cautious (euphemistic) label dried plums. On the latter, from the Wikipedia prune article:

In 2001, plum growers in the United States were authorised by the government to call prunes “dried plums”. Due to the popular U.S. perception of prunes being used only for relief of constipation, and being the subject of related joking, many distributors stopped using the word “prune” on packaging labels in favour of “dried plums”.

red rice. At first glance, this expression is just a nominal composite, of modifying Adj and head N, denoting rice that is red in color. In fact, the expression is semantically much more specialized than that, and is also potentially ambiguous between two very different readings, one referring to a type of grain, one referring to a type of cooked rice.

From Wikipedia on the first:

(#7) Thai red rice

Red rice is a variety of rice that is colored red by its anthocyanin content. It is usually eaten unhulled or partially hulled, and has a red husk, rather than the more common brown. Red rice has a nutty flavor. Compared to polished rice, it has the highest nutritional value of rices eaten with the germ intact.

On the other hand, there is rice that is made red by cooking it with tomato paste; in particular, there is Mexican red rice (in the stew at DB). On the Cocina Marie site, a recipe for “Mexican red rice” by Marie Saba on 12/12/14:

(#8)

Ingredients: 2 tablespoons olive oil or clarified butter; 1 clove garlic, peeled; 1 cup white rice, preferably Mahatma Basmati; 1 teaspoon salt; 1 Tablespoon tomato paste; 1 cup reduced-sodium beef or chicken stock; 1 cup water.

The Hi and Lois cartoon from 2/7/16:

(#1)

Super Bowl Sunday — today, this year — joins Thanksgiving and Christmas as a holiday that serves as an occasion for gatherings of family and friends plus a spread of characteristic food. A family food holiday, for short.

The SBS holiday crucially involves the Super Bowl football game, for the NFL championship: this year, SB LIII  (El Ay Ay Ay!), New England Patriots vs. Los Angeles Rams at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta GA (6:30 ET).

While much of the US population gathers around tv sets for the game, its half-time show, and its ads — virtually emptying out many public spaces —  others seek out alternatives. (I myself have an unbroken record of studied inattention to the game, from SB I in 1967 on.) Alternatives that are cultural, recreational, commercial, and even sexual. (This posting will devolve into tales of SBS mansex, but I’m putting that material at the end, so kids and the sexually modest can enjoy the rest of this material and then bail out when the gay guys strip and go at it with one another like weasels in heat.)

SBS food. In line with the occasion of SB-watching, SBS food is mostly finger food. Often messy finger food, but not table-sitting knife-and-fork food.

In line with American football as a supremely macho working-class team sport framed as warfare in uniform (close kin to ice hockey and some forms of rugby), the food is also manfood, free of cultural associations with femininity or homosexuality: pizza is manfood, quiche is not; tortilla chips are manfood, carrot sticks are not; chili is manfood, beef bourguignon is not. (These are brute cultural facts.)

Classic SBS food comes in three categories: meat-centered (beef, pork, or chicken), chip-centered (salty fried tortilla or potato chips), and pizza:

meat-centered: (ground beef) chili (with beans); baby back ribs (of pork); buffalo (chicken) wings with hot sauce, blue cheese dip, or ranch dressing

chips (tortilla or potato), alone or with dip (esp. guacamole, but also spinach dip or chile con queso); nachos (see my 11/16/13  posting “macho nachos” ); pretzels or peanuts (but not fancy nuts like cashews, Brazil nuts, or macadamias) might be allowable as alternatives to unadorned chips

pizza by the slice (so long as it’s not too foofy), esp. pepperoni pizza; sections of submarine (or hero, Italian, grinder,… ) sandwich might be an allowable alternative

Since SBS comes during American winter, its characteristic food is also indoor food, or at least food easily prepared indoors — in contrast to the characteristic foods of the Fourth of July, hamburgers and hot dogs barbecued on an outdoor grill.

This year’s SB, #53. The logo:

(#2)

(The SB logos are almost always clunky and awkward; I imagine that anything with style would be viewed as too girly-faggy.)

I choose to read the Roman numerals as a sequence of letter names L I I I el ay ay ay, as if it were Spanish ‘the ay ay ay‘, with the “Mexican Spanish exclamation ay ay ay, conveying ‘dismay, confusion, or frustration'” (from the Mental Floss posting “Where Did the Phrase “Ay Yai Yai” Come From?” by Will McGough  on 11/14/13). So this is the SBS of Dismay.

Then there’s the spelling of the SB name, as two separated words (Super Bowl), rather than one solid word (Superbowl). The NFL presumably chose this spelling on the model of existing college bowl game names (the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, etc.), all of which were N + N compounds. But Super Bowl doesn’t look like a N + N compound; instead, it looks like a composite of the Adj super ‘very good or pleasant; excellent’ + head N bowl, as in a super cook. But then it should have the accent pattern of an Adj + N composite (afterstress, as in a super cook), rather than the accent pattern of a N + N compound (forestress, as in Superman). The solid spelling of Superman (Supergirl, Superglue, superbug, superclass, etc.) signals forestress, so you’d expect the name of the NFL bowl game to be spelled Superbowl. But the analogy to Rose Bowl etc. won out in the spelling.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t mention these delicate matters of spelling, but as it happens, in my writing about sex at the gay baths on SBS in 1996 (coming up in a little while) I chose the solid spelling Superbowl — defensible, but from the point of view of the NFL, just wrong, and the NFL is the authority here.

Alternatives to the SB. Cultural, recreational, commercial, and even sexual.

Cultural. On a Sunday afternoon in the middle of winter there are likely to be all sorts of culltural events — concerts, exhibitions, performances, movies — you could go to. Lively Arts at Stanford happens to have no afternoon event today, but they often schedule concerts on the afternoon of SBS. (Cellphones are prohibited during concerts, but one of the musicians, or someone from the management, comes out during intermissions to report on the SB game score.)

Today, for me, it’s the National Theatre Ensemble’s performance of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, screened at the Aquarius Theatre in Palo Alto.

Usually, parking is easy.

Recreational. Fitness centers and the like typically have few users on SBS. Parks and amusement parks ditto, though the weather might be a problem.

Commercial. Many stores — especially those with high percentages of male customers (like hardware stores and sporting goods stores) — are nearly empty, so this would be a good time to do that in-store shopping you’ve been thinking about.

Sexual. You might consider getting off with some porn, or a willing partner, on this generally quiet day. If you’re into mansex, you should know that a fair number of gay men and also MSMs (men who have sex with men, while not identfying as gay or bisexual) like to celebrate SBS by getting off in the morning or early afternoon, before going on to SB events, and that non-sports-oriented queer guys are likely to find the gay baths and sex clubs humming with similarly disposed horny men who are avoiding SB events.

Now comes the mansex. If that doesn’t suit you — the gay baths material is quite explicit — you should leave this posting.

SBS mansex I: gay porn for the occasion. From my 2/6/16 posting “The Super Bowl looms”, about a C1R gay gangbang film advertised on Super Bowl Sunday:

The flick, advertised as Gridiron Gang Bang or Gridiron GangBang or Gridiron Gangbang (with the subtitle Penetration in the Backfield), was the subject of an AZBlogX posting “In the locker room, half-hard” of 10/21/15, featuring a locker room scene showing two men with half-hard cocks. Men’s locker rooms are, of course, prime territory for homoerotic photography and gay porn.)

It’s the high-macho world of football that makes that particular locker room so attractive to C1R’s audience of gay men. So of course the company offered Gridiron Gang Bang for sale on SBS.

SBS mansex II: Superbowl Sunday, San Jose, 1996. Three pieces of ficto(auto)biography on a day at the gay baths in San Jose CA:

on 10/3/10, “Superbowl Sunday (Part I): San Jose, 1996”

on 10/3/10, “Superbowl Sunday (Part II)”

on 10/3/10, “Superbowl Sunday: notes”

From the first, a visit to one of the byways of mansex:

…..

Football fan.  At the gay baths, there is a noticeable outflow of patrons as the magic hour of 3 (Pacific Time) approaches: fags hurrying on to their Superbowl parties.

I know what some of you are saying to yourselves: they aren’t real fags, they are mostly-straight bisexuals, in the closet, getting a little dick on the side. And that is probably the case for the first guy I play with – a guy with hugely broad shoulders and big chest who reels me in in the porn-TV lounge by stroking his proportionally big hard-on under his towel and staring fixedly at me. I follow him back to his room, where it turns out that what he wants is to suck my cock for a little while, an experience that gets him so excited he comes almost immediately (in a spray that goes over two feet – it splashes on his face – something I’ve never seen before and find entertaining, in a Believe It or Not sort of way).

 Football Fan has a wedding ring on. In the over 40 years since my first carnal experience with another man, I’ve had maybe a dozen guys ask to suck my cock and then shoot within seconds of taking it (always appreciatively, but then as far as they were concerned we were done). Every one of them was a married man, to judge from their wedding rings or their explicit testimonies.

I got into gay sex when i was a married man myself, but I was never one of these hair-trigger guys. Ok, I was into connecting, they were into getting off.

After a while, I stopped being surprised. Like I said, men are such thoughtless selfish shits.

As soon as Football Fan catches his breath he’s ready to get out of the baths and get to his Superbowl event. So I say bye and see-ya, give him a slap on one of those big shoulders, and tell him I hope the Steelers win.  (They lose, 27-17.  I just looked it up.) By then I know about as much about his sports enthusiasms as I do about his sexual interests.  An excellent moment for someone like me to say goodbye.

 I doubt that he thinks of himself as a fag, and I wonder if he even thinks of himself as some kind of gay. I don’t actually care – for a first encounter of an afternoon, this one’s been just fine, a nice little appetizer (some emotion beyond lust would have been nice, though, not to mention some affection), it’s a way back into sex with men after a while away, I don’t really want to shoot my load right away, and it’s always pleasing to give someone what turns out to be exactly what they want – but I can’t help musing on how people see themselves and how they think about others.  Writer’s curse.

The baths do have a non-porn TV tuned to the game, and there are plenty of watchers, including at least one guy, someone who no one’s gaydar could miss, who describes himself (in my hearing) as a football queen, which I would take to be evidence that you can keep all the Kinsey points you want and still be a football fan, so long as you do it in style.

…..

Most of the rest of the 1996 story is a tale of a long and deeply satisfying sexual encounter between my character and Mark, his main trick of the day. Moving and complex, but only accidentally connected to SBS.

(Warning: scattered amidst the daffodils, substantial allusions to some technical linguistics)

From John Wells, a greeting for the day, March 1st:

(#1) Dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus! ‘Happy St David’s Day!’ (word by word: ‘Day Festival Davy happy’)

(Note on spelling and pronunciation: the spelling DD represents the voiced fricative /ð/, while the spelling D represents the stop /d/; the spelling Ŵ represents a long vowel, while the spelling W represents a consonant or a vowel, depending on context (see John Wells’s comment below); the spellings Y and U represent a high unrounded vowel — back ɨ or front ɪ, depending on your dialect.)

(Yes, hapus — seen also in Penblwydd hapus i chi! ‘Happy birthday to you! — is a borrowing from English.)

On the day, see my 3/2/15 posting “St. David’s Day”, on:

Saint David, patron saint of Wales. Land of the leek and the daffodil and the Red Dragon national flag (see my 3/1/12 posting “Take a leek” for some discussion of these symbols).

With an image of Fluellen and his leek:

(#2)

On the nickname Dewi, from Wikipedia:

Dewi is an alternate or diminutive form of the Welsh masculine given name Dafydd (“David”) [anglicized as the slur name Taffy for a stereotypical Welshman]. It is most famously borne by the patron saint of Wales, Saint David (Welsh: Dewi Sant).

And now the descent into some of the technicalities, from a language lesson on the BBC Wales website:

This week it’s St David’s Day – Dydd Gŵyl Dewi. But sometimes you will hear people saying Dydd Gŵyl Ddewi, where they mutate the name Dewi. In fact, both versions are correct – the first version Dydd Gŵyl Dewi refers to the fact that it is the festival of Dewi –

Gŵyl pwy? – whose festival
Gŵyl Dewi – Dewi’s festival of course!

The second version – Gŵyl Ddewi – describes the actual festival rather than explain whose it is [that is, it picks out a particular type of festival] and could be loosely translated as ‘the Dewi festival’. Gŵyl is a [feminine-gender] word, so any adjective [modifying] it would have to take a soft mutation [a systematic morphophonological alternation affecting the initial segments of words in connected speech] –

gŵyl dda – A good festival [da ‘good’]
gŵyl ddiflas – A boring festival [diflas ‘boring, tasteless’]
Gŵyl Ddewi! – Well – a David festival!

We all know that Dydd Gŵyl Dewi falls on March the 1st. But in the same way that we can say in English either March the first or the 1st of March we can say in Welsh – Mawrth y cyntaf or y Cyntaf o Fawrth. Of course if you use the second pattern – y Cyntaf o Fawrth – you must remember to mutate the [name of the] month after the preposition ‘o’. So Mawrth becomes Fawrth [the spelling F represents a /v/].

Further technicality, inserted into my nostalgic 2/16/19 posting “President’s Day weekend in Berkeley”:

A significant part of [“The general case: basic form versus default form” (Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1986)] was taken up with what I call shape alternations in [morpho]phonology (largely in connection with Welsh mutations) … Here’s a brief post-1986 statement, from my “Some choices in the theory of morphology” (Levine, Formal Grammar, 1992), where it follows a lengthy and intricate discussion of (inflectional) forms of lexemes [at this point there comes a reproduced passage on shape alternations, as in English a ~ an for the indefinite article] — “related to what has been labeled, in other contexts, external sandhi, phrase phonology, postlexical phonology, and precompiled lexical phonology, inter alia”]

Now go out and smell the daffodils (perhaps in the snow).

(#3)

(Yes, this will get into bodily fluids in ways that many people will find really icky, especially in connection with food. There will be some complicated plant stuff and some analysis of fragrances, but you’ll have to be prepared for spurts of semen and the smell of sex sweat. Use your judgment.)

I blame it all on Ryan Tamares, who posted on Facebook a few hours back on some yummy broccoli he’d had for dinner. With a photo — not a great cellphone image, but you could get a feel for the dish — and appropriate hashtags, starting with:

#cuminroastedbroccoli

Oh dear, “cum in roasted broccoli”, probably not such a crowd-pleaser as the dish in the photo (though it would have a small, devoted audience). Spaces can be your friends.

Roasted broccoli. A picture — not Ryan’s, but a crisper one from the SmartHeartEats site on 1/23/17 (published under the name “Coriander-Roasted Broccoli”, but cumin is the main action):

(#1) Ingredients: 2 garlic cloves; 1 tablespoon cumin seeds; 2 teaspoons coriander seeds; kosher salt; 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil; 2 heads of broccoli (1 3/4 pounds), sliced lengthwise through the stems 1/4-inch thick

Cruciferous vegetables (in the Brassicaceae family) like broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and kale all have significant sulfur content that gives them their characteristic somewhat bitter taste — a taste that is largely eliminated by roasting and is counterbalanced by aromatic seeds of umbelliferous plants (in the Apiaceae family): cumin, caraway, coriander, fennel, celery.

A note on processing printed text. You might be thinking that reading #cumin… as starting with the word cum rather than the word cumin just shows you have a dirty mind, but that’s probably too facile an explanation.

To a large extent, in processing text we are always striving for (partial) closure, hoping to chunk off smaller meaningful bits as they appear during our scanning, so as to make the task of processing easier. (In processing whole sentences in text divided visually into words, this inclination yields the effect known as garden pathing; see the brief discussion in my 9/5/14 posting “garden pathing”.) So: cum is a word, let’s take that at face value and move on; that will net in as a separate word, and then roast, which will have to be revised to roasted, etc. You might have re-thought cum in, but unless you’re a food person of some kind (especially one knowledgeable in South and Southeast Asian cuisines), cumin is a rare word for you, not one you’d be likely to entertain. So you stick with cum in, despite (or because of) its lewdness.

Food 1. The spice cumin. Cuminum cyminum. A familiar culinary ingredient: seeds that, whole or ground, give a characteristic aroma and taste to Indian food. Some discussion in my 3/20/15 posting “cumin”, with photos of the blooming plant and of the seeds:

(#2) The plant resembles Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrot), to which it is closely related

(#3) And the seeds

Food 2. Black cumin. Shopping for cumin in ethnic groceries or from on-line sources is likely to lead you into confusion. First you discover that there’s something called black cumin, distinct from plain old cumin but with similar culinary uses. Then you discover that there are two things called black cumin.

There are seeds that look a lot like Cumimum seeds, with a similar smoky and earthy smell and taste, but subtler, less pungent than Cumimum; these are in the genus Bunium. And there are small roundish seeds sometimes advertised as substitutes for Bunium; these are in the genus Nigella, closely related to the ornamental flower love-in-a-mist, and are the source of a flavored oil used in South Asian cooking under the name black seed / blackseed oil.

(I’ll use cumin to refer to Cumimum, black cumin to refer to Bunium, and black seed to refer to Nigella.)

From Wikipedia:

Bunium bulbocastanum is a plant species in the family Apiaceae. It is related to cumin (Cuminum cyminum) and commonly called black cumin, blackseed, black caraway, or great pignut, and has a smoky, earthy taste. It is often confused with Nigella sativa (which is also called black cumin, blackseed, and black caraway).

(#4) Black cumin seeds, looking very much like cumin seeds

(#5) The whole plant, from an old herbal; again, looking much like the cumin plant (and Queen Anne’s lace)

Dried B. bulbocastanum fruits are used as a culinary spice in northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Iran. It is practically unknown outside these areas. The tuber-like root is locally collected for food; the “pignut” or chestnut” names refer to it.

From Wikipedia:

(#6)

Nigella sativa (black caraway, also known as black cumin, nigella, and kalonji) [also fennel flower] is an annual flowering plant in the family Ranunculaceae [the buttercup family], native to south and southwest Asia.

N. sativa grows to 20–30 cm (7.9–11.8 in) tall, with finely divided, linear (but not thread-like) leaves. The flowers are delicate, and usually colored pale blue [or] white, with five to ten petals.

The fruit is a large and inflated capsule composed of three to seven united follicles, each containing numerous seeds which are used as spice, sometimes as a replacement for black cumin (Bunium bulbocastanum).

(On the closely related Nigella damascena, love-in-a-mist (which we used to grow in our Columbus OH garden, because it was pretty, tough, and freely self-seeding), there’s a section in my 6/23/11 posting “More plants of love”.)

Cumin, black cumin, and black seed all have medicinal uses in herbal medicine. In particular, black seed is sometimes claimed to increase sperm quality and quantity — which now takes us back to cum in roasted broccoli.

Food, magic, and medicine. Folk medicine incorporates a variety of magical practices: a deficiency or affliction in some part of the body can be treated by consuming the corresponding body part in animals (or, in cannibalistic practices, the relevant body parts in other human beings); or, more metaphorically, by consuming a plant with a part resembling the affected part of the human body (the doctrine of signatures, treated in a number of my plant postings).

So, if you seek greater acuity of thought, by the doctrine of signatures you’re led to eat walnuts as “brain food”. Or you can absorb brain power more directly by eating the brains of calves or sheep (perhaps in brown butter).

Similarly, to treat male infertility, you might by led to garlic cloves (with their testicular shape), perhaps only in a powdered form, as therapy. Or you could absorb the masculine power of testicles more directly by eating the testicles of animals; see my 9/8/15 posting “Go for the nuts!”, with its section on testicles as foods. Or even more directly by fellating another man and swallowing his semen.

Cum in or as food. Eating semen can be viewed as a kind of folk medicine. But more often it’s viewed as a kind of folk psychology — as a way of incorporating  the psychological values of semen as the locus of masculinity, virility, adulthood, strength, power, and the like. Some notes from postings on this blog, in chronological order:

— on 7/26/10 in “Notes: euphemisms 7/26/10”:

After breakfast, I worked at the computer, filing examples while watching a gay porn flick (Sweat, a “food-fuckers” scene, with three guys of remarkably similar appearance, down to the minimal buzzcuts, having enthusiastic sex with one another, most of it involving foodstuffs [including ejacuating on or in food], in the cramped and steamy restaurant kitchen where they work).

— on 7/17/13 in “Gay cookbooks”:

Then there’s the specialist site Cooking With Cum, “the home of semen cuisine”, offering things like this book: [Paul Photenhauer, Semenology: The Semen Bartender’s Handbook]

— on 7/19/13 in “More sexual slang”

cum play of various kinds, in particular snowballing and gokkun (illustrated in #1 and #2, respectively, in [the posting “Cum play”] on AZBlogX). The first practice was familiar to me, though I didn’t know it had a slang name, other than the transparent name cum sharing; and the second I vaguely recalled having heard about, but under the transparent name cum drinking.

— on 5/22/18 in “The cumless cake”:

this is the infection point, where we shift from cakes without the P[reposition] cum on them (cumless cakes) vs. cakes with it on them and move to cakes without cum on them (massively the default for cakes) to cakes with it on them (a minority taste, to be sure, but one with devoted adherents among seminophiles)…

I’ve explored the great symbolic value of cum to gay men in a number of postings on this blog (links to these collected in a Page here). Beyond the routine act of swallowing cum in fellatio, there are many manifestations of seminophilia treated there:

coming on a partner’s body, cum feeding, cum sharing, cum drinking, watching cum shots, cum facials and other forms of bukkake, and creampies

In porn (gay or straight), the object of bukkake is sometimes referred to as a cum cake or cumcake — a play on cupcake. The idea is that the ejaculating men in bukkake are providing dollops of cream to the recipient in the event, treating the recipient like a cupcake, with the men’s cum as topping, icing, or frosting.

Actual cupcakes or larger cakes with a cum garnish or with a creamy topping of cum are sometimes depicted in porn, and maybe also composed in real life.

The cumcake / cupcake play is inviting if your mind tends to sex and sweet food together

I’m now, of course, trying to imagine how to prepare roasted broccoli with cum in it. Cum on or in sweets, easy. Cum in drinks, ok. Cum with dairy foods, sure: cream with cream. (Mac ‘n’ cheese seems to lend itself easily to seminal elaboration.) Cum on eggs, possibly; it could easily be added to the hollandaise in eggs benedict, for example, creating spermandaise sauce. It might work in general as a substitute for tofu. But sperm on broccoli spears, I don’t know.

Then there’s the question of whether the magic is most potent when the cum is visibly a component of a dish, or when it’s folded imperceptibly into it.

The scent of a spice. Finally, the scent of cumin (and black cumin) is heavily aromatic, pungent, often likened to sweat and as a result found either sexy or unpleasant — but then sweat has a wide variety of odors, and tastes in sweat differ hugely from person to person. Musky male armpits are offensive to many people, but there are gay guys who actively seek it out.

In my 3/6/17 posting “Body work, Part III: Axillary Delights”, there’s a brisk but fairly comprehensive survey about the taste and smell of sweat and about gay male sexual practices focused on sweat, in particular pit licking (there are pictures).

Meanwhile, cumin is used as a musky note in many fragrances, especially for men.

From a recent chain of postings on Facebook, a 1/9/14 Bizarro strip rendered en français:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

Il faut mettre l’œil avant le scarabée, sauf si le participe passé est placé devant le serpent. (more or less literally) ‘It is necessary to put the eye before the beetle, except if the past participle is placed in front of the snake.’

(It came to me from Susan Fischer, who got it from the Facebook group Improbables Librairies, Improbables Bibliothèques, which — predictably, I suppose — tells us nothing about who did the translation.)

The English original, which I posted about on 1/9/14 in “Early writing in the comics”:

(#2) Piraro’s hieroglyphic version of “It’s I before E, except after C”: It’s eye [the 2nd glyph] before flea [the 1st glyph, an insect], except after sea [the 3rd glyph, water]

It turns out that the 2014 version re-uses the artwork from an even earlier Bizarro:

(#3) (I see only two Bizarro symbols in this one; the speech balloons cover space where two of the Bizarro symbols are placed in #1/#2)

The 1st glyph in this version is a bird (maybe a falcon) rather than an insect as in #1/#2; the 2nd row 2nd glyph is a flower rather than the Bizarro eye symbol as in #1/#2; otherwise the glyphs are as in #1/#2:

… – 2  eye – 3 wiggly line [actually, water] – 4 beetle

1 goose – … – 3 lump [actually, loaf of bread] – 4 bird [of some kind] – 5 snake

(except that two partial glyphs at the right edge of #1/#2 have been erased).

Re-use, recycle.

Bonuses. Piraro has turned to hieroglyphic writing for humor on at least two other occasions.

In my 2/16/17 posting “Emoji are the hieroglyphs of the future”:

(#4) The Bizarro of 2/16/17, with 4 Bizarro symbols (plus an emoji and some hieroglyphs) — basically the same artwork as in #1-#3, but  reversed

Another bash at the hieroglyph-emoji relationship. For discussion, see my 10/28/16 posting “Emoji days” (with two cartoons on the subject), where I note that emoji are primaily ideographic / pictographic, while hieroglyphs are primarily linguistic (representing specific words or phonological material).

And then some totally different artwork:

(#5) From 10/22/12 (with 5 Bizarro symbols in it)

From Wikipedia:

A spelling bee is a competition in which contestants are asked to spell a broad selection of words, usually with a varying degree of difficulty. The concept is thought to have originated in the United States, and spelling bee events, along with variants, are now also held in some other countries around the world. The first winner of an official spelling bee was Frank Neuhauser, who won the 1st National Spelling Bee (now known as the Scripps National Spelling Bee) in Washington, D.C. in 1925 at age eleven.

There’s a conventional format for these events. In part, as illustrated above: the contestant is given a word by the moderator, and can ask the moderator for a definition. Then proceeds by pronouncing the word (signalling the beginning of the spelling), spelling it out loud (pronouncing the names of the letters in it, in order), and then pronouncing the whole word again (signalling the end of the spelling).

A Bob Eckstein cartoon circulated today, on the occasion of an unprecedented event in the world of English spelling competitions:

(#1) FB note from Bob: “Can you use it in a sentence?”

Story in the New York Times today,  “National Spelling Bee, at a Loss for Words, Crowns 8 Co-Champions” (octo-champs, as one of them said) by Daniel Victor.

Note that Bob has chosen to represent two of the four contestants in his cartoon as adolescents of color. In fact, 7 of the 8 winners are of Indian descent. (This is, of course, a cultural, not genetic, phenomenon — but certainly worth some reflection.)

On the format for spelling bees, see the discussion following cartoon #5 in my 3/19/19 posting “Le retour des hiéroglyphes”.

Spelling bees are a form of competitive language play — a competition in which the contestants compete in reaching some criterion of performance (as in competitive diving), rather than a racing competition (as in swimming races) or a competition framed as combat (as in chess or most team sports). As this year’s competitors themselves said, they were competing against the dictionary, not each other.

Note on ages: the eligibility requirements are moderately complex, but there’s no minimum age, and no one 15 or older is eligible; most competitors are 13. In this year’s winning cohort, one is 12, six are 13, and one is 14. Oh yes, 2 girls, 5 boys.

Of the eight words in the last round, one — bougainvillea — I use with modest frequency, and two — auslaut and erysipelas — I recall having encountered, and know what they mean. One more — aiguillette — I believe I’ve seen in print, but I’m hazy on the meaning. The remaining four — pendeloque, palama, cernuous, odylic — I’m completely unfamiliar with. Of course, at the top levels, spelling bees rely on extremely rare words (I know bougainvillea only because I’m a gardener in coastal California; I’ve grown the plant on my patio, and there are several of the vines now blooming showily within a block of my house.)

And there’s a challenge only because English spelling has so many alternative spellings for particular sounds, especially because it has borrowed spellings from other languages. Given the pronunciation /ˈpaləmə/ for ‘the webbing on the feet of aquatic birds’, there are a fair number of possible spellings, most prominently the 24 spellings PALxMA, PALxMMA, POLLxMA, POLLxMMA, where x is one of the vowel spellings A, E, I, O, U, Y. PALAMA is probably the best guess — but this is a spelling bee, where exotic spellings abound, so the most likely spelling is probably not the right one. Oh, it is.

#1 isn’t Bob’s first foray into spelling-bee cartooning. From my 6/24/16 posting “Bob Eckstein”, space aliens at a spelling bee (#4 there):

(#2)

In recent tweets from Hong Kong about protests and the governments attempts to put them down, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof repeatedly writes water canon instead of water cannon (both with /kǽnǝn/) — not an uncommon sort of spelling error, but somewhat surprising from an experienced journalist, and one that introduces an unintended misinterpretation, since it happens that CANON is the spelling of an English word (a number of different English words, in fact) distinct from CANNON. And that opens things up for little jokes about what a water canon might be. On Facebook I was responsible for one such joke, a bit of musical foolishness:

The reference is of course to the round “By the Waters of Babylon”. Though I doubt it’s effective against throngs of protesters.

8/31 tweets from @NickKristof:

Constant clashes this afternoon and evening in Hong Kong. Huge throngs taking over Central district, fires, police charges, rubber bullets, water canon with blue dye to stain and identify protesters, and crowds of residents screaming curses at the riot police when they pause.

Hong Kong police used a water canon truck and clouds of tear gas to try to disperse huge throngs of pro-democracy protesters. The water canon for a time used blue dye that would stain skin and make it easier to…

The many nouns canon. None of them anywhere near as frequent as the noun cannon. From NOAD:

noun canon-1: 1 [a] a general law, rule, principle, or criterion by which something is judged: the appointment violated the canons of fair play and equal opportunity. [b] a Church decree or law: a set of ecclesiastical canons. 2 [a] a collection or list of sacred books accepted as genuine: the formation of the biblical canon. [b] the works of a particular author or artist that are recognized as genuine: the Shakespeare canon. [c] the list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality: Hopkins was firmly established in the canon of English poetry. 3 (also canon of the Mass) (in the Roman Catholic Church) the part of the Mass containing the words of consecration. 4 Music a piece in which the same melody is begun in different parts successively, so that the imitations overlap.

noun canon-2: [a] a member of the clergy who is on the staff of a cathedral, especially one who is a member of the chapter. The position is frequently conferred as an honorary one. [b] (also canon regular or regular canon) (in the Roman Catholic Church) a member of certain orders of clergy that live communally according to an ecclesiastical rule in the same way as monks.

The error. The most likely spelling for /kǽnǝn/ would have the medial /n/ spelled with doubled letters, NN, to signal that the precedng (accented) vowel is lax (A representing /æ/ rather than /e/ as in Damon and Karen). So doubled letters are the norm for spelling the medial sonorant, S1, in the configuration

V-lax  S1  ǝ + S2

(where S1 and S2 are sonorant consonants, n, m, l, or r). Some typical examples with lax /æ/: GALLON, PALLOR, STAMMER, BANNER, BARREL, BARREN. Similarly, SIMMER with lax /ɪ/, the name EMMON (Bach) with lax /ɛ/.

But, for whatever reasons, S1 in this configuration is sometimes spelled with  a single consonant letter. Some examples:

S1 is n: TENOR, TENON (as in mortise-and-tenon joints), CANON, the name LENIN; S1 is m: LEMON, TREMOR; S1 is l: FELON, MELON; S1 is r: BARON

There are contrastive spelling pairs, besides CANON / CANNON:

the names LENIN (Vladimir) / LENNON (John); LEMON / the name LEMMON (Jack), MELON / the name MELLON (Andrew); BARON / the name BARRON (of Barron’s magazine)

Given this situation, even practiced writers might inadvertently spell one of these words wrong on occasion, and for the names and rarer items (like TENON) might have internalized a wrong spelling as their own. But on the basis of general sound-spelling correspondences and on word frequencies, we should expect misspellings of CANON as CANNON, but hardly ever the reverse, at least from practiced writers. So Kristof’s WATER CANON spellings are quite the surprise.

Back in the old days of journalism, such misspellings occasionally resulted from reporters phoning in a story, which was then hastily transcribed on the spot by someone at the publication. In the circumstances, the reporter’s spelling abilities were pretty much beside the point, while errors of haste (and, sometimes, of ignorance) on the part of the transcriber were common.

But I’m assuning Kristof was submitting copy electronically from Hong Kong, so, frankly, I’m baffled as to where water canon comes from. But I view it as a gift.

Digression on Kristof. From Wikipedia:

Nicholas Donabet Kristof (born April 27, 1959) is an American journalist and political commentator. A winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he is a regular CNN contributor and has written an op-ed column for The New York Timessince November 2001. Kristof is a self-described progressive. According to The Washington Post, Kristof “rewrote opinion journalism” with his emphasis on human rights abuses and social injustices, such as human trafficking and the Darfur conflict. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has described Kristof as an “honorary African” for shining a spotlight on neglected conflicts.

I think of what Kristof does as morally engaged journalism, with considerable care to make his judgments and opinions explicit.

By the Waters of Babylon. A canon — NOAD canon-1 sense 4 — about water. In captivity in Babylon, the singer sits down on the banks of the Euphrates and longs for the Zion they have lost. The lyrics:

By the waters,
The waters,
Of Babylon.

We lay down and wept,
And wept,
For thee Zion.

We remember,
Thee remember,
Thee remember,
Thee Zion.

The scene, as depicted in on the the many artworks on the theme:

(#1) By the Waters of Babylon by Thomas Bowman Garvie (1859-1944)

In my 6/22/10 posting “Rivers of Babylon”, you can read about gay disco music and musical versions of the story of the Babylonian captivity — two topics that aren’t nearly as disparate as you might have thought.

The canon in two performances, one historical, one quite modern:

(#2) Ensemble Sottovoce performing an arrangement of “Canon à quatre voix” by Philip Hayes (1737-1797)

The 18th century was a great time for canons; Mozart, for example, wrote quite a few, some notably vulgar. American grade school children are sometimes taught this one, because it’s simple and easy; I suspect they don’t get a lot of cultural context for it, though. (Given the opacity of the lyrics to the nursery rhymes kids learn with such pleasure, that’s probably not much of a worry.)

(#3) Don McLean, from American Pie (1971)

(There will be rampant male shirtlessness. Just a friendly warning, or an invitation, depending on your tastes.)

It’s a Zippy strip (today’s!). It’s another gender note (about masculinity). It’s yet another shirtless posting (shirtlessness as a prime masculinity display, in fact.) It’s about umliterature (physique magazines, in particular). And about camp (Flash Gordon). And of course, since the arousing shirtless campy musclemen are from Mars (or possibly Mongo), about SF. And finally, tucked in there inconspicuously in the last panel is an antique Griffithian self-referential surprise (from 1973):

(#1)

Male superheroes are extravagant embodiments of masculinity: they are, to start with, embodiments of great human power (conventionally associated with men), and then they have superhuman powers beyond that; their costumes are designed to encase their bodies, but tightly, so as to suggest, reveal, or exaggerate every bit of gendered anatomy (the broad shoulders, the musculature of the arms, torso, and thighs, and the genital package). (Beyond the powers and the costumes, there are the conventionally hyper-masculine faces.)

The strip begins with superheroes on this planet, but it ends, in the lower right corner, with (hunky) superheroes in space — “Musclemen from Mars” is what the Dingburgers are reading — and it turns out that space-traveling superheroes (as exemplified by Flash Gordon) are given to frequent bouts of shirtlessness (mostly while performing their feats of manly derring-do, but sometimes during the virtually obligatory shirtless torture scenes).

“Musclemen from/of Mars”. A search on these expressions took me in several directions, some of them unexpected.

First, presumably through musclemen, I was led to sites for male revues (for female audiences) in several cities, all using this figure of Pecsy McAbs against various urban backgrounds:

(#2) Shirtless masculinity on display to the max (on the gender significance of shirtlessness, see my 9/28 posting “Gender notes: transgender fashion models”)

The item revue, from NOAD:

noun revue: a light theatrical entertainment consisting of a series of short sketches, songs, and dances, typically dealing satirically with topical issues. ORIGIN French, literally ‘review’ [but distinct in spelling].

So there are Broadway revues. But also male revues, which are only minimally structured. From my 7/1/19 posting “Oh Canada, baby, ripple my maple leaves!”

Male revues.The more refined term of art for the performances of male strippers, referring to male striptease shows — for audiences of women or of gay men. The performances range from no-contact shows emphasizing professional choreography and playfulness — as in the Chippendales’ shtick for women — down to raunchy foreplay to actual sex, as in what was available for gay men until last December at the Nob Hill Theatre in San Francisco

Second, presumably through the combination of musclemen and Mars, I was led to the pocket-size men’s physique magazine Mars (which exploited the symbol  representing the Roman god Mars, the planet Mars, and the element iron, and — as the spear of Mars — serving as the biological symbol for the male sex). From the Pinterest site:

(#3) Issue #1 (5/63); just a posing strap, buddy

(#4) Issue #27 (9/67); sniff the leather and sweat

The physique studio Kris of Chicago operated from 1953 until 1976 and was responsible for documenting a huge array of athletic models throughout the period. Co-founded by Chuck Renslow (founder and current president of the International Mr. Leather Contest and The Leather Archives & Museum).

Physique / beefcake magazines were soft gay porn for an earlier, more censorious era. From Wikipedia:

Beefcake magazines were magazines published in North America in the 1930s to 1960s that featured photographs of attractive, muscular young men in athletic poses. While their primary market was gay men, until the 1960s, they were typically presented as being magazines dedicated to encouraging fitness and health: the models were often shown demonstrating exercises.

Because of the puritan culture of the era, and because of censorship laws, gay pornography could not be sold openly. Gay men turned to beefcake magazines, which could be sold in newspaper stands, book stores and pharmacies.

Mars was a small player in the beefcake market. For a major figure, see my 7/17/16 posting “A remarkable website”, with its section on the physique photography of Bob Mizer.

The space-traveling superhero Flash Gordon. More to the point of the Zippy cartoon is the celebrated muscleman Flash Gordon, the first science-fiction superhero of tv and the movies, with a decided predilection for gender-display shirtlessness, though on the (distant) planet Mongo rather than Mars. From a listing in my 11/14/10 posting “Flash Gordon over the years”, three movie highlights:

the 1936 movie serial starring Buster Crabbe as Flash (and its sequels in 1938 and 1940)

Flesh Gordon, a 1974 erotic spoof of the serials films

Flash Gordon, a [knowingly] campy 1980 film starring Sam J. Jones as Flash (with music by Queen)

I am a great fan of the movie serials and the 1980 movie, each enjoyably campy in its own way. And both containing monuments to shirtless masculinity. Notable moments:

(#5) Buster Crabbe in 1936; his arousing performances transferred to tv attended my very early onset of puberty (age 10) and consequently drove an intense but shame-filled fantasy sex life (so I’m not rational on the subject; there is no desire like young desire, especially when recalled in old age)

(#6) Sam J. Jones in 1980, in a shirtless torture scene

On the Flash of the serials, this thoughtful, funny piece from the tor.com site (“Science Fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects.”), “The Flash Gordon Serials of the 1930s Changed the Face of Sci-Fi”  by Hector DeJean on  8/21/19:

Thanks to the growth of streaming services, a vast archive of antique entertainment is now easily accessible to the public, though whether it should be or not is a matter of personal opinion. In the case of the Flash Gordon serials that Universal created from 1936 to 1940, the debate over such material’s worth is a significant matter to science fiction fans. The serials, starring Larry “Buster” Crabbe as Flash (a character who had first appeared in newspaper comic strips a few years prior) made a powerful impression which is evident in much of the sci-fi films and shows that followed. You can see a clear impact on EC comics like Weird Science, on the original Star Trek, and of course the 1980 Flash Gordon film. George Lucas acknowledged the influence of the serials on Star Wars — a film he made when he was unable to acquire the Flash Gordon film rights.

So the pre-WWII serials are significant, but are they actually worth watching? With their stock characters, recycled sets, cobbled-together special effects, and disjointed stories, you could argue that they qualify only as pure camp. It’s easy to laugh at Crabbe’s earnest heroics, and even easier to mock the tin-cans-plus-sparklers rockets and hair-dryer laser guns.  …  And yet there is no such thing as perfect entertainment, and if films like Guardians of the Galaxy and The Incredibles can offer important life lessons, one of those lessons is that over-the-top silliness and action-packed derring-do can function together in harmony. … When certain expectations are managed, the early Flash Gordon serials are not just enlightening peeks into the formative years of science fiction movies — they’re also enjoyable films on their own, with enough solid adventure and spectacle to make for a fun ride. And, oddly, the longer they run, the better the ride.

Let’s start with the star, Olympic swimmer Larry “Buster” Crabbe. Crabbe will never ascend to the pantheon of Hollywood greats alongside Paul Newman, Ingrid Bergman, Kirk Douglas, and the rest; he’ll never even make it to the level of Michael J. Fox or Jane Seymour. Yet with his Greek-ideal looks and his athletic build, he may have been, visually, one of the greatest action stars who ever lived. Crabbe’s beefcakeiness is such a part of his Hollywood legacy that even his IMDB profile photo shows him shirtless. [Please stop and admire beefcakeiness in bloom.]

… The campiness of the Flash Gordon serials is thick and the effects are laughable, but this is a rocket ship that we boarded a long, long time ago — and it still flies.

The cartoonist’s Easter egg. Finally, my googling on “Musclemen from Mars” turned up a surprise. From the ComixJoint site, about Real Pulp Comics #2 (March 1973), which had strips by Art Spiegelman, Roger Brand, S. Clay Wilson, Charles Dallas — and, yes, Bill Griffith:

Bill Griffith also reprises his appearance in the first issue, but this time not with a Zippy story, but with a hilarious spoof of the comic artist who had taken the underground comics world by storm by 1972: Richard V. Corben. Corben, who had exploded on the scene in Skull, Slow Death, Rowlf, Fantagor and Fever Dreams, was disparaged (or surreptitiously condemned) by many rebellious cartoonists as a slick, shallow and overtly commercial artist who tried to cash in on the underground culture.

Griffith lampoons the style and substance of Corben’s comic art in “Musclemen of Mars,” which features nude, hypermuscular men and women in conflict over matters of little consequence and minor social relevance. Some might presume that Griffith would retract some of his excoriating satire in light of Corben’s subsequent accomplishments, but I tend to believe he would stand his ground even more today than he did in 1973.

… Real Pulp Comics survived for only two issues and the second one only enjoyed one printing of 20,000 copies.

So it’s not just by chance that the Dingburgers in the final panel of #1 are discussing the comic book Musclemen from Mars.

… in recent mail: border-collie-bereft medicos (from Scott Hilburn on 8/12/14) and Egyptian spelling contests (from Rhymes With Orange today), bringing the return of two familiar cartoon themes:

(#1) The POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) from Doctors Without Borders + border collies

(#2) A spelling bee done with hieroglyphs

Doctors without border collies. Previously on this blog: from my 4/28/17 posting “Friday word play in the comics”, in #2 this Bizarro strip “Doctors without border collies”:

(#3) A slightly different take on the POP

Hieroglyphic spelling bees. In #2, the spelling is presumably:

(#4) BIRD (Swallow, in particular) – COBRA – MILK JUG

Previously on this blog, in my 3/19/19 posting “Le retour des hiéroglyphes”, a Bizarro strip on hierogyphs, in French and English; an earlier version of the artwork in this strip; and in #5 there, a 2012 Bizarro strip “Hieroglyphic spelling bee”:

(#5) An earlier approach to the hieroglyphic spelling bee

Note that the child in #2 is a boy, given the name Nefertotep — a male name, borne by three pharoahs of ancient Egypt.

… or Social Distancing. More art of the pandemic: a CGI homage to Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun (1952) by Vadim Temkin:

(#1)

The original, a portrait of stark isolation:

(#2)

My response (on 3/21/20) to Vadim’s previous adventure in homage art for the pandemic, a bow to Magritte’s Golconda (1953) that I portmantitled Golcorona :

[It’s] a many-depthed airscape of naked young men (with modesty hands) and fuzzy coronavirus molecules

… Vadim’s work, with its stormcloud-studded sky, terracotta-tiled roofs, and detailed house facades, seems much more vividly, urgently real than Magritte’s. This is where we live now, it’s not a surrealist dream: Golcorona is both familiar and gorgeous, but it’s also a mine of death.

On Facebook yesterday, Vadim said of this work, “It was surreal, and cartoonish, and melancholy, and very direct.” In contrast to #1, which is subtle and very bleak, recognizing (in Vadim’s words on FB):

how “social distancing” is a leitmotif in Hopper’s works. The original is brighter than my version, and still quite melancholy. This one doesn’t have any viri in it, but … it very much represents [the] zeitgeist of the moment.

About #2, from the Edward Hopper Net site:

Edward Hopper was one of the early American artists to paint the experience of human isolation in the modern city. In Morning Sun, the woman – modeled after Hopper’s wife, Jo – faces the sun impassively and seemingly lost in thought. Her visible right eye appears sightless, emphasizing her isolation. The bare wall and the elevation of the room above the street also suggest the bleakness and solitude of impersonal urban life.

Bonus on Vadim’s name. I don’t recall having noticed this before, but Vadim’s name in Cyrillic (which cme up in FB discussions) is

Вадим Тёмкин

That family name, with the Cyrillic vowel letter ё (pronounced [jo]) rather than e (pronounced [je]) or э (pronounced [ɛ]), is usually transliterated into Latin letters in English with the vowel letters yo, jo, io, or just o: Tyomkin, Tjomkin, Tiomkin, Tomkin. But not Temkin, which looks like it has a confusion of Cyrillic ё and e.

Then the penny dropped, and I made the onomastic connection between Vadim — Jewish, originally from Minsk in Belarus — and the celebrated movie composer Dimitri Tiomkin — Jewish, originally from Kremenchuk in Ukraine (a different piece of the old Russian Empire). Тёмкин here, Тёмкин there. From Wikipedia:

Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin (Russian: Дмитрий Зиновьевич Тёмкин, Dmitrij Zinov’evič Tjomkin, Ukrainian: Дмитро́ Зино́війович Тьо́мкін, Dmytro Zynoviyovyč Tomkin) (May 10, 1894 – November 11, 1979) was a Ukrainian-born American film composer and conductor. Classically trained in St. Petersburg, Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, he moved to Berlin and then New York City after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, after the stock market crash, he moved to Hollywood, where he became best known for his scores for Western films, including Duel in the Sun, Red River, High Noon, The Big Sky, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and Last Train from Gun Hill.

In any case, I now feel that I’ve been pronouncing Vadim’s family name sort of wrong all these years, as /tɛmkɪn/, when the straightforward anglicization would be /tamkɪn/. Well, it’s a spelling pronunciation, what you get if you spell it Temkin.

(A guest posting from Vadim Temkin, reproducing (without editing, so I can hear Vadim’s actual voice in all of this) a note in his Facebook notes yesterday about a section in my posting “Mourning Son” on  that same day)

Portrait of a thoughtful Vadim, by Sergey Zhupanov

On my surname

My friend and preeminent linguist Arnold Zwicky wrote about my Morning Sun post and ventured into pronunciation of my surname:

Bonus on Vadim’s name. I don’t recall having noticed this before, but Vadim’s name in Cyrillic (which came up in FB discussions) is

Вадим Тёмкин

That family name, with the Cyrillic vowel letter ё (pronounced [jo]) rather than e (pronounced [je]) or э (pronounced [ɛ]), is usually transliterated into Latin letters in English with the vowel letters yo, jo, io, or just o: Tyomkin, Tjomkin, Tiomkin, Tomkin. But not Temkin, which looks like it has a confusion of Cyrillic ё and e.

Then the penny dropped, and I made the onomastic connection between Vadim — Jewish, originally from Minsk in Belarus — and the celebrated movie composer Dimitri Tiomkin — Jewish, originally from Kremenchuk in Ukraine (a different piece of the old Russian Empire). Тёмкин here, Тёмкин there. From Wikipedia:

Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin (Russian: Дмитрий Зиновьевич Тёмкин, Dmitrij Zinov’evič Tjomkin, Ukrainian: Дмитро́ Зино́війович Тьо́мкін, Dmytro Zynoviyovyč Tomkin) (May 10, 1894 – November 11, 1979) was a Ukrainian-born American film composer and conductor. Classically trained in St. Petersburg, Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, he moved to Berlin and then New York City after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, after the stock market crash, he moved to Hollywood, where he became best known for his scores for Western films, including Duel in the Sun, Red River, High Noon, The Big Sky, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and Last Train from Gun Hill.

In any case, I now feel that I’ve been pronouncing Vadim’s family name sort of wrong all these years, as /tɛmkɪn/, when the straightforward anglicization would be /tamkɪn/. Well, it’s a spelling pronunciation, what you get if you spell it Temkin.

This gave me an opportunity to write an essay on letter ё and my name. Here it is.

Oh, what a fun. I’ve got to write something linguistic-adjacent on Arnold’s site to protect my name

First, let’s start with Cyrillic ё. It is used in Russian and Belarussian, but not other Slavic languages written in Cyrillic. It represents the vowel shift of stressed е from /e/ to /o/ in some situations in 12-16th centuries, after the introduction of writing. It is probably a unique letter, which has a documented date of birth and author. Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, the director of St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences proposed it November 29, 1783. (Yep, Catherine the Great was not the only great Catherine of her time.) This letter was always a bastard of Russian alphabet: always had proponents and opponents with very strong opinions, and it is traditionally only used in books for children and foreigners, or in cases where there is need for disambiguation. My friend, who was long time ago my Ph.D. thesis advisor, Mark Nemenman, was a great proponent of including it in computer encoding standards. For his birthday, few friends and I gave him the UNICODE character adoption for Ё.

Now, let’s move to my surname. It is true, any Russian speaker, would figure pronounce my name Темкин as if it was spelled Тёмкин /Tiomkin/ whether it is spelled with е or ё. I suspected it is because of the surname Potemkin (of Potemkin village fame, one of the very few Russianisms from before 20th century). In Russian Prince Grigory Potemkin is Потёмкин and everyone knows that. This is the reason why the great film composer Dimitry Tiomkin spelled his surname this way. When my cousin from independent Belarus visited me many years ago, in the letter to the American Embassy to Belarus I had to explain that Tsiomkin was my immediate relative: his name was transliterated from Belarussian Цёмкин, because in Belarussian soft /t/ sounds more like /ts/, spells ц and transliterates correspondingly. All is good, however…

Really, historically, my name should be pronounced /tɛmkɪn/, the way English speakers pronounce it. And here goes another bit of history. The Jewish surnames were decreed in Russian Empire in 1804 (and then again in 1835, because the first decree didn’t hold). Some of the surnames were based on toponyms (usually based on the place where the family was originally, but not at the time of the recording: it wouldn’t make sense to call Minsky the guy residing in Minsk). My great-grandpa was Uniegovsky supposedly because there was a miniscule village called Uniegovka (I found only one reference to the village in the early 1800s). Others were based on profession: Portnoy, Kravets, Khait, and Shnaider – were all tailors – in Russian, Ukrainian/Belarussian, Hebrew, and Yiddish correspondingly. There were some more patterns of forming the surnames, but one of the most prolific was creating it from matronymics. In the land where many of the Slavic neighbors had patronymics as surnames, the Jews used matronymics. Another of my great-grandfathers was Margolin. This is older, medieval Ashkenazi surname, from Margalit, which was form of Margaret, but modified to sound like Hebrew for pearl. In 19th century they would be Perlin, because Pearl became popular female name. Menuhin is son of Menuha, Zeldin – son of Zelda, Raikin – son of Raika (Raissa). Son of Tamar would be Tamarkin, or if they used diminutive form – Tema (pronounced with hard /t/) – he would be Temkin /tɛmkɪn/. So here is mine historic surname. In Russian-speaking environment it changed. Dimitry Tiomkin was raised in family of doctor and musician, and studied in St. Petersburg Conservatory – that’s why he went by Tiomkin. If he emigrated directly from Yiddish-speaking shtetl, he would be probably Temkin.

This is why while I would go great lengths to explain how to pronounce Vadim, I happily adopted the default pronunciation of Temkin in English.

Back on 3/4 on Facebook, from Peruvian linguist Ernesto Cuba, with a photo of him

[Cuba phrase] con mi queridx Iván Villanueva Jordán, traductor queer … lingüistica marica

(#1) Ernesto (right) with his Peruvian student Iván (who’s studied drag queens in Lima)

(Google at the time didn’t try to translate queridx but translated lingüistica marica as ‘faggot linguistics’)

Cuba’s queridx posting led me to discover Dario Cocimano’s song “Hola Queridx” from his 2018 Digno album —

(#2)

— and so to query Cuba about the linguistic usages involved.

On Ernesto Cuba. From the Graduate Center of CUNY on the Academia site (from, I think, 2018):

Ernesto Cuba is a second-year student in the Hispanic Linguistics doctoral program within the department of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages at The Graduate Center (CUNY). He earned a BA in Linguistics and a Diploma in Gender Studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Ernesto is interested in the sociolinguistic practices of queer Spanish-speaking communities and the politics of language related to Spanish and indigenous languages spoken in Peru. He is a feminist, LGBTQ activist, and is involved in activist and academic organizations and networks of LGBTQ people of color. He wrote the “Guidelines for the use of non-sexist language: If you don’t name me, I don’t exist” for the Government of Peru (2013).

(Cuba addresses me as Arnold, and I address him as Ernesto, and that’s the way I’ll talk about him from now on.)

As of 4/6, he’s been working at Universidad Peruana de ciencas Aplicadas on the San Isidro campus, living in Lima (and reporting on Facebook every so often on the lgbtq scene and the pandemic in Lima).

mi querido. In my 3/8/20 posting “Where is the fishmonger?”, there’s an image of one man in a sling (Alex) being taken carnally by another (Dakota); the image is attached, absurdly, to a dialogue for learners of Spanish, from which the relevant line is, from Alex:

Pero te deseo, mi querido. ‘But I want you, darling/buddy’

mi querido (with masc. querid-o), from a straight guy to another guy, would ordinarily be translated as ‘my friend,  buddy (in AmE; mate in BrE)’; mi querida (with fem. querid-a) used by a straight guy would be addressed to a woman and translated as ‘(my) darling, dear’ (while mi querido would also be used by a woman to ref to her beloved: ‘darling, dear, sweetheart’). Usage between two gay men opens up all sorts of possibilities, starting from the fact that it’s very common for male couples to be both best buddies and also romantic/sexual partners, which would allow mi querido to simultaneously convey ‘buddy’ and ‘darling’. (My man Jacques and I didn’t speak Spanish to one another, but if we had, we almost surely would have used querido this way, because it would have fit our relationship perfectly.)

But then fem. inflectional forms like querida (and  lexical items referring to women, and also feminine names) are very commonly used by one gay man to another, for all sorts of purposes. A gay guy might use querida to, or of, his partner specifically to convey affection, to highlight their romantic/sexual relationship (understanding that the usage is merely metaphorical). At the other end of the scale, he might use it derisively to, or of, a trick, to establish himself as a stud and deride the trick as a fag (a faux-girl). Or a number of things in between.

I suspect that there’s a big range of uses of querido and querida among gay men, probably with considerable variation from one hispanophone community to another. In Spanish more generally, Ernesto perceived both forms to be somewhat formal, probably from their use in salutations of letters — Querido/a + NAME ‘Dear NAME’ — though he noted the ‘darling’ use as well.

Spelling. Then there’s the question of how to convey neutrality as to gender in spelling (rather than assuming that the masc. querido covers women as well as men). The slash tactic — latino/a, querido/a —  has been around for a while, but many see it as awkward (and challenging to pronounce).

As a less orthographically awkward substitute for latino/a, latinx has gained some currency, and queridx (and other parallel forms) followed. But again, the question is how these written forms woud be pronounced. The Google translation of [Cuba phrase] above just leaves the orthographic form untouched. But the pronunciation?

Ernesto e-mailed me a while back:

I don’t pronounce “x”, I mostly only write it. If I had to pronounce it, I would say “queride” [AZ: the -e representing an inflectional form that is neither fem. nor masc.]. Some years ago, the pronunciation “queridex” was more popular though.

My impression is that both queridex and queride are still current pronunciations, in different communities of use according to some complex pattern I know nothing about. Ernesto noted that the the use of the X spelling is pretty new and doesn’t belong to standard Spanish, so it’s not surprising there’s variation in its pronunciation. (In fact, nothing guarantees that the usages are parallel for different lexical items: I suspect that querid– and latin– diverge for many speakers.)

AMZ: Do you know where i could get the lyrics of Dario Cocimano’s “Hola Queridx”? (he goes back and forth between saying querido and querida, but my colloquial Sp. is infinitesimal, so the rest is kind of a blur)

EC: Thanks! I didn’t know that song. I can’t find the lyrics either. But after listening a couple of times, I understand that it’s a sort of cheerful welcome, like a colorful celebration of life. It’s very cute.

Hello my baby, hello my honey
Hello my ragtime, summertime gal
Send me a kiss by wire, by wire
Baby, my heart’s on fire, on fire
If you refuse me, honey, you lose me
And you’ll be left alone, oh baby
Telephone, and tell me, tell me
Tell me I’m your very own, oh

Two (of many) recordngs. First, from the Chordettes in 1954, which you can listen to here.

From Wikipedia:

The Chordettes were an American female popular singing quartet, usually singing a cappella, and specializing in traditional popular music. They are best known for their hit songs “Mr. Sandman” and “Lollipop”.

Very white, singing in close harmony.

Then, Phish, which you can listen to here (in a Walnut Creek CA performance from 7/22/97).

From Wikipedia:

Phish is an American rock band that formed in Burlington, Vermont, in 1983. The band is known for musical improvisation, extended jams, blending of genres, and a dedicated fan base. The band consists of guitarist Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, drummer Jon Fishman, and keyboardist Page McConnell, all of whom perform vocals, with Anastasio being the primary lead vocalist.

Also very white, in close harmony, but male.

Hola Queridx!

The One Big Happy of 9/13, in which Ruthie and Joe exhibit their prowess in spelling though mnemonics:

Spectacular examples of expression mnemonics, in which

The first letter of each word is combined to form a phrase or sentence — e.g. “Richard of York gave battle in vain” for the colours of the rainbow. (Wikipedia link)

… versus name, or acronymic, mnemonics, in which

The first letter of each word is combined into a new word. For example: VIBGYOR (or ROY G BIV) for the colours of the rainbow or HOMES (Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, Lake Superior) the Great Lakes. (also from Wikipedia)

English spelling is notoriously erratic (though far from totally irrational), because it pastes together a bunch of quite different conventions, but it hadn’t occurred to me that arithmetic, geography, and (especially) history were notably problematic — who needs Here in sleepy town, only rebels yell? — but that’s no doubt the comic point of the strip. (It’s surely easier to memorize the spelling of history than to memorize the mnemonic expression.)

But of course the mnemonic expressions are a lot more fun, and sometimes they can be acted out.