Morning names – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Morning names’ Category
Let’s dance!
April 27, 2026
Playing on my Apple Music when I woke this morning (4/27): the trio and chorus “They shall be as happy as they’re fair” from Act V of Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, Z. 629, with its forward-driving syncopations accompanying the repeated “happy, happy”. A wild wedding song to start the day:
They shall be as happy, happy, as they’re fair,
Love shall fill all the places of care;
And ev’ry time the Sun shall display his rising light,
It shall be to them a new Wedding day,
And when he sets a new Nuptial night.
Every day a new festive wedding day, every night a new conjugal wedding night; let’s dance!
I was profoundly happy.
Posted in Morning names, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »
Je suis Monsieur Pantoufles
November 19, 2025
Today’s morning name (pure playfulness after a long night of uneasy sleep fragmented by joint pain): from the Cambridge French-English dictionary, the noun
pantoufle (fem.): slipper; a loose, soft kind of shoe for wearing indoors
(#1) An array of pantoufles (from the Cambridge dictionary)
Considered as a nonsense word, it’s silly-sounding in French, or when borrowed into English as /pæntúfǝl/, which sounds like a cousin of kerfuffle.
But then the things it denotes are often indulgences — playfully pleasurable in design, material, or color (as in #1), so that the word comes with an air of the ridiculous, both in sound and in meaning.
An air that carries over to uses of pantoufle as a name. Two of which I now explore: an imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, from the world of fiction; and me as Monsieur Pantoufles, the woolly moccasins guy. (more…)
Posted in Books, Clothing, French, Morning names, Movies and tv, Names, Shoes, Silliness | Leave a Comment »
Like a Spanish cow
November 11, 2025
Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French:
parler français comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’
I heard this first from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and our good friend Benita Bendon Campbell, It’s vivid and silly, and then English like a Spanish cow can be adapted as a critique of someone’s linguistic abilities in French or English or, I assume, any language. Cows being linguistically quite limited, and Spaniards being one of the nationalities French people are inclined to mock (though I would have expected the cow to be Italian, Dutch, or German; or of some exotic despised nationality, like Turkish or Chinese).
Posted in Etymology, Formulaic language, French, Idioms, Insults, Morning names, Pragmatics, Stock expressions | 2 Comments »
Jessica Hagedorn
October 19, 2025
[warning: female full frontal nudity at the end, plus a beheading, so not to everyone’s taste (note that this is an actual Penguin Books cover, and it counts as art; certainly it’s not intended as, shudder, pornography]
My morning name on awaking on 10/15 — almost surely the result of subliminal perceptions during sleep, through some story broadcast on KQED-FM during the night (I’m now doing talk rather than music during the night). From Wikipedia:
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn [AZ: Tarahata is her birth surname, Hagedorn her (Filipino) husband’s surname; Hagedorn is a surname of Germanic origin (MHG hagedorn ‘hawthorn’)] (born May 29, 1949) is an American playwright, writer, poet, and multimedia performance artist.
Hagedorn is an of mixed descent. She was born in Manila, Philippines, to a mother of Scots-Irish, French, and Filipino descent and a father of Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese heritage. Moving to San Francisco, California, in 1963, Hagedorn received her education at the American Conservatory Theater training program. To further pursue playwriting and music, she moved to New York City in 1978.
In 1978, Joseph Papp produced Hagedorn’s first play, Mango Tango. Hagedorn’s other productions include Tenement Lover, Holy Food, and Teenytown. Her mixed media style often incorporates song, poetry, images, and spoken dialogue. From 1975 until 1985, she was the leader of a poet’s band — The West Coast Gangster Choir (in SF) and later The Gangster Choir (in New York).
… [And she wrote] the novel Dogeaters, which illuminates many different aspects of Filipino experience, focusing on the influence of America through radio, television, and movie theaters
Posted in Art, Books, Language and the body, Morning names, Names, Writers | Leave a Comment »
Zapf, Zagat, and Zimmerman
June 16, 2025
The morning names of 6/14, all Z names — well, I’m a Z-person, and I notice — all of which were in my mind from recent mentions on Facebook
of Zapf dingbats (named for the typeface designer Hermann Zapf)
of the Zagat restaurant guides (now taken over by Google)
and of the singer-songwriter Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing MN (who became famous as a very young man in NYC under the name Bob Dylan and is more or less constantly in the news)
Posted in Design, Language and food, Morning names, Music, Names, Professional names, Typography | Leave a Comment »
Morning Italian jobs
May 20, 2025
(This will, somewhat surprisingly, eventually veer into men’s bodies and some man-on-man sex, recounted in street language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest; I’m sorry, but not even the best of Verdi opera and Italian tennis can quite counterbalance naked guys going at it with one another)
Today’s morning names were Rigoletto and Sinner, and for a change I knew exactly why they were in my head: Rigoletto is the name of an opera by Verdi (from which the magnificent quartet Bella figli dell’amore was playing on my music feed during my 2 am whizz break); and Sinner is the surname of someone who turns out to be an astoundingly famous Italian tennis player but was known to me only from a Sergio Scalise Facebook posting yesterday in which this Sinner was identified as a great champion who does commercials for De Cecco, Lavazza, and La Roche — I am, famously, deeply ignorant of sports; and also, despite Sergio’s occasional attempts at educating me, neglectfully ignorant of matters social, cultural, and political in today’s Italy (I’m not merely not au courant, but actually inert). This is Jannik Sinner; I had never laid eyes on him until this morning (I’ve been entertained by a recent Lavazza commercial, but it’s one for the American audience and doesn’t have Jannik Sinner in it). I go on at such length about JS because my readers from or connected to Italy will find it impossible to believe that I had no idea who Sinner — that athletic and cultural phenom — is.
Now, the coming program: about Rigoletto, briefly; about Jannik Sinner, at greater length, with a note about Lavazza coffee commercials; a side note about Google searches; and then a raunchy digression on the Italian jobs of the title.
Posted in AI, Art, Italian, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language of advertising, Language of sex, Morning names, Music, Slurs | Leave a Comment »
Zimbalistics
May 12, 2025
Zimbalistics, the study of the artistic Zimbalist family, in the three generations from Efrem through Stephanie, following up on my report yesterday, in “Zimbalist, accompanied by Satie”, of this morning name. I wrote:
I understood the [morning] name to refer to Stephanie Zimbalist, most famously (with Pierce Brosnan and Doris Roberts) a star of the American tv show Remington Steele. But then the topic branched wildly in many directions, in a way I couldn’t imagine organizing into a single posting. So, today, just one piece of that network of topics, the surname Zimbalist.
… [plus a promise of] more on three generations of talented Zimbalists, on their religious affiliations, and on Zimbalistic tv shows.
No doubt Stephanie would not have been your first association to the surname, but she was mine yesterday morning; that’s just an observation about how my mind was working in the fog of coming out of sleep. Sometimes I have no idea where a name in my head comes from. Sometimes it’s associated with a specific referent that I realize was in my mind from something that happened recently. Sometimes, as here, I’m baffled as to where an association comes from; it just is. (I once got Goethe as my morning name, except that — surprise! — it referred to the street in Chicago, locally pronounced /góθi/. I have no idea why I slighted the great German writer, but there it was.)
On to the Zimbalist family — a brisk and abbreviated tour, since I’m overwhelmed with things today. (There are decent Wikipedia entries for Efrem, Efrem Jr., Stephanie, and Alma Gluck.)
Posted in Actors, Morning names, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »
Zimbalist, accompanied by Satie
May 11, 2025
Today’s morning name was Zimbalist, which came to me at 4:10 am to the accompaniment of the delicious, very French, piano music of Erik Satie (to which it has no associations I can think of). I understood the name to refer to Stephanie Zimbalist, most famously (with Pierce Brosnan and Doris Roberts) a star of the American tv show Remington Steele. But then the topic branched wildly in many directions, in a way I couldn’t imagine organizing into a single posting. So, today, just one piece of that network of topics, the surname Zimbalist.
Zimbalist looks like zimbal + ist, an association surname, possibly an association to an occupation, and so it is: it’s a Slavic Jewish surname meaning ‘cimbalom / cimbal player’ (so it’s parallel to the common nouns pianist, violinist, accordionist, trombonist, clarinetist, etc.).
(The initial letter c of cimbalom represents a voiceless dental affricate [ts], spelled with a c in Russian, a z in German; because of the spelling with c, the name cimbalom is pronounced in English with an [s], and because of the spelling with Z, the name Zimbalist is pronounced in English with a [z] — yes, this is a multilingual, multiorthographic mess, but don’t blame me, I’m just the reporter.)
Now, briefly, to the instrument.
Posted in Actors, Derivation, Morning names, Morphology, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Spelling | 6 Comments »
Morning name with scorpion
May 10, 2025
My morning name on 5/6 was a misremembered word — I report to you, regularly, on the fragility of memory, including my own — that evoked an excellent political portmanteau from the autumn of 2016, as the Presidential elections (HC vs. DT) were heating up, these words together taking me to a bit of prescient song-writing by Gilbert & Sullivan in 1882 — involving loud braying, vulgar display, and open contempt for their inferiors — a character sketch of the moral monster of 2016, who has over the ensuing decade transfigured into a foolish but vindictive scorpion, with a deadly sting in its tail and no control over its instincts.
Now come with me back to the morning of 5/6. As I woke, what dinged in my mind was the repeated:
tarentara tarentara
which I recalled with pleasure as a chorus of peers from G&S’s Iolanthe, imitating the sound of brasses, specifically of trumpets, as they marched. I went to the net to recover the rest of the chorus, only to discover that I had misremembered the marching noise; it was actually
tantantara tantantara
And so began the journey that ends with all of us embrangled in the animal tale The Frog and the Scorpion.
(more…)
Posted in Language and poitics, Memory, Mistakes, Morality, Morning names, Music, Nicknames, Portmanteaus, Quotation, Stories | 6 Comments »
Suzerains of sheldrake
April 26, 2025
Today’s (4/26) morning names: sheldrake (or Sheldrake) and suzerainty. I have no idea how the gorgeous big duck (or the parapsychologist) got into my head; suzerainty might have popped up because of its prominent medial /z/ — I am ever Z-alert — though I don’t recall having seen it in print recently (I don’t think I’ve ever heard it spoken), so it might have come to me just for its oddness. The workings of my mind are often mysterious.
(The music playing at the time — well into a performance of Handel’s Messiah — provides no obvious source for any of these words.)
Posted in Alliteration, Language and animals, Language and politics, Morning names, Music, Names, Nicknames | 2 Comments »